Stella Nickell

Stella Maudine Nickell (nee Stephenson, born in August, 1943) is a Seattle-area woman who was sentenced to 90 years in prison for murdering her husband Bruce in June 1986 by deliberately poisoning his Excedrin capsules with lethal cyanide. Her May 1988 conviction and prison sentence was the first under federal product tampering laws instituted after the Tylenol murders.

Nickell, who was looking for money to open a tropical fish store, realized that the State of Washington, for whom her husband worked, had employee life insurance policies of $71,000. Addititionally, the policy would pay a bonus $105,000 if the cause of death was shown to be accidental.

She first poisoned Bruce Nickell with hemlock and foxglove, but they had no effect on him. However, her second murder attempt was successful: she laced her husband's medicine with cyanide, which killed him. His death was ruled to be as a result of emphysema, which meant that the accidental death insurance bonus was not liable to be paid to the widow. Stella's next step was to plant five other Excedrin bottles (each one contaminated with cyanide) back in the store, hoping to make it appear like the work of a serial killer. It was inevitable that at some point an innocent member of the public would enter the store, unknowingly purchase a bottle of poisoned Excedrin and ingest the contents. That person was 40-year-old Sue Snow, who died after swallowing poisoned Excedrin planted by Stella Nickell. Snow's husband also consumed the poisoned Excedrin, but survived. Once the death of Sue Snow was found to be from the cyanide-laced pills and the other bottles were found in the different stores, police released the batch numbers for the contaminated bottles in an attempt to warn consumers of the danger. Nickell then came forward, stating that she had two bottles of the contaminated medicine, bought from two different stores. Her husband's death was then ruled to be an accident, which meant that she was now eligible to receive his life insurance policy bonus.

The Excedrin poisoning murders remained unsolved until Stella's daughter, Cindy Lee Hamilton, went to the police out of a guilty conscience and informed them of Stella's involvement in the crimes. Cindy subsequently received a reward of $250,000 from the drug industry. Stella will be eligible for parole on December 7, 2017 and is serving her term of imprisonment at the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin a federal prison in Dublin, California.

Seattle author Gregg Olsen wrote about the Nickell case in his book, "Bitter Almonds: The True Story of Mothers, Daughters and the Seattle Cyanide Murders".

The incident was used as the basis for an episode of "". The episode's main perpetrator tampered with several bottles of the fictional painkiller "Necedrin" in order to murder her husband. Similarly to Stella Nickell, she did it for insurance money with which to open a children's clothing store. The incident also has many similarities to the plot of the episode .

Nickell was also featured in an episode of the Oxygen Channel true crime show, "Snapped".

External links

* [http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5643 Poisoned Painkiller Panic: The Snow-Nickell Cyanide Murders]
* [http://www.truthinjustice.org/stella.htm CBS broadcast article detailing recent developments of the case]
* [http://nickell.tierranet.com/tales/bruce.htm Article describing events of the original case]