At 6:40, Hayley, 15, noticed her mother was taking a long time. "Mom?" she called out. There was no answer--only the sound of running water. Entering the bathroom, she found her mother sprawled unconscious on the floor, her fingers splayed across her chest, her breathing labored. Rushed to a hospital, Sue Snow died hours later without regaining consciousness.
Doctors suspected an aneurysm in the brain, but found no evidence of internal bleeding. The symptoms also suggested an overdose, but Hayley insisted her mother didn't drink or smoke, much less take drugs. Since the cause of death could not be determined, an autopsy was ordered.
During the examination, one of the pathologist's assistants detected a faint odor of bitter almonds emanating from the body--a telltale sign of cyanide. Could Snow have been poisoned? A lab test came back positive. Police questioned the distraught family. Would Sue Snow have tried to poison herself? Certainly not, they said. But thinking back to that horrible morning, they wondered: Could the capsules have been tainted? Another lab test confirmed it: the capsules contained cyanide. When ingested, cyanide prevents cells from using oxygen. It looks like table salt and a small dose can kill rapidly. It's the perfect poison for murderers. On June 16, the Food and Drug Administration published the lot number of the tainted capsules. The manufacturer, Bristol-Myers, cabled stores across the country to take the capsules off their shelves. Meanwhile, police found two other bottles of contaminated painkillers in Auburn and in Kent, a Seattle suburb adjoining Auburn.
Hysteria spread through Washington. Police stripped all nonprescription capsules from pharmacy shelves. The King County Medical Examiner's office began checking recent unexplained deaths to see if any were cyanide-caused, and a state of emergency was declared in the county. A Head for Details. The investigation was turned over to the FBI. Product tampering had been made a federal crime after seven Chicago-area people died from cyanide-spiked Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules in 1982--a case that remains unsolved.
Sixty agents were assigned to the Snow case. One of the agents who was to play a major role was Jack Cusack. At 43, the street-smart, prematurely gray 16-year veteran knew how to read a killer's mind. His offhanded charm and casual style lured suspects and witnesses into giving him crucial information. At first Cusack thought the killer might be a political terrorist or a disgruntled co-worker, but no one called to take credit or make demands. Then on June 17, a 42 year-old woman named Stella Nickell telephoned the police. She reported that 12 days earlier her husband, Bruce, 52, had died suddenly after taking Extra-Strength Excedrin capsules.
Bruce Nickell had already been buried, and his autopsy reported the cause of death as emphysema. However, because he had volunteered to be an organ donor, a sample of his blood serum had been preserved. A test of the serum on June 19 showed cyanide present. By that time the police had discovered two bottles of contaminated capsules in the home.
To an increasingly jittery public, it now looked as if a random killer was loose. A policeman in Auburn voiced the dread that many felt: "We've got a maniac out there." Cusack searched for some connection between Bruce Nickell, a heavy-equipment operator for the state, and banker Sue Snow, but none became apparent.
Then an alert young chemist at the FBI crime lab in Washington, D.C., discovered something peculiar about the cyanide in the five contaminated bottles--each contained tiny crystal-like specks of green. Breaking the particles down chemically, he identified the substance as an algae killer used in home fish tanks. He even came up with the brand name: Algae Destroyer.
Someone must have mixed the cyanide in a container used earlier for crushing algicide pellets.
Daily, the file on the killer grew thicker. An agent was needed who could cut through the ponderous material. Ron Nichols, an Annapolis-educated detective with a head for details, was chosen.
As Nichols read through the file, one thing kept bothering him. The FDA had examined more than 740,000 over-the-counter capsules in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. Only the capsules in five bottles had turned out to be laced with cyanide, and two of those were found in Stella Nickell's home.
If Stella had bought the two bottles at the same time, it would seem a simple case of bad luck. The problem was, Stella had said she bought them at different times in different stores. The odds that it was a coincidence were infinitesimal.
"The Woman Who Jingled." Stella Nickell seemed an unlikely suspect. A grandmother, she had two daughters and worked as a security guard at the Seattle-Tacoma airport. To all appearances she and Bruce had been happy together. They lived in a trailer on a large woody lot. Neighbors described her as cheerful and hard-working. She seemed genuinely shocked and despondent when Bruce died.
Then one of the agents remembered something seemingly insignificant from her investigation. "Stella Nickell has a fish tank in her trailer," the agent told Cusack, who by now had become the case supervisor.
Agents canvassed pet stores, asking if anyone recalled selling Algae Destroyer to Nickell. On August 25 they hit pay dirt. A clerk at a store in Kent identified Stella from a photo montage. He remembered her because she had a little bell attached to her purse. He called her "the woman who jingled."
The clerk's recollection, though tantalizing, was neither enough to support an indictment nor enough to convince Cusack this grandmother was a killer.
Yet, gradually, another side of Stella Nickell began to emerge. An FBI background check turned up convictions in California for check fraud, forgery and child abuse between 1968 and 1971. The Nickells were chronically short of money. They barely survived a brush with bankruptcy, and before Bruce died, the bank was moving to foreclose on their trailer.
By late summer, the agents began digging into the Nickells' life-insurance records. Bruce's policy from the state paid Stella $31,000. But if his death was "accidental," she would collect an extra $105,000. Further, Stella had taken out two additional $20,000 policies on his life in the year before he died.
In all, she stood to receive $176,000 if Bruce's death were judged accidental. (For insurance purposes, death by cyanide poisoning is considered an accident.) But the doctor who examined Bruce's body had failed to detect cyanide. Curiously, Stella had called the doctor several times to question his findings that her husband had died a natural death from emphysema.
A chilling thought now crept into Cusack's mind. He tried to dismiss it. It persisted. There was the appalling possibility that Sue Snow was murdered--and many others could well have been--so Stella could make her husband's death look like an accident.
The Lie. On November 18, Cusack and Nichols met Stella Nickell for the first time in an interview at FBI head-quarters in Seattle. Cusack watched as a darkhaired, middle-aged woman in a buckskin coat came in. As she sat down, a bell on her purse jingled lightly.
Cusack wanted Stella to believe this was a routine interview, so he tossed out questions in a flow of easy conversation. He went over the details of her husband's death, where and when she had bought the tainted bottles. Had she ever bought Algae Destroyer? She told him no. Had she ever bought extra insurance on her husband? Again, she said no. That lie nudged Stella one rung higher as a suspect.
Finally Cusack asked if she would take a polygraph test. She refused, sobbing that she couldn't go through any more questions.
For several days, Cusack bided his time, hoping her doubts would wear her down. It was, he explained, 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. It's like they're almost asleep at night and there it is again--ping, ping, ping on the roof." Four days later, Stella called him and agreed to take the test.
During the subsequent polygraph, Cusack and Nichols watched Stella closely. When Cusack asked if she put cyanide in Excedrin capsules, she calmly denied it, but her jump in pulse rate and breathing convinced the agents otherwise.
Of course, believing she did it and proving it were two different things. The agents knew polygraph data are normally inadmissible in court. They needed to corner their quarry and pressure her into a confession.
Cusack switched the machine off. "Stella, listen to me," he said softly. "Based on your physiological responses, I am positive you caused Bruce's death." Stella went white. Then she looked coldly at Cusack and said, "I want to see my attorney."
Grisly Tale. Cusack realized that if he was going to crack this case, it would have to be without Stella's confession. He began phoning witnesses again, asking if there was anything more they could add.
Six weeks later, friends of Cindy Hamilton, Stella's 27-year-old daughter, called Cusack. Cindy had defended her mother when Cusack had questioned her months earlier. Now, after the polygraph she had begun to have second thoughts. And when Cusack questioned her this time, a grisly tale unfolded. Her mother, she said, had talked about killing her stepfather for years. Stella was bored, but she didn't want a divorce because she'd lose half the property. Stella had even talked about hiring a "hit man" to shoot Bruce or run his car off the road. Once, she tried to poison him with toxic seeds, but they only made him drowsy. A few months before his death, Cindy said, Stella began talking about cyanide.
When her mother told her about Bruce's death, Cindy said, Stella had looked hard at her and said, "I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no." So Cindy had stifled her suspicions until the polygraph results revived them.
Cindy talked for nine hours straight. Cusack tried to remain calm, but his mind was racing. This could bring a conviction, but Cindy hadn't seen her mother pack cyanide in capsules or place bottles in stores. There was no smoking gun.
Cindy agreed to testify so long as her mother was not executed. Cusack assured her that the most severe penalty in a federal product-tampering conviction was life imprisonment. But a warning light was blinking in his brain. What if this were only a mother-daughter feud? Will she flip-flop and deny everything in court?
One part of Cindy's conversation haunted Cusack. "I knew my mother was capable of doing this," she had tear- fully confided. "I just didn't want to believe it." Cusack now realized the enormity of what Stella had done. She had killed an unsuspecting victim to make the murder of her husband seem accidental so she could collect more insurance money. She had even filed a wrongful-death suit against Bristol-Myers for "contributing to" her husband's death! Cusack wondered: What if Sue Snow's daughter, Hayley, also 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 willingly have killed for an extra $105,000?
By February 1987, with the grand jury now hearing testimony, the FBI team had shrunk to Cusack the inter- viewer, Nichols the analyzer and an energetic rookie named Marshall Stone. What they needed was that last link in the chain of evidence against Stella Nickell. But most of the leads they checked out went nowhere.
Learning that Stella was interested in tarot cards and fortune-telling, they visited dozens of occult shops, searching for a connection to cyanide. They found nothing. Then Cusack remembered something Cindy had told him. In the months before her stepfather's death, her mother had researched cyanide at libraries. Stone volunteered to canvass the local libraries. One of the first he visited was in Stella's hometown of Auburn.
"Do you have a library-card holder by the name of Stella Nickell?" Stone asked the librarian. The woman searched the library's files and returned with a piece of paper which she handed to Stone. It was an overdue notice for a book Stella had borrowed and never returned. Its title: Human Poisoning.
Armed with Stella's card number, Stone combed the aisles for all the other books Stella had borrowed. When he opened a volume on toxic plants called Deadly Harvest, he found her number stamped twice on the checkout slip-- both dates before Bruce's death.
He packed the book and the volumes that covered cyanide from three encyclopedias and sent them to the FBI crime lab. Fingerprint analysis revealed 84 of Stella's prints in Deadly Harvest--the biggest concentration on the pages discussing cyanide.
Stella Nickell pleaded not guilty in a federal court trial that began in April 1988. It took 31 witnesses to stitch together a portrait of a woman in an unhappy marriage who felt financially desperate and saw murder as a solution. The prosecutor called her an "icy human being without social or moral conscience."
The jury found her guilty on May 9. Judge William Dwyer, citing "crimes of exceptional callousness and cruelty," sentenced Stella to 99 years, with no parole consideration for 30 years.
As a result of the case, the FDA tightened its regulations, requiring more anti-tampering protection for over-the-counter medicines. Bristol-Myers, the maker of Excedrin, joined the manufacturers of Tylenol and other drugs in abandoning two-piece nonprescription capsules, replacing them with one piece "caplets," thus effectively ending the threat of capsule tampering by crazed killers.
When he thinks about the case now, Cusack wonders about the "what ifs." For instance, what if the curious FBI chemist hadn't detected the tiny specks of algae? Stella Nickell might have committed the perfect crime. But she didn't. Plain, dogged persistence nailed her.
"It's the old lesson," says Cusack. "You turn every stone, leaving nothing to chance. This time, it worked."
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