The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  An aneurysm in the brain was suspected, but doctors found no evidence of internal bleeding. The symptoms also suggested an overdose, but Hayley insisted her mother neither drink nor smoked—and certainly did not take drugs. With no obvious the cause of death, a post mortem was ordered.

  During the autopsy, one of the pathologist’s assistants noticed a faint odour of bitter almonds emanating from the body—the telltale sign of cyanide. Lab tests confirmed that cyanide was indeed the cause of death. The source was traced to the bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin and Bristol-Myers organized a national recall.

  Hysteria spread through Washington. Police stripped all nonprescription capsules from pharmacy shelves and the FBI was called in. They found two more bottles of contaminated painkillers, one in Auburn and one in the adjoining suburb of Kent.

  The day after the highly publicized product recall had started, 17 June, Stella Nickell telephoned the police. The 42-year-old widow said she feared that her husband had been poisoned the same way less than two weeks earlier. On 6 June, 52-year-old Bruce Nickell, a heavy equipment operator who worked for Washington State, had collapsed and died after taking four capsules of Extra-Strength Excedrin. A post mortem had initially determined the cause of death to be complications resulting from emphysema and Bruce Nickell had already been buried. However, earlier he had volunteered to be an organ donor, so a sample of his blood serum had been kept. On 19 June a lab test on the serum showed cyanide to be present. By that time the police had discovered two bottles of contaminated Excedrin capsules in Nickells’ home.

  All five contaminated bottles were sent to the FBI crime lab in Washington, D.C. to be checked for fingerprints that might belong to the killer. During the examination, lab technician Roger Martz made an unusual discovery. He found that the cyanide in all five bottles contained tiny green crystals. Breaking the particles down chemically, he identified it as the substance that killed algae in fish tanks. He even came up with the brand name: Algae Destroyer. And he concluded that the killer had mixed up the cyanide in a container used earlier for crushing pellets of the algicide.

  FBI agent Ron Nichols then spotted an anomaly. Of the 740,000 capsules from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska the FDA had examined, the capsules that contained cyanide were found in only five bottles—and two of them were found in Stella Nickell’s home. If she had bought the two bottles in the same store at the same time, that might just be a case of bad luck. However, Stella Nickell said she bought them at different times in different stores. The odds against such a coincidence were infinitesimal.

  Stella Nickell, a grandmother with two daughters, seemed an unlikely suspect. She worked as a security guard at the Seattle-Tacoma airport and lived a seemingly happy life with her second husband Bruce in a trailer on a large woody lot. Neighbours said she was cheerful and hard-working and seemed genuinely grief-stricken when Bruce suddenly died. But then FBI agent Jack Cusack, who was now heading the investigation, remembered something seemingly insignificant another agent had told him earlier—“Stella Nickell has a fish tank in her trailer.”

  Agents combed pet stores to see if anyone recalled selling Algae Destroyer to Nickell. On 25 August 1986, a clerk at a store in Kent identified Stella Nickell from a photo montage. She stuck out in his mind because she had a little bell attached to her purse and he called her “the woman who jingled”. Intrigued, FBI agents began a background check on the grandmother who had now become their prime suspect.

  Between 1968 and 1971, she had convictions in California for cheque fraud, forgery and child abuse. What’s more the Nickells were chronically short of money, barely escaping bankruptcy recently and the bank had been moving to foreclose on their trailer before Bruce died.

  The crisis had been averted when the state had paid out $31,000 in life-assurance, a policy that they maintained as Bruce Nickell’s employer. However, they would have paid out $176,000 if his death had been “accidental”—under the policy being poisoned by a random killer would have qualified as accidental. The problem was that the doctor who examined Bruce had failed to detect the cyanide. The autopsy said that her husband had died of natural causes. Stella Nickells had called the hospital to question the post-mortem findings. She stood to make an extra $105,000 if the cyanide was found. That was why she had had called the police.

  Furthermore, in the year before his death, Stella had taken out two $20,000 policies on Bruce’s life. Now she had even filed a wrongful death suit against Bristol-Myers for “contributing to” her husband’s death.

  Up until this point, Cusack had been trying to find a link between the murders of Sue Snow and Bruce Nickell. Now he was faced with the chilling thought that Stella Nickell had put bottles of Excedrin laced with cyanide on drug store shelves—risking the lives of many others and taking one—to make the murder of her husband look like an accident.

  On 18 November, Cusack asked Stella Nickell to come in for a routine interview at FBI headquarters in Seattle. As a dark-haired, middle-aged woman in a buckskin coat walked into his office sat down, Cusack heard a soft jingle from the bell on her purse.

  First, he went over the details of her husband’s death, then asked where and when she had bought the tainted bottles. Had she ever bought Algae Destroyer? he asked. She said no. Then he asked whether she had ever bought extra life assurance on her husband. Again, she said no.

  Cusack had caught her out lying, twice. So he asked Stella Nickell if she would take a polygraph test. She refused, sobbing like a grieving widow and saying that she was not in a fit state to undergo any further questioning. Cusack let it go at that, but kept up the pressure in what he calls his “pebbles-on-the-roof” technique.

  “The suspect gets the impression we’re interviewing everyone they know. They begin to think we know about every mistake they make,” he said. “It’s like they’re almost asleep at night and there it is again—ping, ping, ping on the roof.”

  Four days after the first interview, Stella Nickell called Cusack and agreed to take the lie-detector test. Once she was hooked up to the polygraph machine, Cusack asked if she put cyanide in Excedrin capsules. She calmly denied it, but the jump in the needles measuring her pulse rate and her breathing told a different story.

  Unfortunately, polygraph tests are rarely admissible in court, so Cusack switched the machine off.

  “Based on your physiological responses,” he said, “I am positive you caused Bruce’s death.”

  “I want to see my attorney,” said Stella Nickell. It was plain that Cusack was not going to get a confession.

  Cusack had already questioned Cindy Hamilton, Stella Nickell’s 27-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. She had defended her mother but, hearing about the result of the polygraph test, she was beginning to have second thoughts. When Cusack questioned her for a second time, she said that her mother had talked about killing her stepfather for years. She was bored, but she did not want a divorce because she would lose half of their meagre property. She had even talked of hiring a hit man to shoot Bruce or run his car off the road. Once, she tried to poison him with foxglove seeds, but they only made him drowsy. Then, a few months before his death, Cindy said, Stella began talking about cyanide. When Bruce died, Cindy talked over the matter with her mother.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Stella, “and the answer is no.”

  Cindy had allayed her suspicions until the polygraph results revived them.

  “I knew my mother was capable of doing this,” she said. “I just didn’t want to believe it.”

  Slowly, a nine-hour interview with Cusack brought home to Cindy the enormity of what her mother had done. She had killed an unsuspecting victim to make the murder of her husband seem like the random act of a deranged poisoner. What if Sue Snow’s daughter Hayley had taken the capsules that morning? What if the other two bottles had found their way into people’s homes? How many people would Stella Nickell have killed for an extra $105,000?

  Cindy agreed to testify against her
mother as long as she did not have to face the death penalty. Cusack assured her that a Federal conviction for product-tampering conviction carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

  But there was still no smoking gun. Cindy had not seen her mother put the cyanide in capsules, administer them to her husband or place the contaminated bottles in stores. In court, her testimony could be dismissed as a feud between mother and daughter. Indeed, the maternal bond was strong and she might deny everything in court.

  As the grand jury began hearing testimony in February 1987, the FBI team had shrunk to just three men—Cusack, Nichols and a rookie named Marshall Stone. Desperately they tried to put together the last link in the chain of evidence against Stella Nickell. But most of the leads they checked out went nowhere. Then Cusack remembered that Cindy had told him, in the months before her stepfather’s death, her mother had been researching in libraries. Stone headed for Stella Nickell’s local library in Auburn.

  “Do you have a library-card holder by the name of Stella Nickell?” he asked the librarian. She searched the files and handed to Stone an overdue notice for a book Stella had borrowed and never returned. Its title: Human Poisoning.

  Armed with the number Stella Nickell’s library card, Stone combed the aisles for other books on toxicology. He found a volume on poisonous plants called Deadly Harvest. Stella Nickell’s library number had been stamped twice on the checkout slip—and both dates were before her husband’s death. The book was sent off to Washington, DC, where the FBI crime lab found 84 of Stella’s prints in Deadly Harvest—mostly on the pages covering cyanide.

  On 9 December 1987, Stella Nickell was charged with the murder of her husband and Sue Snow. When her trial began four months later, she pleaded not guilty. It took 31 witnesses to piece together a portrait of a woman whose unhappy marriage and financial desperation led to her to see random acts of murder as a solution. The prosecutor called her an “icy human being without social or moral conscience”.

  The jury found her guilty on 9 May. Saying her crimes exhibited “exceptional callousness and cruelty”, Judge William Dwyer sentenced her to 99 years, with no consideration of parole for 30 years.

  As a result of the case, the FDA tightened its regulations, setting national requirements of anti-tampering protection for over-the-counter medicines. The maker of Excedrin, Tylenol and other non-prescription drugs stopped using two-piece capsules that could easily be pulled apart, refilled and pushed back together. They were replaced with one piece “caplets” in an attempt to prevent tampering by crazed killers. It failed.

  On the evening of 2 February 1991, Jennifer Meling collapsed in the apartment she shared with her husband Joseph in Tumwater, Washington, after taking the decongestant Sudafed. Earlier the couple had been separated and Jennifer had filed for divorce, but now they were now reconciled. When she lapsed into unconsciousness, her 31-year-old husband called 911.

  Rushed to hospital, emergency room staff had trouble identifying what was wrong with her. Joseph Meling then suggested that they look for signs of cyanide poisoning. Cyanide was found in her blood, but Jennifer recovered. Unfortunately that was not the end of the matter. In attempting to murder his wife to cash in on a $700,000 life assurance policy he had taken out on her, he had tried to cover his tracks with more product tampering.

  On 11 February, 40-year-old Kathleen Daneker died of poisoning in Tacoma. The Pierce County coroner found cyanide in her body on 1 March. In her home, the police found Sudafed capsules which they took to Seattle where they confirmed they had been tampered with.

  By then 44-year-old Stanley McWhorter of Lacey, Washington, had died shortly after taking a Sudafed capsule on 18 February. Once the Pierce County findings came to light, the Thurston County coroner checked McWhorter’s body and found cyanide.

  The following day, nearly all of FDA’s Seattle district’s employees, along with investigators from the agency’s offices in Spokane, Yakima and Portland, Oregon, started removing Sudafed capsules from store shelves. Over the next three weeks, district investigators worked around the clock collecting the drug from all stores along the 47-mile stretch of Interstate 5 from Olympia, Washington, north to South Seattle. Some 248,000 capsules were collected and screened.

  One contaminated Sudafed capsule was found at a Pay ’n’ Save Drug Store in Tacoma, about 30 miles from Tumwater. Two consumers returned packages each containing one cyanide-laced capsule that they had purchased at the Drug Emporium Store No. 6 and a K-mart Discount Store, both in Tacoma.

  Although Jennifer Meling stood by her husband and testified for the defence at his trial, Joseph Meling was found guilty of two counts of murder, one attempted murder, six counts of product tampering and three counts of mail fraud. On 8 June, he was sentenced to two concurrent life terms plus 75 years in prison, with no possibility for parole.

  The judge said that Meling’s “planning and preparation for the crime was extraordinary, detailed and elaborate, and it was only through good fortune that more persons didn’t die”.

  In addition, Meling was ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution to Burroughs-Wellcome, the manufacturer of Sudafed, and $4,794.29 to Blue Cross for his wife’s medical bills. Any money Meling earns through media contracts and book royalties will be used to make the restitution.

  Many of the product-tampering cases that have resulted in death have, for the most part, led to the successful conviction of the perpetrator. Despite the pharmaceutical industry’s best efforts to make their products tamper-proof, incidents of product tampering have continued all over the US, with a surprising concentration in the Chicago area. Some 53 threats of product tampering have been received by the FBI with a postmark from south Chicago or Gary, Indiana which is part of the Greater Chicago area. Other cases of tampering—in some cases using cyanide—have occurred in North Chicago, Lombard, Chicago proper and outlying areas.

  Although some culprits have been brought to book, the man who started it all—the Tylenol Terrorist—is still at large. He had no simplistic motive like that of Stella Nickell or Joseph Meling. There has been another unsolved product-tampering cyanide poisoning in Detroit and one in Tennessee. The Tylenol Terrorist is still at large and could be at work, attempting to bypass the latest tamper-proof devices. If, as seems likely, he was in his 20s in 1982, he will only be in his 40s or 50s today.

  The Cincinnati Carbon-Copy Killings

  A serial killer seems to be stalking the Cincinnati area. Since 1996 numerous women have simply vanished and about a dozen female bodies have been found in the counties of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana that surround the city. The victims all have a similar in age and appearance.

  The disappearances began on 28 August 1996. That evening 22-year-old Carrie Culberson and two friends from Blanchester, Ohio went over to the town of Morrow, some nine miles away, to play in a volleyball march. After the game, Carrie rode around town with her friends looking for something to do, but it was a quiet Wednesday night in a small town in the Midwest and a neighbour saw Carrie being dropped off at around 11.30 p.m. at the home she shared with her mother, Debbie Culberson, and her teenage sister, Christina. A few moments later that same neighbour said they saw Culberson’s 1989 red Honda CRX reverse out of the driveway and head down the block.

  Debbie Culberson noticed her daughter’s car was not in the driveway at around six o’clock the following morning and began driving around Blanchester looking for her daughter. First she checked out the house of Carrie’s long-term boyfriend, 24-year-old Vincent Doan, but he was not home. Nor was Carrie’s Honda in the driveway where it would normally have been if Carrie had spent the night away from home.

  Debbie found Doan later that morning at the home of his father, Lawrence Baker. She said that Vincent first told her he had not seen Carrie for three days, but later he changed his story. He then said that Carrie had driven by his house at around 12.30 a.m., honking her horn. She had plainly been drunk, so he just closed his door and ignored her. However, Carrie’s companions a
t the volleyball match said she only had one beer.

  Debbie Culberson maintains that Doan changed his story a second time, when she went to see him again. This time, she said he told her that he had come out of his house wrapped in a towel to talk to her—and when he told her that he did not love her any more, she sped off.

  Far from not loving her any more, Carrie’s friends said that he was obsessed by her. He would call the beauty parlour where she worked as a nail technician at least five times a shift, co-workers said. Relatives, friends and acquaintances said that his obsession manifested itself in physical abuse. Some had witnessed the abuse; others saw injuries. A photograph of her taken in April 1996, showed Carrie with badly bruised, swollen face, allegedly the result of a beating. When challenged by Carrie’s parents, they said that Doan blamed her injuries on a bumpy ride in a Jeep. Later, Debbie Culberson maintained, Doan told her he only slapped Carrie and never hit her with a fist. But Carrie told friends that scratch marks on her face were caused by her frantic efforts to pull Doan’s hands away from her mouth and nose when he tried to smother her.

  Friends said that on 28 July 1996—one month to the day before she disappeared—he hit her on the back of the head with an electrical heater. The resulting wound needed five stitches, but Doan, they said, had told her to say that she had fallen on his front porch. Debbie Culberson was not having this, though. She took Carrie to the Blanchester police to file misdemeanour assault charges against Vincent Doan. These charges now had to be dropped when Carrie disappeared and there were no other witnesses.

  Even though Carrie was pressing charges against Doan, she continued the relationship with him. Three days before Carrie disappeared, she spent the day with Doan at the beach. The next evening they went out to dinner together. But things did not go well. A friend named Tonya Whitten said that, the next morning, Carrie told her that Doan held her at gunpoint for around five hours out in the countryside. According to Whitten, Doan had said: “You think I’m a big joke. I’ll show you how big a joke I am. I’m not going to jail.”