Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - She Poisoned His Medicine - The Stella Nickell story

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Stella Nickell, a former airport screener from Washington state, was convicted in May 1988 of deliberately tampering with Excedrin capsules by lacing them with cyanide, causing the deaths of her husband, Bruce, and an unsuspecting woman, Sue Snow.

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So this woman murdered her husband and then had to pretend to be a serial killer so that she wouldn't get caught. This is wild. Now the woman's name is Stella, and Stella's 42 living in Seattle, and Stella has a big problem that she doesn't know how to solve. She's married to a boring guy, this guy, Bruce. And unfortunately, she isn't really happy with Bruce anymore, like she's done with this relationship. Because Bruce used to be a fun person. person. He was an alcoholic. But since he's recently cleaned up and gotten sober, she now finds him boring and she wants him out of her life. And so Stella tries to solve this in a few different

ways. Like she keeps partying without him. She even starts smashing with some other guys on the side, but it's just not enough. She can't keep this up. She needs to end this relationship. Now, instead of hiring a divorce attorney like a normal person, she gets an insane idea. She's going to do the thing where she murders him to collect some insurance money. And so one day in 1986, she low-key goes and takes out a life insurance policy on him for $76,000. And if he accidentally dies, she'll get an extra $100,000 on top of that. She even forges his signature on the paperwork and everything. And so great, now all she's got to do is pull off the actual murder.

Here's the thing, though. Stella's never murdered anyone before. I mean, she figures she'll probably poison him, because that's the easiest way to do it, but she doesn't know how to do all that. And so she hits up the public library, and she starts doing research. She's like reading, she's checking out books,

books with titles like, Human Poisoning from Native and Cultivated Plants, and Deadly Harvest, a guide to common poisonous plants. And once she gets the knowledge of how to poison someone, she tries to take poor Bruce out in a couple of different ways. Like she laces his daily vitamins with foxglove, which is like a plant that's poisonous to humans.

She spikes his iced tea with cocaine. I guess she's trying to get him to overdose. But that doesn't work. But then Stella gets her big breakthrough idea. She remembers hearing a story on the news about the Tylenol murders. What are the Tylenol murders? Well, the Tylenol murders happened four years before this in 1982, Chicago. When a random anonymous serial killer went into a few local stores and they took bottles of Tylenol and they opened the capsules and they filled them with cyanide.

Then they put them back on the shelves for unsuspecting customers to purchase. Customers then purchased these, took them for a headache or whatever, and they immediately died. In fact, seven people died from this. And of course, this story blew up and it became huge news and it sent the public into a panic all across the country. Now, the Tylenol killer was never caught. Still hasn't been caught to this day. And so Stella remembers this story and she's thinking, what if that happened to Bruce?

What if I lace his headache meds with cyanide and make people think he was also the victim of the Tylenol killer? It's a brilliant plan. What could possibly go wrong? And so she goes and buys cyanide from a chemical supply store. Then she crushes it into powder and puts it inside of accedron capsules. Excedrin is over-the-counter headache medicine that Bruce often takes when he isn't feeling well. Then, soon enough, just as Stella had planned, Bruce comes home from work and he's got a big headache.

So like always, he takes four excedrin. And within seconds, the cyanide hits, and boom, he collapses onto the porch. And Stella calls an ambulance and Bruce is rushed to the hospital, but unfortunately he doesn't make it. And so her plan worked flawlessly. Not only that, the doctors who saw him as he was dying in the hospital said, Oh, this must be emphysema. And because of that, his death is eventually ruled to be from natural causes. And they don't find any cyanide in the autopsy because I guess they just weren't looking for that.

So no one suspects he was poisoned. And Stella got away with it. Now, you'd think this would be great news for her. I mean, she unalived him. they thought he died from natural causes, no one suspects she was involved. However, the life insurance policy she took out on him states that she only gets $76,000 if he dies of natural causes, but she's hoping for that extra $100,000. And so now to get that extra $100,000, she has to make people think he died not from natural causes, but rather that his death was accidental, which means she has to go out

and poison more people so that all this feels like another Tylenol murders incident. And that's what she does. A week later, she poisons more Excedrin capsules, and she puts them back in the bottles, and she goes to local stores, and she low-key puts them on the shelves. And sure enough, a random middle-aged woman comes along and unknowingly buys a bottle off the shelf, goes home, take some of the tampered with pills,

and she immediately crashes to the floor, and she unfortunately dies. However, this time when they autopsy her body, they actually detect cyanide, which means this woman had definitely been poisoned. And upon learning this, they alert the FBI. Then the company that makes Excedrin has to recall all the bottles of it in the Seattle area so that no one else gets poisoned. And the public panics as they think the Tylenol murders are happening again, but this time in Seattle. And all of this is part of Stella's big plan. And so about a week later, she calls the police, and she's like, you know, my husband died suddenly after taking Exedrin.

Maybe he's also a victim of this serial killer. And so the medical examiners, they check a blood sample they got from Bruce, and they discover that, yeah, he didn't die from emphysema. He had actually been poisoned with cyanide. And this official change in his cause of death now means Stella can get that extra life insurance payout of $100,000. And if that isn't diabolical enough, she goes and files a wrongful death lawsuit against the manufacturer of Excedrin. Girl is about to get seriously paid. Until... Until the FBI really starts investigating Bruce's death.

And they go and they ask Stella to hand over the Excedrin that she has, and she hands over not just one bottle, but two bottles, and both have cyanide in them. Now, during their investigation of all the recalled bottles, they only find that five total had been contaminated with cyanide. So there are five bottles in the entire city of Seattle, and Stella has two of them. That's suspicious. Then they discover that the cyanide pills also have some tiny little green pieces of something mixed in. And when they analyze it, they see that it's crystals used to treat algae in fish tanks.

And Stella is really into tropical fish and has a fish tank and would crush up algae destroyer in the same container that she used to mix the cyanide. But the big one, the thing that makes Stella look guilty as fuck, is the next year in 1987, her daughter suddenly contacts police one day. And she just vomits all this information on them. Like, I think my mom murdered Bruce, she would often talk about how she wanted him to die. She tried to poison him before but failed and she would even check books out of the public library on. how to do it. Now, if her daughter had all this information the whole time, I'm not sure why she suddenly decided to turn her in now, months later, maybe it's because they're now offering a $250,000 reward. I don't know. $250,000 tends to motivate people. But regardless, she snitches on her mom.

And so, the FBI goes to the public library and they check the records and they see that Stella had indeed checked out books with titles like Human Poisoning and a Guide to Common Poisonous plants. And they also find her fingerprints on encyclopedia pages about cyanide. And so, bam, they arrest her. And I don't have a mugshot, but here's a picture of her. And she goes to trial, and she's found guilty, and she's sentenced to 90 years in prison.