The case of Stella Nickell has always fascinated me because of the odd twists of her otherwise horrific story.
In a copycat crime based on the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, Nickell poisoned her husband’s Excedrin painkillers with cyanide. But that’s when things start to go “wrong” for Stella,
His [Bruce Nickell’s] death was initially ruled to be by natural causes, with attending physicians citing emphysema.
So she murdered her husband and no one suspected a thing, but that was not an ideal outcome for Stella. The insurance policy she had taken out on her husband paid out $76,000 with an additional $100,000 payout if his death was accidental. So by missing the cyanide poisoning, those physicians cost Stella $100,000. And she wasn’t about to let that stand.
A week later, a 40-year-old bank manager named Susan Snow died after taking two Extra-Strength Excedrin. An autopsy of Snow’s body determined she had died from cyanide poisoning.
In response to the publicity, Stella Nickell came forward on June 19. She told police that her husband had recently died suddenly, after taking pills from a 40-capsule bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin with the same lot number as the one that had killed Susan Snow. Tests by the FDA confirmed the presence of cyanide in Bruce Nickell’s remains and in two Excedrin bottles Stella Nickell had turned over to police.
. . .
Investigators’ suspicions began to turn to Stella Nickell when they discovered that she claimed that the two contaminated Excedrin bottles that she had turned over to police had been purchased at different times and different locations. A total of five bottles had been found to be contaminated in the entire country, and it was regarded as suspicious that Nickell would happen to have acquired two of them purely by chance.
In 1988, Nickell’s was convicted of the murders of her husband and Susan Snow. She won’t be eligible for parole until 2018.