Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 104. Lovesick: A Tale of Poison

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

In March of 2023, an office manager at a dentist office in Colorado received a package that would make her blood run cold. It was cyanide, and it was addressed to her boss, whose wife had been in the hospital with a strange illness... TW: Mentions of suicide Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to bonus content as well as other perks. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to bonus episodes and more when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. On March 15, 2023, a Colorado man named James Craig sat by his wife's hospital bed. There, 43-year-old Angela Craig, mother of six, was hooked up to machines that were gently beeping and whirring. About a week and a half prior to this, Angela had started feeling strange. She texted her husband James in the middle of the day that she was feeling dizzy and cold, and it was almost like her eyes couldn't focus. He was concerned enough to bring her to the hospital, but once they got there, her symptoms improved quickly, and then she was sent home. But just a few days later, things took a turn for the worse. A wave of severe nausea and headaches washed over her, and so she was brought back to the hospital. The second time she was there, Angela stayed for about a week, and once again the symptoms started improving. The doctors ran a bunch of labs, and nothing really jumped out at them. They weren't really sure why

these symptoms had started, but her vitals had gotten stronger and she wasn't feeling as horrible. And so, she was released. But within 24 hours of her leaving the hospital for the second time, she was back. But this time, things were looking much worse for Angela. She couldn't even open her eyes. And yet doctors still had no idea where this mysterious illness was stemming from. In the hospital room with James and Angela was a man named Ryan who had known the couple for a long time. He had gone into business with James to start their own dental office and they had become well respected in their community. James was particularly liked. His patients had really nothing

but nice things to say about him, and Ryan couldn't help but think, what a shame it was that James's wife was so sick. Why did bad things happen to good people? Just then, the steady, quiet beeps of Angela's machines started screaming, and within seconds, nurses were flocking into the room. Ryan felt like that was his cue to leave.

He didn't want to be in the way of the doctors, and plus, he had to get back to the dentist's office. He was keeping operations running so James could spend time with Angela while she healed. But when Ryan arrived back at the office, he saw the office manager sitting behind a desk and she had this panicked look in her eyes. And she stood up the second he walked in the door. Um, I have something to show you, she said. And she brought him back behind the desk

where there were a bunch of packages. A few days ago, while James was in the hospital with Angela, he was supposed to be getting an urgent package delivered to the office. He had been waiting all day for this package, but eventually he had to go check in on his wife and so of course that's when the package arrived. The office manager signed for it and she described the package as a foil square with no markings on it other than a biohazard warning label. I thought I was doing him a favor by opening it, she said. But when she opened the package, she saw something she didn't recognize. Inside was something

labeled potassium cyanide. The office manager told Ryan that she didn't know what it was, but she got nervous at the word cyanide, so she googled it. Maybe it had some dental usage that she wasn't aware of, but the first thing that came up was cyanide poisoning. And the symptoms were listed as dizziness, headaches, nausea, all symptoms that had sent Angela to the hospital, three times. The only problem was the only thing that was left of the package in the office was the wrapping it came in. Where's the potassium cyanide now, Ryan asked.

The office manager told him that James had come and collected it the day before Angela went to the hospital for the third time. Ryan was stunned. He didn't know what to do. All he could get out was call the cops. Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaelin Moore.

I'm going to tell you a story today about poison, a theme that I felt was fitting as we approach Valentine's Day here in the US. Throughout history, poison is often linked to lovers' quarrels, used by sneaky husbands who want a fresh start and women looking to cash in on their husband's insurance policies. Though, that's not always the case. And so, in this episode, I want to provide some additional context to poisoning cases. Like what does a typical poisoner really look like? And what does the type of

poison they use say about them? If you've been a long-time listener of the bonus episodes on Patreon, you may recognize this case from a short episode that I did two years ago. But there's been a lot more information that's come out. And I'm going to end the episode with one dark thing, so it's worth it to stick around for those. But before we get into that, you guys have been flooding me with your darkly curious jobs and hobbies, I love it. So this episode, I wanna shout out the listener, Erin,

who let me know that she was actually the real estate agent who sold Count Orlok his home in Weisburg. Congrats, that sounds like a huge sale and I hope that Orlok is loving his new place. You can always let me know the darkly curious things you do for work or for pleasure in your reviews or comments and I'll be sure to shout you guys out in episodes. Before we jump in, you may remember a couple weeks back I mentioned I was going to be adding a new monthly episode for all listeners. Patreon and Apple subscribers already get a monthly

bonus episode that's voted on by the community. I wanted to experiment with some new formats and so I'm excited to finally be able to announce what this month's bonus episode is going to be and it's going to drop on Monday, February 24th. It's a very special collab episode I filmed in Salem, Massachusetts just after Halloween with Corinne and Sabrina from Two Girls One Ghost. We actually spent the night in the most haunted house in the town and yes, we did contact something. I'm not sure what but we did contact some sort of entity. We did an actual ghost hunt that Two Girls One Ghost is going to release the following day on their channels and we filmed a Hearts are Pounding episode that goes more into the history of Salem,

the house we stayed in, and our experiences. So mark your calendars for Monday, February 24th. It's going to get very spooky. Okay, but for now, let's get back to it. So what followed after the shocking discovery of potassium cyanide, the very astute front desk worker made, was a police investigation. Police arrived at the University Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, where Angela was being treated at 1230 a.m. on March 16th. But it was already too late. Her condition was quickly worsening and she was suffering from seizures

and increased cranial pressure. By 2 p.m. she no longer had any brain activity and on March 18th she was declared brain dead. Before the official plug was pulled on Angela, James requested that no autopsy be done on her, which really didn't sit right with the hospital staff. Someone actually pleaded to him to allow Angela's body to be autopsied, especially because she died of an unknown cause. What if she died of something genetic? Wouldn't you want to know

in case it could affect your children? But James wasn't budging. He said if they couldn't figure out what she was sick with while she was alive, then he didn't want them poking around her body when she was dead. This was suspicious, obviously. Your 43-year-old wife, the mother of your six children,

just died unexpectedly from some unknown illness, and you don't care to know why? But what really made this suspicious was that now the hospital and police had both been made aware of James' odd purchase, and they pulled him aside to ask him some questions. What was a guy like him doing ordering cyanide? To his office?

Well, James actually had a very quick response to that. He said that yes, he had ordered the cyanide, but it was because his wife, Angela, had asked him to. He told the police that he had asked Angela the previous December for a divorce, and after that, her mental health rapidly declined. It got so bad, James told the officers, that he had to revive her on multiple occasions due to her attempts to take her own life. She had recently asked him to buy her cyanide online. He didn't think she would actually take it, he told police. He thought that it was like a game of chicken. The officers were not really buying this story.

If your wife was asking you to buy poison, was severely depressed, had attempted her own life multiple times, why didn't you tell the hospital that she may have poisoned herself? Why didn't you try to get her any help? There were no police reports confirming Angela had made any attempts on her life,

and a quick questioning of her friends and children indicated that James may have been fabricating that part. The police launched a bigger investigation, which included confiscating James' phone, and that's when things started to look a lot worse for him. What they found was, on the first day that Angela started feeling ill, March 6th, she had actually texted James, I feel drugged. And his response to that text was pretty damning. He wrote back, quote, He wrote back, quote, "'Given our history, I know that must be triggering,

but just for the record, I didn't drug you.'" Given our history? What history was James referring to? Well, to understand that, we need to go back to the beginning of the story. This episode is brought to you by Hero Bread. What's your health goal for the year? Mine, maybe some of you can relate to this, is for my stomach to feel good.

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James and Angela Craig lived in Aurora, Colorado with their six children. They married in 2001, and while on the outside, it seemed like they had a perfect life, James being a successful dentist and all, people close to them knew that their marriage had long been tumultuous. James was known to have had multiple affairs

while married to Angela. James had actually also filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Things were not going well at the dentist office, and word on the street was he was close to having to declare bankruptcy again. And Angela had also recently complained to a friend that James had gone to Vegas and gambled away over $2,000. But the most devastating thing to occur in their marriage was six years prior to Angela's death, when she was drugged by James the first time. Now, there's not a ton of details about this drugging or poisoning or whatever it was, but Angela had confided in a friend that James had slipped her something.

We don't know what. And when Angela found out what was happening, she confronted him about it. And just like how he had a quick explanation for police at the hospital, James had a reason as to why what he was doing wasn't really his fault. He said that he was planning on taking his own life, so he drugged

Angela to make sure she wouldn't be able to stop him. After that, the couple did stay married, which maybe now is a good time to underscore that if you stay with someone who hurt you, you don't deserve to be murdered. I just wanted to make that clear. But James had joined a club. A club that throughout history has had members from every demographic. Jealous men, vengeful sons, angry mothers, bored wives, you name it. The Poisoners Club. In many ways, James fits the exact profile of a poisoner. There's a long-standing myth that women poison more than men do, but that's not true. At least not on paper. The idea that poison is a woman's weapon of choice comes from the nature of it. It requires no grotesque violence, no strength. There's no need to overpower your victim.

The typical poisoner was a woman who knew she couldn't take her husband in a fight, so she'd slip him something in the dinner she prepared for him, as did Tilly Klemak, a Polish woman in Chicago who killed multiple husbands with a splash of arsenic in her famous stew. And then she'd go and cash in on their life insurance policies. Tilly killed her husbands in the early 1900s. And at the time there was a test for arsenic.

So poisoners weren't able to get off scot-free like they could before the Marsh test was developed in the 1830s. But she also lived at a time where more people just died of random things that would be preventable today. Investigations weren't always launched into unexplainable deaths, and so Tilly was able to move in silence. But the way that poison is used also says a lot about the type of person that has it

as their weapon of choice. Poison is not something that can be done in the heat of the moment. It has to be carefully planned. It has to be procured, which was easier to do at other points in history. Your victim also can't know they're being poisoned, which takes some manipulation. Arsenic, for instance, is a poison that can take multiple doses over time to kill as it accumulates in the victim's body. And as the victim gets sicker and sicker and starts to wonder what's happening to them, the poisoner may have to convince them that they're not in fact being poisoned. So the profile of a poisoner is someone who is patient, someone who is manipulative. And that makes it

someone who is very, very hard to stop. Take, for instance, the case of the Belus in California in 1897. Suzy Belu lived with her brother, Louis, and was just days away from her wedding when she came down with a horrible stomach ache. A doctor was called to check in on her, but by the time he arrived, Susie's brother Lewis and the boarder who lived with them were also sick. The doctor said it must have been the meal they all had shared the night before, and he told them to rest. And then he just went on his way.

But their condition kept worsening. It got so bad that Susie and Lewis's other brother, Frank Ballou, had to come over and take care of them. He brought them cups of tea and soup broth, but the group could hardly eat. And within a few days, all three of them were dead. Their condition sounded suspiciously like arsenic poisoning. But the Ballouus had no enemies and tests were done on the food in the house and the water in their well and it all came back

negative for the poison. But one afternoon, an investigator was walking around the Belus home looking for anything that would indicate how the trio died. When he saw the tea kettle was still sitting by the fire, he went over and he lifted the lid and he saw that all around the lid of the kettle was this white powdery substance. He called for the kettle water to be tested for arsenic

and it came back positive. There was so much arsenic in the tea kettle actually that when the water boiled, the arsenic would boil off and cake onto the lid in a powdered form. The question then became, well, who put the arsenic in the tea kettle? It turns out that the night the trio had dinner, the dinner that seemed to start all of their symptoms, there was actually a fourth person there, one who didn't come down with any symptoms afterwards. It was Frank, the brother that came back to help

his siblings. Frank was a jealous man with a criminal past who was cut out of his parents' will. When they passed, it seemed like he was upset that Susie and Lewis received inheritances, but he did not. The night of the dinner, he spiked the tea kettle. But as is often true with arsenic, one dose isn't enough. And so he came back to nurse his brother and sister back to health with cups of tea, all poured from the kettle. Frank fit the profile of a typical poisoner. He was a man, for one. He was manipulative, conniving, patient,

but also he had a sense of inadequacy, something that's typical of poisoners, according to Dr. Joni Johnston, a clinical forensic psychologist and private investigator. Dr. Johnston has done a lot of research to create this profile that we have for a typical poisoner. However, she adds, it's believed that only one in five poisoners are ever caught. So in reality, we don't have a profile on poisoners. We

just have a profile on the ones that get found out, which suggests that women do actually poison more. We just tend to not get caught. So as I was saying, James and Angela stayed married after the first drugging incident. James then went on to declare bankruptcy and then their finances and relationship all took a turn for the worse. In early March of 2023, before Angela ever went to the hospital, the office manager at James' dental office was leaving for the day when she noticed that James was in the back of the examination room on a computer. That was kind of strange, she thought, because James never really used the computer at the

office. An investigation of this computer showed that around this time, James was making searches like, how many grams of pure arsenic will kill a person? And is arsenic detectable in an autopsy? He even looked up a YouTube video titled, top five undetectable poisons that show no signs of foul play.

The video cited polonium, mercury, botulinum toxin, cyanide, and arsenic as undetectable poisons. And editor's note, those poisons are all detectable, just so we're clear. But James also did something that made me stop in my tracks when I was researching this. And honestly, it probably put me on a list. He bought arsenic for $13 on Amazon. Now, I will say, when I first caught wind of this story in 2023, I did look it up and

yes, the arsenic that James bought was still available for purchase on amazon.com. However I did look it up again recently and it is no longer purchasable there so if you're the FBI agent assigned to my search history we're good don't worry. On March 6th the day the arsenic arrived at James's house he came downstairs with a protein smoothie he had made for Angela. After she drank it, she started feeling ill and that's when she went to the hospital but was quickly released when she started feeling better, most likely because she wasn't being exposed to poison anymore. James might have been a little shocked that she started feeling better so quickly because on

March 8th, according to the affidavit, James flew a woman he was having an affair with out to Denver. James, turns out, was seeing a dentist based in Austin, Texas on the side. He had also purchased a second flight for his mistress to visit him on March 16th through the 20th, and he purchased those flights the day the arsenic was delivered to his home. So it seems like he was pretty confident in his plan. But what was James to do now? His mistress was in town, but he couldn't see her because his wife was out of the hospital recovering. Well, he came up with a plan. And on March 9th, 2023, James reached out to a company called Midland Scientific.

It's a company based out of Nebraska and is described as a one-stop shop for all your laboratory needs, including pH test strips, petri dishes, equipment, and also chemicals. And through the site, James placed an order for potassium cyanide, a much faster acting poison than arsenic.

Buying the cyanide was not as easy as buying arsenic on Amazon. It's actually very difficult to order in America, and for good reason. In his book, When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut said, quote, If arsenic is a patient assassin, hiding out in the most recondite of the body's tissues and accumulating there for years, cyanide takes your breath away. Cyanide kills in an instant. It does this by triggering a reflex in your body that almost immediately stops your ability to breathe. The sound it causes people to make is known as an audible gasp because the victim literally

gasps for air before collapsing from their heart giving out. Cyanide kills so quickly that it's said only one person who took it lived long enough to describe the taste. Acrid, they said. A goldsmith in India who consumed the poison started quickly scribbling a note saying the poison tasted acrid. However, he died before he could even finish the sentence. To give an example of just how toxic cyanide is, we can look at the classic example of Jonestown. Now Jonestown refers to the commune in the Guyanese forest started by cult leader Jim Jones.

Jones had brought his followers down from America with a promise of creating a utopia, but really he was just isolating them from their loved ones so he could have full control over them. He starved them, he sleep deprived them, and he stole all of their meds so he could just take them recreationally. Jonestown was a very bad time, to put it lightly.

When his plan was not going accordingly and he feared that the cult was going to be shut down, he ordered over 900 people to drink Flavorade Laced with Cyanide. And though many of his followers were eager to drink the poison and go to the next life with their leader, others were not. But armed guards were standing by the Flavorade, drink the poison and go to the next life with their leader. Others were not.

But armed guards were standing by the flavorade, watching to make sure everyone drank it. Detractors would be shot on sight. So some had the idea that they would just hold the flavorade in their mouths and then play dead until they could formulate a plan. However, cyanide is so toxic that merely holding it in their mouths was enough for the poison to take effect, and they died within moments. So this is probably why a rep from Midland Scientific reached out to James to inquire why he was buying the cyanide.

And James responded that he was a dentist who did craniofacial reconstruction and some of his patients were allergic to some of the metals that he used. The cyanide was going to be used to help him layer new metals to use on his patients and if it was successful, his findings would be published in a paper for the National Institutes of Health. He included his dental license number so that the rep could confirm everything he was saying. And I include these details so people don't think they can just email a lab supply company and order cyanide. And also so my FBI agent knows why I

was googling how to buy cyanide at two in the morning. The rep told James that because he was a new member in the system it would take probably an extra day for the shipment to come. And James checked in every day to see where the package was. His emails were constant and anxious. He kept asking for the tracking number, for any update. He seemed way too eager for a man who was going to layer some metals.

There were delays in the shipping and by that point Angela was already back in the hospital. On March 11th, while Angela was laying in her hospital bed, James apparently waited in his office all day for the package. And when it didn't come, he shot off a pissy email to the rep that started with, quote,

"'Wow, it's 7.30 at night "'and I have been waiting all day in my office for the shipment. Looks like it didn't come. As a reminder, at this point in the investigation, as the police are reading through these email exchanges, James had told them that he ordered the poison at Angela's request. So then why would he be so desperate to get the package quickly if there was a chance his wife was going to take her life with the cyanide? Finally, on March 13th, the package arrived and was noticed by the office manager. And two days

later, James approached Angela again with a protein smoothie. Something to help with her strength. Angela again with a protein smoothie, something to help with her strength. Not long after she drank it, Angela was in the hospital again with much worse symptoms. By March 16th, police had a search warrant for James' home. They confiscated a water bottle, powdered proteins, workout mix shakers, a tablet computer, and two bags of white powder that they found.

An autopsy was eventually done on Angela, and it found that she had consumed lethal doses of cyanide and tetrahydrosaline, a medicine found in eye drops that can be lethal if consumed. Arsenic was listed as a quote, significant condition relating to her death. James was arrested for the murder of his wife in 2023 and is still awaiting sentencing. His trial was actually supposed to start late last year, but his attorney abruptly quit his case. And shortly after that, two new charges were brought against James,

one of them being for an attempt to solicit murder. Yes, that's right. James tried to order someone's death while he was in prison. It hasn't been released exactly who he was targeting, but it is believed to be a detective that worked on James' case. It seems like even though he didn't get away with murder, he still believes that he can do whatever he wants

without consequences. And that's proven even further by another plot that he concocted while behind bars. See, he also tried to coerce another inmate into helping him plant evidence to make it look like Angela had in fact taken her own life. He tried this in April of 2023, shortly after his arrest. He approached the inmate with a plan. He wanted them to find some attractive women between the ages of 25 and 45. James was very specific about that part.

And he wanted them to pretend to be his mistresses. The story that he was going to create was that Angela had learned about the affairs and had worked with one of the mistresses to kill herself and make it look like James did it. James offered the man free dental work for his mother. And the inmate said he would think about it and then immediately went to the authorities in the prison

because he didn't wanna get roped into James's dumb plan. Throughout all of this, even though James insisted he was innocent, that it was Angela who planned this entire thing, it just made him look more like the typical poisoner who gets caught, a manipulative man with childish tendencies who wanted a sneaky solve to a problem and no consequences. But as is the case with many poisoners, getting away with the first crime only makes them want to do it more.

It's like they develop a God complex and think that they're so much smarter than the authorities, which James was already showing signs of feeling like that. It's lucky that he was caught before he could have done even more damage. And now it's time for One Dark Thing. Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your back all season long from puck drop to the final shot. You're

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome to One Dark Thing, a segment where I tell you one more dark thing that's been on my mind. And with all of this talk about poison,

I wanted to tell you about a current poisoning case that is unfolding in Brazil. So on December 23rd of last year, seven people gathered in a house on the north coast of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil for Christmas celebrations. There, a 61-year-old woman named Zelly brought out a special Christmas time cake, Bolo de Natal, which is a bundt cake, often a fruit cake with white icing. So everyone sat down to have this cake when Zellie's grandson, a 10 year old boy, mentioned that the cake tasted weird. And as everyone was eating this cake, they started

to agree. It was like there was a spiciness to it that just did not taste right. And then, everyone started getting violently ill, including Zellie. Horrible stomach cramps, throwing up, it was like food poisoning that set in immediately. The group ended up going to the hospital where three of them sadly passed away. A woman named Tatiana Flores de Silva, who was 43, Maida Flores de Silva, who was 58, and Nayuza Silva dos Anjos, who was 65. Because of the immediate onset of symptoms and the strange taste of the cake all happening before three people died, police were brought in to investigate. And when they tested the cake, it came back positive for arsenic. A lot of arsenic. Like some reports have suggested 350 times the amount needed to kill

a person. And the police start looking at Zellie. She was the one who baked the cake after all. But she was also in the hospital, as sick as the others, though getting better. But she told the police that she didn't bake the cake alone. "'I baked it with my 10-year-old grandson,' she said, "'the one who also was sick, "'and his mother, my daughter-in-law, Daisy.'" So someone who knew one of the deceased spoke to police

about the contemptuous relationship that Daisy had with her mother-in-law, Zellie, but even more suspicious still, is Zellie's husband had gotten food poisoning just a few months earlier in September and had passed away from it. On September 2nd, Daisy brought powdered milk to Zellie and her husband and both of them fell sick enough to go to the hospital. Zellie recovered, but her husband didn't make it. And after the fact, Daisy sent Zellie some texts that kind of seemed nice at the time

but now seem a lot more sinister. Like quote, I think we need to pray more, accept more and not look for someone to blame where there is none. Neither the police nor forensics can help us to unravel the matter. Because of the cake incident, police felt like they should exhumed the husband's body and test for arsenic also. And that test came back positive. And her in-laws were not the only people to have fallen sick around her recently. Her husband and son had both gotten violently ill twice in the last six months, and officers now believe that was also due to arsenic poisoning. Daisy was arrested earlier in January, but

there's no official motive to this crime. Everyone's best guess for now is that Daisy just didn't like her in-laws. But why go after your own son and husband? And now officers are also looking into the 2020 death of Daisy's father. Okay, that's all I have for you in this week's episode. Be sure to tune in next week, either here or on the free Odyssey app

for tales of backrooms horror. If you're afraid of liminal spaces or glitches in the matrix, you're really gonna be creeped out next week. And until then, stay curious. Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound Design and Mix by P. H. Shree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlop, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com.