'Perfect' Husband Takes a Terrifying Turn

July 19, 2006 — -- Cheri Kostrewa met Harald Ehrenfeld in the spring of 1986. She worked in a bakery, he in the frame shop next door. He was charming, while she was shy. Soon, Harald began to court Cheri, sending her flowers and cards. After dating for three years, he asked her to marry him.

"We got serious pretty quickly," Cheri tells "Primetime." "Within two months, he gave me an opal ring and by Christmas we were engaged. Our families were very happy. My family loved Harald. He's very charming, funny."

Cheri even thought sometimes that Harald was too good to be true.

"He was everything a boyfriend should be," she says. "You know, I thought I knew him very well. But sometimes ... just seemed sometimes too perfect."

Cheri's instincts turned out to be right.

A Different Harald

After they married, Cheri and Harald started a business together, selling gifts and frames in the small town of Medina, Ohio. They worked side by side six days a week and were so happy together, they put off having children for nine years.

Their son, Karl, was born on Nov. 7, 1998, and Cheri thought this would be the beginning of another happy chapter in her life. But within days of Karl's birth, the even-tempered husband Cheri knew seemed to have disappeared.

"He wouldn't want to get out of bed in the morning," she says. "He wouldn't want to interact with us. ... I would ask him, what's wrong? Because he just didn't feel like himself. And he would say, I don't ... feel good."

Nevertheless, Cheri became pregnant again two years later. This time, though, the joy was replaced with worry. Harald, Cheri says, continued to grow remote and withdrawn. Cheri says it was painful to watch her sons try to interact with their father.

"That was very painful to me," she says. "Sometimes he would ... come home and he would just turn on the television, and he'd be watching the television, and laying on the couch and Karl would be trying to tell him something. And he wouldn't even look at him."

Cheri says she tried desperately to reach Harald and urged him to seek help. Instead, when Karl was 8 months old, Harald chose to go on a trip with his mother to visit family in Norway, including a woman Cheri thought was only a cousin and a friend from Harald's childhood.

When Harald returned from the trip, he began to act suspiciously.

"When he came back he started receiving letters here at work from Norway," she said. "I said to him, 'Oh, I hear you got a letter from Norway,' and he'd deny it. He said, 'No, I didn't,' and that started a whole series of events. You know he was seen on the phone all the time. He would talk quietly and in the backroom. And he was seen writing letters."

Cheri was devastated when she learned that her husband of 14 years was corresponding with a mysterious woman in Norway. But when she confronted Harald, he denied it.

"He'd tell me that I was crazy, that I was imagining things, that I was too suspicious," she says. "And then he would become angry. ... He'd say, 'I can't take this anymore, I just can't take this anymore,' and he'd just get up and walk away from me, and then he wouldn't speak to me, sometimes for days."

Not So Innocent Objects

When Erik was months old and Karl was 2, Harald left home once again to visit his distant cousin, Hilda, a stunning beauty who had been Harald's first love.

Besides Harald's distance from the family, Cheri says she noticed something else, something even more disturbing.

"... when he returned from that trip is when I started to notice scary things at home," she says.

She noticed little items on the stairs began to appear after she took her sons to bed and came back down. "One time there were marbles, another time little matchbox cars. Um, blocks," she says.

Cheri says she checked and double-checked, and realized that little objects were being placed in her way, objects that could have made her trip and fall. She noticed other strange things as well.

"I always keep a glass of water by the bed, and I went to take a sip, and it was vile tasting, it tasted metallic. I was so bad that I woke Harald up," she says.

She tried to get him to taste it -- he refused. Alarm bells went off in her head, she says.

"I put it up on the dresser. I actually thought to myself, there is something wrong with this water. I'm going to take it and have it tested," she says. "And I went to take a shower, and when I came back it was gone."

By now, Cheri was beginning to question her own sanity, and fear for her safety.

"I thought, who is going to believe me? No one will believe me. Here is this great guy, people love him, he's well-respected, and I had no proof," she says.

Finally, Cheri turned to a friend and co-worker at the shop, Mary Ellen Prochaska. When Cheri poured out the story, Prochaska says, "I was thinking, are you kidding?"

But soon even Harald's co-workers thought he was acting strangely. He was withdrawn at work, spending countless hours huddled in a back office on long-distance calls.

Hold the Cheese

In spite of all the clues, Cheri was still having trouble believing Harald was trying to harm her. And then her food began tasting funny.

According to her, it began tasting "bitter, metallic. And it would leave this aftertaste ... like a can of soup, or a can of vegetables, and they've been in the can too long."

Meanwhile, though, Harald seemed to have snapped back to his old self. In fact, he seemed more cheerful and thoughtful than ever.

"In the past I would go home and have to make dinner, but then all of a sudden, I'd go home, and he'd say, 'Well, I made dinner for us, isn't that nice?'"

So Cheri ate the food Harald made for her for nearly six months, before she made a sickening discovery.

Harald had made frozen pizza and put extra cheese on Cheri's. "I started to eat it, and it had that taste, that funny bitter, metallic taste, and I said, this tastes funny," she says. "I took my fork, and I kind of lifted up the cheese, and underneath that I saw all these little green crystals."

Though she suspected Harald was indeed trying to poison her, Cheri did not leave the house.

"I still wanted to save this marriage, and I wanted to save him," she says.

When her food tasted strange, Cheri refused to eat it. But Harald found another way to introduce the poison. After having sex, Cheri would become violently ill and even found green crystals afterward. Harald had put it on a condom before they had sex, Cheri says.

"It was horrible. It was worse than the stomach flu," says Cheri. "I said I want to go to the hospital, I said, I'm really sick. And he said, 'Oh, you'll be fine, you just need rest, you'll be fine.'"

Cheri was horrified -- could the man she had loved as a husband, friend and father of her children really be determined to poison her? It was then she started looking for proof.

She found an empty film canister that contained green powder, the same color that she had seen in her food. She showed it to Harald and asked him what it was. He told her it was herbs. She took a sample of the powder and decided to have it tested. The Ohio State Crime Lab said it was backlogged, and it would take months to process the sample.

Shocking Phone Call

One afternoon, as Harald was preparing to leave for Norway again, Cheri answered the phone. On the other end was a stranger asking to speak to Harald -- it was a woman named Mary Jo who had no idea he was married.

After they spoke and Mary Jo found out Harald was married and had two children, she was stunned. "I was just so devastated. I just never expected a wife," Mary Jo says.

For the first time, Cheri felt as if she had the power -- proof of his infidelity, and a motive for murder.

"I didn't know what the green powder was," she says. "But now with Mary Jo ... it was something concrete that he can't lie his way out of."

Armed with that information, Cheri called Harald in Norway. "I told him I know about Mary Jo. I said, we're getting divorced, that's it."

When Harald finally returned home a month later, he found he was no longer welcome -- Cheri had changed the locks.

Frightened as she was, Cheri finally spoke to Harald and forced him to confess what the green powder was. Finally, he admitted it was rat poison.

That night Cheri took her husband to the hospital, where he was locked up in a psychiatric ward. For the first time in three years, she felt safe -- so safe, she chose not to press charges. While she was sure Harald would be confined to a psychiatric hospital for years, he was let go after ten days.

The Final Straw

Despite her husband's confession, Cheri still did not go to the police, until she found another piece of evidence while scanning an e-mail account the couple shared.

"I saw he had booked a flight back to Norway," she said.

Before he could catch his flight, Cheri contacted the district attorney. She offered to help catch her husband and put him in jail by secretly taping him, hoping for enough detail so he could be prosecuted.

On tape Harald admitted he had sprinkled rat poison in her food "once a month," but he blamed his actions on "my unthinking deep depression mood."

But one day a co-worker stumbled on evidence to the contrary and a clear motive for Harald to poison his wife. Hidden in the ceiling of the couple's small business were photographs, love letters and even a videotape of Harald and Hilda kissing.

Harald was arrested and on July 1, 2005; he pleaded guilty to food-contamination charges. He received ten years in prison without the possibility of parole.

During the trial, Harald was given the opportunity to address his wife; he said he was "truly sorry."

Cheri finally divorced Harald in August. The question remains: If Harald wanted to be with another woman, why didn't he just divorce Cheri?

"I think the answer is he couldn't stand to be the bad guy," Cheri says. "Standing up to the disapproval of his family, his friends, his co-workers. I don't think ... he couldn't face that."

The hardest part for Cheri is accepting how normal things appeared before they suddenly took this bizarre and terrifying turn.

"That's what made it so hard for me to accept it; it was all so normal," she says. "And if he were released today, and he was walking down the street, you'd probably say hi to him and think, what a nice guy."