The Tylenol Mafia (49 page)

On the afternoon of June 5, 1986, Stella’s husband, Bruce Nickell, came home with a headache. He took four Excedrin capsules, walked out on the deck to watch the birds, and then collapsed. He was taken by helicopter to a Seattle hospital, but was dead on arrival from what the doctors said was emphysema. That didn’t make any sense to Stella, because Bruce did not have that disease.

Nearly two weeks after the death of Bruce Nickell, news reports said that Sue Snow had died in Auburn, Washington on June 11
^th
from cyanide-laced Excedrin. Stella contacted the police and told them that her husband had taken Excedrin from the same lot as Snow’s Excedrin. Doctors soon realized that Bruce Nickell had also been poisoned. As political pressure mounted to get a conviction for these murders, FBI Director, William Webster, told several associates, according to one of them, that he was worried that if an arrest was not made soon in the Seattle area killings, tamperings nationwide could get out of hand. The FBI, under pressure to indict someone, then targeted Stella as its prime suspect in the poisoning deaths of her husband and Sue Snow.

Bruce’s life insurance policy paid $136,000. He also had a Death and Dismemberment policy that paid $40,000, but only if he died from an accident, including poisoning. Auburn Detective Mike Dunbar said, “I think that she [Stella] probably killed Bruce and expected them to find out that he died from cyanide poisoning.” Prosecutors claimed that Stella put poisoned painkillers in stores, hoping someone else would die and the tainted capsules would be discovered, and she would collect on Bruce’s Accidental Death and Dismemberment policy. However, Stella was already going to collect $136,000 on the life insurance policy. Why would she come forward and make herself an obvious suspect for the $40,000 in accidental insurance? If Stella had poisoned her husband, the hospital gave her the perfect cover – the disease – she would have gotten away with it.

The Justice Department’s prosecution of Stella relied primarily on the testimony of Cindy Hamilton, Stella’s estranged daughter. Hamilton, who had been in and out of Stella’s life for years and had a history of abusing drugs, testified that Stella had talked about killing Bruce for the insurance money. She made a formal statement to the FBI shortly after the federal government put her and a friend up at a trendy Ocean Shores resort for a week or so in January 1987 to give Hamilton and her roommate time to “think things over.” There was no witness to corroborate Hamilton’s claim, and prosecutors had no physical evidence whatsoever to connect Stella to the poisonings. Without Hamilton’s testimony, prosecutors had no case.

As it turned out, Hamilton’s testimony was enough. On May 9, 1988, a jury convicted Stella of murdering Bruce Nickell and Sue Snow. U.S. District Judge William Dryer sentenced her to 90 years in prison. Stella will be eligible for parole on December 7, 2017.

In 1999, private detectives Al Farr and Paul
Ciolino
decided to look into Stella’s case. After an extensive 19-month investigation, they concluded that she is innocent. During their investigation, they found the typical signs of prosecutorial abuse – a case built on speculation, fabricated “facts,” false stories leaked to the press, and FBI harassment of the suspect. One glaring problem had to do with Stella’s polygraph exam. Jack Cusack, the FBI agent who gave the exam, was the same FBI agent in charge of building a case against Stella. All the protocol for conducting an exam was violated, using it instead as a prosecutorial opportunity to intimidate and unnerve Stella. Stella never saw the results of that polygraph exam. In fact, nobody ever saw the polygraph exam results, not even Stella’s federal public defender, Tom Hillier.

“My belief is that the polygraph was a ruse to try and coerce a confession out of her,” said Stella’s new lawyer, Carl Colbert. Colbert has asked to see the polygraph, but the FBI will not let him.

The government claimed that all required documents had been handed over to Stella’s first lawyer. Yet Farr discovered thousands of pages of documents that had never been turned over to the defense. The jury also never knew about the reward money that would go to Cindy Hamilton if her testimony led to the conviction of her mother.

The Proprietary Association, the OTC drug manufacturer’s primary lobbying group, had put up a $300,000 reward to whoever provided information that led to a conviction in the Excedrin poisonings. The Proprietary Association, with McNeil Chairman David Collins as the vice president of the association’s Board of Directors, paid Hamilton $250,000. The remaining $50,000 went to eight others, including five who testified at trial.

The Proprietary Association paid Stella’s neighbor, Sandy Scott, $7,500. At the request of Jack Cusack, Sandy had been a spy for the FBI, maintaining surveillance and even searching Stella’s home for algae destroyer that the FBI hoped would link Stella to the poisoned capsules. Roger Martz, a “chemist” at the FBI Lab in Washington D.C., had found green specs in the cyanide-laced Excedrin capsules recovered in the Seattle area. He matched those green specs to a particular type of algae destroyer. The feds, theoretically, had connected the cyanide to the algae destroyer, and the algae destroyer to Stella Nickell. In reality, neither Sandy nor the feds ever found that algae destroyer at Stella’s house, something the jury also never heard. The FBI never linked the cyanide or the algae destroyer to Stella. Later, Sandy realized that the whole thing was a set-up and that Stella was wrongly convicted.

Thomas Noonan, the fish store manager who testified that he had sold Stella the specific kind of algae destroyer that the FBI said was found in the cyanide, was paid a $15,000 reward.
 
When Farr interviewed him later, Noonan said he never recalled selling algaecide to Stella. He had made that statement to the FBI because it seemed like it would help their case and because he did not specifically remember not selling the algaecide to Stella.

 
“Big business and big government got in bed together and cooked up a scheme to convict this woman, and they did it,” said Farr. “This is the craziest thing I’ve heard in 30 years of doing this. You find a lot of cases where maybe one witness was paid. You never have found a case that I’m aware of in the history of jurisprudence in this country where so many witnesses received a check from a third party for their testimony.”

Based on their findings, Stella’s new legal team, working pro bono, filed a request for a new trial. This third attempt to reopen the case was denied. Farr says the only thing that can get Stella off now is a confession from the actual killer. The best chance of informing the public about the wrongful conviction of Stella Nickell might have been the movie
Who Killed Sue Snow
?
.
But pressure from Johnson & Johnson led USA Network to shut down the production set of that movie on Thanksgiving eve 2000, just a few days before filming was to begin.

Not brought up at Nickell’s trial was that two of the five bottles of cyanide-laced capsules that the jury convicted Stella of poisoning were unopened and showed no signs that their tamper-resistant packaging had been breached. One of the unopened bottles was a bottle of cyanide-laced Extra Strength Excedrin capsules, and the other was a bottle of cyanide-laced Anacin-3 capsules. FDA spokesperson, Ellen Miller, said the presence of cyanide in the unopened bottle of Anacin-3 was detected by a fluoroscope examination, similar to an X-ray. This examination was done without removing the packaging. Officials found no signs that the unopened bottles had been tampered with, leaving a very important question unanswered: How did Stella supposedly get the cyanide-laced capsules into those two unopened bottles while leaving no signs that the taper-resistant packaging had been breached? The FBI and Justice Department had learned during the February 1986 Tylenol murder investigation in New York to avoid that topic.

The same
modus operandi
promoted during the Tylenol murders investigations in Illinois in 1982 and in New York in 1986 was the cornerstone of the prosecutors’ fabricated case against Stella Nickell. In each case, the FBI initially targeted a victim’s relative as the perpetrator of the tamperings. In each case, the FBI claimed that the killer used a cyanide-laced analgesic capsule to murder his or her intended victim after first planting cyanide-laced capsules in bottles in a number of stores, so others would die, making the alleged premeditated murder look like one of several random murders committed by a madman. If nothing else, the FBI is consistent. In effect, they “picked” the guilty party and then investigated backward to try to get a conviction.

*****

The
Chicago Tribune
found that the Illinois record for misconduct by prosecutors is particularly abysmal. Of the 381 people whose homicide convictions were reversed between 1963 and 1999, forty-six were tried in Illinois. Yet not a single prosecutor in those cases was ever brought to trial for misconduct or disbarred. Several years after the
Tribune’s
expose’, the wrongful prosecution of three men for the rape and murder of a young girl in DuPage County became the only such case to result in an indictment of prosecutors.
 
The three prosecutors and four DuPage County sheriff’s officers indicted in that case are known as the DuPage 7.

Rolando Cruz and Alejandro “Alex” Hernandez were convicted in 1985 for the 1983 rape and murder of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. Jeanine had stayed home with the flu on February 25, 1983. Her father, an engineer, went to work in Chicago. Her mother, a school secretary, went to work in Naperville, the prosperous suburb in DuPage County where the
Nicaricos
lived. Jeanine was left home alone. That afternoon, Jeanine was abducted from her home, sexually assaulted, and her skull then crushed with a tire iron. A task force of local police, DuPage County sheriff's police, and the FBI began sifting through the evidence and tracking leads. Detective John Sam, who regularly led the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department in felony arrests, was the lead investigator.

DuPage County prosecutors, led by Assistant State’s Attorney Tom Knight, soon developed the hypothesis that three DuPage County residents - Rolando Cruz, Alex Hernandez, and Stephen Buckley - had gone into the Nicarico home to burglarize it, were surprised by Jeanine, raped her, and then killed her to prevent her from identifying them. As the investigation wore on, Detective Sam realized that the prosecutor’s theory was not credible. The odds against three burglars also being child molesters “are astronomical,” Sam said. There was no physical evidence no fingerprints, no hairs, no fibers, and no eyewitnesses. Sam became so sure that Cruz and Hernandez were innocent that he resigned from the Sheriff's Department and offered, in vain, to testify on their behalf.

On December 20, 1984, the Wheaton law firm of
Callum
, Anderson, and
Deitsch
held its annual Christmas party, attracting a variety of judges, lawyers, and law enforcement officials, including Assistant State’s Attorney Patrick King, and DuPage County Sheriff’s Detectives, Dennis
Kurzawa
and Thomas
Vosburgh
.
 
Vosburgh
told King that he was concerned because neither he nor
Kurzawa
had been contacted to testify in the Nicarico case.
Vosburgh
said he and
Kurzawa
were particularly eager to testify about the “vision statement” that he said they had taken from Cruz 18 months earlier.

This vision statement, which
Vosburgh
said included specific details about the Nicarico murder that only the actual perpetrator could have known, was not mentioned in any of the thousands of pages of transcripts from the Grand Jury that indicted Cruz, Hernandez, and Buckley. Police never wrote it down or made a report about it. This lack of documentation about the vision statement, as was later revealed, was because Cruz had never made it.

The trial against Cruz, Hernandez, and Buckley went forward in January 1985 with the vision statement as the key piece of evidence. Detectives
Kurzawa
and
Vosburgh
testified that a distraught Cruz recounted a vision or dream he’d had about the Nicarico murder. Cruz allegedly told them that Jeanine’s nose had been broken, that she had been hit in the head so hard that a depression was left in the ground where her body was found, that she had been sodomized, and that she had been left in a farmer’s field.

The jury was unable to reach a verdict on Buckley’s guilt, and charges against him were ultimately dismissed, but the jury found Cruz and Hernandez guilty of kidnapping, raping, and murdering Jeanine Nicarico. On March 15, 1985, Judge Edward
Kowal
sentenced them to death.

Tim
Gabrielsen
, one of two attorneys appointed to represent Cruz’s appeal, began reading the 11,000 pages of trial transcripts in July 1985. “It became very clear how little evidence the State had against them,” said
Gabrielsen
. “There was no question the prosecution failed to prove these guys were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. They were just out to convict somebody.”

In June 1985, Brian Dugan was arrested and charged with the rape and murder of 7-year-old Melissa Ackerman, and the rape and murder of 27-year-old Donna
Schnorr
. He had been arrested 27 times in the DuPage County area for burglaries and assaults on women. When Dugan was first interviewed by his public defender, George Mueller, he confessed to raping and murdering Ackerman and
Schnorr
. He pleaded guilty to those crimes in exchange for a life sentence. Dugan then told Mueller that he had also raped and murdered Jeanine Nicarico. He also wanted to cut a deal to plead guilty to that crime, but only if prosecutors would agree not to seek the death penalty.