Anatomy of Murder - Without a Trace (Jim Cappello)

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

After a private investigator is found dead, police narrow in on their suspect. But a huge obstacle remains: will they be able to prove what killed him. For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

Honestly, it's kind of novel that you would get an undetermined. We get a whole lot of whodunit, but there has to be very special circumstances for the cause of death to be truly undetermined. We've got to prove that there has been a murder before you can convict somebody of murder. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasika Nikolazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murph. Cause of death.

We've all heard that phrase. In fact, it may be one of the few things that everyone, all of us on this earth have in common. We will all eventually have a cause of death of our own. But it is also the first step in any homicide investigation, determining how somebody died. Today's case takes us south to Alabama, where we spoke to prosecutor Timothy Douthit. Tim is the chief trial attorney in Madison County's district attorney's office in Huntsville, which is a city of about 200,000 people located about a half hour drive from the Tennessee border. To be completely honest, when I was in about high school, somebody said, you should be a lawyer, you know, and I turned around and said, oh man, you can argue and give speeches for a living. I didn't realize they paid people to do that. That's a great job.

You know, Tim's story is really an interesting one, and it really brings up the fact of how important it is for prosecutors in general to be good storytellers. And I know you know that, Anasika. Now, that's a familiar story for many attorneys and something that most of us, including me, love about the work. But what also drew Tim to being a prosecutor was the challenge of putting the pieces of a puzzle together. And you all know where I fall on there. You know, it's taking those limited number of facts and building a story using logic, science, common sense, sometimes even a bit of drama when you put it together

until you have a full picture of what actually happened. And in 2018, Tim found himself at the center of a remarkable story. I never read the local news until I became a prosecutor. And now I read it all the time because invariably it's going to wind up on my desk. And so I remember reading in the news when he was just a missing person. And that was kind of a blip on my radar. I mean, you know, we have missing persons around here, same as you would in any big city. The missing person Tim is referring to is 37-year-old husband and father Jim Capella. Jim had grown up in Lockport, Alabama, playing sports, driving ATVs,

and working a variety of odd jobs before he ultimately moved to Huntsville and started his own business. What I tell everybody is, I never get to meet my victims, but I get to meet the people that they have left behind. And the picture that emerges of Jim is a happy-go-lucky, free-spirited sort of guy. He's got his share of tattoos and things like that. Turns out he was a private investigator and had done work for other attorney friends that I knew. His sister referred to him as a really, really hard worker, and his friends said really at heart he was just a good old boy. But Jim was also a family man.

He was married to 32-year-old Nikki Capello, who was a nurse at the North Alabama Specialty Hospital in nearby Athens, Alabama. She and Jim had been married for several years at this point, and they had a four-year-old daughter named Riley that lived with them. To be living that, whatever a typical suburban life looks like. Nice house, steady job, lots of friends. But by the fall of 2018, cracks had begun to appear in their marriage.

Jim and Nikki were not in a happy place in their marriage. We know Jim was having at least one and probably multiple affairs and that he believed that Nikki had a drug problem. According to Jim's sister, Nikki had been using various prescription medications for a back injury she sustained on the job years before. But in 2018, her suspected use of painkillers and other pills, according to Jim's sister,

was taking a toll on the family. He had had an intervention with her and her parents once or twice that basically boiled down to, if you don't get Nikki off of these pills or these drugs, I'm going to take Riley

and I am leaving. Things had not come to a head yet, but they were definitely boiling in the house. Narcotics, reports of infidelity, a marriage at its brink, and the fate of a young girl in the balance. This is the stage that was set when things in Huntsville began to go very wrong. On a Thursday morning in September of 2018, Jim Capello fails to show up for work at the office. A few hours tick by, but still no sign of him, and he's not answering his cell phone. After work, his co-workers reach out to Nikki and start saying, hey, where's Jim? Hey, has anybody seen Jim? People start to worry about him.

Now, when asked, Nikki didn't seem to be alarmed that Jim was a no-show at work. She spoke with his co-workers, and she said that she was sure that everything was fine and she just kind of went on with her day. Now, I know you'll agree with this, Nanasega. It's not out of the norm for a private investigator to work long hours, overnights even, and basically dive into one of their cases trying to make progress. And perhaps this was the reason. And also, as we were already talking about, this is a marriage that has its issues. So maybe she doesn't know where he is. And maybe that isn't unusual for this couple, for one of them to be gone with the other one not knowing for a period

of time. So after no word from Jim for the better part of a day and through the night, there's no help or at least no information coming from his wife Nikki, Jim's colleagues decide to call the police and request a routine welfare check. And once they do, police head out to the couple's home. And so they go out at about 1230 at night and knock on the door. And at first Nikki won't come to the door. She's talking to him through the ring camera and the dog is barking. And finally, they say, can you just come down here and talk to us, please? And so she gets on a robe and comes down and talks to him. And I don't remember the exact quote, but it's something along the lines of, hey, ma'am, can we talk to Jim Capella? We've got a report that he's missing. And she says, oh,

well, I'm glad you're here, officer. My husband is missing. I was going to call the police. So welfare check, Anasig, as you know, we talk about that a lot in our shows and I've done dozens of them. But let me focus on this case specifically because we have a uniform presence come to your door and normally that would raise some concerns. I mean, if a police officer shows up at my door and I haven't seen a loved one in a few days, I would think something is definitely wrong, that they were there to bring me some bad news. And this visit was some type of notification that a family member was in an accident or a victim of a crime. How about you?

I think it's really interesting. Again, no one has to speak to police and we never know why people react certain ways. But certainly, regardless whether the marriage is having problems or not, this is the father of her child. And if police are there looking for him because people have sounded alarm bells, you would certainly expect that she would at least be forthcoming with information or at least come down to the door and tell them whatever it is that she might know. You know, it is suspicious, I guess, but people do sometimes run off and not tell their friends and family where they're going for a day or two. And so the police's hackles are not up at first. They ask her if she would like to file a report that night, and she says no, and that she'll just file it tomorrow if she doesn't hear from it. So here is the mindset of the officer who's responding to this request for a welfare check.

You know, there's a lot of things that you look for. Of course, you're asking basic information. But is the person you're talking to appear to be rattled? Now, I mean, even if you've never met this person, an experienced officer or deputy would know. But past that, just based on her being a little bit hinky, and I've used that term a couple times, outside of that, there's no reason at that point

for further action to be taken. But it ends up being deep into the next day before Nikki picks up the phone to call police. And so finally she calls the police to make a missing persons report. But she drops her daughter off first and then she drives to her mom's house and makes the report and has the police come and meet her at her mom's house instead of at her house to tell them that her husband is missing.

So by now, some of you may think that Nikki's behavior is a bit odd, even perhaps suspicious. But at least let's just say this. Unusual behavior or being nervous around police is not really that unusual at all. And it's also normal to want somebody else, a friend, a family member to be with you when being questioned by police. But here's the thing, it's like, well, wait a second, does she have something to hide? And if she does, well, maybe it's definitely about Jim. Maybe it could also be that, again, people in general sometimes have their own things going on that they don't

want the police to see. So investigators obviously have to look at all options. And there is one thing about Nikki's actions that immediately raises the police officer's suspicions. After filing that missing persons report, Nikki gives the police officer Jim's keys, his computer, and his cell phone. Now, that makes no sense, Anastasia. Here's an investigator who doesn't have his computer, his cell phone, or his keys. Something sounds really wrong with that. Well, to me, the big one is the cell phone because keys, well, most of us have multiple sets of keys. His computer, I don't know, maybe he keeps one at home, another at work. But who goes

anywhere without their cell phone these days? And that right away, you know, to use your term, big red flag, Scott, that was it for me right there. Normally what would happen is on a missing person's report, he'll send it back to the office, they'll work up a case file, it'll land on a detective's desk in a day or two and somebody will start looking. But he goes ahead and calls back to the station and says, I need somebody to be assigned to this, like, today. This one, there's something weird about the way this is going down. I think it was such a big red flag that the police officer decided to go back to the police station and inform a detective who was immediately assigned to the case. He then calls Nikki to have that same type of conversation she's already had with the uniformed officer. Now she's told that story several times. The story

that, you know, Jim just didn't show up to work. And I have all of his things here. And I, Nicky, his wife, have no idea where he could be. And at the same time, she's trying to downplay it and is, I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm going to feel foolish when he comes back. Don't do anything you don't have to do. And so she's reporting what she's required at this point socially to report. But she's not acting like somebody whose husband is really missing. In fact, his sister, Jamie, called her that night and, you know, just check up, have we heard anything? And she told him she was going to work. And his sister was just gobsmacked and said,

you're going to work? Your husband is missing. The police are involved. Everybody's coming in and you're just checking in? And so ultimately she decides, well, I guess you're right. I guess I won't go to work. But had nobody called her on it, she was just going to go about her daily routine. Investigators now believe that this is anything but routine. So they decide to do a follow-up by again going to the couple's home, this time by the detective who's been put in charge. And Riley, the little girl, keeps trying to grab his hand and show him around the house. Let me show you my room.

Let me show you what's in the playroom here. And Nikki keeps saying, no, Riley, he doesn't need to see that. No, Riley, leave him alone. And so ultimately, he doesn't get any farther than that front foyer. And he says, well, I see you've got this ring camera here. Did you capture him leaving? At least we could see what time he left the house yesterday morning. And she says, no, it didn't capture anybody leaving the house.

He says, well, that's really weird. You've got it on the front and back door. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I don't know why it didn't capture anybody leaving the house. He says, well, that's really weird. You've got it on the front and back door. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I don't know why it didn't catch him leaving the house, but I've checked the footage and she shows him the footage. And sure enough, nobody's leaving the house. At this point, it's late on Friday. No one has seen or heard from Jim from at least Wednesday.

His friends are starting to organize search parties. His sister is even driving up from Florida. And Nikki, she's reaching out to an old friend for help. His friends are starting to organize search parties. His sister is even driving up from Florida. And Nikki, she's reaching out to an old friend for help. But when the details of that call become known to investigators, this case takes a shocking turn. It's Saturday morning about 9.45 in Huntsville, Alabama. Nikki Capella's husband, Jim, who hasn't been heard from since Wednesday, picks up the phone and calls an old friend of hers, Crystal Anderson. She'd been in their wedding. She was a good friend to the family, but they had not spoken in several years. And Nikki calls her out of the blue that Saturday morning. And

she says, oh, I'm so sorry about Jim. And Nikki says, hey, are we good friends? She says, well, yeah, we're still good friends. She said, are we good enough friends that you would help me bury a body? Would you help me bury a body? Let that sink in for a moment. I think that's a pretty big, significant piece of information coming out of that phone call, Anastasia. It's certainly not what you would expect if you pick up the phone from an old friend. Crystal, at this point, thinks that she's talking about, you know, we're going to find him and I'm going to have to have a funeral.

And so she goes into comfort mode and says, oh, sweetheart, they're going to find him. It's going to be fine. Don't think about stuff like that. And Nikki says, no, I need you to help me bury a body. I've killed Jim with insulin. And Crystal gets real quiet on the phone and says something to the effect of, sure, let me call you back. And hangs up the phone and immediately calls the police and tells them what she's just heard. Now armed with this reported information, police obviously want to go back and make sure they get inside the Capello home.

The first patrol officer to get out there knocks on the door. She answers the door, and he's very friendly. He's not confrontational at all. He says, why don't you let us check the house? Because a lot of times in missing persons cases, somebody may have died and, you know, crawled under the bed or in a tree or something, and maybe you just missed them. And I know that sounds weird, but why don't you just let us check the house just to make sure he's not inside?

She says, no, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. He says, all right, if you don't want to agree to that, then hang tight here with these officers. I'm going to go get a judge to sign a search warrant and I'm going to search your house. Finally, Nikki relents and she agrees to sign the form which gives legal consent to have the police come inside her home and look around. And so she signs it and then she says, but I'd really prefer if you didn't check in the garage while you're out there. So that would be the first place I would go in and see, I mean, clearly the garage.

I mean, that's what she's telling you to do by telling you not to go check the garage. A hundred percent. It's like if you say don't go, it's the first place you want to go. However, she is giving consent and she's giving consent only into certain portions of her home. So at least at the moment, those are the only places police can go

without that search warrant. But as you said, Scott, they are now going to go to the judge to make sure it is signed for the entire premises, including that garage. And at that point, the detective says, you know what? We're just going to go to the judge to make sure it is signed for the entire premises, including that garage. And at that point, the detective says, you know what, we're just going to do this the official way. And he has her sit there and he goes and finds the on-call judge and swears out an affidavit

and gets a search warrant and comes back with crime scene to search the house. And he says, as soon as you open the front door, even before you can get into the garage, the smell of death just wafts and hits you right in the nose. And when can get into the garage, the smell of death just wafts and hits you right in the nose. And when they get to the garage, they find Jim's half-repaired Corvette, and leaning out of the passenger side is Jim's body. He's in just his underwear. He's extremely bloated. He's wrapped halfway up in a tarp, and his feet are inside on the floorboard, but the upper half, the torso, is laying out on the tarp in the garage. Like, you got his feet in,

but you couldn't get him all the way inside. Due to the condition of the body and the level of decomposition, police are not able to immediately determine a cause of death or positively identify the deceased was Nikki's husband, Jim Capello. Now, Anastasia, you know there are a lot

of factors that go into the progression of decomposition. Two of the main factors are time and environmental factors, where the body is located. Temperature, moisture, insect activity, sun or shade, you know, those exposures, especially where the body is left outside, or in this case, a garage, that could have really poor ventilation. That would decompose a body more rapidly. Like I said, he was a skinny, wiry kind of guy before he died. I would not have identified him as the same person if he'd not been having the same tattoos on him.

Beyond the tattoos, police didn't see any gunshots. They didn't see blood cuts, no lacerations of any kind, no obvious external trauma that might give them a clue how Jim died. They were going to have to rely on the medical examiner's autopsy to determine the cause of death. But Nikki had already given them a major clue during her phone call with her friend Crystal. Ins. Now, insulin, we've all heard the term and we usually equate insulin with someone who is diabetic. But what actually is insulin? It's a naturally occurring substance in the human body that helps regulate blood sugar. But in the case of someone who's diabetic, their body doesn't do that. They at least have trouble making and using the insulin. So that's why a diabetic has to inject the insulin that they get from a

prescription from a doctor to help balance it out. Now, injected insulin has saved thousands, if not millions of lives. However, if anyone ever receives too much insulin accidentally or deliberately, it could have serious consequences. Dizziness, slurred speech, organ failure, and even death. I am not diabetic. Nobody in my family is diabetic. So I didn't know anything about insulin when this case landed on my desk, but I could already tell it was going to have trouble proving cause of death. And so I started calling the medical examiner, calling other people I know that are medical professionals to try and figure out what we would be able to prove and what we would not be able to prove. And what they learned was not good news.

Insulin is fascinating because honestly, if you can hide that body for two or three days, we will medically never be able to prove what that person died of. Stuff like antifreeze and other poisons, we'll still be able to pull bits and pieces out of the organs and stuff like that, but insulin will break down naturally. And in two or three days, medically, we will not be able to determine a cause of death. Now, I don't know about you, Anastasia, but I have not heard of anyone using insulin as a poison or as a weapon in a homicide case? So we have had them suspected. But again, the problem with it is it's very hard to know what drug it is. There are certain drugs that basically are not recognizable and really give investigators a run for their money.

And now, again, not wanting to in any way give people any ideas. I will not disclose the rest. But certainly insulin itself, the way that it is coming out here, is pretty novel. They took the body to the medical examiner and told her what the case was. She said, you know, if it's insulin, I'm probably not going to be able to find anything after this amount of time. And so we knew very shortly thereafter this was going to be one of the problems. And this is another place that the medical examiner's work is so critical. To prove this is a homicide, you really need to know a defined cause of death that is not natural causes or even undetermined. So we've had cases where

you believe it was a homicide, but an ME ruled it to be undetermined. And you cannot proceed with formal charges. So it makes sense that the next thing investigators want to do is scour the house for clues. The only thing that they found that tied into this case is in the bedside table in the bedroom was a single needle, a hypodermic needle that said for insulin use only. It did not appear to have anything in it, but it was an empty, very skinny little needle in one of the bedside tables. What's the obvious question police are asking at this point? Is anybody in the house diabetic? If so, maybe it's an accident or an adverse reaction to the medication.

And maybe Nikki's only crime was trying to cover that up. That's the reason the needle is so important, because nobody in that home is diabetic. Not Nikki, not Jim, not Riley. There may have been reason for other medical supplies to be there. There was no reason for an insulin needle to be in that house. Now, this is important. While police were searching Nikki and Jim's home, Nikki had been taken down to the station to wait. So she doesn't know the police had already found his body in the very place she asked them not to search, the garage. And Scott, just thinking about that from your investigator's perspective,

you know, when you have that person inside the room being interviewed and there are this other information you know that is really critical to your investigation, it's so important how you play your hand. Yeah, clearly it's important for investigators to begin with a method that I call being very open-handed, right? Nikki, we need your help. We're trying to determine a potential timeline to help us with this investigation. So let's establish these facts first so we can move forward towards resolving the issue here. You know, that's being very open-handed.

The main reason why is they already know that her husband is dead, but she's unaware of that fact, perhaps thinking they abided by her request not to check in the garage. So they want to get her into a place where her first misstep occurs, because that would put her in a position of being on the defensive. And they would have the biggest true fact that he's already dead. And his body is in the very place, as I said, where she did not want them to check. So they're going to hold on to that information close to the vest and see if they can bring her to that space. You know, people always say,

well, you just really want to get the confession. And sure, if people give you those direct words of what they've done, well, that's great as long, obviously, as it's corroborated. But sometimes the lies are as important and have as much impact in a case because if they're lying, the question then becomes why. And you can sometimes use that to bootstrap to other evidence to make it almost in a way better than just if they had said, I did it. And you have to prove that that was truthful and everything else. So, again, it's going to be really important. And what police obviously are doing with their questioning is not at that point letting on what they already know about Jim being in the garage.

Finally, after about 20 minutes, he says, Nikki, you told me that you'd searched the whole house. She says, I did. I searched that whole entire house. Why didn't you want me to come into the house that morning, Nikki? Well, because it was a mess and I just didn't know what to do. I was so overwhelmed. He says, that's not true. Why didn't you want me to go into the garage that morning? And then she gets real quiet and says,

I found Jim. And he says, you found Jim? I don't know how he got there. I checked that Corvette. I must have checked it. I didn't want you to come in because I was scared of how it would look. Jim's decomposing body in the couple's garage is certainly not going to help Nikki's case. But does hiding her husband's death mean that she's the one that killed him? Police won't know for sure until they can first prove how he died. Okay, so your husband goes missing for days,

and you're the only one that doesn't seem concerned. And then his dead body turns up in your garage. Seems like an open and shut case, right? Well, it obviously doesn't look good, as Anastika said, but the burden of proof is on investigators and prosecutors that Nikki had a hand in his demise. And with no evidence of trauma or injury, no trace of poison in his system, police don't even have the proof that Jim Capello was even murdered. But what they do have is multiple pieces at this point of circumstantial evidence. And at that point, it will together be enough to arrest Nikki Capello and charge her with Jim's murder. Police are making an arrest based on probable cause,

that probably somebody has done something and probably it was this person. I'm going to have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a much higher burden. It's a mountain that I'm going to have to climb. You know, prosecutors never have to prove motive because you can't often get inside someone's head. But here, especially when you're trying to figure out something that already has the hurdle of this cause of death, of course, the answer is why? Why would this mother, this nurse,

this wife go to such lengths that she would be willing to murder her husband? We do know that there's been some reported infidelity, that they were not getting along and fighting, and that Jim had threatened to take the child away if she didn't deal with her narcotics use. So then we're looking at means. In other words, did she have the ability, the tools necessary to commit the crime? So Scott, if the theory is that she injected Jim with insulin, well, one, he's not diabetic.

So we have talked about the potentially fatal impact that could have. And again, she's a nurse. She would likely know the effects that insulin poisoning could have on an otherwise healthy person. And of course, let's add the fact she also works at a hospital. And could that be connective tissue between her knowledge of what it can do and getting possession of that drug? I mean, these are great building facts for a potential motive. Now that we believe it's insulin, we got to figure out where she got it from. So he goes to the hospital and he's talking to co-workers and checking drug counts at their drug machines at the hospital dispensary there. At the hospital, detectives are able to discover that there was a security system in place that controls how medical professionals access the drugs that they administer to their patients.

Once you get that locker open, there is not much of a check on what you're actually taking. And so if you type in your key code and say, I'm charge nurse Nikki Capello, and I need two Percocet for the patient in room 12. And when you open the door, you pull out two Percocet and a vial of insulin and close the door, the computer's not going to set off any alarms. Insulin is rotated through because it does expire and they don't keep a track on it. Just whenever they run out or they need a new vial, somebody just puts the next vial in. It's not as regulated as the narcotics are because insulin is not a drug of abuse. You don't get high on it. Nobody steals insulin to sell it on the streets, so hospitals are not generally worried about people stealing it. Why would you steal insulin like you might steal Valium or something? You know, what's interesting, Anastasia, is that

in order to get into that room in the hospital, you have a key card and that key card has an identity. So if it's true, they will know that if she tried to access that closet at a certain time, her key card would be recorded. And that type of digital evidence could come in handy. Now, is it possible that she was doing it for another patient? Of course. But that's just really part of the puzzle. But as gyms are counting what they find at the hospital, while they can't say exactly what one person takes out or not, they can put her there at the time that they can see that insulin is going missing. And remember, there is no medical reason that anyone knows of, of why that insulin should be in the Capello home.

There were, in the days and weeks leading up to this, two or three different times where insulin went missing by 300 units, which is exactly the size of one bottle of insulin, when she was on duty. We cannot prove that she is the one that removed them because, like I said, there's no check on when the insulin went out, but it did go missing while she was on duty. And if you think of it this way, Anastasia, where you have a suspect who used a.22 caliber gun to commit a murder, and it turns out they work in a gun store, then I think if you're thinking the weapon here in this alleged murder is insulin, is a drug or narcotic, and she had access to narcotics,

maybe you can draw that inference. And also they find evidence of it in the home. I look at each one of these. None of them are dispositive, but each one is a brick in that evidence wall that is slowly building, building towards the top. And if you get to the top, then hopefully they can convince a jury that she's guilty. So we have means, but what about opportunity? Did she have adequate chances to commit the crime in a specific window of time that corresponds to the time of death. So they live together. So obviously there is the opportunity of them being together in that home.

But if it's insulin, that would mean you have to sneak up or at least be in close contact with someone to inject them with a needle. And right there, Scott, you know, that was one that I had to think about for a couple of minutes. There could be a lot of reasons why she was able to actually inject him without him seeing it coming, so to speak. Maybe he was sleeping. Maybe he had alcohol in his system and it rendered him, you know, incapacitated in a sense. But I think what you said is it, because when I was thinking about it, that's where I came out. You know, first of all, some people are very sound sleepers. He worked as a private investigator, which's where I came out. You know, first of all, some people are very sound sleepers.

He worked as a private investigator, which sometimes has very long hours. So when he slept, he may have slept that much harder. And again, that insulin needle is as tiny and as thin as you can get. Again, because people have to use them every single day when medically required. So it is not like you are using a elephant tranquilizer and hoping that he won't wake up or notice. So in trying to work this new theory, Tim goes back to the timeline. It turns out on the Wednesday night before Jim went missing, he spoke on the telephone to his mom, his sister, and a coworker. And all three them said, it was almost like we couldn't get through to him, like he kept trying to make a sentence and couldn't finish it.

His co-worker, the last thing she said to him, she actually said, look, you're going to have to text me. I can't understand what you're saying. And hung up the phone and texted him about whatever they were talking about and then said, get to sleep. Remember, insulin can have many different effects on a healthy person, including slurred speech.

But at first, it just starts to be like a brain fog, almost like that COVID fog that people would get, where I can't quite put things together the way that I used to. Eventually, you'll start to act a little drunk. It'll be kind of a slurred speech, and you will stumble around. Pretty soon, you won't be able to speak, and you'll need a caretaker, and then you'll slip into a diabetic coma, essentially, and ultimately death will result if insulin is continued to be administered. Okay, so at this point, it sounds like there is a ton of evidence.

Jim's body in the garage. We have an insulin needle in the bedside table. Nikki's admission to her friend, Crystal. The missing insulin from the hospital, this still sounds all circumstantial, right? Right, but we all know how I feel about circumstantial, how many prosecutors feel about circumstantial evidence. You know, when people say, oh, poo-poo, it's circumstantial,

like, no, it's sometimes so much stronger than the rest. Because how do you get away from it? She tells someone about insulin. There is insulin in their home, photographed by Jim. There is a needle next to the bedside. Again, there is no innocent picture that can be painted as you start to put these pieces one after the other, after the other. It really gets me to the top of that evidence wall.

I have the fact that you're after the other. It really gets me to the top of that evidence wall. I have the fact that you're at the top, but I have to say, we still have no official cause of death. And if I'm the defense attorney, I'd be coming back to the fact that you can't even definitely say that Jim didn't die from natural causes. Now, it doesn't matter if she had a million reasons to kill her husband. You have to be able to prove that it actually is a murder. A hundred percent, which is why it's always the hurdle of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But people don't get a free pass because they are savvy in their murder weapon of choice. And that is what Tim is going to argue to his jury. Obviously, in cases like this, it's a circumstantial case.

And so a large part of the prep and the trial itself is building a wall brick by brick. It's not like there is one killer piece of evidence that you can just pull the curtain off of and here it exists. It's like putting a mural together. And, you know, a big mural on the side of a church or an art exhibit or something may have 100,000, 200,000 pieces, but each piece is the size of your thumb, and in a vacuum, it doesn't mean anything. It's only when you get every piece put out there in the place that it belongs that everybody can see, oh, I see exactly what the

picture is now. I've got to convince 12 people, beyond a reasonable doubt, to convict when I don't have a medical cause of death in a jury that's going to be composed, half of them, of people that have master's degrees or PhDs and really trust science and engineering and things like that. And I'm going to have to tell them to go with their common sense instead. And despite what it feels like a mountain of coincidence and circumstantial evidence, 32-year-old Nikki Capello is not the picture of a murderer. She's a nurse, a mother, and she has no criminal record. But the one thing we all know is that there is no picture of what a murderer is. They come just like in everything

else, all shapes and sizes. But one thing that never changes is that it is the prosecutor's burden alone to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And it's not like her defense team needs to prove anything. It's more of a job of trying to poke holes in the prosecution's circumstantial case. And that circumstantial case is going to come down to this. Tim being able to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Jim Capella was murdered and that it was his wife who committed the crime. Jim was very concerned about his daughter. He was also very concerned about the alleged drug use by his wife, enough to a point where he began to document that with the intentions potentially in the future

of having his daughter removed from the home. Jim had told several people that if she did not straighten up her act, he was going to put together a case file of her and her alleged drug abuse, and he was going to take Riley away. And sure enough, when we found Jim's laptop, he had taken a bunch of photos and documented pills and pill packaging and things like that around the house. Unknowingly, in collecting that evidence,

he'd actually taken photos of the insulin that was probably used to kill him. But he was not a doctor, and he was just taking pictures of whatever medical stuff he could find. He didn't know. And so Jim unknowingly is giving prosecutors some of the strongest, most necessary evidence in this case. Because what have we been talking about from the beginning? Can they prove cause of death? However, they've actually shown that insulin was in the home. Pictures that he took trying to document the various drug use in the home. He takes pictures of actual insulin vials. It doesn't get much better than that. So how are prosecutors going to get around the fact that his autopsy results said the cause of his death was still undetermined? And all of the insulin that was found in his home and all of the photographs that he had taken can't prove that that was what was used to kill Jim if it cannot be detected in his body.

But you don't get a free pass, like I said before, because you are a savvy killer. And what Tim does was he went about proving it by process of elimination. The value from the autopsy was that while she can't tell us medically what Jim died of, she can give us a whole litany of things that we know he did not die of. When you check the body, you can see that he did not die of stroke. He did not die of cancer. He was not shot or stabbed or bludgeoned. He did not have a heart attack. He did not have organ failure. He did not asphyxiate either from something in his lungs or from

strangulation. He did not die from an allergic reaction. He did not have antifreeze. He did not have hypothermia or heat exhaustion. All of those would leave some sort of trace in the body somewhere that we would be able to find. And so while the doctor can't say that it's insulin, we can say that almost everything else that human beings die from is not what happened to June. So now with what Tim is talking about, Anastasia, do you believe this case crosses the threshold at a point of being able to prove murder beyond a reasonable doubt?

Well, if we talk about all these pieces as bricks in the wall or pieces of a puzzle, well, the photograph of that puzzle is becoming very, very clear. But Tim is about to get a new piece of evidence that changes everything. Around a week before Jim went missing, Nikki was hanging out with one of her friends named Ashley. They were at a play date where their kids were running around in the backyard. And Nikki started talking to her about her marital troubles with Jim. She told this friend Ashley and said, look, I'd be better off if he were dead.

I could kill him, you know. And Ashley thinks she's joking and goes, oh, don't say that. And she goes, no, I could. I read it in a book at work, a book on autopsies. And if I give him enough insulin, they will be able to find it after a couple of days. And Ashley starts to do that nervous laughter when a friend has made an off-color joke and says, hi, yeah, whatever. And she says, I already tried it once. I don't know how that guy survived so much insulin. I gave him enough to kill a horse. So this makes now not one, but two admissions, all of which go straight to Nikki killing her husband. When you tell two different people, I've killed my husband with insulin, we find a body consistent with insulin, you have an insulin needle in your house, insulin is missing from your office, and you have a motive to kill him, you have killed that man with insulin. There's just no other conclusion to arrive at when you put everything into one big picture.

Nikki chose not to testify at her trial, which is obviously her right not to do. The prosecution had painted a vivid picture of a cold, premeditated killer. But would the jury be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt? Huntsville itself is a very tech-savvy engineering kind of city. They call it the Rocket City. This is where they designed the Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon during the Apollo missions. And so in the actual city, you have a real big contingent of PhDs, high education. But Madison County also encompasses very rural areas that are just good old boys doing honest blue collar work. And so our juries get a nice cross section

of both technology and salt of the earth. You know, sorry to go a little deep on the jurors here, but I love the fact that they really have this mix of these very science minded people with more people that are just of the earth and are going to use common sense. That's a pretty great mix, a true cross-section of society. So what Tim is hoping at this point is that common sense is going to prevail.

But remember, no matter what, they are never going to have that official cause of death. So the big question is going to be, is this jury going to be able to get past that hurdle and still be able to convict with the evidence they've been given? Without sounding too arrogant, I'm very good at the very many of things that I do for my job. I'm absolutely crap at reading juries. I can never tell whether or not anything I'm saying is actually getting through or if it's just bouncing off of them.

And so they go back there into this kind of black box and we just wait. I'm talking to the family and I think about the time that I'm telling them, I don't anticipate a quick verdict just because there's a lot of evidence in this case and a lot of pieces they got to put together. And I don't even think I get that sentence out of my mouth when my phone rings and it's the bailiff saying, hey, come on back down, we got a verdict. The jury was out for less than an hour. get that sentence out of my mouth when my phone rings and it's the bailiff saying, hey, come on back down, we got a verdict. The jury was out for less than an hour. They find Nikki Capello guilty of murder of her husband, Jim Capello.

She was sentenced to life in prison. and while justice prevailed in that courtroom, there are other things still out there and impacted by the result. Remember, this couple had a daughter who now is going to be left to not grow up with either her father or her mother. We have no indication that Riley knew what was going on. She was gone when the police showed up and arrested her mother. We have no indication that Riley knew what was going on. She was gone when the police showed up and arrested her mom. She was gone when her dad's body was removed. She was given immediately to her aunt and has lived with them ever since. She has cousins there that are about the same age. The last I heard, she is thriving. She obviously has questions. I mean, she knows that she had a dad and a mom. She was four. And now she doesn't. And she knows that her dad is dead

and that her mom is in jail. And that's something that's going to go with her for the rest of her life. I mean, we can get a kind of justice, but it's really just punishment. There's no way to give the world Jim back, and there's certainly no way to give Riley, her dad, back. It's just another of those painful ironies

that we see in so many of these cases. Justice for her dad means locking away her mom. Life and crime is filled with these contradictions. A caregiver becomes a killer. A life-saving medicine for one person becomes a poison for another. But as we see in time and time again, the puzzle does not have to be complete for us to see the truth.

And bringing this back to Jim, the one thing that he loved most in this world and was the center of his earth was his daughter. And to know now that she is very much loved and by all accounts doing well, that is the thing that hopefully helps him rest in peace. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer.

So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?