FBI Tampering Alleged in Cyanide Case

June 6, 2001 -- Stella Nickell has never stopped denying she killed her husband Bruce with cyanide in 1986. But now her defense team says they can prove her innocence.

Nickell, 57, is serving two 90-year prison terms after being found guilty of putting cyanide in a pain-reliever capsule taken by her husband and trying to hide the crime by tampering with other bottles of the over-the-counter drug, which resulted in a second death.

Her case came at a time when the country was reeling from a series of drug-tampering incidents.

Now, two private investigators who have been digging into the Seattle case for 14 months say they can prove her innocence with documents the FBI never turned over to the defense at the time of the trial.

If the claim sounds strangely familiar, think again, says Al Farr, one of the two sleuths who have been working on the case.

"I know when news first got out there that we were doing this, some people assumed we were just floating on Tim McVeigh's coattails," Farr said. "That couldn't be further from the truth."

The FBI has admitted it failed to turn over more than 4,000 documents in the case of McVeigh, who faces the death penalty for the deadly Oklahoma City bombing.

Farr, Paul Ciolino and attorney Carl Colbert have filed a motion with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking permission to reopen Nickell's case.

The court has 30 days to respond, and can ask for further information, ask the U.S. attorney's office for a response or decline the request.

A Question of Innocence

The FBI in Seattle has referred all questions about the case to the U.S. attorney's office. A spokesman there said Nickell had received a fair trial.

To Farr and Ciolino, though, the evidence is overwhelming.

"We did not come into this case because we thought there were some nice legal technicalities involved that would perhaps swing her out the jail door," Ciolino said.

"Her legal technicality days are over with. They're done. The only thing walking her out of that jail cell in California is a question of innocence."

The only doubt remaining, according to the investigators, is the extent of the guilt of the FBI and drug companies in sending Nickell to jail for two 90-year prison terms.

"Stella Nickell is a victim," Ciolino said. "She is not a murderer. She did not tamper with products. She did not conspire to defraud any insurance company. She didn't do anything but be a wife and a mother and a grandmother. And for her trouble the FBI targeted her and eventually convicted her of horrendous crimes, basically taking her life away from her."

Nickell's 1988 trial was short, just 2 ½ weeks.

A Slam Dunk or Bunk?

Farr said he was approached in the fall of 1999 by a colleague who persuaded him to look into Nickell's case. He was skeptical, still carrying the memory of her quick conviction.

"I remembered thinking at the time, 'They must have her cold to slam dunk it like that,'" he said.

As he started to investigate, though, his doubts gradually built, and he eventually called in Ciolino "to make sure I wasn't barking up the wrong tree."

Then, in October, he was contacted by former FBI lab worker Frederic Whitehurst, who told him he had 1,000 pages of FBI documents related to the case that were never seen during the trial.

According to Farr, those documents indicate the FBI focused on Nickell as the key suspect early on, and not only concealed evidence that may have helped her, but also allegedly tampered with two witnesses.

Documents he received from Whitehurst back up a claim by Nickell's daughter, Cynthia Hamilton, that the FBI filed the papers needed to get her a $250,000 reward from the Nonprescription Drug Manufacturers Association given to people who helped resolve drug- tampering cases.

At the 1988 trial, Hamilton testified that her mother often talked about wanting to get rid of her husband because she was bored with him.

Missing Witness

The FBI also convinced a family friend, Anna Jo Rider, that Nikell had hired a hit man to kill her, and persuaded her to go into hiding so that the defense would not be able to find her to testify, Farr said. Even when Nickell's lawyers did find her, Rider was so convinced that her friend wanted her dead that she was too afraid to testify.

Farr said Rider would have refuted two aspects of the prosecution's case — that Nickell often talked about wanting her husband dead, and that she bought two bottles of Extra-Strength Excedrin that contained capsules contaminated with cyanide at different times.

Rider lived with the Nickells in the months before Bruce Nickell died and rode to and from work with Stella Nickell and her daughter every day.

Farr said Rider told him she had never heard Nickell speak badly of her husband. This would directly contradict Hamilton, who said at the time that her mother talked incessantly during those rides to work about how badly she wanted to end her marriage to her husband.

A reason the government might have wanted to keep Rider from testifying was that she had already told investigators she was with Nickell when she bought two bottles of pain reliever in a two-for-one sale, Farr said.

Nickell could not remember buying the drug, and prosecutors in the trial emphasized how strange it was that one woman buying pain killers at different times could have bought two containers that had been tampered with.

Something else the defense never heard about was that on Sept. 8, 1986, three months after the two deaths, Seattle police found a pound of cyanide and a bag of red capsules "just like Excedrin" at the scene of an unrelated suicide, Farr said.

"I've turned over hundreds and hundreds of rocks and not once have I found a scrap of credible evidence pointing to Stella," he said. "The things the prosecutors said pointed to Stella, we have blown major holes in their testimony, or blown it away altogether."

Nickell is not eligible for parole until 2017.