Trace of Suspicion - Ep. 2: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

I've always been a glass half-full kind of guy, and now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that we too.

“Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges, their stories, their funny, and my candy.”

So I hope you'll join me each week and who knows. You might just come away with your own glass half-full. Search Glass Half-full with Craig Melvin from today on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. It was one of those days in March when spring is in the air. The dathadils are up. Cherry blossoms are beginning to bud. The young chemist trudger across the Walter Reed Army Medical Center campus that morning.

Would probably have wanted to savor the moment. Because once he entered building 54, home to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,

he knew he would be completely shut off from the outside world. Unlike those quaint rose brick Georgian buildings elsewhere on the Walter Reed campus, building 54, well, this place was unique.

“Unlike any other building on campus, indeed, unlike any in the country.”

Building 54 is a massive five-story white block with three basements below ground, not a window or decorative curly queue on it. With steel blast proved doors, and walls that were two feet thick. Building 54 was built in the 1950s to survive a hydrogen bomb blast, to be a presidential refuge if it came to that. Grim and graceless, all of the above. Just inside the building contained brightly lit labs that were a pathologist's dream, all the best equipment.

There was a brand new tissue analyzer, clunkily named inductive couple plasma mass spectrometer, very expensive. There were microwave digestive systems for prepping samples, top notch chemicals and compounds, high purity reagents.

“All of it was intended to help the military pinpoint toxins, contaminants, and environmental risks that might threaten the nation's soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen.”

After buzzing through security on that spring day in 2003, the chemist Tutor Tutor Off took the elevator down to the basement to his lab, the department of environmental and toxicologic pathology. It was there he would spend months analyzing tissue samples that had been harvested from the body of marine sergeant Todd Summer. The labels on the sample containers he pulled from the freezer indicated this particular marine had died a little more than a year earlier. However, the labels said nothing about the circumstances.

The chemist did not know the marine had left a wife and four kids behind. He did not know a lot of NCIS investigators had been left scratching their heads. One thing he did know was that NCIS wanted Todd Summer's tissue samples tested for toxins and trace elements.

He had never tested human tissue before, but he was eager to give it a go.

Elements were tested for arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum, cadenium, and mercury. It took hours for the big gray analyzer to quietly run its cleansing and calibration cycles, and then analyze each sample. What it was done, the numbers showed elevated levels of arsenic in the liver and kidney samples. That is not quite as shocking as it sounds. The chemist knew arsenic is a natural compound that's present in practically everything.

Most people have minuscule levels of arsenic in their body. This wasn't that. The data points now blinking at him from his computer screen were astounding. When he showed his lab director the results, the boss said, "Do it again," and he did. And then he did it again.

And the results came out the same. The arsenic levels in Todd Summer's tissues were astronomical. More than a thousand times higher than the normal range in the liver.

This is a level that should be looked into, because it's a high level of arsenic.

“How did that much arsenic get into the system of a 23-year-old marine who had apparently dropped dead from a heart attack?”

The chemists in Washington did not know. That was a job for the NCIS investigators in San Diego to figure out. Had Todd Summer accidentally ingested arsenic on the job? Or had someone deliberately poisoned him? 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.

In this episode, you'll ride along with investigators searching for an answer to that question.

One of the things that we had to do was interview a whole circle of people who hadn't been interviewed after Todd Summer's death. And you'll learn what they found when they took an up close and very personal look at Todd Summer's widow Cindy.

“She lost her balance emotionally, she lost her bearings, and quite frankly none of that has to do with whether or not she's guilty of the crime.”

I'm Josh Maykowitz, and this is trace of suspicion upon cast from daylight. Episode two, girls just want to have fun. It was February, 2004, when NCIS, special agent Rob Terwilliger, reached across a pile of investigative reports on his desk, and grabbed a stack of dog-yared files marked Summer. It was now his job to head up that investigation.

Leaving through them, he reviewed the timeline of the case. February 2002, a 23-year-old marine dropped dead. The medical examiner certifies natural causes, cardiac arrhythmia, heart attack. May 2003, the lab report revealed very high levels of arsenic in some of the tissues harvested from the marine's body. Now it was early 2004, and the investigators who had been working the case, suspected homicide.

Their noses told investigators the widow had something to do with it. Guilty of conduct, unbecoming a marine corps widow, if nothing else, said some. She hosted loud parties, and spent the dough from her husband's life insurance policy like it was going out of style. He was dead. She was partying. Cops don't believe in coincidences.

Flipping through the file to Williger could see how his predecessors on the case had collected witness statements from all the first responders.

Who had come to the summer's home, the night-todd summer collapsed. The medical records and doctor's statements were there. Arsenic. Arsenic. Arsenic. Murder? That seemed to be a popular theory among the investigators. A special agent to Williger closed the file and headed home that night.

His mind likely spun with thoughts of what he should do next. Once it became apparent that there was a potential homicide. Once we got those test results back, the idea was that what we had this two-pronged investigation. That special agent Rob Terwilliger.

“The question was, was this accidental? Was it environmental? Was it occupational?”

We're looking at those avenues, but at the same time, is there someone out there who wanted to hurt Sergeant Summer? And who benefited directly from his death? The investigators saw from the file how some of that work had already been done. Other agents had consulted with experts on the lab results. All agreed that the levels of arsenic in Todd Summer's body were extraordinary.

But one in particular went further. That expert, a toxicologist, told the investigator who met with him, that there must have been some mistake made at the lab. It was impossible the expert said. For such high levels of arsenic to be found in some of Todd Summer's tissues.

But not in others. I'd believe you're referring to Dr. Ralfon's Polkless. And he's a toxicologist out of Virginia Commonwealth University. And Dr. Polkless said, "Well, you might want to look at occupational exposure,

And so those were the things that were subsequently done.

“Turns out Todd Summer had not worked with arsenic,”

or been anywhere where he could have breathed in or ingested arsenic. On top of that, no one who had worked with Todd had become sick. There seemed to be only one conclusion to be drawn from that. The arsenic, in Todd Summer's tissues, had not arrived by accident. We even made attempts to recontact Dr. Polkless.

Essentially through the San Diego County Medical Examiner, because medical examiner said, "We should go back to this guy and talk to him again and see what he thinks." Well, it was done to know a veil. We did not know how hard it was to find Polkless, who, as far as we know, was not living underground.

What is clear is that he and NCIS never reconnected.

Either agents could not find it, or maybe he didn't call them back. Or maybe they did not look very hard. Anyway, investigators reasoned, Todd Summer had to have died from arsenic poisoning. All of his symptoms leading up to the night he died pointed to it.

The vomiting, the diarrhea, even the heart attack. You had a substance in his system that was at a lethal level, which would account for the symptomology and the result in cardiac arrhythmia.

And that was based on what are initial consults with pathologists were telling us.

This is a known side effect of arsenic poisoning cardiac arrhythmia. This was murder, no question about it. The medical examiner even changed Todd's death certificate to read homicide. And who did the deed? Well, investigators could imagine only one suspect, the wife, Cindy Summer.

After all, who else could it have been?

“What chance is there that someone else gave Todd the arsenic?”

Some other person. Did he have any enemies? Based on the witnesses we spoke with, he had no enemies. So it all keeps coming back to Cindy. Yes.

Now the question was why? And the way the investigator saw it, Todd Summer's death had been a financial info for Cindy Summer. You have lethal levels of arsenic and a perfectly healthy young man and only one person benefited from his death. benefited to the tune of a $6,000 immediate death activity. $250,000 in a service member's group life insurance policy and a lifetime of VA benefits.

Judging from the canceled checks and credit card bills in the file, Agent Terwilliger could clearly see how Todd and Cindy had been financially strapped before he died. They're money melting away, like snow in a heavy rain. A lot of expenditures weren't going towards the maintaining of the household, you know, the needs of the children. Didn't see a whole lot of finances going out towards groceries and necessities versus wants. And that's where we saw the discrepancy.

A clear lack of financial discipline to Williger thought. He was not alone in that assessment. While leaving through the file, he had seen that once while Todd was away on deployment. Cindy had asked the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society for help, making a car payment. And Navy Relief had turned her down.

Navy Relief denied that based on her unwillingness to modify her spending patterns and her use of Sergeant Summer's pay.

“So if she wasn't spending the money on the house and the kids, what was she spending her money on?”

Based on what Navy Relief saw and what we saw in the finances, fast food, unnecessary expenses in the form of restaurants. The fact was, Todd's salary of $1,800 a month had simply not been enough to support their lifestyle. He's a young Marine, he's a sergeant at the time, he was a corporal, and living on a corporal salary with four children to tick care for is, it's hard enough to do it with one. As a result, the agents learned the couple frequently asked Todd's parents for money, for food, and for other essentials.

We saw large influxes of money coming in from Todd's father. We saw a large amount of money going out of the accounts, and with no explanation as to where those funds were going. For the NCIS investigators, the Summer Family Finance has seemed like a big red flag snapping in the San Diego Sea Breeze.

It appeared that there was a financial motive, and there was only one person who had that financial motive.

“That person, of course, was Cindy Summer, thoroughly in the way she behaved, and then later spat her husband's death benefits.”

And well, none of its struck NCIS as the actions of a grieving wife or innocent widow. Those were the actions they thought of a murder suspect. I really love the start today up. They care about how I feel. It's the staff on the app.

It's the connections you make. Without good mental and physical help, you have nothing. That tells me how to cook to keep myself healthy.

“I look at my having a like while I'm on this sudden ballot of steps today.”

Start today meets you where you are, download the start today, well, this app now on your Apple Android device. Terms apply CF for details. Hey guys, Willie guys here reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with the multi-talented Mindy Kaling to talk about her beginnings on the office. Her hit creation running point and her latest series, not suitable for work.

You can get our conversation for free wherever you get download your podcasts. Hi, it's Kate Snow and BC News Anchor and host of the NBC News Podcast, The Drink. And this month, I'm grabbing a Hugo Spritz with former reality star Lauren Conrad.

“Here at The Drink, we love learning about someone's journey to the top.”

And Lauren and I, we go back to the very beginning of her extraordinary story.

We talk about why she always saw reality TV as temporary for her, the scrutiny she faced in the public eye,

and why she says she'll never watch Laguna Beach again. Hope you'll join us for the drink. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts. People are creatures of habit. They tend to use the same ATMs, shop in the same stores, and unless they're traveling, their bank records will show transactions that are closer to home.

A break in that routine is to a detective, what she says to a mouse, irresistible. So starting to look closer at the finances and notice that there was one particular transaction that sort of jumped out from the rest. In the homicide investigation that was now focused on Cindy Summer, it was an ATM withdrawal she made on February 8, 2002. That started Agent Turwilliger's nose twitching, as if it had caught a punch and whiff of chatter.

You see, that was the day that Cindy's husband taught, first reported feeling ill.

In this particular case, there was an ATM transaction that took place in La Jolla. And it jumped out of me as this was something that was odd in their spending patterns. So we went out to that particular ATM machine, noted that it was an design-med building, which is a medical building, which is on the campus of Scrips La Jolla Medical Center. That struck the investigator as odd, not just because that ATM was 12 miles from where

Cindy and Todd lived. But because the ATM was in a private healthcare facility. Typically, military families get their healthcare from military-sponsored medical clinics and hospitals, because it's free. So there would have been no reason for her to have to go to this building to get medical care. Yes, unless there were some kind of referral and in-based on my review of their medical records at that time, there had been no such referral. Puzzling, the investigator stared at the building's office directory, trying to guess from all the specialists listed on that wall,

which one Cindy's summer might have come there to see, and then it hit him, surgery, cosmetic. There were several listings on the wall directory for plastic surgeons. That must be it, he thought. Because he remembered that somewhere in the pages and pages of interviews in CIS agents had done with potential witnesses,

We noted that some of those individuals would talk to us. They said that there'd been something that she had wanted prior to Todd's death. A search of Cindy's canceled checks from the spring of 2002 soon gave the investigator the name he'd been looking for. In April of that year, she'd written a big check to Dr. Scott Miller, a board certified plastic surgeon. Miller's name had been listed on that building directory in LaHoya near the ATM where Cindy's summer had withdrawal and money.

“And once that connection had been made, the question was, what was she doing there on Friday, February 8?”

Because that date jumped out at me in the sense of their finances because it was also the same day, Todd began to exhibit the symptoms of the poisoning.

So, the Cindy, the Todd first got sick? Yes. Cindy, at a time when they had almost no money in their bank account.

Not no more than $300 in their bank account. Was it a plastic surgeon's office talking to him about breast augmentation? That's correct. That was just a hunch, of course, but a good one. When the agent petitioned a court for a warrant to see Cindy's summer's medical records from Dr. Miller, his request was granted. And sure enough, when we reviewed the medical record, she had been in the office on that day. And I'm Friday February 8, doing a consultation.

An operation that must have cost $5,000. I believe it was around $5,600. And at that time, again, they had no more than $300 in their combined bank accounts. They couldn't even afford to pay for a vehicle. They had no credit history to speak of. Now, you have someone in that type of financial environment looking at getting a cosmetic procedure that has no medical benefit.

There is no medical reason for it. Two months after Todd Summer died, Cindy got her new breast implants. A few weeks after that, she left the kids with a sitter. And spent a while weekend in Tijuana showing off her new acquisitions. Sometime in April, when we had gone down there, and we were at the club dancing.

And I remember looking up, and they were doing a bikini contest, a thong contest. And she was in it. That's chanter Wells, one of Cindy's friends from her job at the subway sandwich shop. What was she doing? Struggling. Pretty much.

Dana, close off? Oh, yeah. This was how long after her husband died? Did you hear your performance? That strike you as inappropriate?

Puzzling anyway? I mean, I don't see anything wrong with going down there.

“I think what she was doing was who's down there was inappropriate.”

Now, here's the thing. Questionable behavior is not illegal. Not unless it leads to or covers up a crime. However, it does attract attention. It can even make the innocent seem guilty.

And once investigators shine, the black light of suspicion on Cindy's past. Well, they found more than enough reason to believe this 31-year-old mother of four. Could be a murderer.

Hey, everyone. I'm Dylan Dreyer, co-host of the third hour of today, and mom to three wild boys.

I've learned a lot my years as a parent. Mostly that I don't have it all figured out yet. And I'm not the only one. This is my new podcast, The Parent Chat. Each week I sit down with someone new for Anna's conversation and real world advice about parenting.

I am over here just like winging it. Hey, I'm just trying not to screw my own kids up. I'm not giving you advice on how not to screw yourself. Search the parent chat on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. [Music]

The trouble started at Camp Lajoon in North Carolina.

“At least, that's what investigators were hearing from the friends and military wives,”

who had known Cindy Summer back then.

It was during Todd's second six-month deployment to the Mediterranean, they said.

But Cindy began to display a side of her personality that was shocking. And he started to see her in the company of other men's, specifically going out there doing things of a sexual nature with cameras and the computer. That is NCIS, special agent Rick Rendell. He joined the Summer Investigation in 2005.

It starts to break down at that point, but it's again when Todd isn't there to enforce the rules of the house.

Just he was away too much. I think it was a sense of what being a military wife was really like.

“He is away. She is left there in the home with all the responsibilities.”

And that special agent Rob Ter Williger again. There had been an allegation of child abuse. And when CPS went into the home, they found the home and totally unacceptable condition. Things were such a shambles investigators learned that the Marine Corps actually cut short tops deployment so that he could come home and deal with Cindy.

It hurt him in the sense that you're leaving the deployment early. You're leaving your unit behind. Nobody wants to do that. That's a math about that, right? Right. He was an NCO in this unit.

These are some young Marines that were looking up to him. And now he's got to come home because of an issue that was caused not that happened. It was just the culmination of all these strains going on that home with Cindy. For investigators, it seemed the troubles Todd and Cindy had had in North Carolina came with them to California. It was in one of their financial transactions.

And it was an adult single's website, specifically Cindy, established an accountant, her name, their user ID, her credit card number for a company operating under the pseudonym. Erotacy.com, which is an adult single's website. So think of it as a dating website that's a little more graphic than say a Yahoo personal's website.

“Erotacy, and she was on this website, how long before Todd died?”

The account was established on February 3rd, I believe, so that would have been five days before he started to get sick. The optics of a married woman seeking sexual hookups just days before her husband dies are not good. Now NCO has wondered, what Cindy had been like before she married Todd?

Cindy's had a colorful life, pretty much some of the things we've found throughout the course of the investigation, before she was married to her first husband.

She had some problems as a young teenager in and out of substance abuse centers. It was while Cindy was in one of those drug rehabs that she met Dan Peace, a cousin of one of the other patients. I met Cindy in late 1987, I was 19, she was 14, so like that. That's Dan Peace. He was Cindy's first husband and the father of her three oldest children. In CIS agent Rendon had another investigator from the San Diego DA's office, interviewed Dan Peace at his apartment in London.

He told them he had moved to England after he and Cindy divorced, in part to avoid paying her child support and alimony.

“Yeah, but before you start asking me questions, can you explain to me a bit about why you're here?”

Sure. Why we're here is we needed to talk with you, not your ex-wife. It was a long story when the took Dan Peace three hours to tell, on that chilly November afternoon in 2005. We became, you know, couple, I'd say late 1988, so no like that. Because of the difference in their ages at the time, remember, Dan was 20 and Cindy only 15. Cindy's mom obtained a restraining order to keep Dan away from her daughter.

It didn't work. Cindy ran away from home. She and Dan hit the road. We went on a winter, a grateful dead tour. There were some legal scrapes along the way. She was arrested in Arizona for shoplifting. In 1991, came an unplanned pregnancy that led to marriage.

My oldest child was born in October of 1991, and we got married, but it's shortly after Christmas 1991. In the presence of God and witnesses, they promised to be there for each other in good times in bad. Dad told the investigators how less than a month after the wedding. He got the feeling that the bad times part of that had arrived early. Our marriage was horrible. She wasn't coming home at night.

According to Dan, those nights out turned into days. There were loud arguments followed by icy silences. I don't know what she was doing. Yeah, I do know what she was doing. She was out partying.

Cindy's whole thing in life is that she never got the child that she wanted.

And so it went, year after unhappy year.

“Oh, there were good times. Times when Cindy seemed to settle down.”

But Dan says those times were the exception, not the rule. She started disappearing again. This is a cycle that prepared itself all through the time I knew her. Between those times, she was, I had no complaints. I was completely happy. She was a good wife, she was a good mother, that you get along with. Dan told the investigators it was during one of those periods of calm that he and Cindy added two more children to their growing family.

Both of them boys. Those were the stable times. Times when Dan entered law school and Cindy finished her GED.

But according to Dan, Cindy never really settled down.

She basically conducted a series of affairs that I didn't find out about until much later.

“You know, I hear people that she had either affairs with.”

Yeah, I mean, I guess I know them well. You know, pretty much. There were a lot of them. Dan told investigators, once he finished law school, he got a job at a law firm that was about an hour away from their home in Dearborn. Those were 14 hour days for Dan. For Cindy, they must have felt like years. So I started working these long days and Cindy had to take care of the kids. This didn't work for longer than about two weeks or so. She couldn't deal with being home with the kids.

It drove her crazy. So Cindy and Dan put the kids in daycare. That solved one problem, but from Dan's point of view, it created a new one. He said Cindy now had time on her hands and seemed to be spending a lot of it on the internet.

“She got into an online chat with the social outlet at this point and struck up certainly online relationships with men on Canada, a soldier fetish.”

She used to participate in a chair room called Burles for a military man or something like that. At the mention of Cindy, possibly having a soldier fetish, the investigators ears perked up. We actually had a soldier fetish. Exactly. General, I was at my focus towards sailors, marines, airmen. She likes, yeah, I don't know. She likes marines. Yeah, she prefers marines to army types, but at the...

Oh, just because she told me, you know, I don't know exactly how it came about that she told me. But she's got a uniform thing in general. According to Dan, it was sometime during the week between Christmas 1998 and New Year's 1999. But he realized he had reached the end of his rope with Cindy.

There was a night where, you know, I finally looked at my sophomore marines and I'm not going to have any more self-respective of where, you know, deal with this person again.

And, you know, I may or if I'm all tomato, then she would be off, and, you know, so it was over. There were still the details of their divorce to be worked out, of course. But Dan told the investigator that by January of 1999, Cindy had already moved on. Dan says she told him about a marine she was interested in. A marine who was based at Camp LaJune in North Carolina.

That marine was Todd Summer. Todd seemed like a decent guy to me with no idea what he was getting into. I must have met Todd that summer. As the investigators said listening to Dan Peace, they couldn't help feeling as if they were watching a coming attraction trailer for the Todd Summer story. And we see this pattern develop and we see these things start to snowball much like they didn't her previous marriage.

And ultimately she's on the internet again, literally days before Todd starts to get sick and establishing a profile by which she could meet other people on the internet.

And it seemed to be following that same pattern that she had exhibited in her first marriage. The investigators were about to leave, Dan Peace is a part of it. Special agent Rendon asked one last question. Run stay at, just. There's many adjectives or skew adjectives that you can't describe. Dan Peace took a long pause, gazed at the floor and then said this.

I know you're not asking me if I think she didn't, but Cindy doesn't strike me as the kind of person to commit the perfect correct.

I think that if Cindy had done something like this, either the evidence has been destroyed or you'd be found it.

“As the investigators boarded their flight back to the States, they no doubt wondered if Dan Peace had been right.”

Perhaps the hard evidence they'd been looking for would never be found.

But like hounds on the scent, they could not bear the thought of giving up. No, two weeks later, another set of investigators board of a flight to Florida. That's where Cindy's summer now lived and just maybe the evidence they'd been looking for was there. Coming up on future episodes of Trace of Suspicion. Until you're in someone's shoes, you don't know how you would respond.

“I started drinking and that's that was my priority.”

Until we went to Florida, we had no clue that there was even a trust fund in the picture.

What am I being arrested for? There was some film substance that was found in his body. Are you trying to give me a murder? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Are you serious?

Where do you think she got the arsenal? There's really no way to say.

“This podcast is a production of date line and NBC News.”

Tim Beachen is the producer. Marshall Housefell, Brian Drew, and Meredith Cramer are audio editors. Molly Dorosa is associate producer. Rachel Young 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. I'm Craig Melford. Cheers.

I've always been a glass half-full kind of guy.

And now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that we too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their trials, challenges, their stories, their funny and my candy. So I hope you'll join me each week and who knows. You might just come away with your own glass half-full.

Search Glass Half-full with Craig Melford from today. Today, on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.