Stella Maudine Nickell (née Stephenson; born August 7, 1943) is an American woman who was sentenced to ninety years in prison for product tampering after she poisoned Excedrin capsules with lethal cyanide, resulting in the deaths of her husband Bruce Nickell and Sue Snow, a stranger.
Her May 1988 conviction and prison sentence were the first under federal product tampering laws instituted after the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders.
[2] When her bar visits were curtailed by Bruce's sobriety, [3] she began requesting evening shifts at her security screener job at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport and cultivated a home aquarium as a new hobby.
[5] During an autopsy on Snow, Assistant Medical Examiner Janet Miller detected the scent of bitter almonds, an odor distinctive to cyanide.
When another tainted bottle from the same lot was found in a grocery store in nearby Kent, Bristol-Myers, the manufacturers of Excedrin, responded to the discovery with a heavily publicized recall of all Excedrin products in the Seattle area,[8] and a group of drug companies came together to offer a $300,000 reward for the capture of the person responsible.
She told police that her husband had recently died suddenly after taking pills from a 40-capsule bottle of Excedrin with the same lot number as the one that had killed Snow.
[2] Tests by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirmed the presence of cyanide in her husband's remains and in two Excedrin bottles Stella had turned over to police.
[3] The FDA inspected the Morrisville, North Carolina, plant where the tainted lot had been packaged, but found no traces of cyanide to explain its presence in the Washington bottles.
[2] A total of five bottles had been found to have been contaminated in the entire country, and it was regarded as suspicious that Nickell would happen to have acquired two of them purely by chance.
[6] Concrete evidence proving that she had ever purchased or used cyanide was lacking, and despite their relative certainty that she had orchestrated the poisonings as either an elaborate cover-up for an insurance-motivated murder of her husband or a desperate attempt to force her husband's death to be ruled an accident to increase her insurance payout, they were unable to build a strong case supporting arrest.
[1] Further proof of Nickell's involvement was determined when her name was found on library records showing she borrowed a book on botany, which contained a chapter about poisonous plants.
In January 1987, Nickell's now-grown daughter, Cynthia Hamilton, approached police with information: her mother had spoken to her repeatedly about wanting her husband dead, having grown bored with him after he quit drinking.
[5] Nickell, Hamilton claimed, had even told her that she had tried to poison Bruce previously with foxglove hidden in capsules.
[13] On December 9, 1987, Nickell was indicted by a federal grand jury on five counts of product tampering, including two which resulted in the deaths of Bruce and Snow,[6][14] and arrested the same day.
All sentences were to run concurrently, and the judge ordered Nickell to pay a small fine and forfeit her remaining assets to the families of her victims.
[19] As of April 2019[update], Stella Nickell is housed at female-only low security/minimum security Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin in California, just east of San Francisco.
Nickell claimed that her daughter, Cynthia Hamilton, lied about her involvement in the case in order to reap the $300,000 of reward money being offered.
Nickell also alleges that the evidence actually points to another person as the killer, and that the testimony about various smaller details in the case, such as the store owner who testified about her having purchased Algae Destroyer, was influenced by promises of payment.
[27] After the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, new FDA regulations went into effect which made it a federal crime—rather than just a state or local crime—to tamper with consumer products.
[2] The case was referenced in an episode of In Plain Sight titled "Kill Pill", which aired November 23, 2018 on the Investigation Discovery channel.