73. The “Cereal” Poisoner
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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into the Dark podcast. I'm your host Peyton Moreland and I am so happy you are here. I just wanted to say thank you guys so much for your continued support. I feel like I get the kindest messages and just people who really really connect with me on here and I connect with as well and I don't know I

don't know how I got so lucky to be able to do this, but I'm so glad that you guys are here and I'm so grateful for this place. And I just really wanted to say thank you for giving this to me because it is because of you guys. Okay, let's get into my 10 seconds before we jump into the episode.

So we just got done with our Salt Lake City live show. It went so good. It was so fun. We actually had a lot of friends and family at that one, and that was kind of cool and a blast. Yeah, it went good. We have our two Nashville shows next, and then we're done with our spring tour. I guess it's kind of turned into a summer tour now, but it's been so fun. Like truly the live shows have been a blast, and I'm really glad we do it, and I hope

soon that we can kind of branch out and go to more locations for our next tour. After tour, I actually went to LA with a friend. So I was there this weekend. It was for her birthday. And I'm not typically one to do girls trips. In fact, I don't know if I've ever done a girls trip like that where I've slept over somewhere, but I would, you know, I'm trying to branch out a little bit and I actually did have a lot of fun. So we just kind of walked around, we worked out,

We ate food. It was great. It was fun. I loved it. And now I'm back and literally tomorrow I am going to Idaho. I have to choreograph a couple of routines, dance routines, and I'll be doing that for a week there just for a couple different people. So yeah, I feel like I've just kind of been jam-packed this week.

But don't worry, all of the episodes are coming out. I'm still here. I'll be in DMs. Like I'm still around. I'm just busy. But that's kind of my 10 seconds, just a little life update. And let's get into the episode. Okay, so they say that truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes stories from real life have twists and turns that you wouldn't buy if you came across them in a movie or a book.

And today I'm going to delve into a murder case. Guys, we are doing true crime today that felt just like something out of one of Shakespeare's plays. Except unlike in fiction, this story is totally true.

So it all began in the fall of 1993 when a new student enrolled at Mansfield High School, which was in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. Again, we're in 1993, Fort Worth, Texas, new student enrolled at school. Her name was Dorothy Marie Robards, but she went by her middle name, Marie.

So Marie was 18, a senior, which is an odd time to start a new school. But that weirdness aside, Marie sort of seemed like she lived a charmed life. She was a beautiful straight A student and Marie was especially good at chemistry. It was one of her best subjects. Plus Marie was active in extracurricular activities, including the yearbook staff and the volleyball team.

Her outfits were always impeccable, which like it's the 90s, so I'm sure. She had perfect hair, makeup, everything. She was very conscious of her image, but she was also very reserved. Everything Marie did and said felt like it was calculated in some way. Almost as though she was afraid to kind of let her mask slip in case someone saw something underneath.

That said, most people were all too happy to just take Marie at face value. Again, she was popular. She was smart and athletic. Like what wasn't to like? Well, one of Marie's classmates just did not buy the perfect act. And her name was Stacey High. Now, Stacey was anything but perfect. In fact, she was a survivor of childhood abuse and she'd had to learn to deal with the intense emotions that came from that.

After talking to lots of counselors and mental health professionals, Stacey was good at spotting coping mechanisms. And basically, she thought that perfect popular Marie was putting on an act at school, that she was pretending to be perfect to cover up for some deeper trauma or emotional struggle in her life. Stacey even had a theory about what that trauma might be.

See, Marie lived with her grandparents, not her mother and father. And there were rumors flying around the school about Marie's dad. Some people thought he died recently and that's why Marie had moved to a new house and changed schools. Others said that he was alive and they were positive that Marie had told them that he was still alive. In fact, Marie was apparently telling completely contradictory stories about whether or not her dad had passed away. I mean,

Kind of think Allison from Pretty Little Liars here. Like she's just mysterious. No one really wants to question her, but she's actually lying and like telling people different things. She's almost spreading weird conflicting gossip about herself all around her new school. So Stacey figured maybe Marie's father really had died and Marie was just having a hard time coping with the fact. If she was traumatized by the loss of a parent, she might lie about her dad still being alive rather than just deal with her grief.

Stacey also thought if she could just get Marie to open up about whatever had happened, maybe it would help. So Stacey goes out of her way to befriend the new girl, Marie. And Marie seemed grateful for her attention. Stacey was also popular and she had a reputation of having a fantastic sense of humor. They were basically two high school superstars, the popular girl and the brainy jock, who kind of found one another.

Even if Stacey initially befriended Marie to try and help her, they actually really did click once they got to know each other. The friendship was genuine, and before long, they were kind of hanging out nonstop, ruling the school.

But then on the nights and weekends, according to an article with Texas Monthly, they just drive around town killing time behind the wheel. And once they both got their hands on a pair of fake IDs, Stacey also took Marie out to the local bars. And every now and then when it started to seem like Marie was letting her guard down, Stacey would try and ask about her dad. But each time the topic came up, Marie immediately would clam up again. It was the one subject that she just did not talk about, even to her best friend.

To Stacey, this was a confirmation of what she had already suspected. There was something weird about Marie's father's... Now, it would have had to be pretty bad to stand out from all the other challenges Marie had overcome in her childhood. So this is like things that people didn't know, but she was more willing to talk about.

Her parents had separated and then gotten divorced when she was only six years old. And because her father had some mental health issues, including severe depression, her mother actually raised her. Now, over time, Marie and her mom, Beth, became super, super close. Marie actually felt a little bit protective over her mother. And when Beth started dating a new guy named Frank Burroughs, Marie was initially suspicious, even after she had been with him for a while.

After Frank and Beth got married, Marie kind of held him at arm's length, almost like she thought she had to protect her mother from her new stepdad. And it turned out that her instincts in that arena were actually good because Marie actually caught Frank cheating on her mom. Marie told Beth what she'd learned, and she was appalled when Beth decided to forgive her new stepdad, Frank.

She thought they could work through the things and move on past the affair. For her part, Marie refused to live in a house with the man who'd betrayed them in that way. So during her junior year of high school, she decides to move in with her dad, Stephen. Now, unfortunately, this was a really bad fit. Marie and Stephen at this point are practically strangers. Before that, he'd only ever visited her once every couple of weeks.

Plus, Stephen lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. Marie didn't even have a room of her own or a normal bed. She had to sleep on a fold-out roll-away bed. She set it up in the dining room every night and then would fold it up and put it away during the day. Stephen,

Stephen kept promising that he'd move to a bigger place soon, but Marie missed her mom and her old home. So eventually she asks to move back a bunch of times, but Beth and Frank refused. They're like, listen, you chose to leave, which...

OK, specifically, Frank, her stepdad, worried that if he let Marie keep going back and forth, it would just cause more tension. He wanted her to pick a home and stick with it. And since she'd already chosen Stephen, her dad, she was going to have to stay with Stephen. Now, at one point, Marie even saved up all of the money she had and used it to take a cab to Beth's house. But when she rang the doorbell, Frank wouldn't let her in.

Now, once it was clear that Marie wasn't going to be able to move out, she tried to make the most of her life with her dad in Fort Worth, Texas. She focused on her schoolwork, got good grades, seemed like things were maybe turning around for the better. That is until Stephen died of an apparent heart attack on February 18th, 1993.

Now, again, Stacy didn't know much about the heart attack because Marie barely ever spoke about it. But Stephen had died very young. He was only 38 years old. And before that point, he'd never had any serious problems with his heart. So the death was extremely shocking. Now, after he passed away, Marie did end up moving back in with her mom. I mean, it's not like she had a lot of other options. And I'm happy that her mom decided to take her back in.

But life in her home was still incredibly tense. Even though her stepfather, Frank, had promised that the affair was over, Marie caught him cheating a second time and her mother decided to take him back again. And that's when Marie was like, listen, I have had enough. So she moved in with Stephen's parents. This is her grandparents who lived in Mansfield. And this is why she ends up going to the new school at the beginning of her senior year. And that catches you up to where we are.

But now at least she has a new friend, Stacy. Sometimes after a particularly long day, I love to play games on my phone to get my mind off things and one game I have been loving is June's Journey. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery mobile game that puts your detective skills to the test. You play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. With hundreds of mind-teasing puzzles, the next clue is always within reach.

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Use code dark. All right, let's get back to the episode. Now, when the girls weren't sneaking into bars or driving around town, they helped each other do homework and study. And in January of 1994, they were reading Hamlet together for a class assignment. Now, in case you're not up on your Shakespeare, Hamlet is the story of a man named Hamlet, go figure, and Hamlet's father is dead and Hamlet thinks his uncle, Claudius, murdered him.

So he sets a trap to trick Claudius into confessing to his father's murder. He writes a play that features a scene where a character is murdered and it's the same way that his father was killed. And when Claudius goes to watch the play, he obviously gets really upset during this scene and he storms out of the theater. And that confirms for Hamlet that his suspicions are right. Because you know, he figures Claudius wouldn't be so bothered if his conscience wasn't getting to him. And

And there's a scene later on where Claudius gives speech all about redemption and how impossible it feels for him. The murder is weighing heavily on his soul and he doesn't know if it will ever be possible for him to be a good person again. And when she reads the play, Stacy was so moved by Claudius's words that she had to read them out loud to Marie. And once she finished, Marie's face had turned totally ghostly white.

Her hands were shaking. And that's when Marie asked, do you think people can go through life without a conscience?

Now, Stacey didn't understand why her best friend Marie would ask this. Neither of the girls had ever gotten into serious trouble, and she definitely didn't think either one of them was missing a conscience. So she tried to think of the worst possible thing Marie could have done. Like, why did Marie react this way? She guessed that maybe Marie had damaged her grandparents' property or she might have been pregnant. Marie brushed off both of those guesses, but still didn't explain whatever it was she felt so guilty about.

As a joke, Stacey said, why did you kill somebody? And that was when her best friend Marie burst into tears. So she began shaking even harder than before while trying to breathe through her intense sobs. It was hard for her to even get any words out. But eventually, Marie managed to explain to Stacey that she'd actually killed her father about a year ago. And it all came back to the question of which parent she'd lived with.

According to Marie, she thought the only way to get out of Stephen's house and back to her mother was to do something to him. If she could create a situation where it was impossible for him to take care of her, Frank and her mother would have to let her come home, right?

So for a while, she toyed around with the idea of burning down the apartment complex they lived in. She'd wait until Stephen wasn't there, of course, and she didn't really want to hurt him. But ultimately, Marie decided against that plan. And I'm not sure why, but maybe she realized that there were lots of other people living in the building and she had no way of ensuring that they could escape the fire. So she came up with a new plot while she was working in a chemistry lab one day at school.

See, Marie had to handle lots of dangerous chemicals, and this included barium acetate. Now, barium acetate looks like a white powder, and it's extremely dangerous. If you swallow it, the chemical can cause an upset stomach or an irregular heartbeat. If the dose is high enough, it'll close your throat so you can't breathe. Like, it'll kill you.

The good news is barium acetate isn't the sort of chemical you're likely to find just lying around the house. If Marie wasn't around it in the high school chemistry lab, she would have had a very hard time getting her hands on it. Now, one day when the teacher turned their back and wasn't watching, Marie poured a little bit of barium acetate into a paper towel and then she took that towel home.

She held onto it for about a week. Maybe she was working up the nerve to use it. She was just waiting for the right opportunity. But on the night of February 18th, 1993, her dad ordered Mexican takeout and Marie knew that particular restaurant made really flavorful food. The spices would cover up the taste of the chemical. So she slipped the poison into her dad's refried beans and he ate them without noticing anything odd. And

And after dinner, he went to church. And when he came back, he was like, I have a stomachache.

And from there, his symptoms got much worse very quickly. Once Stephen began to vomit, Marie went to a neighbor's unit and knocked on the door. Now, this wasn't just any neighbor. It was actually Stephen's new girlfriend, Sandra Hudgens, who lived in the same building. And that's who Marie went to for help. And as soon as Sandra opened the door, Marie said, hey, my dad is sick. And it's unclear if she was having second thoughts about drugging him or just genuinely trying to get help or if she was...

trying to just, you know, be an innocent bystander. That question would be hotly debated later on. But in the moment, Sandra didn't know what was wrong with Steven or how sick he was. So she headed over to his unit just to check on him.

By this point, he was foaming at the mouth and struggling to swallow. He also said that he couldn't feel his arms or legs. So Sandra immediately called 911 while Marie stood in the doorway and watched all of this play out. She didn't say anything about how he'd gotten sick. She didn't try to help. Sandra just figured that Marie was in shock. She also thought that no teenager should have to watch her dad die. So she hugged Marie and pushed her head into her chest. That way, the teen couldn't see what was happening.

The paramedics arrived quickly and they took Stephen to the hospital, but they never figured out what was actually wrong with him or how to treat him. And he died that night. The doctors ruled his cause of death a heart attack. Nobody even suspected that Marie had murdered Stephen. And when she told Stacey about what she'd done...

Stacy didn't know what to think. It was a lot to take in, but Marie made her swear not to say anything. And Stacy really wanted to be a loyal friend. So she promised to keep the secret. Now, of course, that's not the sort of secret that's easy to keep, especially as a teenager. So that very same night, Stacy spills the beans to her mom. She said she didn't know what to do.

But Stacey's mom, Libby, did not believe the story. Now, to be clear, she thought Stacey was telling the truth and that Marie really had told her about poisoning her dad. But she also thought the whole narrative was kind of a bit over the top. It seemed more likely to her that Stephen really had died of a heart attack. And Marie was just acting out, looking for attention, like wanted attention. She was just saying this because she needed love.

maybe she blamed herself for her dad's death which wasn't really her fault she may have invented this story about barium acetate in the refried beans to help her make sense of her complicated feelings

But eventually, it sounds like even Libby started to wonder if there was more to this account. Like as time goes on, she starts to get curious. And so one night she calls a poison hotline. Her thinking was that if Marie had made the story up, the hotline could just point out any inconsistencies in it. But instead, Libby described all of Stephen's symptoms, but framed it like, hey, could this really happen if someone swallowed barium acetate?

And the operator said, yeah, Libby had described all of the symptoms of that poisoning perfectly. And they sounded pretty suspicious. And they asked Libby why she was asking this specific set of questions. I mean, if you call and ask that, the hotline is going to be like, why do you need to know this? And rather than answer, Libby just hung up the phone. Now, like her daughter, Libby was hesitant to tell anyone else what she knew, even the police.

So even after that call to the poison hotline, she kept this a secret too. But by now, Stacey was kind of getting to be afraid of Marie. She thought her friend might do something to her if she told anyone else about what she'd done. I mean, the weight of this secret was killing her. After all, if this girl was willing to kill her own father, what would she do to someone who she just met this past fall?

Stacey began having nightmares about Marie that were something like out of a horror movie. In them, Stacey would be running away from her best friend through a dark forest. But no matter how fast she sprinted, Marie was always right behind her, breathing in her ear. She also dreamed about Stephen.

Stacey had never met him and didn't know what he looked like, but in her dreams, she'd find his grave and hear him shouting her name from under the ground, like his restless spirit was begging her to solve his murder. So needless to say, the stress was getting to Stacey and she was not dealing with it well. She actually began drinking excessively and even spent some time at a mental health facility. She didn't know how to live her normal life, especially when she had to see Marie in school every day and knew what she'd done.

Stacey even quit the yearbook staff just specifically to get away from Marie. And at one point, Stacey told Marie a little white lie. She said that the Guild of the Secret had gotten to her and she confessed what she knew to a priest. Now, obviously, this wasn't true. We knew Stacey had only told her mom, but she told Marie it was a priest. I think she thought maybe this little fib would keep her safe. Now,

Now, Marie tells her, "Hey, like, it's fine that you told him. I understand." But still, this didn't make Stacey feel any more secure. She was terrified that Marie might try to silence her permanently. And she was also carrying the guilt of preventing Steven from getting justice. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color-treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me.

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Let's get back into the episode. So every day that passed, Stacey was more and more freaked out. She was starting to crack under the pressure. Stacey had a few older friends, former classmates who had already graduated. And Stacey decides to tell them what she knew. Maybe she hoped that because they never met Marie, word wouldn't get back to her that she talked.

Except Stacy's friends didn't believe her. The story just seemed too outlandish. They accused Stacy of making it up for attention. She talked to the school's guidance counselor all the time and eventually she admitted what she knew, but she didn't name names. Basically, she told the counselor that a friend had killed someone, they got away with it, and she didn't know what to do. And after one of these conversations, Stacy decided she'd had enough. She was ready to just go to the police. And with the guidance counselor's help and support, she did exactly that.

So she goes in and she tells the authorities everything. But even with this report, the investigators did not treat Marie's possible murder like a priority.

There were a couple of reasons for this. The first was that Steven Robards had received an autopsy after he passed away. At the time, the medical examiner didn't see any indication that he was poisoned or that there was anything unusual about his death. This whole story about a teenager killer who basically committed the perfect murder, it just seemed too dramatic and twisted. Their assumption was that Marie made the story up to seem edgy. This was the same thing that Stacy's mom, Libby, thought at first too.

and what all of her friends had said. It actually made Stacey feel even worse that no one believed her, like she'd never escaped the hell she was living in. She focused on getting through her senior year and getting out of high school and away from Marie. But all the while, she still tried to act like a friend, going back and forth on what was the safest move. She even second-guessed her instincts at time, thinking, okay, no one else sees Marie as a killer. Why do I?

The next fall, Marie and Stacey had both graduated and gone off to separate colleges. Stacey thought Marie was out of her life for good, except that's when the investigators finally got around to following up on her report.

First, they went to the chemistry lab at Marie's former high school in Fort Worth. That's the school that she attended while she was living with her dad and where Marie claimed she stole the poison in the first place. Now, I'm not sure what they expected to find at this point. It had been a year and a half since she claimed she had taken the chemical. But while the police were there, they saw a manual sitting on a shelf and it had a list of the chemicals they used in the lab with descriptions of how to handle them safely. And when they turned to the page on barium acetate,

It was missing. Someone had torn it out. So then they decided to test the blood and tissue samples that had been taken back during Stephen Roberts' autopsy. Now, luckily, it was standard process for the medical examiner to keep samples in storage for up to five years after a person's death, even in cases like Stephen's where nothing seems suspicious at the time. Now,

Now, once the police collected Stephen's blood, they tried to find a lab that could analyze it. Like I mentioned before, this is a pretty rare chemical. People don't get exposed to it very often, so it's not standard to test for its presence in a person's blood. Most coroners didn't even have the equipment they needed to detect it.

It took these investigators three months just to find a facility that could check for this specific compound. And when they finally got the results, they saw that Stephen didn't just have barium acetate in his blood. It was at a concentration 250 times higher than normal. He definitely swallowed a fatal dose and that's what had actually killed him, not a heart attack.

Right after the police got these results, they arrested Marie and questioned her about her father's murder. And almost immediately, Marie confessed. It was like she was sick of carrying the weight of the secret. She wanted to finally come clean and tell the investigators what she'd done.

Now, interestingly, the detectives still had a hard time buying her story. This was a kind of theme with Marie. She was so warm and sweet and good-natured. Nobody could believe she was a killer, even when she was admitting it herself. Did you know that this stuff is dangerous? Yes or no? Yes, sir. How did you know that? Because my kids just noticed it.

It wasn't that the detectives thought she was innocent. They just figured that she would have a good explanation that could justify the crime. They thought she would have a motive, a good motive. At least one police officer became convinced that Steven must have been abusing her. They thought Marie might have killed him in self-defense, but she insisted that wasn't the case. She says he was a good father and he never hurt her. It wasn't his fault. She just really wanted to go home to her mom.

Marie almost had to work to convince the police that she was just as guilty as she said she was. But once she got them to believe her story, she typed up a written confession and turned it over. She was ready to face her fate. So her trial began in 1996. This was three years after Stephen's death and two years after she'd confessed to Stacey.

On the stand, Marie admitted that she did poison her dad, but she said that she'd killed him on accident. She'd only wanted to make him sick, and she had no idea that the barium acetate would actually be fatal.

But the prosecution poked holes in her story. First, they said that her plan made no sense. If her motive was to go back to living with her mom, making her dad sick wouldn't accomplish that. I mean, eventually after a few days or hours, he'd get back better and Marie would still be with him. Plus, if she really didn't want to kill her father, she could have said something when the paramedics arrived. Let them know that he'd eaten barium acetate so they could try to help him.

The fact that she just stood there in silence suggested that she wanted him to die. At the very least, she didn't do anything to save him. They also didn't buy Marie's argument that she didn't realize that this was a deadly poison. She literally tore that page out of the chemistry lab's manual. It said exactly how toxic the chemical was. And even without that book, Marie was too good of a student not to realize what she was doing. Remember, chemistry was one of her best subjects.

But the biggest challenge to Marie's testimony came from her former best friend, Stacy. She took the stand and said that Marie had told her the intention was always to kill her father. She knew exactly what Barry Amacitate could do, and that's one of the reasons she picked it as her murder weapon.

It was enough for Marie to be found guilty of murder, and on May 6, 1996, she was sentenced to 28 years in prison. And as surprising as it might sound, Marie didn't seem upset about the sentence. It really did sound like she felt guilty about the murder and wanted to pay her debt to society.

Now, according to her guards, she was very cooperative during her time behind bars. She even took on the really tough chores that nobody else wanted to do. And she also wore these very thin paper gowns that were not warm, like even in the dead of winter, almost like she didn't believe she deserved something more comfortable.

Now, during one phone call with her mom, Beth, Marie's mother asked her if she blamed Stacey for turning her in. And she said she didn't. She understood that Stacey did what she had to, and she said her friends shouldn't feel guilty about sharing her dark secret. Which does make it sound like maybe Stacey had Marie all wrong. She thought Marie was a monster who might try to harm her. But to all appearances, Marie was actually struggling with her guilt and maybe a little relieved that Stacey did the right thing.

At the very least, it didn't sound like she was bearing a grudge. Now, just in case anyone has been doing any back of the napkin math here, yeah, Marie received a 28-year sentence almost exactly 28 years ago in 1996. But that doesn't mean she's going to be released soon because she was already let out all the way back in 2003.

She was eligible for parole after only seven years behind bars. And given that she really seemed remorseful and she'd been a model prisoner, the state agreed that she was ready to live her life as a free citizen. Marie was 25 years old and she'd served less than a decade for her murder conviction. Now, understandably, this decision was very controversial. On the one hand, her time behind bars was extremely short.

Some people thought her apparent guilty conscience was all an act, that she never wanted to get caught and only pretended to be cooperative to get out of prison as fast as possible. After all, if she really thought she deserved punishment, why did she lie about what she'd done for years? Why not just plead guilty? On the other hand, it really did seem like Marie never wanted to hurt anyone else again, and she didn't appear to pose a threat to society. It's

It's hard to say what became of her after she got free. Marie changed her name. She stayed out of the public eye. So it's anyone's guess if she'd really learned her lesson and grown or if she was an extremely successful manipulator, someone who pulled off the perfect murder and almost got away with it and then barely had to spend any time in prison.

Now really, this whole story sounds like something out of Shakespeare. Not only because Marie was inspired to confess by a play in which a killer gives away his guilt while watching another play about a murder, but also because the true story has betrayals, secrets, a dramatic confession, a conclusion that leaves you weighing really hefty questions. And I think it's notable that a lot of Shakespeare plays were focused on the question of whether it's ever even possible to be redeemed.

Unfortunately, Hamlet, the play that inspired Marie to come forward to Stacey, was a tragedy. Things didn't work out for the characters and nobody got redemption at the end. But maybe real life has been a bit kinder to Marie. Maybe she really did seize her second chance to do better. I guess we'll never know. And that is our case for this week, you guys. I will see you next time as we go further into the dark. Goodbye.