Case Illustrates Rarity of Murder by Poisoning : Crime: Orange County death confounded investigators for months. The victim’s husband has been convicted of killing her with cyanide.

The murder case of Richard K. Overton was unusual for more than its twisting course and the cryptic diaries that helped persuade jurors that the Dana Point computer consultant killed his wife seven years ago.

The slaying was especially rare for the weapon used: cyanide.

Murder by poison, the stuff of Agatha Christie mysteries and palace plots, is almost unheard of in modern America. A ranking of the ways Americans kill each other puts poison next to the bottom--just above being tossed from a window.

Nationwide, the FBI counted only nine poison slayings out of 23,271 homicides in 1993. In Orange County, the cyanide slaying was one of only four poisoning homicides since 1982, including the unsolved death of a San Clemente woman whose body was pumped with fatal levels of nicotine last year.

“It’s pretty rare, because we’ve got no gun control. We had to go to Europe to find our expert,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans, who won conviction of Overton in a retrial that ended last Monday. “If you want to kill somebody, why fool around with poison when unfortunately you can whack ‘em with a gun?”

Overton, 66, was convicted of giving a fatal dose of cyanide to his 46-year-old wife, Janet, an elected trustee of the Capistrano Unified School District who collapsed in the family’s driveway on Jan. 24, 1988. He kept meticulous journals documenting the couple’s failing marriage--and revealing, prosecutors said, a slow poisoning campaign using a separate chemical.

The death confounded investigators for months and initially was not classified as murder. But an ex-wife of Overton called authorities alleging that he had poisoned her nearly 20 years earlier. Although the body of Janet Overton was already cremated, further testing on tissue kept from the autopsy found cyanide.

“The guy almost pulled this thing off,” juror Art Shappy, an Anaheim machinist, said after the verdict.

Poison, once dubbed “the coward’s weapon,” has long spiced history and legend. Socrates was forced to take hemlock. Medieval France crawled with rumors that lepers were poisoning wells. When bubonic plague swept Europe in the 14th Century, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and food supplies. The ruling Borgia family in Italy was widely rumored to have raised poisoning of their rivals to an art form. In 1982, when deadly cyanide killed seven Chicago-area people who had taken Tylenol capsules, it was an age-old fear come true. In 1991, the body of President Zachary Taylor was exhumed amid fanfare to see if he died from arsenic. (He did not.)

“What must strike a chord in us is the idea that you’ve ingested (poison) and there’s no way to tell. You’re done before you know it,” said T. Jefferson Parker, a Laguna Beach mystery writer. “That’s kind of spooky.”

Just as the Overton case winds down, Orange County sheriff’s investigators are probing the death last year of a San Clemente woman.

Linda L. Curry, a 50-year-old employee at Southern California Edison, was pronounced dead when taken to Samaritan Medical Center on June 10. Coroner’s investigators ruled the cause unknown until a few months ago, when toxicology tests found fatal levels of nicotine in her system. The case is being handled as a murder.

Besides being the addicting agent in tobacco, nicotine was once a common ingredient in pesticides and a frequent source of accidental contamination. But nicotine murders are very rare.

“I never came across nicotine used as a homicidal agent,” said Dr. Ashok Jain, a poison-control official at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

Detectives said the nicotine investigation is just under way, and no one has been arrested. “We haven’t even determined yet how it was administered,” said Orange County sheriff’s investigator Bob Russell.

“It is not an easy crime to detect,” said Gilbert Geis, a retired criminologist at UC Irvine. “Backing a car out of a garage over a husband or wife is a lovely way to kill because they’re never going to find you out. Poisoning is another.”

In fact, experts say, an undetermined number of poisonings may be mistaken as natural deaths--especially of the sick and elderly--because bodies are seldom checked for toxic substances unless something points to poisoning.

A tipster helped police nab Sacramento landlady Dorothea Puente, 64, convicted in 1993 of murder for drugging three of her tenants and stealing their government benefit checks. The crimes had gone undetected for months when authorities found seven bodies buried in the garden of her boarding house. All the bodies were found to contain the prescription drug Dalmane, although the jury could reach verdicts on only three cases.

Blanche Taylor Moore, a North Carolina preacher’s daughter, is awaiting the death penalty for the 1986 poisoning of her boyfriend. The crime was unsolved for three years--until she allegedly tried to poison her second husband. She also was suspected of fatally poisoning her first husband in a case turned into a 1993 TV movie, “The Black Widow Murders.”

Tim Dobeck, a Cleveland prosecutor, is preparing for a retrial this year of a cyanide murder case that initially eluded authorities. Two years ago, he won conviction of an embalmer whose 42-year-old wife was found dead in the bathtub with no apparent cause of death. Coroners were baffled for weeks but kept the probe open because anonymous callers told investigators to keep looking. Finally, cyanide turned up in test results.

“Cyanide is one of those things you don’t typically check for,” Dobeck said.

The conviction was reversed, however, on an appeal challenging the use of a jailhouse informant. The second trial begins in June.

Sometimes the poisoner gives himself away.

In a 1982 case, San Jose authorities arrested the husband of Susan Bowen, who fell ill and nearly died, just weeks after the Tylenol episode sparked a national scare. Richard Ray Bowen initially told police she had taken Anacin-3 pain reliever. But he aroused suspicion by suggesting that her pain reliever had been laced. Tests found cyanide in her system.

Prosecutors said Richard Bowen had a girlfriend, had tried to buy life insurance on his wife before the poisoning and was planning a product-tampering suit against the pain reliever company. He was convicted of attempted murder and served six years in prison.

“He wanted to get rid of his wife, run off with his girlfriend and get some money out of it,” said the prosecutor, Lane Liroff.

It takes only a pinch of cyanide to kill, and death usually arrives in minutes. Cyanide, forms of which are used in everything from art printing to extracting gold from ore, attacks enzymes that help the body use oxygen. A stricken person can breathe, but the body can’t process its own oxygen.

“It’s like having a whole ocean of water and you’re not able to drink it,” said Jain, the USC toxicology expert.

Cyanide sometimes leaves investigators one telltale clue: an odor commonly compared to bitter almonds. The problem is, about half of the population cannot smell it.

Indeed, in the Overton case, pathologists did not smell bitter almonds. But prosecutors said during the trial that Overton may have masked the scent by giving his wife chlorine pills, which were found in his house.

Workers at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s forensics laboratory are screened for their ability to smell the odor so they can more easily recognize cyanide in cases they are studying.

Still, poisonings are so rare in America that prosecutors on the Overton case looked to London’s Scotland Yard, which they figured had more experience solving such crimes.

They found Dr. Bryan Ballantyne, a British poison expert who once helped London authorities investigate a case involving local mob bosses who sought to silence witnesses using a cyanide-containing syringe loaded on a briefcase. The assassin lost his nerve and never went through with the hit.

Ballantyne was instrumental in helping Orange County prosecutors prove that the cyanide found in Janet Overton’s body was sufficient to kill.

Little has been written about traits of murderers who choose poison.

A psychiatrist who studies criminals said the act of poisoning lacks the outward rage expressed in bloodier assaults, such as shootings and stabbings.

“When you shoot somebody . . . you make a statement of power and anger. Rage is expressed, particularly if there’s a lot of splatter,” said Bruce L. Danto, a Fullerton-based forensic psychiatrist and onetime homicide investigator.

“Poisoning is for me--the poisoner,” he said. “Violence is kind of the ultimate act of power, and poisoning isn’t.”

The element of guile attached to poisoning is what makes it a favorite theme of mystery writers--and, long ago, the scourge of paranoid princes.

“It was not uncommon for people who felt they were politically on the outs to claim they were being poisoned or about to be poisoned,” said James Given, a history professor at UC Irvine.

But Given said those fears--and the perception of olden Europe as a hotbed of poisoning--are probably inaccurate. Given, who has studied murder in medieval England, found no instances of poisoning in 2,500 homicide cases he researched.

“Poisoning seems to be something that’s more in the imagination of medieval people rather than in practice,” he said.

The same may hold true today.

In Great Britain, the home of fictional sleuths Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, there were only 10 poison and narcotics killings in England and Wales in 1993, out of 606 murders, according to British officials.

“You’d get the idea we have a lot of poisonings--all the Miss Marples and all that,” said Chief Inspector David Spencer, spokesman for a national police chief’s organization in England. “I don’t think we have widespread problems.”

The real drama, he said, is in the overall homicide rate in America.

“The question really is not why do we have 10 poisonings,” Spencer said, “but why do you all keep killing each other?”

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Methods of Murder

Poisoning is among the least-used methods of murder. How homicides were committed nationwide in 1993, the most recent year for which information is available: Firearms: 16,189 Knives, cutting instruments: 2,957 Personal attacks (hands, etc.): 1,161 Blunt objects (clubs, etc.): 1,024 Strangulation: 329 Fire: 217 Asphyxiation: 113 Explosives: 26 Drowning: 23 Narcotics: 22 Poison: 9 Pushed/thrown from window: 3 All others: 1,198 Total: 23,271 Source: FBI

Researched by KEN ELLINGWOOD / Los Angeles Times