Nick tried desperately to establish a separate utility account for his portion of the apartment, but Elizabeth blocked him at every turn. During questioning, she kept repeating the same line: “It’s my apartment.” At one point, she dramatically packed up, took her son, and moved in with her mother — but not to make peace.
After leaving, she flooded the local courts with complaints and lawsuits. Then, after yet another angry phone argument, Elizabeth decided it was time for something far more drastic. She coldly chose thallium as the perfect invisible weapon.
Although access to powerful poisons was tightly regulated, taking the chemical from work turned out to be easy. No full inventory of the lab’s reagents had been done in a long time, so no one knew exactly what was missing. Later, coworkers testified in court that dangerous substances on the department’s shelves were poorly tracked.
Thallium acetate was not listed in any strict accountability records, which made it ideal for carrying out her plan. The crystals dissolve easily in liquid and look almost exactly like ordinary salt or sugar. To make sure the poisoning worked, Elizabeth even put the substance into baby Maggie’s formula.
The food contamination happened that same Saturday, when pregnant Natalie was forced out of the apartment. While the children cried behind a locked door, Elizabeth was not merely humiliating her rival. She was calmly carrying out a murder plan. And the depth of her resentment became even clearer when investigators learned this had not been her first attempt.
During investigative reenactments, it emerged that this fatal poisoning was not the first one she had tried. Elizabeth admitted that a year earlier she had attempted something similar. In the fall of 1994, she had seriously intended to kill her ex-husband…
