Trace of Suspicion - A Death in the Family

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

When Cindy Sommer’s young husband dies without warning, her life changes forever. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Death comes for us all eventually. We can never know exactly when, where, or how. What is known is that the Grim Reaper is always out there, waiting, checking our names against a list, like some bill collector on commission. United States Marine Sergeant Todd Summer had every reason to think his appointment with death was still decades away. After all, he was only 23. Except sometimes the years don't matter.

As he got ready for bed that night in February 2002, the Reaper was watching. Todd had been battling some kind of bug for more than a week. Nausea, diarrhea, stomach pains, chills, fever, the full menu of misery. The doctors at the Miramar Marine Base in San Diego, thought this might be food poisoning. Maybe that gas station egg roll he had eaten.

We do not know how much sleep Todd Summer actually got that night. We do know that at about 1.30 in the morning, his wife Cindy was awakened by the sound of her husband gasping for breath. He got up and he walked towards the bathroom and turned around and just looked at me and, like, just couldn't catch his breath. Years later, the memory of that night is still fresh for Cindy. I went over to him. I'm like, what's the matter? He just looked at me and he said, I'm all right, I'm okay, I'm fine. And then you just fall down and I just kind of freaked out.

That is Cindy back in 2002, on the phone to 911. 911. Do you have one thing? What happened to class? What happened? He could class. He walked back and couldn't learn in class. Okay. The paragon on the waist of me. Is it doing it? Summer.

Go on the way right now. Cindy remembered the basics of CPR from her days as a swimmer in middle school and says she did what she could. I'd never done it before other than on a dummy, so I really wasn't sure the exact sequence of how things should go. A platoon of paramedics, EMTs, and cops were only minutes away. But by then it seemed, the Grim Reaper had her husband, in a death embrace.

Then police and fire got there, and it was just they had taken me out of the room, and it was just all a blur from there. This story is about the why and the how of Todd Summer's death that night. What? I don't know you. What am I going to say? I don't know.

It is about the wife he left behind and the questions that have persisted for more than 20 years. Well, we learned that they had some money issues. It is a story about private behavior and public shame. She started having a lot of people over and a lot of parties shortly after his funeral. I understand everybody says it's the sex.

We understood how it doesn't look good. The experts say that people do some pretty strange things in the grieving. And it is the story about investigators who found reasons to believe. Todd Summer's sudden day. Death was really a cold and calculated case of murder. This was really strange for a 23-year-old seemingly healthy Marine to die, so why don't we run one more test? Because poison could have been an option here.

I'm Josh Mankowitz, and this is Trace of Suspicion, a podcast from Dayline. Episode 1, a death in the family. The phone woke Susan Beach from a dead sleep. Without her glasses, she couldn't tell, what time it was, but she knew the voice on the other end of the phone. It was Cindy Summer, the mother of one of her daughter's friends. She told me that her husband had collapsed on the floor that she called the paramedics and they were on their way and she needed somebody to stay with their children. Susan quickly dressed, woke her two kids, and hustled them out to the car

for the 10 to 15 minute drive to the summer's home. I noticed that the ambulance and the MPs hadn't arrived yet. And I had to figure out where to park. I didn't want to park from younger house to be in the way of the paramedics. Susan did not see Cindy when she and her kids arrived, so she walked in past the stairway that led to the upstairs bedrooms. She assumed Cindy was up there with Todd. Straight ahead, Susan saw Cindy's four kids in the living room.

The kids are talking. I talked to them, but I just can't remember the conversations. I eventually sat on the Florida because there was no place to sit. Although Susan did not see the first responders arrive, she says the children heard them coming through the door. They were curious, and I think they heard them come, and I had to tell them to stay out of the way. I was relieved when they were there because I felt like they could fix everything.

That's Cindy. I guess because they didn't put him on a stretcher and take him right away, I'm like, why aren't they taking him? You know, and I didn't realize that he wasn't stable, that they had to transport when they were stable. Todd Summer was far from stable. Cindy says she was ushered out of the room, never saw the EMTs frantically performing CPR.

She didn't see defibrillator paddles applied, or the intravenous drugs paramedics pumped into Todd's body, hoping to restart his heart. I didn't know what to do. You know, and I guess I grew up thinking that once the paramedics have them and they go to the hospital, that things turn out okay. After about 45 minutes, Todd's body was strapped to a gurney and taken out the front door to a waiting ambulance.

Cindy was outside, chain smoking nervously, when the gurney rolled by. It was then she turned to an MP who was standing there and blurted out a comment about Todd's military life insurance policy, which was worth about a quarter of a million dollars. They joke about a lot, but you never thought that you can actually see it. An innocent comment? Sure. I mean, probably. Well, years later, when Cindy's life went under a microscope,

that comment and some others she made that night would be remembered and written down as evidence. I'm not thinking I need to cover anything up. I'm not thinking I need to have a filter for anything. I'm not thinking along those lines at all. Shortly after the ambulance pulled away, Cindy walked back to the house and told Susan Beach that one of the MPs

was going to take her to the hospital. The house was chilly, and so once Cindy left, Susan went upstairs in search of pillows and blankets for the children. I looked in the kids' room, and I noticed there was no sheets or blankets or anything. And then I walked over to Cindy and Todd's room, and I peeked in. Room was just as first responders had left it. Lights on, an unmade bed. The place littered with discarded medical packaging from the trauma. that had played out on the floor.

It was a desperately sad scene, made all the more haunting by some evidence of life the way it had been. The only thing I really remember was two wine glasses sitting on one of the dresser that was near bed. It looked like they were now full. Because none of the first responders

who were there that night had the slightest notion that Todd Summer's death might one day be considered suspicious, or that his home might have been a crime scene. No photos were taken of the room where he died. The contents of those half-empty wine glasses were never tested, and Susan Beach was never questioned. As it turned out, more than a year would pass before investigators and some others

would realize that doing those things on the night-taught summer collapse, might have made all the difference. Cindy Summers' mind was racing when she climbed into the front seat of an MP's patrol car. Her husband had just collapsed. She had to notify family. What about the kids? What to tell them? And if Todd did not pull through, how would she survive?

So many thoughts. Flashing. Like Morse code. Like an SOS. I was working at Subway at the time, part-time, while the kids were in school for three or four hours a day. You know, do I have enough to eat tomorrow? And Todd, she thought. What about Todd? He'll be okay. Sure, yeah, he'll be okay. I remember feeling like they were going to fix him. And when he got to the hospital, that I wouldn't be able to go right into the room anyway.

You know, it wasn't, you don't follow the person into the ER, into the trauma room. Cindy dug around in her purse for a pack of cigarettes. There were only a couple left. I'm just like, I just need a cigarette. You ask the MP who was driving you. To get, if I could get some cigarettes. I'm ADHD. I, like, I am.

And I need something to focus on. My brain needs to have, it's not wired. right? After the cigarette stops, Cindy's mind slowed a bit. She called Todd's mom, her mom, various sisters and brothers, close friends of the family. Todd had collapsed, she told them. She did not know why. Yes, he was unconscious.

We're on our way to the hospital now. Yes, I'll let you know. Get to the hospital. And I remember he was still. in the trauma room, and they had put me in like a room off to the side. All I knew was that they had said, come in here. You know, a doctor will come and speak with you shortly, and you just sit and wait. And you don't know whether that was five minutes or five hours.

It seemed like an eternity, yeah. You remember the doctor telling you that Todd was dead? Yeah, I remember them coming in and, you know, telling. me that they had tried everything they could. I don't know if I asked them why or how. I don't remember any of that anymore. It had only been an hour since Cindy first called 911, one hour, and in that time, everything had changed.

Cindy asked to have a few moments alone with her husband's body. She told Todd she loved him. Then she took the wedding band from his finger and placed it on her thumb. As she was leaving the ER, a senior Marine officer approached and asked if there was anything the Corps could do for her. That's when Cindy said the second thing that would later come back to haunt her. She asked the officer if she would have to give back. Todd's re-enlistment bonus. Thinking back now as to why I would have said things like that or thought things like that, would just really be, I've lost basically our only source of income.

I have four kids. We can hardly make ends meet now. Indelicate? Perhaps. Unbecoming under the circumstances? Maybe. But Cindy Summer didn't need to be clairvoyant to see that she had no hope of supporting her family on what she earned working at a sandwich shop.

Once assured that, no, she was. would not have to return Todd's re-enlistment money. Cindy called Susan Beach, who was still at her house watching the kids. She told me that Todd was gone, and there was a pause of silence because I was, you know, I was pretty shocked about it. And the next thing I remember was asking her how she was, and she told me she was fine at the moment and that she had come to terms with it, or if she has accepted it, something to that nature. She sounded normal. Cindy told Susan she was coming home, home to the children,

and home to the new realities of a world quite different from the one that had existed when she climbed into her own bed just a few hours earlier. The only thing I recall when she got back is that she wanted to hold the youngest child and she was holding now, and she sat down in a chair and she was staring at a picture of Todd. One kind of imagine what Cindy must have been thinking as she looked at that photo of Todd. Got married barefoot on the beach. You know, really wasn't a very big wedding. It had been a true whirlwind romance beginning in January of 1999. Cindy was living in Dearborn, Michigan at the time. She had three kids ages eight to three,

a girl and two boys. And she was in the midst of divorcing her first husband, Dan. And Todd? Well, Todd was a young Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Cindy had gone down to North Carolina to visit a different Marine she had met online, but ended up falling for that guy's roommate, Todd Summer. We were all hanging out, and I met Todd, and we just, there was an instant connection, and we just spent that weekend together. Soon, Cindy found herself driving 400,000.

miles south from Dearborn to meet with Todd, who was himself driving 450 miles north from Camp LaJune. They would rendezvous in Charleston, West Virginia. I think we both had like an eight-hour trip or, you know, seven-hour trip or whatever, but that was like kind of the closest that, yeah, and we would only really get, I mean, he would leave Friday after work, and I would leave and we would meet there late Friday night and he would leave on Sunday morning. So we didn't have a whole lot of time. You know, when you're in that kind of relationship where you're only with the other person for this little tiny, focused amount of time, that can make things pretty intense. Yeah. Yeah. These days, Cindy looks much as she did back then. Still slender,

still with long brown hair parted in the middle and still brimming with restless energy. Cindy no longer smokes to help her maintain focus. She does have a close relationship with a vape pen. You remember when he proposed? He didn't do a get down on one knee and propose. I think it was more of a we're going to get married kind of a thing. And I think it was, you know, this is what we're going to do.

I mean, within a couple of months, we had started talking about it. We weren't dating for that long. In July 1999, just weeks after her divorce was final, Cindy and Todd married in the Florida Keys. His family was from Isla Marada, Key Largo area. So they were all there. So, yeah, they were there, and then some of his friends from high school were there. Your side?

The kids were there. It had been a glorious day. Cindy radiant in her blue satin dress. Todd decked out in his marine dress blues. I mean, I don't know a whole lot of girls that don't think a man in his dress blues is not sexy. Unfortunately, Cindy did not get to spend much time with that sexy marine on the beach. I was still living in Michigan. He was still living in the barracks at Camp Lejeune.

Once you get married, it takes a while for how much. and for all of that stuff to go through and all that. And he was getting ready to be deployed when I found out I was pregnant. It is a tough way to start a marriage. But Cindy says each separation was met with a surge of affection. While Todd was aboard ship in the Mediterranean, they kept in touch with passionate letters and emails,

fervent imaginings of how perfect their lives would be once they could all live together. The baby, another boy, was born in April 2000, a month after Todd returned. Seven months later, Todd deployed again. That is the job. Cindy's new life involved living on a marine base far from home and raising four kids on an enlisted man's salary. Groceries, insurance, you know, when we had cell phones. I think that we lived as much as we could within our means,

but it's hard to do on that type of salary. Shortly after Todd returned from that second deployment in the summer of 2001, he was handed transfer orders to Marine Corps Air Station Merrimar. So the family packed up again and moved to Southern California, and it was there in that period. pink stucco house on the Miramar base that this young family finally seemed to find their groove. By all accounts, Todd loved hanging out with the kids and being a dad. He was so close with Cindy's children from that first marriage that Todd even talked of

adopting them. He loved them. From the minute he met them, he loved them and the kids loved him and he looked at them is his own and treated them as his own. A lot of guys, particularly guys in their early 20s, would not be so anxious to marry a woman who came complete with a family. Right. I think for me, the allure of that was great. You know, I was coming out of a terrible relationship.

So meeting somebody that was interested in the things that I was interested in and loved the family and loved the kids, I was drawn to them. that. And I think that he was drawing to kind of the instant family. Then came February 8th, 2002, 10 days before Todd died. On that Friday, Todd and some other Marines went to El Centro, about 100 miles east of San Diego. The assignment was to scout a location for an upcoming training exercise. This wasn't something that he had never done before or anything. came home and was not feeling well and thought they stopped at a roadside gas station and he had gotten egg rolls and he thought maybe that made him sick.

Thought maybe that made him sick. Do you remember what he said about his symptoms? His symptoms were food poisoning. He just, he had diarrhea, vomiting. Then it turned into almost like a flu to where he had fever. and I remember I called my mom because I couldn't get the fever down and I couldn't get him to hold down any liquids. Had it been that egg roll that made Todd sick

or had it been something else? Maybe something he came in contact with while in El Centro. Hard to say. None of the other Marines on that trip got sick. Whatever the cause for the next 10 days, Todd felt lousy. He missed a few days of work. When he went to the base clinic, the doctors did some tests and gave him a prescription. And he had started to get better after, I believe, the second trip to the clinic.

He had started to get better and was feeling well enough that he wanted to take the kids to Knottsbury Farms in L.A. Nottsbury Farm is an amusement park, rides, roller coasters, the works. The summer family made a weekend of it. Cindy says Todd and the kids had a ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he seemed to kind of be over that hump. Wasn't 100%, but enough to where, I mean, it wasn't like I had to drag him out of bed. He was into it. He was into it.

He was ready, he wanted to go. He drove, you know, we kids had a great time. They were roller coasters. Sunday, February 17th, was their last day at the amusement park. And as it turned out, the last day of Todd Summer's life. That trip had taken a lot out of him. He asked Cindy to take the wheel on the drive home. Yeah, he always did the driving, but I don't know if that raised any flags

just because I knew he had been sick and being a human, you know, like, oh, you've been sick and you've been sick. You just had a big day. Yeah, I'll drive. You rest kind of a thing. And the kids fell asleep in the car, drove home, got home, and got everybody tucked into bed and went up to bed. A few hours later, Cindy woke to the sound of her husband gasping for breath.

I'm like, what's the matter? He said, I'm all right. I'm okay. I'm fine. And then you just fell down. Cindy says that's when she made that call to 911. That was the moment her life changed. It was also day one of an investigation that would last another five years.

The day after Todd Summer died, investigators from NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service came to the summer's home. You might know of NCIS or its reputation for conducting thorough science-driven investigations from the long-running TV show. The agents assigned to this case interviewed Cindy, took a look around the house, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. This appeared to be a routine death investigation,

the kind that is performed anytime an active-duty service member dies on a naval or marine base. Standard toxicology tests showed no sign of illegal drugs or anything else suspicious in Todd's body. The doctor who did the autopsy concluded he had died from heart failure. That is unusual in a man of 23, but not unheard of.

With no hint of foul play, all that was left to be done was to have an NCIS review panel sign off on the final report. What happens is that the panel will review it, find that all the investigative leads have been followed, and then they would recommend it for closure. That's Rob Terwilliger, one of at least a half-dozen NCIS agents who would work this case over the next three years.

Would that recommendation, that case would undergo a second tier, and then they would close the case in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, the machinery of military death and grief ground on. Samples of Todd's organs and blood were preserved for future. analysis. The rest of what had been Todd Summer was cremated. Three memorial services were held for Todd. One at Miramar Marine Base where he died. One for relatives in Tennessee. And another in Florida, where his parents lived. This is Cindy speaking at one of them. I bring in people and not to bed giving you a hundred kids to me, so and all people see them when they say prayers.

You never always do that to me. Cindy's financial fears were also put to rest, at least temporarily, by the prompt payout of Todd's death benefits. She received a $6,000 death gratuity from the military the day after Todd died, and a $250,000 life insurance payout a month's life insurance payout a month's life. later, at the time, the standard for the armed services. After consulting with Todd's family, she decided to use half the money to establish trust funds for the children. There was talk of just buying a house or, you know, what was going to happen, and we decided on setting up trust funds for the children. You've heard different people grieve in different ways. That's what experts say whenever someone veers off script,

and starts behaving in unexpected or unsettling ways after a death in the family. In retrospect, that could certainly be said of the way Cindy Summer dealt with the sudden death of her 23-year-old Marine Sergeant husband. I'm really good at avoiding and, you know, just compartmentalizing. I think really that's what I did after Todd died was just compartmentalize and put it put it in my brain that he was on deployment. Compartmentalizing may have been Cindy's way of coping. But over the next three months,

her behavior struck many as conduct unbecoming a marine widow. Some would call it disrespectful, disgraceful even. Others called it suspicious. It all started on the night after Todd died. Cindy left the kids with Todd's mom Yvonne, who had just flown in from Florida, while Cindy went out with her friends. And it got to be late.

It was after midnight. And I did call her cell phone, and I believe I suggested that she come home, which she did. That's Yvonne Summer, Todd's mom. But when she came home, She came into the room where I was staying, and she told me to mind my own business

that she would grieve her way, and I could grieve my way. Cindy's way of grieving, it appeared, was the equivalent of accelerating past the funeral procession and flooring it in the fast lane. You'd expect her to be depressed and staying at home and that wasn't happening.

That's Chandra Wells, one of Cindy's friends from the subway shop where she worked. She went to the strip club down the road the day of her husband's service. She went to the strip club down the street the day of her husband's funeral? Mm-hmm.

Alone with other people? With some of her girlfriends. Once Cindy received the death benefit checks, friends say she began spending money like it was on fire, designer clothes, fancy dinners, whatever they said. Cindy was picking up the checks.

Yeah, I bought a Tiffany's ring, and I'm wearing it right now. I see, it's very pretty. Yeah, I thought that it would make me feel better. I liked the way that it felt. I touch it all the time, you know, and it's a reminder of where I've been. As for her neighbors at Miramar? Well, they said Cindy's children seemed always to be outside and largely unsupervised after 10.

Dodd's death. That, while Cindy's home, became party central. Once she started having a lot of people over and a lot of parties shortly after his funeral, a lot of the neighbors and people that lived around was just like, you know, what's going on over there. And she got over that pretty quickly. That's Deniseia Viviapara, one of Cindy's neighbors. A couple months after when it just kept on going and there's just a lot, a lot of people over there all the time and other guys driving her husband's cars and that was just kind of odd for me to have, you know, other men driving his vehicles and coming in and out all the time. But, you know, I never said anything to her about it. I just noticed it and just went on my way.

That is just what people could see from the outside. Behind closed doors, Cindy kept herself busy. with multiple lovers. Some were male, some were female, some were Marines who had known Todd. I'm not ashamed. I mean, having a threesome isn't anything that's out of the ordinary or that doesn't happen.

Why does it matter? I didn't grieve how people thought I should. I didn't do the things that they thought I should. I did things that they didn't agree with. My moral compass may have been off. According to the medical examiner, Todd Summer had died of natural causes, heart failure, pure and simple. Still, the case had lingered, in part because the cast of NCIS special agents investigating it kept changing. There were transfers,

reassignments, and retirements. Personnel changes that every few months required someone new to review the file, get up to speed, and take the final steps necessary to close the case. Todd Summer had been dead for more than a year by the time the file finally made it to the desk of the resident field agent in charge for final review. And it was at this moment that the agent in charge balked. A young healthy Marine was suddenly dead, insurance money, and, based on what investigators had heard from other Marines at Miramar, The wife had not exactly acted as a grieving widow was expected to act. Something about this case, he thought, didn't pass the smell test. In this particular investigation, the consensus was this was really strange for a 23-year-old, seemingly healthy Marine to die.

That's NCIS agent Rob Terwilliger again. The lead agent there, the resident agent in charge of the field office, office when you reviewed that case on the death review panel, agree. There's something that just begs the question here. So in his mind, why don't we have the Armed Forces Institute pathology run one more test because poison could have been an option here? Remember, the initial toxicology report had only checked Todd Summers' body for street drugs or high levels of prescription drugs, not for poison. So frozen samples of blood, urine, liver, and kidney that had been harvested from Todd Summer's body

were pulled from cold storage and packaged for shipment to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. And so they took the tissues in Sergeant Summer and tested those for heavy presence of heavy metals. And it was then, in the spring of 2003, more than a year after he was, his collapse that the death investigation of Marine Sergeant Todd Summer took a wild, unexpected, and utterly bizarre turn. Next time. My theory is that somebody put this colorless, odorless, tasteless substance into something he ate or more likely something he drank and it killed him.

Cindy's had a colorful life. Pretty much some of the things we've found throughout the course of the investigation. This case started because of the breast implants. Think about it. If she had a nose jaw, would we even be talking about it? This podcast is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Tim Beecham is the producer. Marshall Housefeld, Brian Drew, and Meredith Kramer are audio editors.

Molly DeRosa is associate producer. Rachel Yang is field producer. Adam Gorphane is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is executive producer. And Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Rich Cutler.