Up next, he's young,
he's healthy.
And soon he's fighting
for his life.
I called 911, and it just kind
of all snowballed from there.
Family, friends and the
law want an explanation.
It's not something
that happens every day.
We think somebody
must be to blame.
And the blame
comes down with devastating consequences.
The problem wasn't
the evidence in this case.
The forensic evidence
in this case was solid.
Todd Sommer had long
wanted to serve his country,
so straight out of high school
he signed up with the Marines.
There was four guys in his
graduating class
that joined the m*llitary.
There was a couple of them
that didn't make it
through boot camp.
And there was a couple that did.
He was one of them.
Todd's first posting
was at Camp Lejeune,
in North Carolina.
While there the 23 year-old
met Cindy Peace,
the 28-year-old divorced mother
of three young children.
What followed was
a whirlwind romance.
It was love at first
sight when we first met.
We met and six months later
we decided to get married.
Soon Cindy was
pregnant, and Todd
was re-assigned to a Marine
air base outside of San Diego.
In February of 2002,
Todd returned home
from a routine
training mission
with what looked like
a run-of-the-mill stomach bug.
They diagnosed him with likely
food poisoning,
sent him home, told him to rest.
He felt better, a little bit
better in a few days,
until his symptoms recurred.
And they recurred
with a vengeance.
On the night of February 17th
Todd went to bed,
and it was clear he wasn't well.
He sat down in the bed,
he said his heart
was fluttering.
It felt different.
Something wasn't right.
And I asked him if he wanted
to go to the hospital.
He said, "No."
He said, "I'll be okay."
According to Cindy,
she awoke a short time later
to find Todd staggering
to the bathroom
where he soon keeled over.
I didn't know what to do.
I looked for a phone.
Minutes later paramedics arrived
and rushed Todd
to a nearby hospital.
He d*ed a short time later.
I didn't know why.
I didn't know how.
I just didn't know what to do.
There's nothing that can
prepare you for that.
Even doctors were at a loss.
As a marine, his health
was regularly monitored.
His last physical showed
a young man in perfect health.
So why was his body
in the morgue
The official cause
of death was acute
cardiac arrhythmia,
not unknown for a man
in his early 20
but not exactly common either.
I didn't know what
a cardiac arrhythmia was.
I didn't know that perfectly
healthy people
sometimes just die.
Cindy Sommer found herself
a suddenly widowed-mother
of four young children.
It was hard to imagine things
getting worse.
Until they did.
They had arrested me
in at my work.
And told me that I was arrested
for homicide, for k*lling Todd.
Cindy Sommer's life
and the lives of her
four young children
were turned upside down
by the sudden and
the shockingly unexpected
death of her husband,
When Todd had passed,
my whole world ended.
Everything that I knew,
everything that I lived,
everything that I breathed
and woke up to every day
was going to be gone.
Everything had changed
in literally a heartbeat.
A grieving Cindy got
a death payment
of $250,000, standard
operating procedure
for the m*llitary,
and she attempted
to move on with her life.
Our family was just shattered.
And I had to suck it up.
I had to just... I had
to go on for the kids,
I had to still make breakfast
and lunch and dinner.
They still had to go to school.
We had to still try to maintain.
And it took everything
that I had to do that.
And to be brutally honest,
I failed.
Two months after Todd's death
Cindy got breast
augmentation surgery,
something she claimed
she and Todd
had planned before his death.
It cost $6,000.
The cost, to say nothing of
the timing, raised questions.
Before Todd d*ed, the Sommer
family was practically broke.
They were living paycheck
to paycheck.
Lot of folks are,
lot of folks were then,
lot of folks in the m*llitary
are, and were.
m*llitary bases are
essentially very small towns.
Everyone ends up knowing
everyone else's business.
And Cindy made some decisions
that got a lot
of tongues wagging.
They found that she was
engaging in a lot of partying,
that she was going out
with friends,
hanging out with other marines
that she had known
through her husband,
and this didn't fit
their mold of how
she should have been
behaving at that time.
It turned out that
on the night of Todd's funeral
Cindy and some fellow
m*llitary wives went
to a local strip club.
Over the course
of the next few weeks
she had brief sexual encounters
with three of Todd's
marine buddies.
She's in tears and shared
a bottle of wine
and one bottle turns into two
and then before you know it,
they're kissing her
and they're on the couch
and they're having relations and
they end up having sex together.
Now that doesn't fit
what the novelist would call
the standard way of grieving,
I completely agree.
I don't know how to
explain that other than there was...
Anything that I could do
to make me forget
what was happening in my life
was enticing for me.
Cindy's behavior drew
the attention of investigators
from the Naval Criminal
Investigative Service or NCIS,
who now took a closer look
at Cindy's life
before and after Todd's death.
They found she pushed
to get Todd's death
payout as quickly as possible.
I was going
from having my rent paid
in a huge four-bedroom house
and not paying any utilities,
to now I have four kids
on an income
of a part-time Subway worker.
I-I... I did think about money,
I did think about how I was
going to raise my kids.
That seemed reasonable.
But to investigators,
the push for the money,
using some of it to pay
for breast augmentation
and the sexual liaisons
soon after Todd's death
for m*rder.
The first thing
that you always do
when you're a cop
doing an investigation,
you look at money,
you look at sex,
those are kind of the two areas
that you always start with
to take a look at the motive.
But if Cindy k*lled
her husband, how did she do it?
Todd was cremated
shortly after his death.
As part of standard protocol
in such an unusual case,
tissue samples from his body
were saved and stored.
The pathologist took multiple
samples of tissues in the body
just in case it needed to be
evaluated at some later time.
These precautions were taken
even after an autopsy determined
that Todd d*ed
of natural causes.
Apparently the determination
that he d*ed of natural causes
just didn't sit right
with some of the investigators,
they just felt that
there was more to the story.
To investigators these tissues
were a potential smoking g*n
just waiting to be tested.
NCIS investigators
were convinced Todd Sommer
had been poisoned
to death by his wife, Cindy.
Toxicology tests on tissues
saved after Todd's autopsy
turned up extraordinarily
high concentrations
in tissues from his liver
and kidneys of arsenic,
a powerful poison.
Arsenic is tasteless,
it's colorless,
it doesn't have an odor.
And somebody could easily put it
into somebody's food or drink
unbeknownst to them.
Nearly four years
after Todd's death,
Cindy Sommer was arrested
and charged
with using a massive dose
of arsenic to k*ll him.
And I had no idea what they
were talking about or why,
or how, or anything.
I didn't have a clue.
I didn't know
what arsenic even was.
I didn't... I wouldn't
know how to get it.
It was a mess.
Nothing made sense at all to me.
Prosecutors contended
that Cindy acted alone.
No one else was implicated
in the crime.
At Cindy's trial
in January of 2007,
the jury heard a lot
about her behavior
in the immediate aftermath
of her husband's death.
From the outside, right,
drinking, having sex
with different men,
looks like this person
is celebrating.
In reality, they might very well
be just desperately
trying to feel something
other than the grief
that they're experiencing.
I honestly don't see what it has
to do with this case at all.
It's just her behavior
during her way of grieving.
It seems irrelevant to me
in terms of a m*rder trial.
Even worse,
Cindy's original defense team
came up with a novel
and deeply flawed strategy.
They chose not to challenge
the science
that, according to prosecutors,
proved Cindy
poisoned her husband.
The defense attorney
did not contest
the actual finding of the cause
of death by arsenic,
anywhere near as much
as he should have.
He simply jumped over the fact
that scientific evidence
showing Todd d*ed from arsenic
was enormously faulty,
went straight to the fact
that Cindy's a good person,
loved her husband,
never would've done
this type of thing.
And by the way,
where can you point to the fact
that she had
any link to arsenic?
So that concession,
in a tactical way,
was a monster blunder.
Cindy, convinced no jury
would ever convict her
if they heard her story,
testified in her own defense.
It didn't go well.
She'd been in jail
since her arrest.
As she prepared
for her testimony,
her fellow prisoners
tried to make sure
she'd make a good impression
on the jury.
The other women
helped her put mascara on.
You're not allowed to have
mascara when you're in jail.
They took shoe polish
and other types of crayon
and used that as a mascara.
By the time Cindy
had finished testifying,
her tears had dripped this down.
So it was kind of, she looked
really bad, I thought.
It just was a bad look,
not a sympathetic look.
The jury didn't buy Cindy's
testimony or her defense.
We the jury
in the above-empanelled cause,
find the defendant,
Cynthia A. Sommer,
guilty of the crime of m*rder,
of Todd Sommer, a human being,
in violation of
penal code section 187A.
I don't feel like the jury
even looked at
the science of my case.
They looked at my behavior
and all of these
other circumstantial things
that the prosecution said
that I did
and didn't look at anything
having to do with the science.
Cindy wasn't the only person
who thought they'd witnessed
a miscarriage of justice.
My girlfriend was watching
a news program about this case
and said,
"You have to get involved.
You can't let that woman
be convicted."
There's lots of folks who
have sadly d*ed from conditions
where they seem
completely healthy
without any precedent symptom
of any kind and then they die.
Now I'm looking at life
in prison.
Is it going to take me
What do we do? Where do we go?
Do I appeal?
Like how, what do we do?
What mistakes did independent
observers see in the trial?
For one, Todd Sommer was sick
for 10 days before he d*ed.
The amounts of arsenic
that were found
in Todd Sommer's liver
and kidney would've required him
to ingest such a large
amount of arsenic
that he would've been dead
in a matter of hours.
He would not have lived 10 days.
Also, arsenic att*cks
the entire body.
It didn't make sense that lethal
concentrations were found
in just some of Todd's
tissue samples.
If you have an acute dose
of arsenic inside of you,
you would expect to see it
in the blood.
And there was nothing
in the blood.
And it causes cell leakage,
it just tears you up inside.
So, you would expect to see
that damage done on autopsy
and Todd Sommer
didn't have any of that.
As for Cindy's
questionable behavior
in the wake
of her husband's death?
Experts on grieving say
it's not all that unusual.
We look at the ways people
get through situations,
and we found that there's some
things that people have
traditionally thought as bad,
maladaptive, unhealthy coping,
There is no right way
to get through the pain we have.
And if we define something
that works in that moment,
it has done its job.
It's ugly, but it works.
I do believe that sexism
played a huge role in this.
Part of the motivation was that
she wasn't mourning
the way a woman should mourn.
Right?
That she was not doing
the things
that we expect a woman to do
when her husband dies.
Legal experts said
there were legitimate questions
about Cindy's conviction.
It's a lot easier to put
someone behind bars
then it is to get them out
once they're there.
By 2007, Todd Sommer had been
dead for nearly five years
and his wife Cindy had spent
more than a year in jail
for his m*rder.
It was all so surreal,
the whole thing.
I just...
It was crazy.
It was unfathomable that
this could be happening.
As they prepared for a
possible re-trial,
Cindy's new defense team
found documents
indicating that one set
of Todd's tissues
was in storage and was
apparently suitable for testing.
But when the prosecution
was asked to bring this evidence
forward, they said
they couldn't find it.
This was enough in itself
for Cindy's conviction
to be thrown out.
If the failure to preserve
these tissues
was the mistake of the police,
NCIS, or the prosecution.
Then Cindy could be found
not guilty.
A search was on for
the remaining set of Todd's tissues.
And it was found at the hospital
where Todd was autopsied.
They're found exactly where
the tissues had been left
five years before.
And it's almost as if
the caretaker of those
was basically saying,
"You know, I was wondering
when you guys
were going to get around
to asking for these things.
Where have you been?"
Did prosecutors know
this evidence still existed?
No one knows for sure.
Todd's tissues were tested
for arsenic,
and in direct contradiction
of the evidence
that put Cindy Sommer in jail,
came back negative.
He had not been poisoned.
How did this happen?
The answer
was alarmingly simple:
the lab that did the
testing, a m*llitary lab,
didn't normally test samples
from human beings.
This was a lab that
typically did soil samples
and things like that,
it wasn't something
that was really set up
to examine tissue,
human tissue samples.
Because in small amounts,
arsenic is ever-present
in the environment.
This lab did test regularly for
arsenic in non-human samples.
Arsenic is an element.
It's in soil,
it's in groundwater,
it's even in some
of the foods that we eat.
And now investigators,
on both sides of the case,
had an explanation
for why only Todd's liver
and kidney samples instead
of all his samples
tested positive for arsenic:
they'd been stored next
to non-human samples
that likely did contain arsenic.
Once a sample is
contaminated, you can't take it away.
Contamination does happen.
It shouldn't happen,
but it does.
It was not an arsenic death.
There was some sort
of contamination in the lab.
Without that mistake,
we wouldn't be here
talking about this case.
The mystery was solved.
The original autopsy was right.
Todd Sommer d*ed from
a previously
undiagnosed heart condition.
Two weeks before
Cindy's second trial
was set to start,
a corrections officer
came to her prison cell.
And he goes, "You should
probably go call your mom."
So he turned the phone on,
and I called my mom,
and she answered the phone.
I just remember saying, "Mom..."
I said, "Is it true
that I'm getting out?"
And she said, "Yes,"
that they dropped the charges.
The case was dismissed
because after consulting with experts,
we concluded that
there was reasonable doubt,
and therefore the case
was dismissed.
Would you expand on that?
Tell us what the reasonable
doubt was.
Okay.
First, today justice was done.
This is how the system
is supposed to work.
I don't know how you can say
the system works
or that justice was served when
I've spent 876 days in jail.
For something that,
first of all,
I didn't do, and second,
wasn't even a homicide.
The case shows
the value of science,
not only in putting
the guilty behind bars,
but in freeing the innocent.
It's an object lesson
in the power of forensics,
for noble and sometimes
not-so-noble purposes.
Justice was done in this case,
but not because of the
prosecution, but despite it.
The forensic evidence in this
case was enormously important.
The evidence
in this case was sound.
It was solid.
I know this is the most
ridiculous thing to say,
but I'm grateful
for my time in jail.
I think it taught me a lot
about myself.
It taught me a lot about life.
I don't think I'd be the person
that I am today
had I not gone through
all of those things.