The Smell of Cyanide (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
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On a summer day in 1986, a medical examiner and her assistant stared down at a deceased woman lying on the metal table. Neither of them had ever seen anything like this. The woman appeared to have been completely healthy at the time of her death. She didn't have a stroke, there was no heart attack, and there was no sign of a drug overdose. However, this seemingly healthy woman had suddenly collapsed on the floor and been brain dead just minutes later.

Just then, the assistant took a long deep breath in through her nose, and after she did, she looked over at the medical examiner with wide eyes. The medical examiner did the same thing and took a long deep breath in through her nose. They both smelled a very strange odor, and it smelled almost like almonds.

The medical examiner could hardly believe it. She'd only heard about something like this happening in movies and detective novels. But that smell meant one thing to her and to the assistant: This deceased woman must have been poisoned with cyanide. And this theory would soon lead to a large-scale investigation by local police and the FBI, and what they would find would cause panic across the entire United States.

But before we get into this story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please give the follow button a big bag of gummy bears, but don't tell them they're sugar-free. And then as soon as they begin eating them, go ahead and make sure you padlock all the bathroom doors. Okay, let's get into today's story.

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On the evening of June 10th, 1986, Sue Snow climbed into her backyard hot tub in a small suburb outside of Seattle, Washington. The water felt amazing, so Sue told her two daughters to come join her.

The girls came over and jumped in the hot tub with their mom, and immediately they began laughing and splashing each other. And right away, it reminded Sue of when her daughters were actually really young. In reality, her daughters were not little kids anymore. Her oldest was home from college for summer, and her youngest was already 15 and would head up to college herself in a couple of years. So as a result, Sue cherished moments like this, when life just sort of felt simple again.

And tonight actually felt even more special than normal because Sue had actually been so busy at work lately that she'd barely gotten to see her girls at all. Sue was a vice president at a bank and she had just landed a $5 million dollar account that afternoon. This was a huge accomplishment, but it had taken a toll with lots of late nights and very stressful meetings.

Just then, Sue's husband, Paul Webking, came outside with some soda and champagne, and Sue looked up at him with surprise. Paul grinned, handed the soda to the girls, and poured Sue a glass of champagne. Then he raised his own glass to make a toast. He said he knew Sue didn't like to talk about her accomplishments, but he was so proud of her and she deserved to be celebrated for closing such a huge deal at work. The girls cheered, and Paul leaned in to give Sue a kiss.

Sue smiled, and she knew that if right now somebody took a picture of this moment, she and Paul would look like the perfect couple. But the truth was, their relationship had been strained for quite a while. Nine months ago, Paul had made a terrible confession. He'd cheated on Sue with an old girlfriend. He swore it only happened once and that it didn't mean anything, but Sue had been absolutely crushed.

At the time this happened, she and Paul had been together for eight years. They were talking about getting married. And Paul looked after Sue's daughters like they were his own. And so Sue wasn't ready to throw all of that away. So they'd started couples counseling. And just two months after Paul's confession, they had an impromptu wedding.

Sue hoped this marriage would actually fix their relationship. But truthfully, Sue had never been able to shake the fear that Paul's cheating had not stopped. Paul was a long-haul trucker, which meant he spent days and days at a time on the road. And ever since he confessed to cheating on her, Sue spent the entire time he was gone wondering who he was with.

The sound of her daughter's laughter stopped Sue from spiraling further into these intrusive thoughts about her husband, and her attention snapped back to her family. They spent the evening talking and laughing together, and Sue reminded herself to focus on all the positive things she had in her life. And by the time she climbed out of that hot tub that night, she actually was in a good mood again. But the next morning, Sue woke up with a pounding headache. Unfortunately, the stress from work and her constant concerns about Paul had made these morning headaches all too common.

Paul had already left for work, and her oldest daughter had spent the night out with her boyfriend. So Sue rolled out of bed and walked down the hall to say good morning to her youngest daughter, Haley, and then after that, she went right to the medicine cabinet in her bathroom. She grabbed a bottle of extra-strength Excedrin and washed down two pills with water from the sink, hoping this would get rid of her headache.

A little later that morning, Haley stepped out of the shower in the other bathroom. She wrapped her towel around herself and then opened the door to go back to her bedroom. But she heard something strange. The water in her mom's bathroom sink was running, and she thought she heard water splashing onto the floor. Haley called out for her mother, but she didn't get an answer. So, Haley walked down the hallway, and as she did, the sound of running water got louder, but she couldn't hear her mom moving around or anything.

Haley approached her mother's bathroom door, which was slightly open, and through the crack, she saw that the tap water was on and the sink was overflowing with water.

Haley rushed in to turn off the water, but then she saw something on the ground and she just screamed. Her mother was crumpled on the floor in her bathrobe with her back up against the bathtub. Sue's eyes were wide open and her fingers were curled up like she was trying to grip something that wasn't there. And so after a second of screaming, Haley stopped and bent down and checked her mother's pulse because she couldn't tell if she was even alive. And she found her mother's pulse was there, but it was faint.

In a total panic now, Haley turned off the water and then ran to the phone in her mother's room, but she wasn't really thinking clearly, so instead of immediately calling 911, she called her mother's friend. When the friend heard what was going on, she told Haley to call 911 right now and the friend said she'd be over in a second.

A few minutes later, the friend and the paramedics arrived, and Haley, who was totally upset, led them all to the bathroom where her mother was. The paramedics quickly examined Sue and began pulling off her robe to check for hidden injuries. And as they did, one of them asked Haley if her mother had a history of drug use. And Haley shook her head and said, "No, she sometimes took over-the-counter drugs, but that was it."

Meanwhile, Sue, despite having a light pulse, was still completely unresponsive. And so the paramedics put a tube down her throat, they lifted her onto a stretcher, and then ran with her back through the house out the front door, with Haley and her mom's friend following behind. The paramedics loaded Sue into the back of the ambulance and told Haley that her mom would need to be airlifted from the local hospital to a bigger hospital in Seattle, and Haley would need to find her own way there. Then they shut the ambulance doors and sped off with the sirens blaring.

Haley stood in her front yard in a total daze. Her mother's friend put her hand on Haley's arm and told her she would drive her to the hospital. And she also asked Haley if there was anyone else she could call. And that was the first time since Haley found her mother on the bathroom floor that she thought of her mom's husband, Paul.

Paul was loading his 16-wheeler truck in the back of a big industrial warehouse when one of his co-workers came over to him looking panicked. The co-worker said Sue's friend had just called dispatch and told them that Sue had been rushed to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Paul immediately put the box he was holding down and asked his co-worker, you know, what else do you know? What else did Sue's friend say? But the co-worker just shrugged. Sue's friend hadn't given any more details than that.

So Paul gave up on loading his truck and just ran out to his own car and began driving towards the city.

But as he drove, he was more confused than worried about Sue. He knew that lately she'd been having a lot of anxiety, and since Sue's friend had not mentioned a car accident or any kind of big injury, Paul kind of assumed that Sue might just be having a big panic attack. But 15 minutes later, Paul walked through the doors of the emergency room and he saw Haley's pale face, and he knew that whatever happened to her mother was not just a panic attack.

Paul asked Haley what was happening and she blurted out, "Mom's brain dead." And then she began crying. Paul stared at Haley in shock. This didn't make any sense. When he left that morning, Sue was in bed sleeping peacefully, totally fine. But Haley obviously knew more than he did and she was hysterical. And so with a sinking feeling, Paul realized something horrible was really happening. This was real. And so as his heart rate sped up, he tried to catch his breath and then he just pulled Haley in tight for a hug.

A few minutes later, Paul tracked down the doctor outside of Sue's room in the intensive care unit, but the doctor didn't have much more information than Haley did. He said that unfortunately, Sue's brain had been starved of oxygen for so long that she would never wake up again. But he said the medical staff could not figure out why. Essentially, Sue was a healthy 40-year-old woman, except for the fact that she was now suddenly brain-dead.

Then, in a soft, comforting voice, the doctor said now there was only one thing left to do. Paul was going to have to decide when to take Sue off of life support and let her die. Paul just stood there staring at the doctor like he couldn't even process what he was just being told. And then finally he just asked the doctor if he could please go see his wife. The doctor nodded, and as Paul walked into Sue's room and saw her laying there connected to all these tubes and wires, he wondered how in the world he was going to find the strength to make this terrible choice.

One day later, the medical examiner put on a pair of rubber gloves and walked up to the metal table that held Sue's body. Paul had waited until Sue's older daughter could make it to the hospital to say her goodbye to her mother before Paul gave the doctors permission to take Sue off of life support. And so now, the medical examiner had to solve the mystery of why this seemingly healthy woman had suddenly collapsed and died just five hours later.

An assistant took notes as the medical examiner narrated her findings, but she was as baffled as the hospital staff. Sue had not had a stroke, aneurysm, or a heart attack. She had no broken bones, no skull fractures, and no internal bleeding. And a drug panel showed she had not overdosed on any of the more common street drugs like heroin or cocaine. So, the medical examiner began to think that her only hope of solving this mystery would likely come from the full toxicology report, which would take several more days to complete.

But then suddenly, the medical examiner's assistant stopped taking notes and interrupted the medical examiner mid-sentence. The assistant asked if the medical examiner smelled something strange. The medical examiner shook her head and looked at her assistant confused. The assistant wrinkled up her nose and took in a big inhale, and then nodded with certainty like "yup, I smell something." So the medical examiner did the same thing and breathed in deep through her nose and immediately her eyes went wide. The odor was faint.

But it was very clear. Sue's body definitely smelled like almonds. In all her years of performing autopsies, this medical examiner had never seen this before. And so even though she now had a theory as to what happened to Sue, she was already kind of questioning whether that could possibly be true. I mean, this only ever happened in movies or detective novels. But she still made a special note to check for one more chemical on Sue's toxicology report. Because cyanide has a telltale smell. Almonds.

Five days after the medical examiner sent Sue's blood off to be tested, Detective Mike Dunbar from the local police department was about to pop some bread in the toaster for breakfast when his phone rang. Dunbar answered and his sergeant quickly told him to cancel whatever plans he had that day because he was catching a new case. A woman named Sue Snow had been murdered and before Dunbar could say anything, his sergeant said her toxicology report showed that Sue had been poisoned with cyanide.

Dunbar was so shocked he had to ask the sergeant to repeat himself to make sure he heard correctly. Any murder in the quiet Seattle suburb where Sue lived was totally unusual, but cyanide poisoning sounded like something out of a movie. But the sergeant said, "Yep, there's no doubt about it, it was cyanide." He said the medical examiner and her assistant had smelled almonds during Sue's autopsy, which is a sign that perhaps this was cyanide.

and then sure enough when they sent off her blood it came back positive for cyanide. Sue had a lethal dose in her system. The sergeant reminded Dunbar that cyanide was a fast-acting poison and there wouldn't have been more than a few minutes between when Sue ingested it and when she collapsed. That meant that Sue must have come into contact with whatever poisoned her inside of her house because she collapsed in her bathroom. So the sergeant gave Dunbar the family's phone number and then the two hung up and then Dunbar immediately called the family's house.

After a few rings, Paul picked up with a very distracted sounding hello. Dunbar introduced himself, but Paul barely seemed able to hear him. And then eventually, Paul actually just cut Dunbar off and apologized and said, you know, I can't talk right now because I'm about to leave for Sue's burial. But Dunbar told Paul that unfortunately, the news he had could not wait. He told Paul Sue had been poisoned.

and Dunbar needed to come to their home as soon as possible to look for whatever had killed her because it could still be in that house, which means the family could still be at risk.

Paul was completely silent for a minute, and then he told the detective that, you know, that's shocking, but still, he would need to talk to him later on because of this burial. So Dunbar kind of resigned to the fact that Paul was not going to budge on this, told Paul to please gather Sue's family at his house after the burial, and Dunbar said he would come by to talk to them and also search the place to make sure there was no more poison in their house. At this, Paul just kind of mumbled that he'd do his best, and then he hung up.

Later that day, Detective Dunbar arrived at Sue and Paul's house and when he got there, he saw the other detective who was going to help him with the search of the house. Then the two of them walked up to the front door and Dunbar knocked on the door and as they waited, Dunbar turned to his colleague and warned them that the family had just come back from Sue's burial so the mood was going to be very sad and heavy.

However, when Paul opened the door, upbeat music was blasting from the stereo and Dunbar could hear people laughing inside the house. Paul smiled and welcomed the two detectives inside. And he told them that instead of having a gloomy wake, he decided to hold a celebration of Sue's life. He said being sad and crying really didn't help with anything. Dunbar nodded politely, but he shared a quick suspicious look with the other detective. This was not what either of them had expected at all.

Paul pointed them to the bathroom where Sue had died, and he told the detectives that the family had not touched anything inside of there at all. Dunbar then gave Paul a form asking for consent to search the house, and Paul signed it right away. But before the detectives got started, Paul told them he had one question. Dunbar nodded and looked at him intently, curious to hear what this question was. Paul then held up a menu and said he was ordering pizza, and his question was, do you want any pizza?

Dunbar knew people grieved in different ways, but he could not get over how relaxed Paul seemed. But he thanked Paul for the offer and said no, they didn't want any pizza, and then they headed down the hall towards the bathroom. Dunbar put on rubber gloves and then stepped into Sue's bathroom and went right for the medicine cabinet.

One by one, he took out bottles of prescription medication and over-the-counter pain pills and carefully dropped each one into its own evidence bag. As Dunbar worked, the other detectives searched the rest of the house, looking for anything stored in the closets or garage that in theory could contain cyanide. When Dunbar finally finished in the bathroom, he walked back to the kitchen and he found Paul sitting quietly at the table. By now, most of the guests had left and the music had been shut off and the pizza was getting cold on the counter.

Paul seemed to have lost all the energy he'd had when Dunbar and his colleague had first arrived. Dunbar saw an opportunity here, and so he sat down and just began asking Paul questions about where he had been and what he was doing on the morning Sue had died. Paul told Dunbar that he'd left for work before Sue had woken up, and then later that morning, he learned that his stepdaughter, Haley, had found Sue on the bathroom floor.

Paul's voice sounded very tired and his story was very to the point, without any of the extra details that could sometimes indicate a person was making things up. Dunbar wondered if maybe he'd misjudged Paul. Maybe Paul's oddly excited demeanor from earlier was really just his attempt to cope with overwhelming grief and shock.

Of course, Paul might also have realized he'd made a very bad first impression on the police, and so maybe now he was just trying to backpedal and act really upset, like the way they would expect him to. So Dunbar wasn't really sure what to make of Paul.

After asking Paul a few more questions and feeling satisfied that Paul had told him everything he knew, Dunbar thanked Paul and then excused himself to go talk to Sue's daughters and the other family members who were still in the house. But when he spoke to them, they all seemed totally drained and none of them really had anything new to share. And so at this point, Dunbar understood that really there was only so much progress he could make without knowing what exactly had poisoned Sue.

So he and the other detective thanked the family that gathered up all their bags of evidence and left to go turn in everything they had found to the lab. At 8pm that night, Detective Dunbar was back at home relaxing by himself when his phone rang. It was a scientist from the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA for short, which is the government agency responsible for ensuring that food and medicines are safe.

Dunbar had sent all that evidence he collected at Sue's home to the FDA for testing, but he definitely had not expected a callback so quickly. The FDA scientist told him on the phone that this was a very urgent matter. They had found the source of the cyanide. It was in the Excedrin painkillers inside of Sue's medicine cabinet that she was taking for her headaches. Someone had replaced the powder-filled Excedrin gel caps with gel caps that were filled with cyanide powder.

Of the 56 pills that were still inside of the bottle, seven more contained cyanide. And suddenly, Dunbar knew exactly why the FDA had 1. tested everything so quickly and 2. reached out to him right away.

The implications of these pain pills containing the cyanide was that perhaps Sue was not like a targeted killing. Perhaps the murderer or murderers walked into a pharmacy or multiple pharmacies and just slipped poison pills in with the over-the-counter pain medication. And if that's what happened,

There was no way to know if just one bottle had been poisoned or if there were more poison pills out there either still waiting on store shelves or in unsuspecting people's medicine cabinets. Like this could be a full-blown national emergency.

And this was actually not the first time something like this had happened before. Just four years earlier in Chicago, Illinois, seven people had died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol they bought in their local pharmacies and grocery stores. When news of the deaths had broken, there was a national panic, and despite the intense investigation that followed the Chicago Tylenol murders, the killer had never been caught.

Now, Detective Dunbar realized that the Tylenol killer may have just struck again. Or he could be dealing with a copycat killer. Either way, if this killer really was murdering at random through these poison medication bottles, well, figuring out their identity would be very difficult, if not impossible. Dunbar thanked the FDA scientist and hung up.

Then he immediately called the chief of police and let him know they might have a large-scale incident on their hands. The city was going to have to put up some kind of an alert. But even though Dunbar realized this case could be on the scale of the infamous Tylenol murders, he wasn't totally convinced that somebody had tampered with Sousa Excedrin in a store. The more simple explanation was that this was not a random murder.

that somebody who knew Sue, who had a reason to kill Sue, specifically put cyanide pills in with her Excedrin pills. And if that was the case, Dunbar thought Sue's husband Paul was the most likely suspect. So Dunbar called Paul and told him that it turns out it was specifically the Excedrin that had killed Sue. That's where the cyanide was. And in a calm voice, Paul replied to this by saying that he was not surprised. Dunbar was so shocked by Paul's answer that he just kind of fell silent for a second. He

He couldn't understand how Paul could have thought the Excedrin was poisoned unless he was the one who poisoned it. Then suddenly Paul began stammering and he told the detective that "Oh my goodness, I've taken two of those exact Excedrin pills myself! I could have died!" And then Paul began to hyperventilate over the phone. But the whole thing felt a little too theatrical for Dunbar. For Paul to go from not even being surprised about the Excedrin to suddenly panicking that he could have been a victim himself just felt very performative.

So Dunbar asked Paul if anyone had seen him take those Excedrin pills. If this really was Paul's story, Dunbar wanted him to prove it. But Paul, who was still hyperventilating, said no, he was alone when he took the pills. However, this only added to Dunbar's suspicion of Paul.

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The next morning, when Dunbar grabbed his newspaper off his porch and read the headlines, he grimaced. There on the front page in big letters was the announcement that Excedrin had been recalled across the entire country. Dunbar knew the recall was the right thing to do, but he also thought this was going to spark public hysteria. And when he arrived at the police station later that day, he knew he was right.

The station was absolute chaos, with a line of people at the desk. Some of them were yelling out their theories, and others were crying because they were worried they'd taken poison dexedrine, even though if they had, they'd already be dead. But they didn't really know that, so they were just totally losing their minds about it. But it wasn't just civilians that were clogging up the police station hallways. An entire busload of FBI agents had descended, and Dunbar watched them setting up a command post in a big conference room.

Dunbar pushed his way through the crowd of hysterical people and made his way to his desk, where he found a special agent named Ike Nakamoto waiting for him.

Nakamoto was a big, serious-looking guy, but the moment he saw Dunbar, he smiled and shook Dunbar's hand and apologized for the mess. Dunbar had heard stories about how the FBI liked to order local police around, and so he was immediately suspicious of Nakamoto's friendliness. Nakamoto explained that the FBI had been called in as soon as the FDA realized it was the Excedrin that was poisoned. He said that after the Chicago Tylenol murders, the FBI had been given jurisdiction over any investigations that involved poisoned medication.

But Nakamoto assured Dunbar that the FBI was there to focus on the product tampering angle, not to take Dunbar's murder case away. Nakamoto said he wanted the detective to continue to investigate Sue's death, and they could even work together and share information.

Dunbar managed to smile and said he'd be happy to work together, but he said he still thought the killer was much more likely to be Sue's husband Paul than some anonymous poisoner. Paul just seemed off. It was like he was always either underreacting or overreacting, like a guilty man trying to say and do the right thing, rather than an innocent grieving man reacting to events as they happened. It all just seemed very performative. Paul just kind of seemed like he was acting.

And to Dunbar's surprise, Nakamoto nodded and agreed with him. The FBI was discussing all the possibilities, including the idea that, you know, perhaps the Chicago Tylenol murderer had struck again, but they also thought, you know, a local killer here was much more likely. Nakamoto said the FBI was only here to make sure nothing got missed.

All day long, FBI agents flooded local pharmacies and grocery stores, taking more than 15,000 bottles of Excedrin off shelves and out of storage rooms and sending them out for testing. And while that was happening, people kept filing into the police station looking for answers. But by the evening, things had finally quieted down around town and at the station, and Detective Dunbar was exhausted and ready to go home. So he picked up his car keys and headed for the door, but

But right as he was about to leave, Nakamoto stepped out of the room the FBI had taken over and yelled for him to wait. Then Nakamoto rushed over to Dunbar and told him the FBI had just gotten a call from the lab and they had found another cyanide-laced bottle of Excedrin at a grocery store.

Dunbar just hung his head. This meant somebody was almost certainly poisoning medicine at random, likely in the pharmacies or in the grocery store. And this also meant Paul was not nearly as obvious a suspect as Dunbar thought. Now, the killer could be anyone.

The next morning Dunbar arrived back at the police station thinking his role in the investigation was over. It seemed pretty clear that the killer was poisoning bottles at random, which was way beyond anything Dunbar or his small police department had the resources to handle. But as a team of FBI agents headed out the door to interview people at the grocery store where that second tainted bottle was found,

Special Agent Nakamoto approached Dunbar and told him he wanted to keep their two parallel investigations running. Nakamoto said the second bottle could just be a decoy, so the FBI would pursue the theory that the killer was a random poisoner, but Dunbar should keep his investigation alive looking into Sue's life in case the killer was connected to her. Dunbar felt rejuvenated, and the first thing he did was head right to the bank where Sue worked. He still wasn't sure what to make of Paul, and so he figured maybe Sue's co-workers could give him a fresh angle to pursue.

Dunbar walked into the bank, and the atmosphere was quiet and stuffy. He worried that Sue's coworkers might not open up. But he asked a woman working behind one of the desks if she'd be willing to answer some questions about Sue, and the woman's face lit up. She immediately grabbed Dunbar's arm, pulled him into an empty office, and began gossiping like they were old friends. She said that Sue was very flirtatious and had a hot temper. One time, somebody Sue went to lunch with had even left an angry note on Sue's desk afterward,

accusing her of being promiscuous. Sue always claimed that her flirting was not cheating, but the co-worker had always wondered if maybe Sue's behavior really bothered Paul. And she said there was more. People close to Sue knew Paul had cheated on Sue, and so they theorized that maybe all of Sue's flirting was Sue's way of getting back at Paul.

Detective Dunbar thanked Sue's co-worker and then talked to a few more people at the bank and then headed to the station to inform Nakamoto that Sue and Paul's marriage might have been way more strained than anybody realized. But when Dunbar got to the station, Nakamoto was waiting on the steps with two coffees in his hands. He handed one to Dunbar and told him he had big news.

Now, most of the people who had called into the police station worried that they or their loved ones had been poisoned by Excedrin that was laced with cyanide, or people who were just reacting to headlines and being paranoid. But it would turn out one of them was right. There had been another death from cyanide poisoning in town. And it happened three days before Sue's death.

Nakamoto said the victim was a man named Bruce Nichol and he had died suddenly of what doctors thought was emphysema, which is a very serious lung disease. But Bruce's wife, Stella, did not believe that because Bruce had never been diagnosed with emphysema. So a couple of days after Bruce's death, when Stella saw the news about Sue and the Excedrin, she called the FBI saying her husband had died very mysteriously not long before Sue and so maybe he had died from cyanide.

Now, by this point, her husband Bruce had actually already been buried, but he had donated his eyes. So a vial of Bruce's blood had been taken to determine blood type, and then that blood had been stored at the blood bank. So the FBI sent that blood out for testing, and it would turn out it was positive for cyanide.

Detective Dunbar didn't know what to say. After his trip to the bank, he'd convinced himself all over again that Paul must have been Sue's killer, you know, retaliating that she was flirting and potentially cheating on him. But Bruce Nichols' death would mean that Paul killed two people, one of them three days before Sue. And so Dunbar wanted to go talk to Bruce's wife, Stella, to see if maybe there was some connection between Bruce and Sue.

But Nakamoto stopped him and reminded Dunbar that the tampering angle was the FBI's case, and so Nakamoto would interview Bruce's wife Stella, and then he would tell Dunbar what he learned. The next afternoon, Special Agent Nakamoto arrived at the mobile home where Stella and her daughter lived. Stella opened the door and invited him into a small room that was dominated by a huge fish tank.

Nakamoto sat down on the couch and watched Stella's brightly colored exotic fish dart back and forth. Stella watched him and told him she actually had a dream of opening up an exotic fish store of her own someday. Nakamoto smiled and said the fish were beautiful. Then, in a gentle voice, he asked Stella to please tell him what happened to her husband.

But Stella said there really wasn't much to tell. Bruce had gone outside on the deck to get some fresh air and then suddenly he collapsed. She said he had just taken a handful of Excedrin and usually he took four pills at once. Nakamoto nodded and then asked Stella if she remembered where and when these pills had been purchased.

Stella said she didn't, but Bruce saved all their receipts for tax purposes. So she got up and then quickly returned with a small box full of receipts. She said Nakamoto might have to dig a little bit, but she was almost positive he would find the receipt he needed. And so Nakamoto took the box, thanked Stella for her time, and then headed out the door.

But as he walked outside, Stella's daughter Cindy pulled up in her car and got out, and unlike Stella, Cindy was furious. Nakamoto wasn't even down the steps before Cindy launched into a tirade saying she couldn't believe the police were here questioning her family like they would never hurt Bruce. Nakamoto tried to explain that, you know, her mother and Cindy for that matter were not being treated like suspects here, but Cindy just cut him off and went from being angry to kind of sounding really heartbroken, and

and she said Bruce had died right when his life seemed to be turning around. She said Bruce had been an alcoholic, but he'd gone to rehab, he'd stopped drinking, and things had never been better. And then Cindy dropped her head into her hands and looked like she was crying, and Nakamoto just said, look, I'm only here to ask everybody questions. That's how we're going to figure out who killed Bruce. But Cindy just continued to cry and said it just didn't seem fair. You know, it's like everything had been going so well for him. How could this happen?

Nakamoto just said how sorry he was, and he told Cindy he would find the person who did this.

Over the next few days, Nakamoto and his team tried to track down the source of the cyanide that was used to poison the Excedrin to see if they could figure out where the killer purchased it. Even though cyanide is obviously deadly, it's actually widely available. It's used in photography, jewelry making, drug manufacturing, and lots of other industries. And so quickly, the FBI realized that trying to track this down was kind of a dead end. There were too many places it could have come from.

Meanwhile, the public pressure to solve the case was only intensifying. A group of drug companies whose stock had tanked following the Tylenol murders and now also these Excedrin murders put up a $300,000 reward for any information that led to an arrest. To Nakamoto, it seemed like whoever had poisoned the Excedrin was likely a local who was familiar with the grocery stores in the area, so he didn't think the murders of Bruce and Sue were related to the Chicago Tylenol murders.

But he was absolutely certain that whoever killed Bruce also killed Sue. Because an FDA lab had confirmed that the cyanide used in both murders had clearly come from the exact same source, even though they couldn't actually identify what that source was. In both of the tainted capsules, there were these strange green flecks all mixed in with the poison, which made it impossible to identify who manufactured the cyanide, but it was unique enough that it meant this was the same batch of cyanide.

So by the end of June, three weeks after Sue and Bruce had died, even though Nakamoto and Dunbar had made progress on their cases, it just kind of felt like every avenue they had pursued had led to a dead end with regards to actually figuring out who did this. Dunbar still thought Paul was the best suspect, but there was absolutely no evidence that Paul had killed Sue, much less Bruce, and so both investigations began to drag and

and several months went by with no new leads. Dunbar and Nakamoto were getting more and more frustrated because they had both worked almost non-stop on their parallel cases, and both basically had nothing to show for it.

In December of 1986, six months after the murders, Special Agent Nakamoto heard another agent calling his name from across the FBI command center. He waved Nakamoto over to take the phone. Nakamoto headed across the room and despite the other agent's obvious excitement, Nakamoto tempered his expectations. Over the past several months, countless people had called into the hotline but

But most of those tips had gone nowhere. Nakamoto figured most people were calling in in a desperate attempt to try to cash in on the $300,000 reward those drug companies had offered. And so Nakamoto grabbed the phone and introduced himself, and right away the caller said they knew who had killed both Sue Snow and Bruce Nichol.

Nakamoto exhaled, expecting another long-winded theory that really had nothing to do with the case. But as this caller explained how they knew who the killer was, a stunned look came across Nakamoto's face. This caller pointed to evidence leading to the killer that had been right in front of investigators, but they had overlooked it. Nakamoto ended the call and quickly rallied his team. He wanted them to follow up on the details this caller had provided. At this point, Nakamoto was sure that he had just figured out who Sue and Bruce's killer was.

On a summer day in 1986, the killer put on a pair of gloves and then poured a vial of powdered cyanide into a bowl. Then they reached into a bag and pulled out an empty gel capsule, they opened it up, and then using one end, they scooped up the cyanide powder and then took the other end and closed the capsule back up, sealing the poison inside.

On the table in front of them were a row of untampered with Excedrin bottles. The killer picked up one of them, carefully removed the safety seal and lid, and then shook one uncontaminated capsule out into their palm. They then held it up to the cyanide pill they had just made. No one would be able to tell the difference.

After replacing the cyanide pill in the bottle they had just opened up, they did the same thing with the other bottles, basically taking out a handful of good pills and replacing them with more cyanide pills. When the killer was done, they carefully glued the plastic safety seals back onto all of these now tampered with Excedrin bottles and put the lids back on them. Then the killer put those tainted bottles in a shopping bag and walked out to their car.

The killer drove to a grocery store, went inside, and headed for the pharmacy aisle. Once they were there, they looked around to make sure nobody was watching. Then they reached into their bag, pulled out a poisoned bottle of Excedrin, and placed it on the shelf with all the others. And it looked like it belonged there. Satisfied with their handiwork, the killer walked back outside. And then, just hours later, Sue Snow walked into that same grocery store and happened to buy that exact poisoned bottle of Excedrin that would kill her.

But it would turn out the killer, who thought they had gotten away with it, had left behind one telltale clue. Those green flecks mixed in with the cyanide, the flecks that had baffled investigators and made it impossible to trace the source of the cyanide?

Well, it would turn out those flecks were dust from an algae pill used to keep the water clean in large fish tanks. And with that clue, Agent Nakamoto and his team came to realize that about a week before Sue ever stepped into that store, Stella Nickel had used tainted Excedrin to kill her husband Bruce.

Stella had crushed up the cyanide she had put in her husband's Excedrin in the same bowl she used to crush up the algae pills she used in her fish tank. And remnants of that algae showed up in samples of the tainted Excedrin. The tipster who had reached out to the FBI was Stella's own daughter, Cindy.

It was Cindy who had at first insisted to Agent Nakamoto that nobody in her family would ever hurt Bruce, that they were the happiest they'd ever been since Bruce stopped drinking. But now Cindy had a different story to tell. She said her mother, Stella, hated who Bruce had become after he quit drinking. Instead of getting dressed up and going to bars and hanging out with friends, Stella and Bruce now just stayed home all the time, and so Stella was bored. She missed her old life, and she felt like Bruce's new sobriety was holding her back.

Cindy said Stella had even talked to her about how easy it would be to recreate the Chicago Tylenol murders and make it look like somebody had overdosed. Despite that, Cindy had tried to convince herself after Bruce's death that her mother's comments were just a weird coincidence.

But then, six months after the murders, Stella told Cindy she was going to use Bruce's life insurance money to live out her dream and open up a tropical fish store. And at this point, Cindy couldn't deny it anymore. She felt nearly certain that Stella must have killed Bruce for his money.

Stella could have gotten away with this whole thing, but Bruce's autopsy didn't pick up the cyanide. Instead, the coroner listed Bruce's cause of death as emphysema. That was actually a bad thing for Stella, because the life insurance policy she had on Bruce paid an extra $100,000 if his cause of death was accidental, i.e. cyanide, you know, accidentally consumed cyanide, that's what she was hoping it would be, rather than emphysema, which is considered, you know, a natural cause death. And so,

and so therefore would not be considered accidental. And so when Stella found out about this, she went back to the store with more cyanide pills because she needed another death, another cyanide death, to be able to have her own husband's cause of death reinvestigated. And Sue just happened to be the unfortunate victim who grabbed that bottle off the shelf that Stella had left. It would turn out Paul had nothing to do with Sue's murder. She was literally a random victim.

Stella was arrested by the FBI and charged with two counts of causing death by product tampering. She was eventually found guilty and sentenced to 90 years in prison. Stella's daughter, Cindy, would receive $250,000 of that $300,000 reward the drug companies had offered. As for Sue's daughters, they received money in an out-of-court settlement with the drug manufacturer. They put it towards their college education, which is what they thought their mother would have wanted them to do.

Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you enjoyed today's stories and you're looking for more strange, dark, and mysterious content, be sure to check out all of our studios' podcasts. They are this one, of course, Mr. Ballin Podcast, and we also have Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, we have Bedtime Stories, and also Run Full. To find those other podcasts, all you have to do is search for Ballin Studios wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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