An Almost Perfect Murder

by Gary C. King

  Hicks described how Chaz Higgs had spoken about that drug on July 7, 2006, while referring to a high-profile murder case in which a Reno man, Darren Mack, had allegedly stabbed his wife to death.

  “Mr. Higgs said, ‘That guy did it all wrong. If you want to get rid of somebody, you just hit them with a little succs.’ The very next morning, his wife, Kathy Augustine, a woman who he admittedly hated, who he commonly referred to in real nasty terms, and who he desperately wanted to leave, was found in their home, with Mr. Higgs, not breathing and without a heartbeat.”

  Hicks described how treating physicians at the hospital had found no evidence of a heart attack, no evidence of a pulmonary disorder, and no evidence of a brain dysfunction that would explain Kathy’s condition that morning.

  “However, what was found in her system was succinylcholine,” Hicks said.

  Hicks explained that Higgs, as a critical care nurse, was commonly around the drug, and the two hospitals where he had worked had very few controls in place that would prevent a person from taking succinylcholine home with them if they so desired. He also described how an autopsy had been performed on Kathy’s body and it had revealed that she had not succumbed to death as a result of natural causes—she had died from succinylcholine poisoning. He pointed out that when Higgs had been arrested in Virginia, he had a piece of paper in his car that explained the appropriate dosage for the administration of succinylcholine.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re going to hear from numerous witnesses during this trial,” Hicks said. “I want to go over just a few of them this morning.”

  Hicks told the jury that the first witness they would hear from would be Kim Ramey, and explained that she was a nurse who had worked at the Carson-Tahoe Hospital, where she had met Chaz Higgs, a new hire, on July 7, 2006.

  “You see,” Hicks said, “he had been hired as a nurse at that location, and as part of his orientation, he was following around Miss Ramey that day.”

  Hicks explained that personal conversations had developed between Ramey and Higgs, and Higgs began telling Ramey about the contempt he had for his wife, the fact that he was planning on leaving her, and all the while had referred to her in derogatory terms.

  “At one point during that day,” Hicks said, “he made a statement to Miss Ramey that literally made the hairs stand up on her arm. He made the statement that ‘that guy did it all wrong. If you want to kill—if you want to get rid of somebody, you hit them with a little succinylcholine.’”

  Two days later, he said, Ramey experienced that same sensation of the hair raising up on her arm when she saw in the media that Higgs’s wife, Kathy Augustine, was in the hospital in a coma. Ramey, he pointed out, had later contacted a detective at the Reno Police Department.

  Hicks told the jury that they would hear testimony from the REMSA paramedics who were involved in trying to resuscitate Kathy Augustine at her home early on the morning of July 8, 2006. Benjamin Pratt, he said, would provide details of what had occurred upon his arrival at Kathy’s house.

  “[Pratt] will further tell you that when he went into the house, he found Kathy laying in their bed,” Hicks said. “She was not breathing. She had no heartbeat. Mr. Pratt and his fellow paramedics removed Kathy from the bed, placed her on the floor, on a hard, flat surface, and began to administer CPR. Through their efforts, they were able to get her heart beating again. Mr. Pratt will tell you that during that time Mr. Higgs was not even in the room and that it appeared that he could care less as to what was going on with his wife.”

  He told the jury that they would also hear from Marlene Swanbeck, who had formerly worked with Higgs, and how she and another nurse withdrew a urine sample from Kathy as they tried to determine what was wrong with Kathy Augustine. Swanbeck, he said, would describe how Higgs had seemed totally disengaged that morning at the hospital, and how, in the past, he had often talked about his intent to leave his wife, how he had referred to Kathy in very derogatory terms, and so forth.

  Hicks basically went through the state’s witness list as he told the jury who would be testifying and what they would be testifying about, including physicians who had treated Kathy in one capacity or another.

  “First you’ll hear from Dr. Stanley Thompson,” Hicks said. “He’s a cardiologist here in town. He will tell you Kathy did not suffer a heart attack. Her arteries were clean. She had no blockage. He will also tell you that he was amazed at the lack of emotion exhibited by Mr. Higgs when he explained to him the condition of his wife.”

  Dr. Steve Mashour, a Reno pulmonary physician, would testify that there was nothing wrong with Kathy’s lungs that would explain her condition the morning she was brought to the hospital. Neurologist Dr. Paul Katz would explain how he had not found any external injuries to Kathy’s head, no bleeding inside her brain, or anything else that would explain her condition; he would also explain how she had suffered brain damage that was consistent with oxygen deprivation.

  “All three of those doctors will tell you that their observations during their diagnosis of Kathy is consistent with succinylcholine poisoning,” Hicks said.

  And on it went until he had gone through the entire list, providing a glimpse of what jurors should expect from each witness’s testimony: Dr. Ellen Clark, Dr. Jerry L. Jones, Madeline Montgomery, several of Higgs’s former coworkers, Kathryn Almaraz, and Detective David Jenkins, among others.

  “In a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen,” Hicks concluded, “that’s the evidence that we will present to you. And that evidence will show that Chaz Higgs is a calculated murderer who used his trade to accomplish his goal—getting rid of his wife.”

  David Houston provided the opening statement for the defense and talked to them about evaluating the evidence in the proper context and to not “snatch bits and pieces, as has been done a moment ago” with the prosecution’s opening statement. He led the jury through Chaz and Kathy’s history together, how he had been happy-go-lucky at first in their relationship, but had changed when he realized that he couldn’t live a political lifestyle. Despite having wanted a divorce, Chaz stood by Kathy during her impeachment proceedings.

  “And Mr. Higgs stuck it out,” Houston said. “He didn’t leave. In fact, you will hear from one of the nurses when they asked, ‘Well, why don’t you just leave?’ ‘I can’t leave her right now,’” Houston quoted Higgs as saying. “And that would be during the course of time that the impeachment was occurring.”

  Houston drove home the point about context being so important in this case, and asked the jury not to be misled by the “cherry-picking” of statements, ideas, or occasions. He urged that the entire picture be evaluated prior to making a decision in the case, and explained the importance of the medical testimony that they would hear.

  “The state’s case will not survive beyond the defense pathologist, as well as the other information and facts that will be provided you throughout,” Houston said. “Ladies and gentlemen, the idea of looking for justice is such an easy phrase. It’s a catchphrase to some. But, truly, it is not because this is a murder case or because it’s a high-profile case that we apply that rule in this room. This room has been here . . . way longer than most of us. The idea of it is it’s truly meaningful. And I can only ask you on behalf of Mr. Higgs to do everything within your power and honor your promise and to realize the importance of every word you said when you became a juror. Thank you very much.”

  Chapter 23

  Following a brief recess after the opening statements were given, Kim Ramey was called as the state’s first witness. After being sworn in, Ramey explained her position as a traveling critical care nurse, an open-heart surgery recovery position that she had held since 1999. She explained that she had made the decision to be a “traveler,” a nurse who does not work on staff for a hospital. Due to her specialty in open-heart recovery and the overall nursing shortage in the United States, Ramey said, she had always been able to choose the geographical regions where she wanted to work. Because of poor acousti
cs inside Judge Kosach’s courtroom, Ramey was asked several times to speak up as she testified so that jurors on the far end of the jury box could hear her.

  Ramey told of how she and her boyfriend had arrived in Carson City to work at the new Carson-Tahoe Hospital’s open-heart center in January 2006. Since the hospital did not yet do open-heart surgery at that time, Ramey and her boyfriend, because of their specialties, had been invited to help the medical center open such a unit and to help them train their nurses in that medical area. In response to Christopher Hicks’s questioning for the state, Ramey acknowledged that she had been working the day shift at the Carson-Tahoe Hospital on July 7, 2006. Just as she had told Detective Jenkins, she explained to the jury how she had met Chaz Higgs that day due to the fact that she had been asked to help out in the hospital’s intensive care unit, where Chaz had recently been hired. Because she was required to wear gloves and a gown when attending a patient in the ICU, and didn’t want to take the time to change each and every time the need to enter or exit the ICU arose, she asked Chaz to assist her by bringing her the things she needed from other areas in the hospital. That, she said, was how they had become acquainted and began talking that day. One of her patients had bacterial spinal meningitis, and the other had “all kinds of bugs” and was on a ventilator, and having Chaz there to get the things she needed helped her remain as sterile as possible for her patients and saved time by eliminating the need for her to frequently change in and out of a gown.

  Because she had immediately perceived Chaz as a “player,” Ramey said, she had decided to engage him in conversation by telling him that she had a boyfriend and that the two of them were relocating soon to Virginia. She wanted to make it crystal clear to Chaz that she was not available. She also perceived that “he had this . . . aura . . . of anger,” she testified. She said that the anger came out mostly when he was talking about his wife and the fact that he wanted to divorce her.

  “Now, did he tell you who his wife was?” Hicks asked.

  “Yes,” Ramey responded.

  “And who did he say that was?”

  “High-profile, Kathy Augustine,” Ramey said. “I said, ‘Chaz, I’m not from around here. That means nothing to me.’ ‘Yeah, but you know high-profile. She’s the state controller, ’” she quoted Chaz as having said. “I said, ‘I don’t live around here. That means nothing to me.’ ‘Well, she’s running for treasurer.’ I said, ‘It still doesn’t mean anything to me.’”

  “Now, you had indicated that he referred to her in some other unpleasant terms,” Hicks said. “I’m going to ask you. I know it’s embarrassing on the stand, but please just tell the jury how he referred to his wife.”

  “‘She’s a fucking stalker,’” Ramey responded. “‘I’m looking for an apartment ’cause she’s a fucking stalker. She’s a bitch. She’s psycho.’”

  Ramey explained that the derogatory remarks that Chaz had made about Kathy hadn’t been said all at the same time, but that Chaz had said these things to her at different times throughout the day.

  “Aside from the obviously unpleasant terms, did he ever indicate that he loved his wife in any way?” Hicks asked.

  “Not at all. There weren’t any terms of endearment at all.”

  “Were there any terms of hatred?”

  “That’s the only emotion I saw. Anger . . . rage.”

  In response to questioning, she described how Chaz had been on the telephone in her presence and she had heard part of a heated conversation that he was engaged in.

  “What did you hear him saying into the phone?” Hicks asked.

  “‘I will fuckin’ talk to you when I get home.... I said I will fuckin’ talk to you when I get home,’” Ramey responded. “And this is in the middle of a unit, which . . . to me . . . was inappropriate. Especially with an employee that had just started. He wasn’t even off orientation.”

  She explained that she hadn’t known who Chaz had been talking to at first, but she figured that it must have been his wife. She later asked him point-blank what the telephone conversation had been all about, and she said that he told her that his wife had found out that he had opened a separate bank account.

  As the questions continued, Ramey’s testimony eventually turned toward the talk that she and Chaz had engaged in about the Darren Mack case in Reno. It had been the discussion of the Mack case that had led up to Chaz telling Ramey that Mack should have used succinylcholine.

  “He said, ‘That guy did it wrong,’” Ramey testified, quoting Chaz. “‘If you want to get rid of someone, you just hit them with a little succs because they can’t trace it postmortem.’”

  That statement, she said, had been the one that had made her “skin crawl” and had caused her hair to raise up. It had also been the statement that had interested Detective Jenkins at the probe’s outset.

  “Now, you say your hair raised up,” Hicks said. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know if you guys ever get a physical response to something horrible,” Ramey replied. “That’s what I get, that physical response. Like goose bumps . . .”

  Ramey described how she had felt two days later when she had seen the newspaper headline that had read: KATHY AUGUSTINE FOUND DOWN. Although she said that she couldn’t believe it, her gut feeling was that Chaz had done something to his wife. She immediately thought that he had killed her. She said that she waited until July 11 to call the police.

  “Now, ma’am, I’ve got to ask you this,” Hicks said. “It seems a little odd that you had this reaction, and you didn’t call the police right away. Can you please explain to the jury why that is.”

  “I had four shifts left,” Ramey explained, “and I was going back to Richmond, Virginia, to settle a two-and-a-half-year divorce. I had lawyers up to here. I had everything physically taken away from me. I’m not a millionaire, but I worked very hard over twenty-one-and-a-half years. I—you have no idea how much I despised lawyers. And I didn’t want . . . to deal with any more lawyers. I was praying I would watch the TV and watch the newspaper, that they would just arrest him and . . . I would be off the hook.”

  She said that her boyfriend and a coworker had urged her to go to the police about Chaz’s statement. At one point, one of her coworkers had spoken to Dr. Richard Seher, a cardiologist, about the situation. Seher, in turn, had come to Ramey to talk about it. She had become acquainted with Seher due to his specialty and hers having some overlap. They had conversed in the past, sometimes about personal issues, and she had felt comfortable talking with him. After she had explained to him what had been said, Seher told her that she needed to call the police. That was when she phoned Detective Jenkins.

  Ramey also provided some basic information about succinylcholine for the jury, basically what it was, what it is used for, when to use it, its immediate effect when administered intravenously, and how it affects a patient. She also said that it was readily available in the hospital for medical personnel to use. She pointed out a bottle of the drug in a photo that was shown to her of the interior of a rapid-intubation kit. She also pointed out a bottle of the drug, etomidate, in one of the photos of the inside of a rapid-intubation kit. She described where the kit was kept, who had access to it, and how it could only be accessed by someone who knew the code of the key padlock that secured the door of the refrigerator where it was kept. Everyone, she said, used the same code.

  “Are you familiar with the drug etomidate?” Hicks asked.

  “Yes.”

  “As a critical care nurse with your experience, would there ever be a reason to have a vial of etomidate at your house?”

  “No,” Ramey responded. “That would be grounds for losing your license.”

  Following Alan Baum’s cross-examination of Kim Ramey, which had amounted to little more than clarifying a few small details about her testimony, and had not brought any new and significant information for the jury to consider, the state called Dr. Richard Seher.

  Seher, board-certified in internal
medicine, general cardiology, and interventional cardiology, had been practicing in the Reno–Lake Tahoe area for more than twenty-one years. He had been working at Carson-Tahoe Hospital for about nine months, and had come to know Ramey by having worked with her. He described her as a “great” nurse who was “really on the ball,” and said that he would “be happy to have her take care of me or any of my family members.”

  On the morning that he had spoken to Ramey about the comment that Chaz Higgs had purportedly made, Seher had been making rounds in the cardiovascular intensive care unit. Ramey, he said, appeared upset and visibly shaken. He said that he took her to a “side room” that is used for dictation and they, along with another doctor, sat down and talked.

  “Dr. Seher, when Miss Ramey approached you, visibly upset as you’ve stated, what was it that she told you?” Hicks asked.

  Hicks’s question generated a near-automatic objection from Baum on the grounds that the response would be hearsay. The issue was argued out of the jury’s presence, after which Judge Kosach overruled the objection and allowed the question to stand.

  “She said, ‘I know—I know that Chaz Higgs killed her. I know what he did,’” Seher testified.

  “And what did you say when she said that?”

  “I said, ‘What was it?’ And she recounted that . . . when they worked together, she had heard him arguing with his wife on the phone, and he said something to the effect of ‘I’m going to leave my wife, take the money out of the account. ’ Then he said, ‘You know, Darren Mack was stupid. He should never have been caught. He should have used succinylcholine. He wouldn’t have been caught.’”