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a young farmen's untimely death raised suspicions when a young policeman died the same way
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it was no coincidence scientists wondered if these tiny crystals were the cause [Music]
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a fireman's job is exceptionally dangerous and for randy thompson the year 2000 was particularly troublesome
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first he fell off a fire truck in [ __ ] georgia and broke his nose when he had surgery to repair the damage
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he developed a life-threatening staph infection the doctors told him this is a very very
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serious situation you can die from this very easily randy survived that but his health problems continued
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one of his friends found him sprawled on his kitchen floor vomiting and incoherent
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he started hallucinating he looked at me said get back in your damn cage now look
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i said what get in your cage what are you talking about randy i said get in your cage then i realized
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he thought he was talking to his bird this was diagnosed as a severe stomach virus
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but gradually he improved thanks to help from his common-law wife lynn every time i talk to him he sounded
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stronger and stronger and he said lynn made me grilled cheese with sweet tea he said i held it down didn't throw it up
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i said well good right now so that's good so maybe you're on the you're on the uphill side of this
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days later his condition deteriorated and randy thompson died horrible a daddy taken from his children
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for no reason a man taken from a career that he loved for no reason at randy's autopsy toxicology tests
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found no trace of drugs or alcohol in his system but the medical examiner found evidence
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of heart trouble he did have a large heart he did have some significant coronary artery disease
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and so as a consequence then i described this gentleman's sudden unexpected death
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with his heart disease that was hard for us to swallow because he had never had any
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heart problems before i was devastated it was a an experience i don't ever want to have again
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randy left behind his common-law wife lynn and their two young children he was just 32 years old
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the very last thing he asked me was do you think i'm gonna die as time passed randy thompson's friends
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and family gradually came to terms with his untimely death until a few weeks later
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when randy's mother got a letter from a total stranger the mother of a dead policeman
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from the next town over the contents of the letter were shocking i want to share my sorrow in the loss of
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your son randy my son glenn died six years ago mysteriously i didn't really know what to think
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everything she told me was exactly what happened to randy [Music] a few weeks after randy thompson's death
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his mother got a letter i want to share my sorrow in the loss of your son randy it was from a woman who claimed her son
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died under similar circumstances and suggested the two deaths were somehow related i was shocked that her son
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and my son died the exact same way the report from the hospital the autopsy reports everything was just the same
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nita thompson did not believe me she kept saying that can't be true that can't be true
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six years earlier glenn turner a police officer had the same symptoms as randy thompson
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he was so sick i could hear his voice shaking when he talked to me he just said he had an unbelievable stomach
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virus he couldn't get rid of it he was vomiting couldn't stop vomiting he had diarrhea and he's just basically
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said man i've never been sick like this he was also incoherent and hallucinating
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his wife said he'd had a really bad night that in the middle of the night he
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had got up began to hallucinate he began to run around the house he pulled out his weapon he thought
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there was intruders outside intruders trying to get inside the house glenn's wife coaxed him back into bed
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the next morning he appeared to be better he'd called me he was going to go to
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work the next day and i thought that you know he was sounding good and i thought that he was going to
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be fine but a few hours later glenn turner died the medical examiner made the statement
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in the autopsy that he died with a irregular heartbeat that was nothing that he ever had a
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problem with glenn's mother immediately suspected foul play she asked his friends in law enforcement
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to investigate his death but she got nowhere they kept telling me that he died of
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natural causes and there was no reason to go into any further because it cost too much money and that there was no
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foul play in his life i still had strong suspicions that there was something else involved in it but
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the me stated that's what it was and i'm not a medical examiner so i pretty much
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had to accept it and that's how it stood until six years later when the turner family learned that
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randy thompson died the same way it was difficult to fathom how two civil servants in two neighboring towns both
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in their early thirties died so suddenly until both families realized they had something else in common
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the two men were both living with the same woman when they died lynn turner i couldn't turn to get on the phone
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quick enough i called them lead investigator and i just basically said you need to go out there and seal off
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the apartment do what you need to do because i'm telling you there's no way
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uh you could have two young guys like this pass away when questioned lynn turner claimed
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it was just a tragic coincidence and local prosecutors found no evidence the two deaths were connected after all
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lynn turner had no criminal history i actually just thought that it was really really bad luck
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that lynn had been involved with two men who had died that way and friends pointed out that lynn's
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common-law husband randy thompson had very little life insurance just 35 000 dollars hardly enough to
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kill for and toxicology tests on both randy thompson and glenn turner found no evidence of drugs or alcohol in their
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systems we still had strong suspicions that something she had done to him that caused his death but at the time
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i'm not i'm just a police officer i'm not an m.e i couldn't prove it
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then investigators made a startling discovery even though randy thompson had only 35
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000 worth of life insurance lynn was in a big hurry to collect it we were able to determine through cell
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phone records that on the day of randy's funeral between the time of the service
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in the church and the service that was held at the cemetery lynn was on her cell phone trying to
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contact the insurance company maybe there was more to the death of these two men
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than first appeared glenn must have had something to do with some of this because there is no way two young man
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police officer and a firefighter dying at a young age without somebody doing something
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what are the chances that two civil servants both in their early 30s would die under mysterious circumstances from
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heart disease the southeast part of the country leads the nation in cardiovascular disease
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and in our office it is not uncommon that we see young men men of mr thompson's age who
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have bad heart disease toxicology tests on the first victim policeman glenn turner showed no signs
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of alcohol or illegal drugs in his system but during randy thompson's autopsy
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the medical examiner found calcium oxalate crystals in his kidneys these could be the result
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of prescription medications or it could be a sign of poisoning the first thing i did was reach across
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my desk and pick up the phone and call the toxicology department and ask that an ethylene glycol test be performed
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ethylene glycol is the chemical name for antifreeze when we ran the sample from randy
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thompson and analyzed for ethylene glycol the results came back negative for a significant quantity of ethylene
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glycol but the medical examiner had a hard time believing that so i thought that was very very strange
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and bizarre then dr caponen learned what happened to lynn turner's first husband glenn
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six years earlier on a hunch he reviewed glenn turner's autopsy report i looked at all the tissues and
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polarized the lung in the kidney as i do in all of my cases and to my surprise there were oxalate
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crystals in glenn turner's kidneys so dr caponen went back to the toxicology lab and asked them to recheck
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the test results on randy thompson's tissue samples and the lab discovered they'd made a mathematical error
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i immediately realized that i had made an error in calculating the original concentration of ethylene glycol and
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randy thompson's flood and in fact it was off by a factor of 10. when we made the appropriate correction
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for the mathematical air that i had made suddenly became a a lethal level of ethylene glycol
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i've been doing this for [Music] almost 20 years now and this is the first time that such a mistake has
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has ever been been brought to my attention the medical examiner now knew that randy thompson's death was a
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homicide based on the corrected toxicology report then it was quite obvious that mr
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thompson died as a consequence of an acute ethylene glycol intoxication or poisoning
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when i found out randy had died from antifreeze poisoning i knew when they exhumed glenn's body
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when they took those tissues i knew they were going to find out he died from the exact same causes
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and that's precisely what happened officials exhumed glenn turner's body
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retested his tissue samples and confirmed there was a lethal amount of antifreeze
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in his system it's a mixed feeling because you're happy that you've got something happening but
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you're not happy to hear what you hear investigators did some digging into lynn
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turner's background and uncovered more incriminating evidence first was her visit to an animal shelter
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shortly before randy thompson's murder lynn had inquired about what the animal
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shelter uses to euthanize animals what chemical they use she had claimed that she had a stray cat
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problem and was wondering what it was that that she could do about them and the manager of lynn turner's bank
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told investigators lynn had serious financial problems she had a lot of debts outstanding a lot
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of credit cards were she was being charged for uh non-sufficient funds for late charges
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adding up to several thousand dollars monthly lynn had a middle class income but she
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spent like she was a millionaire i mean she lived well beyond her means and that wasn't all
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lynn had gone until the bank a few weeks before randy died and told one of the bank officials that she would have
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everything taken care of all her payments mortgages everything etc taken care of
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in just a few weeks prosecutors believe the motive for both murders was money lynn turner was the beneficiary of her
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first husband's 150 000 life insurance policy and also received his pension payments of 750 a month
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and she was all set to collect 200 000 from randy thompson's life insurance policy but investigators found evidence
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that randy double-crossed her lynn had topped randy into buying life insurance of 200 000
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and she was the beneficiary of that policy but when after randy passed away she found out that the policy had left
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and she would not be getting that money this also raised the possibility that randy might have suspected lynn was
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trying to harm him investigators also learned that a container of anti-freeze had been found
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in the home lynn shared with her husband glenn turner although at the time no one found this
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suspicious so lynn turner was arrested on two counts of first degree murder she insisted she was innocent
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and was sure there wasn't enough evidence to convict her lynn was smart lynn wanted to be a
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police officer she knew a lot she knew how to commit the crime she knew what they'd look for and she
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knew how to create an alibi lynne turner met her first husband glenn while working as a 9-1-1 operator
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but less than two years later glenn told friends the marriage was in trouble he said that they'd only had sex twice
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after they were married he said that she had some kind of female problem and she
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wasn't able to have sex of course we're all thinking to ourselves well we we i could name three or four other
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guys she's seeing that she's having sex with of course i couldn't say anything
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to him glenn also told friends lynn was spending money faster than he could earn
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it he said here i am working 365 days working all these part-time jobs sometimes two or three jobs a day i've
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about gotta paid off and here she just rung them all back up again i mean she just had a stack of credit cards and
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just spent spent spent spent while lynne was married to glenn she met randy thompson a fireman from a nearby
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town randy's family says lynn lied about her marital status lynn had told us she had been married
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but that she was divorced she told all of that told randy that we assume she was divorced lynn's
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primary motive for murdering glenn was for the the money i think his secondary motive was to to
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be with randy thompson the forensic evidence suggests lynn put antifreeze in glenn's food
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possibly in gelatin since this was found in his stomach during his autopsy [Music]
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glenn felt violently ill and died lynn collected a hundred fifty thousand dollars from his life insurance along
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with his pension of seven hundred fifty dollars a month i knew she didn't love
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him so i knew it was pending gloom for him and i figured she'd use him for everything she could use him for then
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she'd spit him back out but i never thought that she'd kill him just a few weeks after glenn's funeral
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lynn moved in with randy thompson although they had two children together they were never legally married
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probably because lynn would have had to forfeit glenn turner's pension i believe that's why she didn't marry
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randy she'd have lost glenn's pension by remarrying so she didn't marry she's smart
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she knew that money was out it wasn't long before randy thompson told friends just as glenn turner had
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that he was unhappy with lynn it was almost comical the way they fought cat and dog just back and forth back and
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forth back and forth my ass was why do you keep calling her why do you even take phone calls
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well she's the mom of my kids and my wife okay whatever an employee of a local animal shelter
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said that lynn wanted to buy the chemicals they used to euthanize cats but they refused to sell them to her
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she didn't want to use antifreeze again she checked around she wanted to use
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something different to kill randy but she wasn't confident enough to use anything else she went back to what she
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used before randy told friends lynn prepared his lunch shortly before he became violently
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ill a grilled cheese sandwich and sweet tea investigators think the anti-freeze was
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in the t within a day randy was dead it was only after his death that lynn learned that randy allowed his
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two hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy to lapse just eleven days earlier
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she gave him the the ethylene glycol i think that uh it's very slow cruel death
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uh it's not like uh you shoot someone and you immediately change your mind and start getting on
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first aid i mean there was no no aid given and she had plenty of opportunity to give aid and she didn't on either
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case when these murders happened antifreeze had a taste that could easily be masked with sweet tasting foods
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the industry has since modified antifreeze so that it is now unpalatable we the jury find the defendant julia
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lynn womack turner guilty of malice murder in may of 2004 lynn turner was convicted for killing
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her husband glenn three years later in 2007 lynn was also convicted of randy thompson's murder
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she is currently serving a life sentence with no chance for parole to hear the guilty verdict was very difficult
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you don't like to hear that your daughter-in-law has done something like this to anybody
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despite the mathematical misstep by the toxicology lab scientists eventually discovered the
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truth about what happened to both randy thompson and glenn turner it was a challenging case to get it all
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out there even though it really was quite simple that you had two men who had been involved with her and both had
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died the exact same way forensic evidence without it we had nothing we wouldn't
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have had a case it had been just a bunch of hearsay and rumors but the forensic evidence it was uh all the nails in the
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coffin it was the hammer that put everything away [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music]
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[Music] you