An Almost Perfect Murder

“Paramedics. Is this an emergency?” George Reade asked.

“Hello. Yes, this is an emergency,” the male resident of the house, forty-two-year-old Chaz Higgs, calmly replied.

“What’s the address?” Reade asked.

Higgs answered, “It’s in the Meadows housing development. Something’s wrong with my wife. She’s not breathing. I don’t know what happened to her.”

“She’s not breathing at all?”

“No. Not breathing at all. I’m a critical care nurse and I’ve already started doing CPR, but I need some help,” Higgs replied.

Having dealt with thousands of emergency telephone calls in his five years in the business, Reade knew that characteristically there would be breaks or pauses in the telephone communication between the caller and the 911 operator when a caller was actually giving CPR to the stricken person who’s awaiting help. The caller typically wouldn’t be able to talk with the 911 operator between giving chest compressions and giving breaths, which appeared to be absent in this case. To Reade, it just hadn’t sounded like Higgs was administering CPR. Reade also noticed that there seemed to be a lack of urgency in Higgs’s voice. He had seemed a bit too calm to have a relative not breathing. Reade also noted that it had not been his experience to have a loved one in an emergency situation taking the time to give specific directions to their house to the 911 operator. In fact, as best as he could recall, this was a first in that regard.

Also by Gary C. King:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AN ALMOST PERFECT MURDER

PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

—William Shakespeare,
Henry VI
,
Part 3, Act 3, Scene 2

 

—Paracelsus, 1493–1541

poi·son
(poi’zen), n. 1. a substance with an inherent property that tends to destroy life or impair health.—
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged

 

Poison, in one toxic form or another—as well as murder by poisoning—has been around for a very long time. Until the advent of modern toxicological methods of investigation, especially when that investigation’s purpose is to determine the means behind the sudden and unexplained death of an otherwise healthy human being, murder by poisoning was once the preferred method to do away with someone, particularly if the murderer felt that he or she could get away with it. After all, in the past, poisoning had been the easiest way to murder someone. It was popular in England in the nineteenth century, because murder by poisoning was so difficult to prove in a court of law. Thanks largely to modern forensic technology, murdering someone by poisoning isn’t nearly as popular today as it was one-hundred-fifty years ago. Nonetheless, people occasionally still believe they can get away with such a murder, as the story that you are about to read will show.

The roots of causing the death of another by poisoning date much further back in history, to the time when tribal hunters and gatherers discovered that ingesting certain plants that they had collected for food caused them to die instead of nourishing their bodies. At some point, these early inhabitants of planet Earth realized that poisoning might be an ideal way to get rid of their enemies without, more often than not, arousing too much suspicion. Evidence of murder by poisoning can easily be traced back to the Roman Empire during the time of Christ, but there is also considerable evidence that poisoning was recognized and used as a method to murder by much earlier civilizations, i.e., the Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, and Sumerians, which all used poison as a method to kill. In those earlier times, it was often used as a method of suicide as well.

For example, before making the decision to use an asp, which is a small Egyptian cobra, to take her own life, Cleopatra was known to have made the most of her slaves and prisoners to test out a variety of different deadly concoctions, such as belladonna, henbane, and an early form of strychnine, which was known as
Strychnos nux-vomica.
None of them pleased her, however. The first two, while acting fairly fast once ingested, proved to cause a much too painful and agonizing death, and the latter displeased her because it caused the victim to have convulsions that resulted in often hideous facial distortions at the time of death. Of course, that just wouldn’t do for the beautiful Cleopatra. It wasn’t until she experimented with the asp’s bite, the venom of which brought about a swift, if not tranquil, death, that she felt satisfied that she had found a preferred method to bring about death.

Fast-forward several centuries to fifteenth-century Rome, and the Borgias could be found poisoning anyone who had offended them, or merely because they disliked a certain individual. The Borgias, however, weren’t alone in practicing what had become somewhat of an art, albeit a deadly one. Many a head of a European royal family utilized poison to kill his enemies, perceived or real. The process was quite simple. Throw a large party, invite the intended victim(s), and place the deadly material in the victim’s food or drink, and voila—death followed a short time later, with no one the wiser.

Catherine de Médicis, the homely princess from Italy, was among the worst of the European royalty to rely upon the deadliness of poisons to achieve her goals: getting rid of those who stood in her way. Shortly after she arrived in France to marry Henry Deux, people began falling sick from mysterious illnesses, and they did not recover. Among her more well-known victims was the Dauphin François, who made the mistake of asking for a glass of water following a tennis match. The reason for his death had nothing to do with the tennis game that he had just played. He was killed because he stood in the way of Henry, the second son of King Francis I, being able to ascend to the throne. With poor François out of the way, Henry, along with his dauphine, Catherine, had suddenly become heir to the throne. She was also remembered for poisoning the Cardinal of Lorraine, whom she had considered an enemy. The cardinal mysteriously took ill and died after handling gold coins that may have been treated with nicotine, the source of which had reportedly been Catherine de Médicis. Nicotine had recently been discovered in the New World, and may have made it into Catherine’s hands by then.

By the time the Victorian era came into being, poisons such as arsenic and strychnine were particularly popular, primarily because they were so easy to obtain and could be used with relative ease in secrecy. For a time, murder by poisoning had become so commonplace, particularly with the rise in popularity of life insurance policies, that poisoning someone for financial gain seemed almost fashionable. In France, for example, arsenic was eventually referred to as “inheritance powder.” Poisoning soon became the stuff of popular mystery fiction, which undoubtedly contributed, even in some small way, to the use of poison as a means to get rid of someone during that period, and later.

During the Victorian era, when the science of toxicology and its use in forensic investigations was still in its infancy, it was often difficult to obtain a conviction for someone charged with murder by poisoning. Arsenic, clearly a murderer’s favorite at that time, was readily available at the local chemist’s shop or hardware store. Many people kept it on hand to kill rats, which had long been a problem in jolly old England, making it little wonder that it would be used on unwanted people, too. Toxicology tests at the time were unreliable, and the findings of scientists of that time period were often disputed. As a result, many people often got away with murder.

Seeing the need to be able to detect the presence of arsenic in the human body, chemist James Marsh set out to devise a scientific test that would serve as an investigative tool during a time when murder by arsenic poisoning had become almost an epidemic in England. White arsenic trioxide powder was odorless, and it could easily be mixed with food or drink for the intended victim to ingest and later fall ill with symptoms similar to cholera, plus it was virtually undetectable in the body. It was during the early 1830s, at a time when chemical analysis could easily detect most mineral compounds, but lacked severely in scientific ability to detect organic poisons in the human body, that Marsh’s work made its way to the forefront with regard to the budding field of forensic toxicology.

Without going through all of the scientific details here, suffice it to say that Marsh, combining the experimental work of several of his predecessors with his own, devised a standard test to detect arsenic by mixing the suspect fluid with sulfuric acid and passing it through a u-shaped tube. Even if only minute traces of arsenic were present, the procedure would create arsine gas, which, when ignited, would decay into arsenic and hydrogen. By 1836, with the utilization of Marsh’s test, it became increasingly more difficult to get away with committing murder using arsenic.

One of the more famous cases that involved arsenic as the suspected poison was that of Dr. Harvey Crippen, a homeopathic doctor who, although married, was having an affair with his secretary, Ethel Le Neve. Dr. Crippen’s wife, Cora, mysteriously disappeared around the end of January 1910. Soon afterward, Ethel Le Neve moved into Crippen’s house and basically took over Cora’s role, including wearing her clothing and jewelry. After suspicion had been aroused among those who knew Crippen, Scotland Yard began an investigation into his wife’s disappearance and questioned the good doctor. He explained that his wife had been cheating on him and had actually left with her lover and had gone to America, where, he said, she died. Fearing that he would be charged with his wife’s murder, Crippen fled England on a westbound ship with Cora disguised as his son. However, his freedom was short-lived. He was arrested in Canada after being recognized as a wanted man and was brought back to England, where he stood trial for his wife’s murder. According to the story, an investigator had discovered a small piece of human tissue buried in the coal cellar. When it was examined, it was found to contain the toxic compound hyoscine, which Crippen claimed he used in making his homeopathic medications. Even though many people to this day believe that Crippen was innocent of his wife’s murder, he was nonetheless convicted and hanged late that same year.

As the twentieth century came into being, it brought with it much new industry and many new toxic agents. Poisoning grew, it seemed, exponentially, as new toxic compounds were created, and, perhaps more important, because the populace in general had become more educated. They could now more easily seek out the information they needed through books, primarily, to do away with someone by poisoning them. Poison suddenly gained the interest of the military, both in Europe and the United States, and insidious compounds were developed that could now kill masses of people on the battlefield.

Mustard gas, for example, was first used by the German Army in 1917, during World War I. Nearly odorless, mustard gas, also known as yperite, was placed into high-explosive shells and fired upon the advancing enemy. Its effects were devastating and horrible. Exposure to it caused the skin to blister, vomiting, blindness, and both internal and external bleeding. It also attacked the bronchial tubes of its victims, and literally stripped away the mucous membrane. Soldiers exposed to it died slow, horrible deaths, often taking up to four or five weeks to finally succumb to its effects. Naturally, mustard gas was not a substance to be used on a rich relative for the inheritance, but it is shown here to illustrate how human beings will seemingly stop at nothing in their efforts to refine the art of killing each other by ever-increasing insidious means.

Returning to the more traditional, one-on-one type of poison that a person might consider using to get rid of a spouse, cyanide became somewhat popular toward the middle of the twentieth century. In addition to being used by real-life spies as a form of suicide during World War II, cyanide also became somewhat popular as a poison that, like arsenic, could easily be placed in the intended victim’s food or beverage. One documented case involved a father, bent on collecting his child’s life insurance money, who placed cyanide in his child’s sherbet. And, of course, who can forget the terror that the cyanide-laced Tylenol, which had been purchased from store shelves in Washington State, had caused?

Of course, there have been a number of high-profile murder cases over the last forty or more years in which legitimate pharmaceutical medicines or drugs were used to kill the intended victims by killers who often had been either a medical professional or someone who was closely aligned to the medical profession. The drug in question in these instances is succinylcholine; for all intents and purposes, it is a pharmaceutical grade version of curare. In these instances, succinylcholine, a powerful muscle relaxer and paralytic drug, was used because its effects, when administered to kill, mimics a heart attack. It can be very difficult to detect if the crime lab doesn’t know it is looking for it.

In 1967, Dr. Carl Coppolino, a New Jersey anesthesiologist, was convicted of murdering his wife, Carmela, by using succinylcholine. The good doctor, however, was acquitted of murder in another case in which he had been charged with killing another woman using the drug.

In 1984, Genene Jones, the so-called “Killer Nurse,” was convicted of murdering a baby in Texas by injecting the infant with succinylcholine. The infant girl had been injected in the thigh and promptly developed apnea and died. At first, the baby’s death was attributed to sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, and buried. However, as additional evidence surfaced in that case, and the child’s family applied more pressure, the baby’s body was exhumed. Muscle tissue from the baby’s thigh, kidneys, and a portion of her liver were examined. After analysis from newly developed toxicological tests, it was determined that succinylcholine was present in the muscular tissue, as well as the organs that were examined.

In 1991, Dr. William Sybers, who had been a medical examiner in Panama City, Florida, was accused of killing his wife with a lethal injection of the potent drug so that he could be with his mistress. Although convicted, his conviction was reversed and he later pleaded guilty to manslaughter in a deal with prosecutors. And who can forget Dr. Michael Swango, dubbed “Dr. Death”? He was suspected of killing as many as thirty-five to sixty people in various locations during the 1980s and 1990s, using succinylcholine that had been mixed with another drug. Swango ended up pleading guilty to three murders. There was also the case of Efren Saldivar, a California respiratory therapist who dubbed himself the “angel of death,” who, after his arrest in 2001, confessed to killing in excess of fifty people using a variety of different drugs, including succinylcholine.

As a testimonial to the difficulty of determining that succinylcholine was used in any given case, as well as the difficulty of obtaining a conviction for those cases that actually go to trial, one can examine the 2002 case of Richard Williams, a former nurse at a veterans hospital, who was charged with ten counts of first-degree murder involving patients at the Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, where he worked in 1992. In each of the cases in which Williams had been charged, the prosecution alleged that succinylcholine had been used. However, there were significant questions concerning a relatively new technology that its creators claimed could detect succinylcholine in a suspected victim’s tissue samples. These concerns were brought to light and resulted in the dismissal of the charges that had been brought against Williams.

And the list goes on and on, bringing us to the case at hand, that of William Charles “Chaz” Higgs, a critical care nurse who had been accused of murdering his wife, Nevada state controller Kathy Augustine. Like many of Higgs’s predecessors in the medical profession who thought that they could get away with murder, Higgs likely thought that he could, too. It’s also possible that he has read about some of the aforementioned cases—there have been volumes written on them. Higgs’s case was similar to some of the other murder-by-poisoning cases in a few respects. As in some of the other cases in which the intended victim was a spouse, Higgs’s chosen victim was also his wife, and a toxic substance was used to bring about her death. However, unlike some of the other victims in the cases mentioned, Chaz Higgs’s wife was a strong, powerful woman in a position of authority and influence whose untimely death demanded, along with her family, that justice be served.