An Almost Perfect Murder

by Gary C. King

  “I talked to her probably at least twice a month,” Nancy said. “She came down to Las Vegas from Reno frequently, and I would meet with her for lunch.”

  Kathy also came to her house for dinner somewhat regularly, affording the two friends plenty of opportunities to spend time together throughout the course of Chaz and Kathy’s marriage. Nancy often gave Kathy marital advice, which had a continuing theme.

  “It frequently was to (tell her to) ‘tell him to leave,’ or for her to get out, because I felt that she had made a bad decision (in marrying Chaz),” Nancy said.

  Nearly every time Nancy spoke to Kathy to give her advice to get away from Chaz, Kathy always told her that she loved him. It had seemed to Nancy that Kathy wanted to make Chaz happy.

  “Truthfully, it was that she . . . loved him,” Nancy said. “He would sometimes apologize to her after he had done . . . very terrible things to her. . . . I would frequently describe him to her as a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde.”

  Around the time of Kathy’s funeral, Nancy said, she had traveled to Las Vegas at the request of Kathy’s family. Because it was difficult for Kathy’s family to dispose of her things at the office she kept at the Grant Sawyer building in Las Vegas, they had asked Nancy to clean it out for them. With the help of Kathy’s secretary, Nancy boxed up everything and took it over to Kathy’s house on Maria Elena Drive. It was about 4:30 P.M. when she arrived at the house.

  Several of Kathy’s relatives were there when Nancy showed up, including Kathy’s brother Phil. They had come to Las Vegas for Kathy’s funeral. Approximately twenty minutes later, Chaz Higgs and Dallas Augustine, Kathy’s daughter, showed up “very inebriated,” according to Nancy. Phil had calmly approached Chaz and asked him to stay elsewhere. According to Nancy, Phil explained that they had a very large family and that they had already arrived. Several other relatives were on their way.

  Higgs, she explained, was not at all happy at that point, and became very upset—to the point of yelling and screaming, “saying that it was his house and nobody was going to tell him that he couldn’t stay at that house.” He became very volatile, she said, “when all hell broke loose in the house.” Chaz had started punching things, including the walls and doorjambs, “and was yelling, swearing, cursing.” At one point, there was a very loud noise that came from another part of the house where Chaz had gone. Everyone had initially thought that it had been a gunshot, and Nancy had been frightened to the point that she called 911.

  When they investigated the source of the loud noise, they found that Chaz had ripped out the front door. Everyone surmised that what they had heard had been Chaz “pounding and ripping out the front door,” Nancy said. He had even damaged the door frame, but had not fired a gun. Just prior to Chaz breaking the door, Nancy had seen him on the phone to someone and had overheard at least part of the conversation.

  “I know he was talking to Kathy’s mother,” Nancy said, “because he said, ‘Your daughter is nothing but a fucking whore and a cunt.’ And when I heard that, it really . . . was awful to hear that because . . . it was hard just losing a friend, and I couldn’t believe that he could call her mother and say something so disgusting and so despicable.... I had a feeling that she hung up on him. . . .”

  Later, after Chaz had already left the house, Dallas asked everyone to leave. Nancy said that she was so nervous and distraught over all of the commotion at the house that she was unable to drive and it had become necessary for her husband to come and pick her up from a neighbor’s house nearby. She said that the entire ordeal had gone on for more than an hour. She said that she had seen Chaz return to the house about twenty minutes later, after everyone else, except Dallas, had left.

  The next day, which had been the day before Kathy’s funeral, Chaz had slashed his wrists and had to be rushed to University Medical Center’s emergency department for treatment.

  As winter passed and spring approached, Chaz Higgs languished in jail in Reno, waiting and hoping for an opportunity to be released on bail while waiting for his trial to begin. He had originally been held without bail, but his lawyers persisted in their attempts to get the judge to change his mind. When he was finally granted bail, both of his parents, who were divorced, each put up their respective homes as collateral to cover Chaz’s $250,000 bail. Washoe County District Court judge Steven Kosach had set bail on March 1, 2007, with a requirement that he remain in the state of Nevada and stay in daily contact with his attorneys, but it had taken until Monday, March 26, 2007, for his mother and father to make the financial arrangements. When he walked out of jail, escorted by several deputies and one of his attorneys, to a waiting car, he was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “He’s very happy to be free,” his attorney David Houston said.

  When they arrived at Houston’s office, Chaz met with his mother, who was making plans to temporarily relocate to Reno from North Carolina to help provide support for Chaz pending the outcome of his trial, which was set to begin on Monday, June 18, 2007.

  “Upon arriving, we walked in and the first thing he did was hug his mom,” Houston said.

  His mother, Shirley Higgs, had believed from the very beginning that her son had not killed Kathy Augustine.

  “He is innocent,” she said. “That is all I will believe. I know him better than anyone. I am his mother.”

  Kathy’s family, however, were very angry that Judge Kosach had decided to release Chaz on bail. They prepared a statement that Phil Alfano provided to the news media.

  “My parents, my brother and I are angry that a psychopath like Chaz Higgs will be allowed to walk free for the next few months, especially given the evidence already presented and his bizarre behavior immediately following Kathy’s death,” Phil said in the statement. “No amount of posturing or showmanship by Chaz’s attorneys will change the facts of this case or alter the outcome. When a jury knows what we already know, he will be convicted and spend the rest of his life behind bars.”

  On Tuesday, May 2, 2007, the Clark County Coroner’s Office released a statement that Charles Augustine had died as a result of natural causes and had not been killed by a lethal injection of succinylcholine or any other type of toxic material. Coroner Michael Murphy said that Charles Augustine had died of a stroke, as originally believed. Murphy’s examination showed that he also suffered from heart disease and bronchopneumonia.

  “There was nothing in our investigation that would lead us to believe Mr. Augustine died of anything other than natural causes,” Murphy said at a press conference.

  One of Chaz’s attorneys, David Houston, believed that the inference that Chaz had anything to do with Charles Augustine’s death had been created and suggested to police merely to taint his client’s image. Houston said that there were a lot of people “willing to believe Mr. Higgs was a monster responsible for two deaths. And, clearly, it just isn’t true.”

  “They now know that Charles died of natural causes and not at the hands of the criminal,” Dallas Augustine said in a statement released to the media. “Charles was a good man. I hope this brings some measure of peace to the family.”

  “We’re relieved to learn that Chaz did not murder Chuck the way he murdered my sister,” Phil Alfano said. “Thankfully, Chuck didn’t suffer the same fate.”

  As a result of the findings, there was no reason for Las Vegas homicide detectives to pursue the issue any further. Similarly, the matter of the purported discrepancy regarding the time frame when Chaz and Kathy supposedly had met each other had not been brought up again. The innuendo and finger-pointing that had been going on suggesting that Chaz and Kathy had plotted Charles Augustine’s death appeared to have no substance.

  Due in part to the evidence that had been collected and the witness statements that had been obtained during Jenkins’s investigation, it also did not appear that Kathy had died as a result of any kind of political intrigue perpetrated by anyone that she had been going after to expose for political corruption, despite a 48 Hours Mystery epis
ode that had been televised on CBS that had hinted at a murder conspiracy concocted by her Republican rivals.

  “My immediate reaction (following Kathy’s death) was ‘They killed her,’” Barbara Woollen, a former candidate for lieutenant governor, stated. Woollen recalled that she’d had multiple conversations with Kathy in which death threats against her had been alleged because of her inquiries into political corruption that had involved the misappropriation of funds at a time when she had decided to run for the office of state treasurer. Woollen quoted Kathy as saying at one point: “They will do anything to keep me from getting into that office.”

  The investigation just didn’t seem to support that kind of inquiry, however, and the purported political corruption had been left to other entities to deal with; in keeping with political tradition, the issues that involved allegedly corrupt politicians that she had been looking into all but disappeared.

  Three weeks before his trial was set to begin, Chaz Higgs’s attorney David Houston filed a request to postpone his client’s trial. Houston claimed that the FBI laboratory had not provided its complete report to the defense team showing that Kathy Augustine had been poisoned with succinylcholine. Because so much of the state’s case against Chaz was science dependent, Houston said the complete report was needed by a defense expert. Prosecutor Tom Barb, however, argued that the initial report had been provided to the defense team in December 2006, and that they should not have waited until such a late date to decide that they needed more information for one of the expert witnesses that they planned to call.

  “There’s overwhelming evidence Kathy Augustine was murdered and Mr. Higgs was the murderer,” coprosecutor Christopher Hicks said.

  “There is no evidence Chaz Higgs killed Kathy Augustine,” attorney Alan Baum asserted.

  “I hate to say this,” Judge Kosach said to the defendant. “But the comments you made to Ms. Ramey, if someone heard that, they would say, ‘Oh, wow.’ It’s almost like television.”

  The judge sided with the state and denied the request.

  “I don’t want this to get out of hand,” Kosach said. “I do not believe the interest of justice will be furthered by a continuance.”

  Kosach said that the comments Chaz had made to Kim Ramey were “damning in my mind.”

  Kathy’s brother Phil agreed with the judge’s ruling.

  “It’s time for this to move forward,” he said.

  The defense team filed last-minute pretrial motions in an attempt to keep the state’s findings on succinylcholine out of the trial. Houston and Baum argued that they had not been provided the opportunity for their own experts to conduct testing of Kathy’s blood and urine samples, and had only recently been told that there was not a sufficient amount of blood remaining for them to conduct their own tests and that the urine samples had “been allowed to deteriorate.” They also argued that their experts had not been allowed to observe the testing of the blood and urine samples, either. The defense lawyers maintained that succinylcholine can occur in the body naturally and might “be found even where it has not been intentionally administered.”

  As a result, read Baum and Houston’s motion, the methods used to test the presence of intentionally administered doses of succinylcholine are hotly contested, and have not been generally accepted by the scientific or legal community as reliable and trustworthy.

  Deputy District Attorney Tom Barb indicated that he would respond to the motions in writing, and Judge Kosach said that some time would be set aside to hear the motions in detail prior to the start of the trial.

  Part II

  The Trial

  Chapter 21

  On Monday, June 18, 2007, the trial for Chaz Higgs finally got under way in the Department Number 8 courtroom of Washoe County District Court judge Steven R. Kosach. It was about 9:30 A.M. when all of the lawyers, defense, and prosecution, along with Chaz Higgs, met with Kosach to address the pretrial motions that had been filed. Jury selection had been scheduled for 1:30 P.M., and discussions were under way to allow a defense witness to testify out of order, due to the witness’s scheduling conflicts, while the state presented its case. Case Number CR06-2876 was one that was not to be missed—in part because of who Kathy Augustine had been, and because of the anticipated strong and often creative defense that had been put together over the past several months. The usual media trucks with their satellite dishes surrounded the historic courthouse, which sometimes can be found draped in large American flags, especially around Flag Day, which had been four days earlier.

  Judge Kosach referred to a motion in limine regarding scientific evidence and expert witnesses. A “motion in limine” is a legal tool that asks the court to render a decision on whether certain evidence may or may not be presented to a jury during trial. As the prosecutor Tom Barb prepared to call a witness in reference to the aforementioned motion, defense attorney Alan Baum addressed the court.

  “Your Honor,” Baum said, “it is our belief that it is the state’s burden to establish the necessary requirements for the admission of this particular type of evidence . . . therefore I would defer to the state to meet its burden by presenting any witnesses that it wishes to. It’s not the defendant’s burden when we’ve raised an objection to the admissibility of scientific evidence. The authority is clear that it’s the state’s burden, that is, the proponent of the evidence burden, to establish the basic foundation for admissibility.”

  “We accept that, Judge,” Barb responded.

  After establishing that it was the state’s burden to establish the necessary requirements for the admission of the particular type of evidence that would be presented in this case, particularly that which is centered on the scientific evidence that everyone knew was coming, Barb called Dr. William H. Anderson, chief toxicologist for the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) Division of Forensic Science.

  Barb elicited testimony from Anderson demonstrating that he had reviewed the analytical data of the toxicological testing done at the FBI laboratory by Madeline Montgomery. Anderson had also reviewed the validation data, which had become an issue of sorts, for the methods and protocols that were used by the FBI, and confirmed that he had discussed the case with an expert witness on toxicology for the defense, H. Chip Walls. Walls, he said, needed additional information about sample availability, among other things, and they had gotten on a three-way conference call with Madeline Montgomery to address Walls’s questions. Anderson said that he had no questions for Montgomery, but was there as an interested third party.

  “So, Walls, Montgomery, and you were on a three-way call, and questions were asked and answered, and then other documents were provided?” Barb asked.

  “That is correct,” Anderson replied.

  “Have you seen those other documents?”

  “I had—one of the primary concerns was an illegible document that Mr. Walls had,” Anderson explained. “And I could read my copy. So I received a list and acknowledgment from Mr. Walls that he had received that material, but I did not receive another copy. . . . I did subsequently receive some validation data.”

  “Based on your review of the documents that have been provided, all of them, do you have an opinion as to the trustworthiness of the FBI testing procedure?”

  “In my opinion, the procedures were standard procedures that are used in forensic toxicology to make identifications. They ran appropriate negative and positive controls. And, in my opinion, there’s no problem with the identification of either succinylmonocholine or succinylcholine itself.”

  When Barb had finished, defense attorney David Houston cross-examined the witness.

  “Doctor, what’s the standard operating procedure as adopted by the FBI for the test of succinylcholine?” Houston asked.

  “It’s kind of lengthy,” Anderson responded.

  “Well, let me ask you this. Are you aware there isn’t one?”

  “I’m sorry. What was that question?”

  “Are you aware there is not a standard
operating procedure as adopted by the FBI for the testing of succinylcholine? Not succinylmonocholine.”

  “I see. Yes. It’s the same extraction, the same LCC parameters, with a slide gradient.”

  “I guess the question was—are you aware there isn’t a standard operating procedure for the testing of succinylcholine?”

  “I didn’t see one specifically for succinylcholine.”

  “All right. The standard operating procedure for succinylmonocholine that was apparently utilized in this case was adopted or created in 2001?”

  “I’m not sure if it was 2001 or 2002,” Anderson replied.

  “It was subsequently amended in 2006, was it not?”

  “I’m not absolutely certain.”

  “Do you recall any amendments going on, possibly even to your lab, that indicated succinylmonocholine can be produced naturally—so, as a consequence, report results of the same with great care?” Houston asked.

  “That’s published in the literature for decomposing tissues.”

  “And in this case, essentially what happened is Ms. Montgomery, the chemist, on the fly, converted the succinylmonocholine standard operating procedure to test for succinylcholine, correct?”

  “Essentially, that’s correct.”

  “And ‘on the fly’ means she sort of made it up as she went.”

  “I don’t know what Ms. Montgomery had done, and I don’t know what her previous experience with that drug was, but it was just a simple extension of a validated procedure.”