[MUSIC]
She could feel their eyes on her.
“She could smell their contempt even though she could not hear their thoughts.”
The taunts and cat calls that greeted Cindy Summer that first week in the last Colleen
as women's detention center in San Diego were unrelenting. Everybody knew who I was, I was very high profile. >> In a lock-up full of accused criminals, Cindy Summer was not just a new fish. She was a celebrity, a husband killer, the arsenic assassin. >> Even like the homeless gross that came in from the street knew who I was, I did.
All the deputies knew who I was. >> And her notoriety was far and wide. Every week brought a new stack of mail. >> The letters from strangers, some offering encouragement, others condemnation. >> Yeah, and getting letters from around the country hate letters.
“They're watching TV and your story comes on the news four times a day.”
It was February 19th, 2002, prosecutors say Summer was living with her husband, a 23-year-old U.S. Marine. >> No doubt there were times during those spring days of 2006. When Cindy Summer felt like screaming, venting, crying even, she did not. The advice she had received from that deputy back in Florida had taken hold.
Do not engage, do not cry, keep a stiff upper lip, never let them see you sweat.
>> If I compartmentalized before, oh, I really could now. So I put my nose down, I focused on my case, I read books, I did Sudoku, I kept my nose clean. >> For 10 months, she gritted out every day, waiting for the exoneration she knew was coming. Once a jury heard the evidence in her case. >> Yeah, there was no evidence against me, there was nothing there.
>> In this episode, you will hear about what evidence there was. >> No one thing is over enough in a circumstantial evidence murder case. >> Evidence? >> The prosecution had.
>> There are lethal levels of arsenic and hot Summers tissues.
>> Evidence, the prosecution ignored. >> The premier expert in this kind of gen arsenic told the government, take a walk, you got it braw. >> And you will hear about a courtroom misstep that allowed a murder trial to become a public airing of so much dirty laundry. >> The judge ruled that I had opened the door to it, and that's the same I confessed to today.
>> That era. >> I'm Josh Makewitz, and this is trace of suspicion, a podcast from day one. >> Episode four, smoke and mirrors. >> Shortly after the arrest of Cindy Summer, NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwiliger was reassigned. Somebody else has to take over.
>> Exactly. >> You're telling me this is not like the TV show. >> No, you don't stay in one place for very long. There is a planning process that goes on. And so when the case agent, the new case agent opens it up, there is an investigative plan.
These are the things based on what the old case agent saw that have been done, and there are things there's a list of things that still need to be done. >> The agent who inherited the Cindy Summer file from Terwiliger was special agent Rick Wendell himself, a 16 year Marine Corps veteran. Wendell was not exactly coming into the case cold.
>> Remember, he was the NCIS agent who had interviewed Cindy's ex-husband, Dan Peace.
“>> When I talked to her husband, I asked him, what kind of shows did she watch?”
I asked him specifically, was it like forensic files, new detectives, did she watch these type of things? >> That was not a question out of thin air, killers have been known to draw tips and inspiration from TV crime programs like they bought, and like NCIS, Wendell wondered if there might be something there that would make their circumstantial case that much stronger.
>> His response to me was, now Cindy was a type that would like to watch, I don't too when I will bare will, you know, friends, Melrose Place, he gave me a list of shows. >> Wendell's ears perked up when he heard Melrose Place. Melrose Place was probably the most vindictive show that there could be some type of nexus here.
So we're doing internet quarry and you know, it turns out that there's two poisoning episodes
That were spousal poisoning episodes.
>> In the end, the investigator decided those TV episodes had little in common with the
summer case, so he dropped it.
“>> It's a circumstantial case, it's, you know, it was definitely no smoking gun.”
The fact was, agents before Wendell had also come up empty, in the search for that same metaphorical gun, and then one day, the phone rang. As agent Wendell listened to the woman on the other end, he might well have imagined he could smell the scent of gun smoke. >> She came across as very genuine, she was very certain about what she saw that night.
>> The woman on the phone was Susan Beach, she was the woman a frantic Cindy called on the night time summer dot. Susan had been following the news of Cindy's arrest, and she told the investigator, she knew a few things about the case that he needed to hear. >> She said Cindy called, "Permix already on the way.
Please come here to watch my children. I want to go to the hospital with Ty." >> Okay. >> That makes sense. Susan says she gathers up the kids, they get in the car, they drive to Cindy's house.
>> When it took her five to ten minutes to get there. >> Not that far away.
>> She should not have beat the first responders.
>> But she did. >> She says she arrives there, and it strikes her odd that there is no police cars. There is no ambulance, there is no fire trucks. >> Suggesting to you that Cindy called Susan to watch her kids before she called my one on one?
>> I think that's a safe assumption.
“>> Was it possible the investigator wondered as he hung up the phone?”
That Todd Summer had collapsed, long before Cindy ever called 911. >> I don't want you, but I'm not going to play it. >> Hat Cindy actually delayed calling for help because she needed to clean up the scene, perhaps hide evidence. The investigators had spun, thinking back on it, Rendon remembered, something about
that 911 call seemed off. >> There's parts of the tape where it sounds like she is frantic and crying. >> I'm not going to wheel it now. >> There's other parts of the tape where it sounds like a routine call, and it's kind of odd where she asks the 911 operator, "Should I do CPR?"
>> He questioned, "Do you know how to do CPR?" >> You said, "Do you?" >> Wild means, and then you can hear the sound of CPR being administered. >> Good to be yelling on that. >> You wanted to hear that?
>> Yeah. >> Do you know how? >> No. >> But it wasn't hands-free phone, she's talking clear into it as if it's still to her head. >> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Dr. Cassandra Stroud, the ER doc who pronounced Todd Summer Dead, about 50 minutes after
“that 911 call, would later remember that his body looked as if it had been dead for longer”
than that. >> Based on my viewing of the body, it had been a bit before the 911 call because he was blue and modeled. >> Combined all of that with Susan Beach's story, and suddenly a new theory of what might have happened that night seemed to be taking shape.
>> She gets there, and Cindy's not there, she says she seems she was upstairs, looks like the kids are having a slumber party in the living room, and she knows that Todd has collapsed this the only information she's going off of, so with her kids and Cindy's kids, she confines them into the living room area, which has tucked away, opposing side of the house's structure. Master Bedroom is not above the living room area, and she's watching the kids.
>> And where was Cindy during the time? >> She assumed Cindy was upstairs.
>> But she never saw her.
>> Couldn't hear nothing. She explained that she was there in the 20 minutes before first responders arrived. >> It was an intriguing theory, except for this little detail. None of the emergency responders who were there that night, reported seeing another woman minding the kids at the summer house.
>> Nobody said that they saw her, however, they weren't there to look for her or see what was in the house. >> The investigator figured maybe the paramedics cops and EMTs simply did not see Susan Beach. When you first entered the threshold at four area, immediately to your right is the stairway that leaves upstairs to the master bedroom.
They go in, they go upstairs, they do their thing, they're not milling around inside the house. So the very possible you come down those stairs, you're not going to see anyone in there.
If they're self-sitting at the couches, the kids are asleep.
Miss Beach is in there with the kids containing them in there, specifically the older ones didn't want them to see their father being carried out like that. It wasn't a crime scene that they were responding to.
The military police role is to get there and assist the first responders, however, need
be. >> Not to seal it off, see how many people were inside, take their names, put up the tape. >> Right, and notify us to come process a crime scene. >> So the fact that nobody notices Beach is to you not indicative of anything. >> Not at all.
>> And you believe she was there. >> I do believe she was there. The big question was, what a jury believes Susan Beach beat the first responders to the summer
“house at night, would they buy a theory without proof?”
Now that is a question you might be asking, at several points in this story.
Most investigators will tell you, quote, "You never know what a jury will do."
Unquote. I've heard that sentiment a lot. It's kind of law enforcement boilerplate. And across town, prosecutors were also unsure of how to proceed as they tried to decide what shape their case against Cindy Summer would take a trial.
The blonde woman in the blue power suit sat quietly at the prosecution table, reading through her prepared remarks. A few feet away sat the accused, a woman about to be tried for murder. The prosecutor knew everything about that woman. After all, she had spent years immersed in that woman's life.
“She knew the evidence, and she knew the science.”
She knew this case backwards and forwards. She knew what every expert would say. She knew how the defense would respond. Yes, she might have thought to herself, "As the judge took his seat, I've got this." Once the formalities were done, the blonde woman rose to speak.
In February of 2002, Sergeant Todd Summer, a 23-year-old active duty Marine, was murdered. Those were the first words, San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Laura Gunn said to the jury that had been seated and asked to decide, "Cindy Summer's fate." Leathal levels of arsenic were found in Todd Summer's kidneys and liver. The evidence she said would show that only one person benefited financially from Todd's death.
And that was his wife, Cindy. Only one person could have poisoned him, and that was his wife, Cindy.
“And only one person had behaved suspiciously in the hours after he died.”
Again, she said, "That was Cindy." As Todd was being taken out of the bedroom on a gurney, she said, "We joked about his
SGLI policy, but I never thought I'd actually see it."
His life insurance. Yes, then when she got to the hospital, she approached his sergeant major at the time. And said, "Do I have to get back his real-nessment bonus?" And that was the first question out of her mouth. So that was a second inquiry about money.
She's not the first person to begin worrying about money immediately after the death of a spouse. What about this looked suspicious? Well, we didn't look at anything in isolation, and certainly the way that she behaved after he died was something that raised suspicion. Ah, yes, the way she behaved.
The prosecutor knew she had to be careful. The judge had ruled before the trial started. That lifestyle evidence, that is, talk of Cindy's carousing and sleeping around in the months after Todd died, was irrelevant, and off limits. During those constraints, the prosecutor was like a high stakes poker player holding
two pair. She had a hand that was good enough to win, but it was close, and even then, everything else would have to go her way. Clearly, it's not a slam dunk case, but in the end, with everything taken together, it absolutely was a case that we thought, you know, we need to try to pursue justice for this
young marine and his family. How big a problem was it that you didn't have a controlled, searchable crime scene?
That was when weakness in the case was that we didn't have an on-the-spot ful...
investigation.
“What the prosecution did have was a parade of first responders who told the jury the”
things they did, saw, and heard the night Todd summer died.
The prosecution also called Susan Beach, who told her story about arriving before first
responders did. She was not challenged by the defense on cross. Is she done? Yes sir. Do you get any further questions?
Nothing, sir. The next building block in the prosecution's case focused on motive. The summer family, prosecutor gun told the jury, was broke. We spent far more than they earned, and had, in fact, fully depleted Todd's $30,000 trust fund two weeks before he died.
We felt like we had strong motive evidence in this particular case.
We had somebody who liked to spend, didn't have very much money, whose nest egg had just run out, who knew that divorce was not going to pay her well for her four kids and not going to put her in a good situation, who stood to gain a great deal financially by this murder, and who made several comments after the fact about the money and her concerns about the money.
To support that theory, the prosecutor called an accountant to the stand who had carefully gone over the summer family finances. I analyzed bank records belonging to Todd and Cynthia Summers around the time of Todd's death before and after. That's forensic accountant April Reel.
“So some of the things that you looked at were the couple's bank records?”
That's correct. Did you look at credit reports? I did. A chart was then shown to the jury, which listed the balance as in each of the summer accounts in reading them off, the account and started with Todd's trust fund account.
But the e-invans funds, and it had zero balance as a February 1802. The marine federal credit union savings account had five dollars and 24 cents, the marine federal credit union checking account had one dollar and ninety three cents, and the bank of America checking accounts had eight hundred and one dollars and seventy five cents. That was the financial picture on the day Todd died.
Just ten days earlier on February 8th, the outlook had been even more grim. Todd and Cindy then had only two hundred and eighty dollars to their name.
That day was significant, not only because that was the day Todd first complained of
being sick after eating a gas station egg roll. As the prosecutor pointed out, that was also the same day medical records showed Cindy had consulted with a plastic surgeon about getting breast implants. A procedure that was going to cost more than five thousand dollars. Where were she going to get that money and why did she go at a time when Todd was gone all
day in El Centro on a training exercise? Suggesting to you that she wanted to keep that visit a secret from him. It appears so. That was key the prosecutor argued, because the day before Cindy Summer was arrested, investigators say she told them, "Ton had been in favor of her getting implants."
“That's how Todd felt about the breast implants and she said, "Oh, he was all for it.”
He came with me to the consultation." That's NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger, one of the investigators who had questioned Cindy before her arrest. That's not true. And that's not true, because her appointment was at 0930 or somewhere in that time frame
on the morning of Friday, February 8th. And you know exactly what Todd was that day. According to the Marines that were in his squadron, they were with him and he did not get home until late in the evening, and at no point during that interview, did she tell us that, "Well, I went to multiple consultations."
She said he went to me with the consultation to that consultation in Lohoya, not knowing that we had already reviewed her medical record and knew that Todd Summer could not be at two places at one time. Gotcha. For the investigators who had surprised Cindy at her workplace in Florida nearly four years
after Todd's death. That counted as a lie, an intent to deceive, not an oversight, not a misremembering, a lie. And the fact that Cindy later used some of the money from Todd's life insurance policy to pay for those new implants, well, that just bolstered the financial motive theory.
When she was interviewed in Florida, we asked her how she dealt with Todd's d...
And she said, "Well, I got these and pointed to her breasts."
“The heart and soul of the prosecution's case was the lab analysis of Todd Summer's tissues”
that had been done more than a year after he died. A potential danger is out for any lawyer hoping to hold a jury's attention. I knew that when we got to that part of the case, it was going to get difficult and it was going to be possible for somebody to get bogged down in it. According to the analysis, Todd Summer had died with more than 200 times the normal range
of arsenic in his kidney and more than a thousand times the normal amount in his liver. In the week and a half before Todd died, he suffered from vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, all symptoms that are consistent with acute arsenic poisoning. In this part of the trial, it was scientists who took center stage.
“The prosecution presented witnesses who talked about the different kinds of arsenic,”
which kinds are toxic and which are not. Others spoke in numbing detail about the chain of custody regarding Todd Summer's tissues and how they were preserved, prepared for testing and analyzed. A little part of the tissue is taken, it's cut, and then it's weight. That is Todd or Todd are off, the chemists who tested Todd Summer's tissues.
The tissue is digested in nitric acid and the resulting solution is analyzed by inductive the couple of plasma mass spectrometer to get the concentrations of the various metals. According to the scientists from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the lab that did the testing. Every test came out the same, consistently high levels of arsenic in Todd's liver and kidney. We have a guy whose tissues were full of lethal levels of arsenic and poisoning is, you know,
kind of by definition, a crime that requires some access. And so we looked into his movements that week and really there weren't any other adults that had both a financial motive and consistent access to him in that regard. And then, unlike other parts of the prosecution's case where the jury could be shown facts, financial records, and solid scientific results, this section was where the case could turn
on the prosecutor's ability to sculpt smoke. Since there was no way to show the jury how, when or where Cindy Summer obtained the poison that killed her husband, the prosecutor needed to convince them that it happened the way she theorized it happened, some way, some out. Where do you think she got the arsenic?
There's really no way to say. There are so many places where she could have gotten arsenic and, you know, we know that she was an internet user, we know that she was an eBay client, but we don't know everything about her computer use. That is because the computer, Cindy owned at the time of her husband's death, was long
on by the time investigators got around to classify that death as a homicide. That did not stop the prosecutor from arguing Cindy could have bought arsenic on the internet. arsenic is getable on the internet, it's getable from various other sources, and there really isn't any way to say, you know, anything is possible in terms of where she could have gotten it.
Laura Gunn was certainly not the first prosecutor to build a case on an airy foundation
of circumstance, essentially asking the jury, who else, but the accused, could have done this after presenting more than 40 witnesses over the first two weeks of this trial. That was the question the prosecutor wanted the jury to ponder. The responsibility for defending Cindy Summer rested on the narrow shoulders of Bob Yudel, a floor at a base attorney hired by Cindy's mom.
Yudel was one of those guys where it's hard to tell where their beard stopped and their hairline began. He kept a pair of granting glasses perpetually perched on the end of his nose.
“Yudel, this would be the best way to put on any evidence.”
Yudel's first witness for the defense was his client, Cindy Summer.
She was also sporting a shiner under her right eye that nearly matched her pu...
blouse.
Cindy would later say she got the black eye, from falling out of her bunk at the jail.
Yudel started by asking Cindy to talk about the night Todd died. We were just sitting on the bed getting ready for bed and he said that his heart had fluttered and I asked him if he was okay and if we needed to go to the hospital and he said that he was okay. For the next 55 minutes Cindy told the story of her life with Todd, from the moment
they met, till their last moments together on the night he died. It was a credible performance. One her lawyer believed showed Cindy to be authentic, likable, and completely incapable of murder.
Cindy's the all-American girl.
That's Cindy's lawyer, Bob Yudel. And Cindy grew up, her golden life, was to be the wife of a marine.
“That's what Cindy wanted to do in life, and she married a marine, and she didn't know”
all of a sudden decide to kill that marine. Cindy Summer is the kind of girl that when they play the national anthem, she cries. Oh, there were some tender moments all right, like when Cindy spoke of getting a tattoo memorial to Todd on her arm, just weeks after he died. The tattoo was across, just like one Todd had wanted, and it included two dates.
The date of his birth when the date of his death. Correct.
Okay, and was that put on there when you put the tattoo on, yes.
Then there was a touching account of how Cindy had frequently called her dead husband cell phone. Why were you calling Todd cell phone? Just the hair is blaze. Unfortunately for Cindy, those stories lost a bit of their emotional punch when she had to explain why she had also memorialized two other men on the same tattoo she had gotten
for Todd, and why phone record showed those sentimental calls to her dead husband cell phone. We're being returned.
“Are you sure you didn't loan Todd's phone to somebody, and did he work calling you back?”
Here Cindy had to explain that, well, you know, she had loaned that phone to her daughter. And there are times that she probably called him back. It was an active phone in the house. It was a rocky road for the defense, but Cindy was game. She spoke frankly about the family's money struggles.
During the marriage, you guys lived over your head, correct? Every meal to her family does, yes. And she defended her decision to use part of Todd's life insurance payout to cover her breast augmentation, saying it was something Todd had wanted her to do. In fact, she said, Todd had gone with her to several consultations, not just the one that
the investigators had questioned her in Florida, had focused on.
“Remember, no recording of that conversation exists.”
I told them that Todd was with you when you went to a doctor to get consultation. Right. I had been to more than one consultation, and I didn't just find one doctor and go there. I guess I was there. Then Bob Yodell called a series of character witnesses to bolster his claim that Cindy had
been a loving wife and a beautiful mother. And it was right then when this happened, okay, we put that in. It was the sound of a door opening. Legally, that refers to one side giving the other an unexpected opportunity to introduce testimony or evidence that had previously been banned.
It happened when Cindy's mother took the stand. She told the jury what a grieving widow Cindy had been after Todd's death. I walked into their bedroom and she was in bed, and she was carrying up in her feet because she was just sobbing and controlling. Well, to prosecute or lower gun, that testimony probably sounded like a very large door opening.
If the defense was going to present Cindy to the jury as a grieving widow, then the prosecution
Had an opportunity to rub but you had to see that comment.
Absolutely, we saw it coming, and we knew it was a problem, and we tried to keep it out.
“And I thought I had kept it out, and the judge ruled that no I had opened the door to it.”
And that's the sin I confessed to today, making that era. I still think I'm right, I still think the judge was wrong, allowing that into evidence. Suddenly, all of Cindy's indiscretions as the merry widow were fair game. And it got blown out of proportion, breast implants, parties, sex must be guilty. And, like top 40 radio on Memorial Day weekend, the hits just kept coming.
The prosecution pointed out the two weeks before Todd Summer died. Cindy had used her credit card to access an adult single's dating site. The significance of that is certainly open to debate on both sides. Prosecutor Laura Gun. But one has to question why somebody would be on an adult single's dating website if one was
in the happy marriage that was portrayed by the defense in this case. The optics to say the least were bad. We understood how it doesn't look good.
“Now, on the substance of the case, Bobby Dale definitely had his moments.”
He countered the claim that Susan Beach had beaten first responders to the Summer home on the night
Todd Galapz, by saving full logs from that night, something the prosecution did not do. According to those full logs, Cindy called Susan to come watch the kids at 143. That would be minutes after paramedics arrived. Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
The question at the center of the prosecution case, the allegation that Cindy Summer had somehow poisoned her husband with arsenic, while the defense called their star witness, Dr. Elfantz Polklus. Please tell the jury your present occupation. On forensic toxicologists and the professor had Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.
“Polklus, you will remember, was the arsenic poisoning expert in CIA asked first consulted.”
When they got the results from lab tests done on Todd Summers' tissues. Those lab tests had shown more than a thousand times the expected amount of arsenic, in Todd's liver. Polklus says he told the NCIS investigator who met with him that those tests did not make sense and that there must have been some kind of mistake.
Did that concern you asked you whether or not Sergeant Summer had been poisoned with arsenic? Can certainly, whether he was poisoned, it concerned me what the world was going on and who did this test? Did you tell them that?
Yes. According to Dr. Polklus, the problem was the test result showed very high concentrations in some tissues and normal levels in others. That he said is not the way arsenic is processed in the human body. Whenever you want to analyze, arsenic is carried everywhere through the body and goes into
all the tissues. Furthermore, Dr. Polklus said he told those investigators from NCIS that anyone exposed to those astronomical levels of arsenic would be very sick. And Todd's medical records from the week before he died said Dr. Polklus did not show that.
I've come to understand that after that visit to the hospital Tuesday, he went to work Wednesday, went to work Thursday, went to work Friday, that he went to some amusement park on Saturday and then he suddenly died Saturday night. It makes absolutely no sense that that's acute arsenic. Dr. Polklus said he told the NCIS investigators all of that.
And the result, he never heard from any of them again.
When it came time for closing arguments, both the defense and the prosecution leaned passionately into points, neither could prove. Defense Attorney Bob Udell argued there was no murder, lab tests showing lethal levels of arsenic and Todd's summers tissues were bogus he said. So wildly out of whack that the samples set out for testing must have somehow been contaminated.
"If there's no arsenic, there's no murder.
That's that. There isn't even any arsenic.
“For her part, prosecutor Laura Guntel the jury, Todd's son was clearly a case of murder,”
and that his wife, Cindy, was the only person on earth who could have given him the arsenic that killed him.
It's a fact that nobody else had access to Todd's summer at the time that he first started
to get sick and shows signs of being poisoned. After 18 days of testimony, the jury of seven women and five men went to a secluded room to decide which of those arguments represented the truth.
“Next time, they thought I was an animated jerk.”
They commented upon my glasses and faces that I make. Jury hated me.
Everybody was, you know, like, they couldn't believe our verdict and I mean, I was like,
"What?" One alternate juror has come forward to say that she heard two of the jurors discussing some parts about the case when they shouldn't have been.
“Yes, without furthering this case, I've received wildly 50 letters and emails.”
These are encouraging me to do one thing or the other with regard to the verdict, you know, a whole of the verdict, or the rest of the verdict. This podcast is a production of date line and NBC news. Tim Beachow is the producer. Michelle Housefell, Brian Drew, and Meredith Kramer are audio editors.
Molly Dorosa is a associate producer. Rachel Young is field producer. Adam Gourphane 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 Melve. Cheers. 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 Melve from today. On YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.
