Forensic Files - Season 2, Episode 9 - Something's Fishy - (In HD) | Forensic Files

It was a typical Wednesday morning in the Snow household. Sue Snow was preparing for another long day as vice
president at a local bank. >> Morning. >> Morning Haley. How you doing? >> And her daughter Haley was running a
little late, rushing to take a quick shower before heading off to school. >> Well, I hope you know it.
>> I know it. I'll be fine. Over the sounds of the running water, Haley couldn't
hear when her mother collapsed. [Music] >> Mommy. >> It was a tragedy, then a medical
mystery, one which sent shock waves throughout the world. [Music] Susan Snow was a successful banking
executive and the mother of two young daughters. She had recently remarried and was well known in the small suburb
of Seattle, Washington. >> She was very wellliked. She liked to flirt, I think, with men. And probably
used it to her advantage. She was in the banking industry, and I think that uh she had a lot of clients that dealt with
her bank because they like Sue Snow and like dealing with Sue Snow. >> Sue Snow was only 40 years old and in
perfect health. On the day she collapsed, >> I realized something was wrong. Her eyes
were open and her they were rolled sort of back and her fingers were very stiff and she looked terrified. She looked
very scared. >> Sue Snow was rushed to a nearby hospital unconscious and near death.
She died shortly after arrival. Dr. Karen Flegner performed the autopsy attempting to identify the cause of
death. >> The initial part of the autopsy revealed what we would call no anatomic cause of
death. That means that there wasn't a definite pathologic finding that could explain Miss Snow's death.
>> But Dr. Fner's assistant in the autopsy room noticed a tiny clue. It wasn't anything she could see. It was something
she thought she smelled. When Janet Miller opened Sue Snow's chest cavity, she noticed the faint smell of bitter
almonds. It was a clue that cyanide was present and a clue that under different circumstances might have gone
undetected. >> It's just such a distinct odor. It's like when you're driving down the road
and you smell skunk. That's a very distinct odor and you say, "Oh, a skunk was near here. Something
happened near here involving a skunk." It's it just leaves an impression in your brain that that you don't forget.
>> Now, with the suspicion of cyanide poisoning, Sous Snow's blood sample was sent for a special test, one not usually
performed in a routine autopsy. An acid solution separated the blood from any possible cyanide molecules.
After mixing, the test tube was sealed with a special reactive paper and then heated.
The paper on the vial turned blue. Proof that Sue Snow had been poisoned with cyanide.
Cyanide is one of the deadliest poisons because it kills the enzymes that transport oxygen throughout the body.
Death occurs within minutes of ingestion. literally starving the body of oxygen. But how did Sue Snow ingest
cyanide? It was her twin sister Sarah who made the initial discovery. On the day of Sue's funeral, Sarah
looked for some headache medication in her sister's kitchen and found something suspicious.
>> S and I both took Eedin tablets. When we got there, I went to the kitchen to get
her Exedan to take and it was capsules and she never took capsules. Lab tests confirmed Sarah's worst fears. Cyanide
was found in nine eedran capsules in Sue Snow's kitchen. Sarah Webb came within inches of ingesting the tainted capsules
herself. The family suspected that Sue's new husband, Paul Webbking, put the cyanide in the eedrin.
>> He was very uptight and very nervous and made crude jokes it seems occasionally
and just it was just the way he was dealing with the situation and it just rubbed me wrong. I was dealing with it
differently. >> Paul Webb King had been married three times before and had been married to Sue
Snow for just 6 months. He was a longhaul trucker with a hard, gruff demeanor and was not as financially
successful as his wife. Shortly before their marriage, Sue discovered that Paul was still dating an old girlfriend.
>> Sue knew about it and they had a lot of trouble over it. And finally, he told
Sue, "Well, I'm not going to see this girl anymore. Let's get married." And they got married and 6 months later,
she's dead. Paul Webb King admitted that it was his idea to switch from headache
tablets to capsules, but said he had nothing to do with the tampering of the capsules. The manufacturer of Eedrin
capsules wasn't taking any chances. They issued an immediate recall of extra strength eedrin from all store shelves.
Health officials feared that the death of Sue Snow was not an isolated incident.
In Auburn, Washington, extra strength eedrin capsules are being pulled from the storeshelves. This after authorities
confirmed that a cyanide laced capsule caused the death last week of a 40-year-old woman. Sue Snow.
>> When news reports of Sue Snow's death were broadcast throughout the country, one Seattle viewer, Stella Nickel, took
more than a passing interest. Stella Nickel told police that her husband had taken some eedrin capsules shortly
before he died. >> She called the King County police and said that her husband had died a couple
weeks earlier and that she had discovered that he had taken eedrin from the same lot number as the eedrin that
had killed Sue Snow. >> You have those capsules? >> Yeah, sure do. >> May I see them, please?
>> Sure. A police detective visited Stella Nichols home to pick up the bottles of
eedran capsules Bruce Nickel had been using. Stella asked that the bottles be tested
to determine whether cyanide was present. >> It's just a shame about that woman.
>> Yes, it certainly was. Well, I assure you we're checking every lead. She also wanted the coroner to reopen
her husband's case to test his blood samples for cyanide, a test which hadn't been performed during his autopsy.
When Bruce Nichols blood sample was analyzed, the reactive paper on the vial turned blue. Bruce Nickel died of
cyanide poisoning and cyanide laced eedran capsules were discovered in the two bottles found in his home.
Police continued to investigate their first suspect, Sue Snow's husband, Paul Webb King.
>> He can be aggressive and fact that he remarried shortly after uh Sue had died,
that was another thing that made the family, you know, uncomfortable and they wanted to blame him for whatever had
happened. >> Web King offered to take a lie detector test to clear his name. To the surprise
of almost everyone, he passed. There was enough circumstantial things pointing at
Paul Webb King that I personally was a little surprised when he took a polygraph examination was administered
by the FBI and passed it and was was eliminated as a suspect. With WebKing now cleared, authorities feared they had
a random killer on their hands, some sort of pharmaceutical terrorist. All of the eedrin capsules removed from store
shelves were analyzed with an X-ray machine. Since cyanide is more dense than pain reliever, tainted capsules
show up as dark areas inside the bottle. Two more bottles of cyanide laced pain reliever were found on store shelves.
Newspapers and television stations throughout the world reported the discovery of the tainted capsules in
Seattle. The FBI feared that this case would wind up like the Chicago Tylenol murders just a few years earlier. A case
which has never been solved. All of the tainted eedrin capsules were sent to the FBI lab in Washington DC for
analysis. Each tainted capsule contained 700 mg of cyanide, four times more than
a lethal dose. The FBI also found something else inside the capsules. Some mysterious green crystals mixed in with
the cyanide. The green crystals were analyzed using a mass spectrometer, a device which can identify the exact
chemical components of an unknown sample. After the crystals were liquefied, a beam of high energergy
electrons collided with the molecules, breaking them down into their smallest possible units. This produces a
fingerprint of every identifiable substance in the crystals. The green crystals were made up of four common
chemicals, atrizine, dicone, monuron, and simine. Two of these chemicals are used to kill algae in fish aquariums.
An FBI chemist visited all of the fish stores near his home, hoping to find a commercially produced algicide with the
same four compounds. >> Do you have any algicide? >> Sure. This aisle right here, other side
of the big fish tank. Thank you. >> After looking through hundreds of products, one algicide in particular
caught his eye. The product was called Algae Destroyer and was sold in green speckled tablets.
The product had the same four compounds in the exact same amount as the green crystals found in the cyanide.
The FBI had no idea why a fish algicide would be in the cyanide, but reported this discovery to Seattle authorities.
One of the detectives in Seattle recalled an interesting coincidence. When he visited Stella Nichols home to
pick up the eedrin capsules, he remembered seeing an aquarium prominently displayed in her living
room. Was it possible that Stella Nickel played some role in the death of her husband and in the death of Sue Snow?
The FBI visited 57 different fish and pet stores near Stella Nichols home. Armed with a photo montage which
included Stella's picture, Tom Nunan recognized Stella Nichols photograph and recalled selling her the same algae
destroyer product. The FBI was making inquiries if I'd ever remember selling her a certain product. And uh I did and
I I told them just like I told her and anybody else that purchased this product when they would take it home to crush it
up to make it more effective because a lot of times when you put it in the aquarium, it would not dissolve. It
would remain rather inert in the tank and not effectively break down and kill the algae that was inside the fish tank.
I think that that they were very suspicious of her and they knew that somehow Stella and her circle was linked to what
happened to Sue Snow and the and what happened to Bruce. >> Bruce Nichols life insurance policies
revealed that Stella would receive $100,000 extra if the death of her husband was accidental.
>> Stella ever say anything about them having any um money problems? Well, yes, because she was going to school and not
working there for a while and uh it was getting pretty tight. >> In fact, the Nicholls were in serious
financial trouble and had recently received a final delinquency notice on their home mortgage and on some other
loans. Just 5 days before Bruce Nichols death, Stella Nickel wrote a series of letters to her creditors. Dear sir, I
know that I am tremendously overdue with my payments. There is a good reason for
it. I'm having marital problems and they are about solved. Bruce is no longer involved.
I will pay you at least $500 per month. Stella Nickel. When FBI handwriting expert Lee Wagner
studied the life insurance documents, he noticed something suspicious. Bruce Nichols signature on the life insurance
application differed from his known signature samples. The N and K were different from his normal signature.
>> The initial stroke of the N begins about halfway up that N, whereas Bruce's N
begins at the top of that N. The final stroke on the signature in question ends up turning to the right below the
baseline of writing in the signature in question. It does not in the genuine signatures of Bruce,
>> but it was consistent with the way Stella Nichols signed her name. Investigators believed that Stella
forged her husband's signature on the insurance applications. But money wasn't the only possible motive. Stella and
Bruce Nickel had always been a very social couple, regularly visiting bars and night spots with friends. But all of
that changed after Bruce entered an alcoholism treatment program and stopped drinking altogether. After a period of
time, it got to her. you know, it wasn't the life that she envisioned because even though she was 42 or 43 years old,
she saw herself as a hot babe still. She wanted to be seen and get out there and
Bruce held her back. She spent a lot of time in bars, you know, driving around, flirting with different men, that kind
of thing. She had a boyfriend. You She wasn't u she didn't paint a picture of being real dedicated to her
husband. >> The FBI interviewed Cindy and told her about the circumstantial evidence they
had against her mother. >> Cindy broke down and she said, "Well, yes, my mom did kill Bruce. I know for
sure that she did because we had talked about it." Cindy also told the FBI that her mother visited the library to
research the subject of poisons. Records at the Auburn Public Library revealed that Stella signed out a book entitled
Deadly Harvest, which lists various sources and methods of poisoning. Stella's fingerprints were found all
over the sections dealing with cyanide poisoning and were also found on the pages of various encyclopedia describing
cyanide. Investigators now had enough circumstantial evidence to charge Stella Nickel with the murder of her husband.
And the FBI discovered why Stella Nickel murdered Sue Snow, a woman she didn't know.
By the spring of 1986, Stella Nickel had grown tired of her money problems and what she considered to be a boring
existence with her husband, Bruce. She hatched a plan to murder her husband and collect on his life insurance policies,
which would pay $100,000 extra if his death was accidental. Her library research led her to choose cyanide, a
highly toxic salt. But Stella was careless. She ground the cyanide in the same bowl
she used earlier to grind the algicide tablets for her aquarium. But she neglected to wash the bowl before
grinding the cyanide. She never suspected that the tiny green algicide crystals would mix with the
cyanide and lead to her capture. [Music] After putting the cyanide into the headache capsules, she placed the bottle
among her husband's other medications. Bruce suffered from chronic headaches and took pain relievers almost every
day. After Bruce Nichols death, the coroner mistakenly ruled that it was due to natural causes, a mistake which deprived
Stella of an additional $100,000 of life insurance money. Stella needed an excuse, some reason to
have her husband's autopsy tissues re-examined. So, she decided to poison someone else
to create the impression that a cyanide murderer was on the loose. She placed three more bottles of cyanide
laced pain reliever on the shelves of two stores near her home. Someone in the Snow household purchased
one of those bottles. >> You know that sister of yours didn't get home till this morning.
>> Sus Snow took two capsules from that bottle one morning before work. >> I don't know what I'm going to do with
her. >> And died a short time later. When the cyanide was discovered during Sous
Snow's autopsy and traced to the eedrin capsules in her home, Stella Nickel had the excuse she needed to ask that her
husband's case be reopened. She got away with murder once and tried to get away with it a second time.
When the FBI identified the tiny green crystals in the cyanide as algae destroyer and located a fish store near
Stella Nichols home, which sold her the product, the library books and forged life insurance policies sealed the case
against her. The FBI never found the cyanide, the algae destroyer tablets, or the bowl used to mix the cyanide in
Stella Nichols home. After a 4-week trial, one in which her own daughter testified against her, Stella Nickel was
convicted of two counts of murder and was sentenced to 90 years in prison. It's hard for me to think that there are
people out there who can do something like that without thinking about what kind of repercussions there are on other
people. It's just amazing to me that there are people that selfish to to take a life and not only my
mother's, but her her husbands. I mean, that that's almost more unimaginable to me than her killing a perfect stranger
such as my mom, but that she would kill her own husband for that. [Music] [Music]
[Music]

Two people in Seattle, Washington died after taking an over-the-counter pain reliever. Lab analysis of the pills showed they were tainted with a lethal concentration of cyanide.

Brief Summary

Sue Snow's cyanide poisoning leads to Stella Nickel's arrest for murder after a complex investigation reveals financial motives.

Key points

The Mysterious Death of Sue Snow. Sue Snow, a healthy mother, collapses and dies suddenly, leading to a shocking investigation.
Cyanide Discovery. An autopsy reveals cyanide poisoning as the cause of Sue Snow's death, raising questions.
Stella Nickel's Motive. Stella Nickel's financial troubles and desire for freedom lead her to murder her husband.
Stella's Capture. Stella Nickel's careless mixing of cyanide leads to her eventual capture and conviction.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It's just amazing to me that there are people that selfish.

Reflecting on the murders committed by her mother.

20:48WatchSep 24, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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