Dateline NBC - Bad Chemistry

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

She was the breadwinner and he took care of the children. It all worked fine until rumors of an affair, fights over the kids and, finally, an ugly divorce. The marriage was ending, but a crime even seasoned detectives find hard to believe was just beginning. Keith Morrison reports in this Dateline classic. Originally aired on NBC on September 18, 2009.

He was Mr. Mom. Taking care of the kids, making sure they got to their doctor's appointments. She was Mrs. Mean. She didn't mind embarrassing him. And their marriage wasn't just miserable, it was a mess. I hope to God you learn and help. No surprise they were divorcing, but big surprise when he disappeared. Maybe there'd been an accident or maybe he'd hurt himself.

But they're fine. Nothing, nothing out there. Nothing anywhere. Because the biggest surprise of all was still to come. A twist so bizarre it could only be true. I saw something that was very, very shocking to me. Sure, she was mean. But mean enough to commit murder?

She looked at the jury. They could believe her. Or could they? All of this, you know, shocks the conscience. Just diabolical. Diabolical. His name was Tim Schuster. and he was having a bad day. Not that he'd say so himself. Well, Tim was pretty quiet. Still, bad day, bad week. He was despondent after being laid off from St. Agnes. That was on top of the daughter trouble. Enough to want to have her relocated to Missouri

to get her straightened up. And of course, the divorce. Last thing Tim would ever have wanted. The sad part about it is he really, really wanted his marriage to work. Awful how things can pile up on a person. And so when, on that particularly difficult morning, Tim didn't make his appointment, it wouldn't be the first time a man had left a life not going so well, now would it? And there had been such chemistry once. He was a young nurse, she still a college student, and she was exciting, ambitious. And after graduation, they came to the heart of the California breadbasket, a little town, a suburb really, called Clovis. Clovis is a really nice community. You find the newer houses there, the wealthier families live there.

Teresa Freed was a TV reporter in bigger Fresno next door at the time. Fresno's nice as well, but a lot of wealthy people do live in Clovis, and it has very low crime. And that was where they made their life. A somewhat unusual arrangement by traditional American standards, she was an entrepreneur, rose to become the president of her own agricultural chemicals company, a double-A type, a smart, demanding boss who succeeded by becoming a workaholic. He employed soft-spoken empathy as a nurse administrator at Fresno's St. Agnes Hospital, and at home in Clovis was Mr. Mom to their daughter Kristen and younger son Tyler.

He liked that, said these friends and fellow nurses Mary and Bob Solis, but he was also supporting his wife's ambitious career. He allowed her to do what she needed to do by getting off work, coming home, taking care of the kids, making sure they got to their doctor's appointments, making sure they had their meals, making sure they did their homework. And for a long time, it worked. At the hospital where he helped run the nursing department, Tim was a popular leader. The other nurses liked him and looked up to him. He was certainly someone that was open to listening to different ideas. If he made a decision, he took responsibility and accountability for the decisions he made. But at home, he remained his quiet, undemonstrative self.

She was probably the one that pretty much drove what was going on. So he was always, as soon as you saw him with her at the beginning, you realized he was whipped, as they say. Balance of power. As long as no one rocked the boat, there was peace in the Schuster home, its normal discontents unspoken, unexpressed. But you can't keep trouble at bay forever by pretending it doesn't exist. When Larissa laid down the law, Tim went along. But her now teenage daughter, Kristen, defied her. Kristen stood up to her mother's powerful personality in ways Tim wouldn't dream of doing.

She'd sneak out of the house with boys, stay out too late, talk back. Larissa's friend, Tammy Belchay. She had a very tough relationship with Kristen. I know that they were really at it for quite some time. It got so bad eventually that Larissa sent Kristen away, packed her off to live with her grandparents back in Missouri, a decision Tim did not necessarily agree with. Around then might have been the time when resentment started to boil

under the placid surface of Tim's demeanor. In public, however, he suffered in silence, even when Larissa spat out her belittling insults. It was obvious that she didn't mind embarrassing him in front of his friends. She didn't mind that at all. In fact, she took relish in that at times. And then the friends that we hung with also noticed it,

and they made the same comment. You know, is there something going on with Tim and Larissa? We don't know. Tim never said anything. What was going on? Increasingly, Larissa told her friend she was fed up with Tim. He wasn't a real man. She'd even had an affair. And she hated his passive-aggressive response. She even let it get around that he wouldn't have sex with her. She wanted out. Tim seemed despairing. I mean, they went to counseling, and his thought was that, okay, you know, we're both agreeing to go to counseling, so there must be a chance that, you know, we can work this out. And that was never going to happen, because that wasn't her plan.

Her plan was, you know, you could use the counselor as the opportunity to say to Tim, this marriage is over with. You know, we're done. So divorce it was, but about as messy as a divorce can be, a process which for Larissa was extremely frustrating. Oh, she told me all the nuts and bolts. She told me about the frustrations, about the small successes, and then the retreating to losing, you know, the small battles with Tim.

So it got to be really acrimonious. Once after the split, Larissa sent a young male employee to break into Tim's house and take back items she claimed belonged to her. But somewhere in the painful process, Tim Schuster seemed to grow a backbone. After that break-in, he even bought a gun. Tim was changing. He was evolving. And he was changing to a point where he was starting to get some stones. Although he was reluctant at first to do it, he was slowly progressing to a point where he was starting to say no.

But the marriage he cared so much about was over. His beloved daughter was gone. The son he adored bounced back and forth through the poison dare between him and his estranged wife. And then one day, he got a pink slip, lost his job in a round of layoffs at St. Agnes Hospital. Had Tim hit bottom? He arranged to meet the hospital's human resources person the next morning. Tim didn't make his appointment. And she looked really, really concerned.

Well, I also got real concerned because we knew how Tim was in regards to keeping appointments. Which was what? Very meticulous, always on time, never missed anything, or he called if he was running late. What happened to Tim Schuster? What had he done? I said, please, I said, call the police. We have a friend. He's not answering his phones.

And he's registered to carry a handgun. Coming up... That right there is a big red flag for us to look at and say, something happened here. When Bad Chemistry Continues. Something was amiss in Clovis, California. Bad enough that nurse Tim Schuster was laid off on top of all his other troubles. But now this impeccably reliable man had skipped a crucial meeting with the hospital's human resources officer.

He didn't just blow things off like that. And this is important. If he said he was going to be there, he was there. So Bob and Mary Solis called another of Tim's friends, Victor Uribe. Could Victor check Tim's house, make sure he's okay? I walked to all the houses, and when I went into his bedroom, I saw his cell phone and his watch. The phone told me something was really wrong because he never went anywhere without that phone.

Victor went to the garage, opened Tim's pickup truck. And I went through the glove box and his console. His wallet was there. There was money in it. Credit cards were there. I mean, it was really strange. So it was. Mary and Bob Solis called the police.

Told them Tim wouldn't go missing without a bad reason, told them about Tim's handgun. But when Detective Vince Weibert heard about Tim's recent troubles... I mean, that right there is a big red flag for us to look at and say, something happened here. Not that Tim had gone postal on anyone, except, perhaps, himself. He possibly committed suicide.

You look at a man who's going through a divorce, who's having child custody issues, who may be having financial issues, and now he's laid off from his job, and he goes missing that day. Tim Schuster's disappearance sent tremors through quiet, prosperous Clovis. This just isn't the sort of place where educated, middle-class people simply vanish without a trace. We've kind of got that small-town, kind of old-school thing going on there.

Now, one of the things which Clovis has always prided itself on, and part of its unique identity, has been a very low crime rate. So suicide seemed the most plausible answer, but Tim's friends didn't buy it, and they certainly didn't believe that the loss of his marriage or his job would have been the reason. He wasn't broken up about it. No. No, he saw it as an opportunity. Yes. Number one, to be with his son, to get some clarity of what's going on in his life. He had such a great concern for his kids, not so much for himself, but for his kids. He would not have left them without a father.

Although, the police put two and two together and figured the timing of all this was probably pretty important. We didn't rule out the possibility of him just saying, you know what, I've been laid off from my job, I'm in the middle of a bad divorce, and I'm having problems. I'm going to go disappear for a while. Take off with a friend, go to the mountains, go to Vegas, do something like that. In which case, it couldn't be that hard to find him, could it? We talked to any family member that we could find. We went

through Tim's notebooks. We went through his phone records. We even looked into having the helicopter fly overhead in the field to the north of their home to flare it to see if there were any heat sources out there. What'd they find? Nothing. Nothing out there. They even went as far as asking Larissa for information, even though because of the divorce the two hadn't seen each other for months. Still, they asked, would she come in for a chat? Of course, she agreed, and they recorded the conversation. Is Timothy capable of, if he wanted to go away, start a new life somewhere, first of all, and this is your opinion, do you think he would do that? And my having a son myself i

wouldn't leave my son is he capable of just packing up cashing out a bunch of money and going somewhere else thinking i need maybe when you just snap and do that is he capable of doing that i don't know that i don't know you think you would leave your son And not see him? My gut tells me that no, that he probably wouldn't do that. So, was it foul play? Had somebody caused Tim to disappear? Of course, in situations like this, police generally like to eliminate the possibility that a spouse, current or ex, might have had something to do with the disappearance. They have to ask. So they did. Larissa, let me ask you this. Are you the type of person that could have anything to do with him

missing? No, not at all. No, I don't. I couldn't do. I can't. I mean, I we've had our problems and I dislike him and, you know, and we haven't been able to get along, but I couldn't do that to my son. And then Larissa, not terribly useful so far, went home. And 48 hours into the search for Tim, police still had no solid leads. But then, well, it's funny, the little things that make a big difference. One of the investigators was going through Tim's papers and stumbled on a familiar name. Detective Kirkhart had received Fagoni's name

by going through the, by Tim's ledger. James Fagoni. The name was familiar because this was the very young man suspected of breaking into Tim's new house and stealing back some of the items Tim had taken from his marriage. Fagoni, police knew,

was a sort of errand boy for Larissa. What was his name doing in Tim's personal ledger? So Detective Kirkhart and Detective Daly actually sat down on Monday and interviewed James. This person might actually be involved in whatever happened?

We thought that he may have some inside information. Inside information? Theft the year before? Who was this Fagoni person? And what did he know? Could he find Tim Schuster? Coming up... Good God!

What a story! He is telling me most of the aspects of this and in fairly good detail. Laying out the whole crime. Laying out the whole crime. When Bad Chemistry Continues. Tim Schuster was gone. Two decades of Mr. Meek to his wife's domination, and now he'd lost his marriage, his job, and at least his friends feared he'd lost his life.

But not, they were determined, to suicide. He wouldn't do that to his kids. He wouldn't do that to his kids. He wouldn't do that to his mom. So, had someone done something to him? Why not ask James Fagoni? This is the home that James Fagoni would babysit at. Fagoni, it turned out, was 21 years old and a babysitter before and after the breakup

for young Tyler, the Schuster's son. He was a personal assistant of sorts for Larissa. Vagoni was a good kid by all accounts, good family. Here's his attorney, Peter Jones. Mr. Vagoni, well, this is a young man who had over a 4.0 grade point average, straight A's in high school. He was an Annapolis candidate. He was really a gentle spirit. Gentle or not, police believed Fagoni might know something about the disappearance of Tim Schuster. And so they found young Fagoni, took him in for questioning. Fagoni was very nervous, that was obvious.

Maybe because right off the bat, cops dragged up that old accusation that Fagoni, along with Larissa, broke into Tim's house and took some things. She was just kind of, like, going around, and I was just kind of trying to get a TV and some stuff. So I wasn't really paying attention. I didn't really want to know too much. I think that was the problem. And whose house were you in? I believe it was Tim's. It was Tim's house. Tim?

Tim Schuster. By now, a few minutes into the warm-up questions, Fagoni seemed visibly frightened. He half-admitted he did help Larissa take some things from Tim's house the year before, but knew nothing at all about the man's recent disappearance. So detectives kept pressing him, telling Fagoni they knew he had to be involved. And suddenly, his resolve not to tell, if that's what it was, imploded.

James Fagoni cracked. Yes, he confessed, he was there the night Tim vanished, was there at Tim's house, and he went there with a weapon. You mentioned a stun gun. Did you use that at all? Yeah. Here in the interrogation room, Fagoni's resolve simply collapsed. As detectives asked their questions, he blurted out the whole story. Where did you use that from first?

That was just kind of like down the arm or whatever, you know, and then he was just like, whoa, and then he fell like in that small area. It happened, said Fagoni, at Tim's front door the night before he missed that morning meeting with his hospital's HR director. After Fagoni fired the stun gun, Tim collapsed and fell in the entrance of his house. And then, well, then the dismal work of that dreadful night began in earnest. And as Fagoni told his awful story, his audience, seasoned detectives, remember, could scarcely believe their ears. This is what James is telling me while I'm sitting there talking to him. And he is telling me most of the aspects of this in fairly good detail. Laying out the whole crime. Laying out the whole crime.

But why would a normal 21-year-old kid, a fine student, a good kid, harm Tim? What motive did he have? And the answer was maybe he didn't. Maybe someone else did. In fact, when he heard the story himself, Fagoni's lawyer was convinced someone must have put him up to it. He would have never done this in a million years on his own. What did young James Fagoni tell his lawyer and those policemen? Was he telling the truth? There was more investigating to be done, more to the story than anyone guessed. The real horror hadn't been discovered yet.

Coming up... When I opened the barrel, I saw something that was very, very shocking to me. When Bad Chemistry Continues. The interview rooms in the Clovis Police Department are like any other, which is to say, a very uncomfortable place to be. When 21-year-old James Fagoni was brought in for questioning, he soon caved under the pressure. And this was the rest of his story. I was kind of messed up and kind of scared and kind of, you know, worried that she would do something. By she, he meant Larissa. He was with her that night, he said. He was frightened, he said. He knew she wanted him to do something. He was going to be her helper, she told him. Or so he said. Larissa paid him for it, two thousand

dollars. What did they do? Here's what Fogoni told police. On the very night Tim was laid off from his job at the hospital, Larissa directed Fogoni to accompany her to Tim's house. He was to purchase and bring a stun gun. They sneaked up the walk to his front door. James said that he waited in the shadows near the door while Larissa went up to the front door of the home. She then heard Larissa talking, saying, Tyler's not feeling well. I need you to come to the door. A few moments later, Tim came and opened the front door. And at that point, James lunged from the shadows at Tim, tackled him to the ground.

And Larissa jumped on top of him also, there inside the foyer of his home. James was stunning him with the stun gun that Larissa had given him the money to purchase. And Tim was struggling. But after a few moments, Tim stopped struggling. That wasn't the end of Fagoni's story. There was more to tell. But to believe what he had told them so far, the investigators needed some kind of proof, physical evidence. I asked him what had happened to the stun gun. And he told me that he had thrown it into a porta potty somewhere on the outskirts of town in the country. And we actually recovered that stun gun inside that porta potty. Wait a minute, you had to go inside the port-a-potty?

Yeah, we had to go fishing inside the port-a-potty to go ahead and recover the stun gun. Something else happened too just as the detectives were interviewing the young man. A woman contacted the Clovis Police Department. Her boss had asked her to do something that now seemed suspicious, she said. Her boss, Larissa. Who, said the employee, directed her to rent a truck with her own, not Larissa's, credit card. She had already been a little suspicious when Larissa asked her to rent a storage locker the year before, again in her own name. Not far from Larissa's biochemical company. Detective Jim Cook drew the assignment to check it out.

He drove to the storage facility, walked down a hallway toward Larissa's locker. He'd been told to look for a blue plastic barrel. As he opened the door of the locker, he was hit with something powerful. And it was very, very strong odor. Wearing protective gear. I had on a breathing apparatus and gloves.

There was the barrel. He opened the lid. And when I opened the barrel, I saw something that was very, very shocking to me, and I recognized immediately his human remains. There was a barrel that's over 3 quarters of the way full of fluid and portions of a body protruding from the fluid, and the body was obviously decaying.

It was placed in acid, and the acid was basically eating away at the body. Had Larissa sealed her ex-husband's body in a vat of acid? Yes, said Fagoni, telling the rest of his story back at police headquarters. That's what she did. After he obeyed Larissa's directive to shoot Tim with that stun gun, he said, he helped her drag the body to a big blue barrel. I helped her prop up the barrel. She put it in there.

She poured some solution in there. What kind of solution? It was really caustic. It was fuming. Then, said Fagoni, he helped Larissa transport the body first to her house and then the next day to her chemical lab, where he watched her pour even more acid over Tim's remains. Oh, and something else, something he could not stop thinking about. The fact that he was potentially alive when the acid was poured on him. That's not

something that you forget right away. By the time they heard and checked out Fagoni's story, detectives had also found evidence of Larissa's true feelings for her ex-husband. Tim, it turned out, had saved phone messages from Larissa. Messages filled with loathing. Here's one of them. Obviously, detectives wanted to talk to Larissa as quickly as possible, but discovered she was gone. Larissa was 2,000 miles away. She'd taken their little boy, Tyler, on a trip. She was at that moment on her way to visit family in Missouri.

No time to waste now. And we have this arrest warrant in hand. Detectives from Clovis Police Department go to Missouri and meet her getting off the plane, and she's arrested for Tim's murder. And the interesting thing is, is that when they tell her she's arrested for Tim's murder, at no point does she ask, what happened to Tim? At no point does she ask, how did he die? Well, I believe it's because she already knew, because she was involved in it.

She said nothing. She said nothing. She didn't really even, according to the detectives that were out there, seem to be terribly surprised. They brought her back to Clovis then and charged her with first-degree murder, charged young Fogoni, too, also first-degree murder. Tim's friends thought about the awful story and their former social relationship with Larissa as bossy wife of Tim. What kind of person was that in my house? In our home that we opened up.

Oh, my God. Gave her your wine. Gave her friendship. And after the shock of the story had settled over Clovis and nearby Fresno, people began to wonder about that odd duo, Larissa Schuster and James Fagoni. Just what was their relationship? Was young Fagoni in thrall with Larissa?

Or was there more than meets the eye? Surely it wasn't a romance, was it? It was so unlikely. She was twice his age, she was his boss. Detectives looked into that relationship, too, and concluded it was likely more hero worship than romance. And the implications of that? Well, listen to Larissa's attorney, a man named Roger Nuttall. He says it was Fagoni alone who killed Tim in some misguided act of loyalty to the powerful Larissa. He talked with his friends about his dislike for Tim Schuster

based upon the way in which Tim Schuster treated Larissa and Tyler as well. Could it be that Larissa's rants about Tim were just talk, and her young acolyte took it all far more seriously than she would ever have wanted. After all, said Attorney Nuttall, there was no physical evidence at all to say that Larissa was the instigator of the murder. It all rested on Fagoni's word. In fact, said Nuttall, she didn't do it. And maybe a jury would agree. Coming up, a jury's about to hear scathing phone calls from Tim's wife, Larissa. You pathetic f***ing a**hole. I tell you what, I am so glad I'm getting divorced from you because I can't stand your f***ing guts.

She said things to him that just actually shocked the jurors. You could see it in their faces. When Bad Chemistry Continues. You might think that James Fagoni and Larissa Schuster would be tried together for the horrifically gruesome murder of Larissa's husband, Tim. But the law has its ways. The trials were separated, and that promised the possibility of a profound consequence. Why? Call it the blame game.

James Fagoni. Fagoni's trial came first. This guy knew him. The prosecutor, Dennis Peterson, spared no detail of the awful incident. The stun gun, the barrel, the acid, and the active role played by James Fagoni. When he choked out the victim, when he stunned him, when he held him as Larissa binded him. And he did all of these things for future promises of some benefit. Her idea, in other words, but with his willing participation,

as he had conceded in his long and detailed confession. How could he defend himself against that? Two words. Blame Larissa. The road to perdition for James Fagoni began and ended with a sick, sadistic sociopath named Larissa Schuster. Defense attorney Peter Jones set out to persuade jurors that Fagoni hadn't intended to murder Tim. He thought Larissa just wanted to rob him, as they had done, after all, once before. He wouldn't kill a spider.

He wouldn't tell you that, but the people who knew him best would tell you that. With nothing to lose, Fagoni testified in his own defense. And though the judge would not allow his testimony to be taped, we can tell you that he portrayed himself as an impressionable boy manipulated by a powerful older woman. Why didn't he just run away? Well, you know, I asked him that when he was on the stand, and he said he was genuinely afraid of this woman and what she was capable of and what she was capable of doing to anybody who double-crossed her.

As she covered the trial, reporter Teresa Freed even encountered some sympathy for Fagoni. One trial watcher called him a sweet kid. He seemed like a very credible witness, like a kid down the street he might be friends with. But it was a tough sell, and the verdict came down quickly. We, the jury in the above entitled action, find the defendant, James Fagoni, guilty of violation of section 187 of the penal code, first degree murder of Timothy Schuster. One down, thought the prosecutor, Dennis Peterson. One more to go. But things were getting a little more complicated by then. Larissa's case had become so famous in Clovis and Fresno that her attorney asked for

and won a change of venue, and they moved the trial to a courthouse in suburban Los Angeles, a three-and-a-half-hour drive away. Was the case famous there? Hardly. Besides, just then, everybody's attention was diverted by wildfires raging in the hills not far away. The prosecution's case seemed to be burning too, because the prime witness against Larissa, James Fagoni, was suddenly not available. Why? By this time, Fagoni had launched an appeal of his own conviction, and that action preserved his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, meaning the prosecutor could not compel him to testify. And worse, since you can't cross-examine the video,

Fagoni's confession couldn't be played in court either. James Fagoni was intended to be our star witness. When we lose our lead man out in front, it just left us that background picture of all of these circumstantial facts. So, what was left without Fagoni? Well, of course there were those nasty messages Larissa left on Tim's telephone message machine. You pathetic bastard a**hole. I tell you what, I am so glad I'm getting divorced from you because I can't stand your f***ing guts.

Tim had saved all the audio tapes that she had left messages for him that were rude, vulgar, and disgusting. You a**hole. I hate your a**hole so bad I can't even stand you. I hope you burn in hell. She said things to him that just actually shocked the jurors. You could see it in their faces. They were absolutely amazed that a lady would talk to a person like that. And one of Larissa's former employees testified that Larissa seemed to have some evil intent toward her ex-husband. Once I was auditing in the lab and there was a news on the TV

that some woman ran over her husband. And then Larissa said that she'll do the same thing if she can get away with it. There was the storage locker too, the curious business of Larissa paying for it but asking an employee to put it under her name, not Larissa's. But if there was a star among the bits of circumstantial evidence, it would have been the acid. Before Tim's murder, the prosecutor revealed that Larissa bought a big supply of hydrochloric acid, far more than her chemical company normally used. There could only have been one purpose, said the prosecutor.

The idea of using sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid to get rid of the remains of a body, all of this shocks the conscience. Just diabolical. Diabolical, it was. But was that going to be enough to convict? Without James Fagoni's detailed confession, Teresa Freed wasn't so sure.

I thought, how in the world are they going to convict her based on all the circumstantial evidence? And the defense was just getting started. It would turn out to have a secret weapon, a most persuasive element, Larissa herself. But when you listen to her, when she looked at the jury, she didn't look out at the audience there. She seemed very calm, very clear.

She knew exactly what to say. I told Bobby afterwards, they could believe her. Still, the jury had also heard a dreadful allegation that Larissa Schuster killed her husband and put him in a vat of acid. How would she talk her way out of that? Coming up, after her testimony, Larissa Schuster gets a strange thumbs up from one of the jurors. She pretty much told the court that she did it because she wanted Larissa Schuster to know that she did a good job on the stand. When Bad Chemistry Continues. Larissa Schuster had always been in control.

But now her fate lay in the hands of 12 strangers, and the gruesome, bizarre details about her husband's murder were truly shocking to hear. A woman who hated her husband so much, she drowned him in a barrel of acid. Or so the state claimed. But Larissa's defense attorney, Roger Nuttall, said his client had been misjudged. She's a very devoted Christian woman. She headed up the Bible studies within the jail during the time that she was awaiting trial. And as for the evidence against her? All of that circumstantial evidence,

but none of it places her at the scene. Remember, her acolyte, James Fagoni, had been tried separately, and prosecutors were not allowed to use his confession against Larissa, allowing defense attorney Nuttall to pin the blame on him alone. James apparently had a dark side to him. So what did Larissa do? She discovered, said her attorney, that her young friend had killed her ex-husband

and had put him in that acid. She knew police would focus on her because of all those terrible things she had said to and about her husband. So she helped Fagoni take the blue barrel to the storage unit. And that's all she did. She knows that she's in a horrible situation. The day from hell, so to speak. What do I do now?

At her trial, what she did was talk a lot. Would you please state that spell in full name for the record? Larissa Leanne Schuster. This was risky, certainly. But she'd always spoken for herself, liked to be in control, and she wasn't about to change now. Hindsight's 20-20. I know that I made some bad decisions that day. I was simply overwhelmed with what was going on in my life on that day. When did she say she first learned about the murder? James Fagoni arrived at her house

and told her he killed Tim, but that it was an accident. I had learned that he had put the body in a barrel and it was at my laboratory in the warehouse. But what about all that extra acid she'd ordered to be sent to her lab just before the murder? Did you purchase that acid so that you could dump your husband's body in a barrel and pour the acid on it? No, I did not purchase it for that reason. It was perfectly innocent, she said. She needed the acid to give the lab's glassware a thorough cleaning. The prosecutor tried to counter Larissa, tried to show, for example, that nobody used acid to clean lab glass anymore.

But after five days on the stand, Larissa had made a powerful impression. If I hadn't heard the testimony from James Fagoni's trial, I would have bought it. But remember, the jury didn't hear Fagoni's testimony. They heard Larissa's version of the story. And? She was unflappable. I thought that she handled herself really well, but I also realized she's very, very intelligent. Even so, no one expected the amazing effect of Larissa's testimony. As she stepped down from the witness stand, a member of the jury gave her a thumbs up. And as soon as it happened, everyone else was out of the room, all the other jurors, and the judge talked to her about it and asked her why did she do that. And she pretty much told the court that she did it because she wanted Larissa Schuster to know that she did a good job on the stand.

We're talking about a person who was accused of killing her husband and putting his body in a vat of acid. Of course, her lawyer didn't mind, especially when the judge allowed the juror to stay on the panel. I thought, that's fantastic, because it came at a point where Larissa was being cross-examined. And then, as defense and prosecution prepared for closing arguments, a different juror was dismissed for being disruptive and failing to pay attention. Right after she was kicked off, I kind of hunted her down to find out exactly what she was thinking. She said that she thought that Larissa Schuster was not guilty at that point. It only takes one, of course. And so Larissa and her accusers waited for four men and eight women to make up their minds. They waited for one day and then two. And on day three,

hours ticked by, the restless tension built all morning until finally the news, a verdict. We, the jury in above-entitled action, find a defendant, Larissa Schuster, guilty of violation of Section 187 of the Penal Code, first-degree murder of Timothy Schuster. Guilty. Even thumbs-up juror turned on Larissa, and just like that, the bubble of suspense burst. It was over. Save for the tears and recriminations. And the sentence, of course. I'm ordering you committed, Schuster, to the Department of Corrections to serve the rest of your life in the state. She still had a friend who sobbed openly

in the courtroom. And her young son, Tyler, who had always believed in her and now knew she'd never be coming home. So, tears. But remember, Larissa had a daughter too, Kristen. The one she couldn't control, the one she sent away. In court, Kristen was seeing her mother for the first time since the murder of her father. She wanted to tell the judge that for Larissa, life in prison wasn't punishment enough. For up to me, the justice system would be an eye for an eye, but it's not. Chemistry, what passion it arouses. I pray you are continually haunted at night by the sight and sound of my father fighting for his last breathing moments on this earth.

There's a balance to the elements of a marriage, a happy formula, a chemistry of love. And when the elements were unstable, chemistry ended a marriage, and then a life as well. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.