An Almost Perfect Murder

by Gary C. King

  “Our initial examination has indicated the body is in remarkable condition,” Murphy told reporters. “The casket was contained in a concrete vault to seal it off from the elements.... It obviously did its job.”

  In the meantime, Lieutenant Roberts said that homicide detectives had begun their own inquiry into Charles Augustine’s death while working with the coroner’s office.

  “The whole case obviously hinges on the toxicology from the exhumation,” Roberts said, obviously in disparity with Dr. Middleberg’s opinion that toxicology doesn’t make the case. “In addition, we are gathering up some background facts, some medical information. We’ll go from there, after we see what [the coroner’s office] comes up with.”

  Following a daylong autopsy, Murphy said it could be months before anyone obtained the results of the toxicology tests.

  Upon his return to Nevada, Chaz Higgs retained California criminal lawyer Alan Baum, with offices in Woodland Hills, on Ventura Boulevard, along with Reno attorney David Houston, to defend him. Both attorneys believed in their client’s innocence, and said so publicly.

  “He’s a caregiver, not a life taker,” Baum said.

  Baum told reporters that Chaz had kept the Reno Police Department informed as to his whereabouts since the investigation began, and that his client did not stand to gain anything from his wife’s death.

  “It’s as big a mystery to him as it is everyone else,” Baum told reporters. “He was quite surprised when Kathy suffered her heart attack and subsequently died. Although he has medical training, he has no better explanation for her demise than anyone else.”

  Baum said that his client also denied having anything to do with Charles Augustine’s death and had no issue with the exhumation. Baum said that he and Chaz believed that the exhumation and toxicology tests would show that Chaz had nothing to do with Charles Augustine’s death. He said that Chaz hadn’t killed his wife, either.

  “Exhumation is unusual,” Baum said. “But if it will help in the pursuit for the truth, we’ve got no problem with that. Chaz is not responsible in any way for Charles Augustine’s death, and we are not afraid of the results. It’s morbid, but let’s clear the air.”

  On Friday, October 13, 2006, Chaz Higgs, along with his attorneys, appeared before Reno Justice Court judge Jenny Hubach via a video link from the Washoe County Jail in his first court hearing upon his return to Nevada. Shackled and dressed in an orange jumpsuit issued by the jail, Higgs responded to the judge in the affirmative that he understood that he was being charged with murder. He also agreed to waive the requirement that a preliminary hearing be held within fifteen days, and attorney David Houston entered a not guilty plea for his client. Judge Hubach set Thursday, December 7, 2006, for a preliminary hearing.

  “I have not seen anything to tell me that [Kathy Augustine] was murdered,” Houston said to reporters after the five-minute hearing. “If anyone murdered her, it certainly wasn’t Chaz Higgs.”

  Houston alleged that the police did not investigate other possible causes of Kathy’s death after landing on the possibility that she might have been poisoned. He said that the police found in Higgs “a subject and then designed evidence to fit their conclusion.” Houston said that the defense team would hire their own experts and would challenge the state’s toxicological tests. Houston reiterated that his client had no criminal record and had cooperated completely with the police prior to his arrest. Houston said that he would seek bail for Higgs, who, he insisted, had demonstrated that he was not a flight risk through his cooperation with the police, who, he said, always knew where they could find him at any given time after his departure from Nevada.

  “There is no motive in this case,” Houston said. “He stood to get nothing. He had no hope of getting anything.... Did they really find it (succinylcholine) in her system? I don’t know. But I do know if you are looking for something, you can find a derivative of it in the body.”

  Chapter 17

  In October 2006, one of Chaz Higgs’s ex-wives, who resides in Las Vegas, talked to reporters for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and provided additional background and insight into her ex-husband’s life, as well as fodder for local and national news media of all types. The ex-wife, who was married to Chaz only briefly, told of how Chaz used to give her vitamin B injections on a near-weekly basis to boost her energy. The injection site, she said, was always in the buttocks.

  In the autumn of 1990, Chaz came home and told his wife that he had been accepted for training as a Navy SEAL. It required a move to the West Coast, and she moved with him. Chaz, his wife, and a female friend of his wife’s began their journey westward in a rented recreational vehicle (RV). His ex-wife told a reporter that she suspected him of having an affair with her friend, and he had denied the accusations.

  During the trip, they began having problems with the RV’s sewage system. It finally failed, and all three of them fell ill. By the time they hit Las Vegas, Chaz became concerned that his wife might be getting dehydrated and was adamant that she needed an IV.

  “Instead of taking me to the (military) base, he decided to plug me up with an IV in the living room,” she said. “That was not the first time he had stuck a needle in my arm.”

  She claimed that Chaz brought home medicine that he obtained through his job.

  “I can tell you in my house,” she said, “I had a pharmacy. And it wasn’t stuff prescribed to him.”

  During her marriage to Higgs, she said, she knew him as “Chuck,” not Chaz. She characterized him as being manipulative and obsessed over his appearance, and he had used steroids—presumably as part of his bodybuilding regimen. He had admitted it to her, she said, and it had seemed like he hadn’t cared whether she knew or not. Chaz also liked to make promises, she said, in which he vowed to take care of her at a time when she was going through a divorce and needed the emotional support.

  “‘You can have me,’” she quoted Chaz as saying. “‘I’m going to be there for you. I’m going to make things okay....’ He knew exactly what to tell me, exactly what to say. He was out there to basically take me away from everything happening in my life. Why did I have to put up with that (from the husband she was divorcing)? Why did I have to stand for those things that my ex-husband was doing to me? Chuck was better than that. He could help me better myself.”

  She said that he had done a good job of sweeping her off her feet, as well as brainwashing her. She didn’t believe that he was faithful to her, however—in part because she had found a letter from a woman among his personal things.

  She said that Chaz had spent of lot of time bodybuilding. He also liked to maintain a dark tan, and shaved the hair from his body regularly. He was always concerned over his hair, she said, and wasn’t satisfied unless his appearance, to him, was flawless.

  “It took him longer to get ready than it did me,” said the ex-wife. “Every curl in his hair had to be perfect. His clothing had to be perfect. It was very strange. He was metrosexual before ‘metrosexual’ was a term.”

  The ex-wife claimed that she regretted her marriage to Chaz right away, and only a few months into the marriage, she kicked him out of their apartment. She always took him back, though, hoping that he would change and repair their broken relationship. But he never wanted to change, and he was often out all night after saying that he was going to work out at the gym.

  “He was at the gym all night,” his ex-wife said. “Sometimes he wouldn’t even come home. I didn’t think you could work out all night long.”

  She said that her parents hadn’t liked Chaz. They had warned her that the relationship was moving too quickly, and her father’s opinion of him was that he was “slick.” Nonetheless, she said, she ignored everyone’s warnings and decided to marry Chaz anyway. The day of the wedding, she said, he had gotten so drunk that someone had to revive him so that he could get married.

  “They basically had to wake him up,” she said, “to get married. It was rainy outside, and he’d even been outside in the
rain, lying down in the rain because he had passed out.”

  In addition to regretting her marriage to Chaz Higgs, the ex-wife said that she also regretted allowing him to legally adopt her child from her prior marriage. But, she said, he had a way of manipulating people into getting what he wanted. He had brainwashed her to the point that her taste in music, clothing, and the decoration of her apartment changed to suit his wishes, and had convinced her to allow him to legally adopt her child.

  “Brainwashing,” she said. “If I had to put my finger on one thing, I would say brainwashing. This person knows how to get into someone’s head, rearrange the thought processes, and get you to think exactly what he wants you to think.”

  Looking back, she said, she could not figure out why Chaz Higgs had wanted to establish a relationship with a woman with a child who was in the middle of a divorce.

  “The only answer I could come up with,” she said, “was that I had property, I had items in my house, I had stability, and those were things that he craved. He had no personal property, he had no real estate, and he had absolutely no stability whatsoever.”

  Remarried and with a new life, the ex-wife said that she rarely thought about Higgs after getting past the divorce until seeing him on the news one night as a suspect in Kathy Augustine’s death. She said that she nearly fell out of her chair when she realized that she was looking at her ex-husband, and the thought of him previously administering injections to her made chills run up and down her spine. She said that she had never suspected that he had tried to poison her at any time, but the allegations he was facing with regard to Kathy Augustine had given her pause to wonder.

  “I would have never thought about that at all until this came up with Kathy,” she told the reporter. “But now that Kathy’s dead, I’ve got to tell you, you start thinking about stuff like that.”

  When news of Higgs’s ex-wife’s characterization of Chaz reached Higgs’s lawyer Alan Baum, the portrayal was quickly disputed.

  “There are some people who are so angry and vindictive that they will take the opportunity to kick someone when they are down,” Baum declared. “There was never any indication of any of this sort of thing until Chaz is in the newspaper, and now she is looking for her fifteen minutes of fame.”

  Meanwhile, amid the flurry of speculation surrounding Chaz Higgs’s character due to his ex-wife talking to a reporter for the Review-Journal, the subject of why there would be an unopened bottle of etomidate inside the house that Chaz had occupied with Kathy surged to the forefront of “breaking news.” Although the subject of the etomidate had arisen before, it now seemed more newsworthy after the ex-wife’s comments and the fact that court records had been released that showed the items found during the police search of Kathy’s house. The bottle of etomidate seemed significant in this case because of its relationship to succinylcholine. Etomidate is a hypnotic drug that is used to put patients to sleep and, according to Dr. Cyril Wecht, is rarely found outside of a hospital or pharmacy setting. When used in conjunction with succinylcholine, etomidate would be administered first to render the patient unconscious.

  “What is it doing there (inside the house)?” Wecht asked when approached by reporters. “It’s not something you use to keep away insects or polish your nails. It has a very, very specific purpose, so what the hell is it doing there?”

  Wecht indicated that a killer bent on using succinylcholine to murder someone could fully incapacitate the intended victim by first putting them to sleep with the etomidate.

  “They are not conscious,” Wecht said. “There is no awareness of the adverse effects of the succinylcholine, so there would then be no likelihood of them calling attention to themselves by movement or verbalizing.”

  Lieutenant Jon Catalano was quick to point out that etomidate was not found in Kathy’s body, and the bottle of the drug found inside Chaz and Kathy’s home hadn’t been opened. Catalano said that investigators were attempting to “determine what the parameters are on this substance and . . . what it does.”

  Two anesthesiologists, Dr. Anthony Frasca and Dr. Edson Parker, agreed that finding etomidate inside a nurse’s residence was “strange.” They commented that if someone had been injected with etomidate first, they would be rendered unconscious and would theoretically suffer less when the succinylcholine was administered.

  “To kill someone with succinylcholine . . . is particularly cruel,” Frasca said. “It could be someone was intending to use etomidate to lower the cruelty factor or to supplement the succinylcholine.”

  “At face value,” Lieutenant Catalano said, “the fact that he did have it shows he was taking what we believe to be controlled substances home from the hospitals (where he worked).”

  When the Clark County Coroner’s Office had finished with its examination and selective tissue removal from Charles Augustine’s body for a variety of toxicological tests, it was taken back to Paradise Memorial Gardens on Saturday, October 21, 2006, and reinterred in the original grave site in a straightforward process, without any type of ceremony being performed, according to Coroner Murphy.

  “We are taking a very broad approach to this exam,” Murphy said. “The goal of the Clark County Coroner’s Office and the reason for the exhumation is to determine, if possible, whether or not the original cause and manner of death was appropriate and factual.”

  Murphy said that the process of the exhumation and reburial had gone off as planned.

  As preparations for Chaz Higgs’s trial moved into November 2006, his attorney David Houston began questioning whether authorities properly carried out the forensic testing on which they had based much of their case against Higgs. Houston complained that he did not know whether tissue samples had been taken from the suspected injection site on Kathy’s body, which would have been the proper procedure to follow. All of the information that he had so far received had not shown that proper procedure had been followed, and he was suspicious that the police and the district attorney’s office had built their case based primarily on the statements that nurse Kim Ramey had made to police.

  “We have not been provided the detailed toxicology or a detailed autopsy report,” Houston said. “They said they’ve given us everything.... The case seems to have been built based on a witness statement from a single person as opposed to building the case on science.”

  “We have an excellent workup on the toxicology,” Washoe County assistant district attorney (ADA) John Helzer said in countering Houston’s remarks. “We weren’t in a hurry, we took our time, and we filed these charges because we believe they are supported by the evidence.”

  Helzer said that the evidence clearly pointed to Higgs as the person responsible for Kathy’s death, and charged that Houston “loves to try his case in the press. That’s what he loves to do.”

  Chapter 18

  As the investigation into Kathy’s death continued with Chaz Higgs being looked at as the only suspect in the case, Detective David Jenkins and the Washoe County District Attorney’s Office considered it of paramount importance that everyone concerned with the prosecution be as well versed as possible on the subject of succinylcholine. In order to make headway in that regard, it was decided that they would have to bring in their own group of experts. One of the experts they talked to was Dr. Pamela K. Russell, a board-certified anesthesiologist from Reno. Russell had been an anesthesiologist for seventeen years, and proved to be quite knowledgeable about the characteristics of succinylcholine. She said that the drug showed up on the board examinations for anesthesiologists because of its complex nature and the complications that can arise from its use. She described it as the “purview of anesthesia and critical care medicine,” and indicated that its characteristics are unique.

  Russell described succinylcholine as a depolarizing muscle relaxant that was developed from the “(curare) poison of arrow darts of South American Indians.” When introduced into the bloodstream of an animal or a human, either through muscle tissue or intravenously, the drug �
�causes the neurotransmitter at the receptor to release.

  “And what happens then,” Russell continued, “is that all this neurotransmitter goes to every single muscle, and those muscles go into massive taut spasm. We have no other drug in our armamentarium that does that.”

  It should be noted that neurotransmitters are defined as chemicals that are used to “communicate, intensify, and modulate signals between neurons and other cells.” In other words, neurotransmitters communicate information between the body’s neurons by causing the information to pass across the synapses from one nerve to the next. Succinylcholine, therefore, causes the subject to which it was administered to go into “big spasms that look like probably the worst seizure that you would ever see,” Russell said.

  “And it lasts approximately thirty to sixty seconds,” she continued, “at which time, all those receptors then have been loaded, and then the muscles are paralyzed.... That’s the main characteristic of how that drug works. It tends to be very quick as far as onset. And of most of our paralytic drugs, it tends to wear off about fifteen to seventeen minutes after given.”

  When asked how long after succinylcholine is administered to a person that the taut spasms begin, Russell said that several seconds are needed “for those receptors to start releasing the neurotransmitter” that causes the spasm to occur. She said that what occurs when the drug is put into the body goes beyond the rigid spasm and includes shaking as a result of muscle vesiculation. In order to avoid the vesiculation and shaking when, for example, a person goes to the hospital for elective surgery but requires a breathing tube, most often the patient is first sedated, then given a different type of muscle relaxer, and then the succinylcholine. In that manner of using the drug, the patient often doesn’t remember the experience. What makes the experience so painful are the severe muscle contractions.