Forensic Files Season 11, Episode 24 - Water Hazard - Full Episode | Forensic Files

investigators described it as a one in a million chance a tiny manufacturing flaw on an envelope
exposed a murderer who was willing to kill innocent victims to get at the one person he wanted dead
[Music] [Music] so [Music] it was a typical monday morning at the transamerica title insurance company in
tempe arizona there were only four employees all friends who spent their work days
processing paperwork 46 year old julie williams had been working at transamerica for two months
she had gotten this new job things were going really well for her she was happy when i talked to
her on the phone she always expressed how well things were going and how she was really starting to feel a sense of
peace and joy in her life on a monday morning around 9 00 a.m julie got a drink from the water cooler
after taking a sip she said that her lips and tongue were burning and warned her co-workers not to
drink the water she walks down to the bathroom she goes into the bathroom the people are kind of
worried about her the other employees were baffled they got some water out of the water
cooler and tasted it and it burned their mouths and they had to spit it out meanwhile
julie never returned from the bathroom she's in the stall they can't open the door because her basically her body is
against the door somebody has to crawl up over the staller underneath the stall they found julie unconscious completely
unresponsive paramedics arrive minutes later and rushed her to the hospital she was in a
coma and by that time we knew that that was pretty serious and that the doctors were telling us we needed to get there
quickly because they really weren't sure how bad this was at first doctors thought julie had
suffered a massive stroke but it was even worse mri tests and the cat scans and things
like that were showing basically a flat line which meant that she was brain dead and we
couldn't understand doctors told julie's three grown daughters she probably wouldn't survive
her heart was fine her liver was fine her kidneys were fine and she could basically go on like this for
who knows how long but she was never going to wake up the hospital asked police to check on
transamerica's water supply when i went to the break room there was an obvious odor that i could smell to
toxicologists this meant only one thing cyanide people say those who can smell it and it
is genetically controlled that it smells like bitter almonds about 40 percent of the population can't
smell it as a precaution everything inside the water cooler room was sent for testing
on examining all the items that were in their coffee cups the coffee maker itself the coffee creamer you know just
everything in there there appeared to be a crystalline crystalline substance in all of these
investigators tested the substance with a chemical strip and it turned blue what you're producing is prussian blue
which is one of the forms of cyanide a gas chromatograph test confirmed the findings
scientists also found a massive amount of cyanide in the office coffee pot well five grams of pure cyanide given
as a as it is in total is enough to kill probably about 25 people the water cooler alone had 32 grams of
pure cyanide enough to kill 150 people but who wanted to kill the employees of transamerica title company
and why 48 hours after julie williams ingested a massive amount of cyanide her three
daughters made the difficult decision to take her off life support there was nothing medical science could
do that's a difficult decision you're not ready to say goodbye as it is you know and now suddenly you have to
make the decision to end someone's life investigators found the source of the cyanide julie had ingested
it was in the office coffee pot and water cooler it would not have been difficult for all
four people in that office to have been killed because cyanide is really a strong
poison i mean you know they could have died before anyone figured out what happened
police questioned the three remaining employees in the transamerica office one of them
diane harry made a startling admission she said that she may have been the intended target
diane said that a few nights earlier she was drinking some scotch whiskey at home
with her husband and it made her ill she also told him that there was something wrong with the
tea kettle she tried to make coffee and the when she put the creamer in it curdled
investigators tested the bottle of scotch from the harry's home and confirmed their suspicions the bottle
contained lethal amounts of cyanide diane's husband louis harry said he thought he knew who was responsible
he said it was roy fitzpatrick a 43 year old delivery man boy fitzpatrick was the ex-boyfriend of
a girl that mr harry was now befriended that's why he described it fitzpatrick's ex-girlfriend
was 33 year old sharon jones well i had dated mr fitzpatrick briefly and he would never accept no
he would stalk me he would choke me and he threatened to kill me if i started dating anyone else
mr harry was very very persistent that i go to get a restraining order against mr fitzpatrick
he even went with me to the courthouse to get it done sharon jones and lewis harry then
realized that the restraining order backfired it infuriated fitzpatrick who responded by sending threatening letters
to lewis harry and his wife diane mr harry describing the content of the letter said that basically roy
fitzpatrick was threatening him and his wife and that they were getting increasingly
more sinister the letters were laced with racial epithets this one was sent to diane harry
i am having a hard time overlooking your husband i think i will take you away from him so
that he can see how it feels and he wrote this to lewis you won't have to hurt for long because
your ass is mine investigators asked roy fitzpatrick if he sent the threatening letters
initially he denied it a day later he recontacted me and came in and decided he wanted to tell me the truth and
admitted that he had sent letters to mr harry but fitzpatrick claimed he was angry with louis harry not because of
the restraining order but because he was sexually involved with his ex-girlfriend sharon jones i
met louis harry in a club i was in love with mr harry he had asked me to marry him
as soon as the divorce was through he had said that we would get married roy fitzpatrick discovered this was all
a lie mr fitzpatrick followed louis harry home one night from my condo and he called me within minutes of mr
harry leaving stating that he was still married the wife was still in the home and that he wasn't going through any
divorce when police confronted lewis harry about the affair he denied it and roy
fitzpatrick gave police one last piece of information he admitted sending louis and diane
harry four threatening letters but claimed that the three type written letters the most incriminating
were forgeries investigators noticed that one of the typewritten letters was in an envelope
with a distinctive flaw the spot where the flaps met was offset they didn't match up the way they were
supposed to apparently this was a manufacturing flaw when you've been in the business for any
length of time you know that this is a very significant find and that especially in a murder case this is
going to be a very important piece of physical evidence on an envelope assembly line
blades slice through reams of paper creating a form with four flaps when the flaps are glued
the left and right ones are supposed to meet in the center of the envelope in this case
the right flap overlapped the left these were coming down the assembly line they were moving
further and further out of whack the way they should be investigators believed if they could
find out who bought the flawed envelope they would find the killer [Music] police were investigating the sinai
death the 46 year old julie williams and the attempted poisoning of her co-worker
diane harry the prime suspect in the case roy fitzpatrick admitted sending diane harry
and her husband louis for threatening letters but fitzpatrick denied sending the three most incriminating ones
i was skeptical he said that uh he had done the first four but you know he'd given me something but now he was just
you know taking away the last three letters and so it just you know caused more doubt and created some more issues
that we were going to have to try to verify or confirm or not confirm but if fitzpatrick didn't send these
three type written letters who did on a hunch investigators got a warrant to search
lewis harry's office he worked in the physical education department of a local community college
it was interesting that they went to mr harry's workplace and they took this big
shelf that was in his office it's like five or six feet long that ended up going out to their expert out at asu
arizona state university also in lewis harry's waste paper basket they found a receipt from chemonix a local chemical
company the label had warning information from with regard to the use of cyanide
but the receipt was signed by someone who identified himself as charles hawley he told the clerk he needed the cyanide
for a college chemistry class forensic document examiner bill flynn was asked to compare this signature to
lewis harry's known signature the second letter in the name holly is an ovate round letter
it is also an ovate round letter in harry and there's a very distinctive style that he used to
move from the h into the next ovate letter both last names ended with a y and flynn discovered that they were
virtually identical as were the h's at the beginning of each name for instance the right side of the h
in holly is made with that rightward curving clockwise rotation circular movement on
the h which we saw is the characteristic that's replicated in harry's own name investigators went to the chemonix
company and showed the sales clerk a photo lineup the clerk identified lewis harry as the
man who purchased the cyanide so she sold him the cyanide under the phoenix college
account and he signed a different name to the receipt in lewis harry's office investigators found an open box of
envelopes when they looked at the ones left in the box they found that three of them had the
same defect as the one with the threatening letter in fact it was a progressive and linear
defect meaning that you could see the progression how the defect had enlarged as the envelopes had
moved down the manufacturing line normally the people in post-production in the quality control would have culled those
out rather than put them into the box i was actually just amazed that something like that would occur it was probably
one in a million that this would have happened this proved that lewis harry sent himself at least
one of the threatening letters perhaps more and on the shelf in his office scientists found trace amounts of
cyanide but how did lewis harry gain access to his wife's office building to poison the
water a key card system is used to gain access on weekends you have to use a key a card to scan in to get into
the door the office security system revealed someone entered the transamerica office
on the weekend before the poisoning the card had been used was diane harry's and
had been used at 10 18 on that saturday but diane insisted she hadn't gone into the office that
weekend the information raised the question is number one who used the card and it
obviously made sense that if someone used the car that knew her she also that person would
also have access to the keys to the office no one reported seeing a woman entered
the building that weekend but a workman recalled seeing a man enter the subject who had been there as a
workman an outside contractor they've been there waiting to get inside the building because it was locked and he
said it was sometime between 10 and 10 30 that african-american subject pulled up in a blue sports car got out was not
very congenial opened the door for him he wasn't able to actually identify him or pick him out of the lineup but he
remembered that the car had a tennis racket in the back seat mr harry had had a tennis racket he played tennis all the
time lewis harry was arrested and charged with the murder of julie williams and the attempted murder of his wife diane
but why did he do it [Music] about a year after julie williams murder 32 year old louis harry went on trial
for murder and the attempted murder of his wife diane prosecutors believe lewis was unhappy in
his marriage to diane whom he had been married to for less than three years then one night in a bar he met sharon
jones a student at the community college where he worked [Music] initially he misled sharon by telling
her he was separated it became serious very quickly within three to four weeks lewis proposed marriage to sharon while
still living with his wife diane sharon's ex-boyfriend roy fitzpatrick learned about a relationship with lewis
harry grew angry then mailed the threatening letters to lewis and his wife ironically they weren't fighting over me
i could see that then i told them both i said you know what this isn't because you want me
it's because of your egos these letters gave lewis what he believed to be the perfect alibi
he'd kill his wife with cyanide pinned the murder on roy fitzpatrick then he'd be free to marry sharon
he typed three more letters even more incriminating than the originals and mailed them to himself
but lewis used an envelope with a significant manufacturing flaw that tied him to those letters
lewis bought the cyanide in a local supply store using an alias but forensic handwriting analysis
concluded that lewis signed the receipt lewis tried killing his wife by putting cyanide in her alcoholic
beverage but she stopped drinking it because of its foul odor he also put cyanide in her tea kettle
this too was unsuccessful so that's when lewis decided to use his wife's security
pass to put cyanide in the office water cooler and coffee pot on monday morning julie williams was the first one to
drink from the water cooler and she ingested a massive dose of cyanide she was an innocent victim of a marriage
gone horribly wrong and really glad that he'll never be able to hurt anybody else again
and really grateful for a system that protects its members from people who cannot control their own actions or
who make bad choices in their life [Music] at the trial lewis's wife and his girlfriend sat
together neither one thought he was capable of murder two girls would sit back there the two ladies look at me
give me dirty looks and they were supporters of louis harry prosecutors presented what they believed
to be a possible financial motive as well diane harry had the life insurance policy
for 75 000 and he was the beneficiary if she died he was a beneficiary he would have
gotten that money lewis harry was tried and convicted of first degree murder and four counts of
attempted murder he was sentenced to life in prison after almost two decades his girlfriend
is finally convinced of his guilt mr harry did a very horrendous thing i tried to forgive him and i can't
i still can't forgive him diane harry's brother went into her attic found more cyanide i think it was
only at that time that she realized that he'd been had been trying to kill her lewis harry is now in the arizona state
prison complex during a recent telephone interview he still maintains his innocence i'm very
sorry for julian's family you know for them to have to have gone through this as far as the actual crime itself i
didn't commit to crime so it's kind of hard to have remorse for something that i didn't do
investigators believe the evidence proves the exact opposite the handwriting the flawed envelopes the eyewitness and
cyanide particles in his office all indicate that lewis harry was prepared to do anything to end his marriage
even if it meant killing others to do it it'd have been much more difficult to obtain a conviction
without the evidence of the matching envelopes and without the handwriting comparison
it was like you know a work of art it started it grew and then it came to a completion and it was all there there
was nothing they could dispute i don't care what defense they brought up we defeated all
[Music] [Music] [Music] you

The victim had ingested a massive amount of cyanide. An unlikely clue - a flaw on a mailing envelope - exposed a murderer who was willing to kill innocent people.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

A murder investigation reveals cyanide poisoning linked to a love triangle and a flawed envelope.

Key points

The Cyanide Poisoning Case. Julie Williams was poisoned with cyanide at her workplace, leading to a shocking investigation.
The Arrest of Lewis Harry. Lewis Harry was arrested for the murder of Julie Williams and attempted murder of his wife.
Trial and Conviction. Lewis Harry was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This proved that lewis harry sent himself at least one of the threatening letters.

13:52WatchJan 20, 2022

Tension

80/ 100High tension

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