Up next... she's
respected, she's successful,
and she's fighting for her life.
It was really
something terrible.
She was deathly ill.
No cause was found
for the illness.
It was so sad
to see her like that.
Is this a job
for doctors or detectives?
They were very frustrated,
very angry.
After multiple tests,
they finally found something
that was really mysterious.
And that something is
a different kind of smoking g*n.
A single pack of cigarettes...
that's all that he needed.
Linda Kinkade was
the kind of person
people tended to notice...
a statuesque,
always impeccably dressed,
high-powered
corporate executive.
Besides that she was beautiful,
the first thing that people
would notice about her
is she exuded warmth,
friendliness, kindness.
And so she just naturally
and easily made friends.
Linda worked in upper management
at Southern California's
San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant,
once one of the largest nuclear
facilities in the country.
She started out as a secretary
and worked her way up
through management,
and she just loved her job.
She was dedicated to her career,
and she really enjoyed it.
I think probably
the most important thing
to Linda in life was
getting ahead in the world,
not having to be
dependent on anybody.
A lot of times,
she would work long hours,
not expecting
to get paid for it.
When Linda met
co-worker Paul Curry,
the driven career woman
was confident
she'd finally met her romantic,
and intellectual, match.
I remember she called me
and said,
"Merry, I met a younger man,
and I really like him."
The main thing she emphasized
was how brainy he was
and how smart he was.
He was this intelligent,
witty, fun, younger guy.
He was a pianist.
He was a Mensa member
and... This is "Jeopardy!"
he had won
"Jeopardy!" twice.
He'd won $24,000 on "Jeopardy!"
And he was a nuclear physicist.
I mean, he was, like,
the whole package for Linda.
In the summer of 1992,
Linda and Paul got married.
She was 48.
He was 35.
She was on cloud nine.
He would dote on her.
I mean, it was to the point
where, you know,
if you're with them,
they would...
I'd call it baby talk,
kind of like,
"Oh, oh, my little Linders.
Are you cold?
Let me get you..."
And it was a real loving relationship.
Just a few months
into this marriage,
the couple got a bad break.
Both of them fell seriously ill.
Meticulous, as always,
Linda kept a journal.
So this is from
Linda's medical journal.
Since both
Linda and Paul were sick,
the first assumption
was food poisoning.
Paul bounced back.
Linda got much worse.
She spent three weeks
in the hospital
and suffered a brain embolism.
She remained sick,
and they supposedly
could not find a reason.
They could never figure out
what was making her nauseous,
vomiting, and have diarrhea.
It was a quandary.
Nobody knew
what's wrong with this
relatively healthy young woman.
A distraught Paul Curry
stood vigil at the hospital.
Paul was sitting there.
He was forlorn.
He had his hand in his head,
and he warned me,
"I don't know, Merry, if you
want to go and see her or not.
She's pretty bad."
And as I walked into the ICU,
there she was,
curled up like
an 80-year-old lady,
laying in this big bed
with all these tubes in her,
and, uh... it's hard to
get that out of my head
when I saw her like that.
But, true to form,
Linda pulled through.
Doctors pored over her records,
trying to find
what almost k*lled her,
and couldn't make
a definitive diagnosis.
Slowly, she recovered
and even returned to work.
But six months later,
she was sick again
and back in the hospital,
which had a lot of people thinking
that perhaps her work
in the nuclear power plant
was making her sick
and possibly even k*lling her.
I'm hearing,
"Well, we're testing for this,
we're testing for that."
It was just a mystery
for so many.
Within six months in 1994,
Linda Curry had been
hospitalized twice
for an unknown illness that had
come close to k*lling her.
There was some theories
as to why she may have
been getting sick.
Some people speculated
that maybe she was
making herself sick
for attention,
but her friends and family
really sh*t that down
because Linda had seemed happy.
She loved her life,
and she loved her job.
Health problems were
nothing new for Linda.
For many years she had issues
with chronic fatigue,
some gastrointestinal problems,
and she'd been treated
for depression and anxiety.
But Linda's
second hospitalization
went much better than her first.
She was out after a week
and looked like
she was in the clear.
She was feeling good.
She was happy.
She was back to work.
Convinced she had
a nearly clean bill of health,
Linda was putting in her usual
long hours at work.
This concerned her husband,
Paul, so much
that he sent an e-mail
to Linda's old friend, Merry.
It said, "Merry, I know
that you haven't spoken
to Linda in a while,
but I'd like to have your help
in convincing her to slow down
and not let this job of hers
further impact her health."
Just hours after
this e-mail was sent,
Paul Curry called 911.
Linda was unconscious
and barely breathing.
The paramedic found Linda
unresponsive in the bed.
He documented
that she was asystole,
or no heartbeat,
no pulse, no breathing.
And they transport her
to San Clemente hospital,
where she's pronounced deceased.
Amid the shock and the grief,
Linda's family and friends
wanted answers
and now turned
to another open question
about Linda's condition.
It got raised
when she first fell ill.
While Linda was in the hospital,
it appeared that her I.V. bag
had been tampered with.
The liquid inside was cloudy,
but nothing ever came of it.
As part of standard procedure,
detectives interviewed Paul.
He said he was told questions
about Linda's I.V. bag
remained unanswered.
But the big question
was one with no answer...
who would want to harm
Linda Curry?
She had no enemies.
Zero. None.
Not only did she not say
anything bad about anybody,
no one ever said anything bad
about her ever, ever.
They couldn't find anything
bad about her.
During her first hospitalization,
detectives asked Linda
if she could think of anyone
who would want to hurt her.
And that potential motive?
A million-dollar
insurance payout,
which left Paul
as the only person
with a reason to harm her.
But Linda was adamant...
this was a health issue
and had nothing to do with Paul.
The problem was that something
remarkably similar happened
during Linda's
second hospital stay,
which was at a different
hospital than the first.
This time,
the port on her I.V. bag
was either broken or sabotaged.
Tests on the bags
were inconclusive.
Her I.V. bag... it appears
it was tampered with again,
and it's really bizarre.
But again, they had no evidence,
so there was nothing.
They weren't able
to prove anything.
After Linda's
second hospitalization,
police re-interviewed her.
Again, she seemed unconcerned.
This didn't make sense
to doctors or detectives.
Two different I.V. bags
being damaged
in two different hospitals,
for just one patient,
seemed like
more than a coincidence.
In fact, after Linda's death,
investigators did another
interview with Paul.
And that's where the case stood.
There were plenty of questions,
but her symptoms were consistent
with a neurological condition.
Now her family and physicians
hoped her autopsy
would finally solve
the riddle of what k*lled her.
Even though Linda Curry
had health issues for years,
her death came as a shock.
The results of her autopsy
did nothing to ease the blow.
So the original
autopsy report...
they could not, you know,
find anything
about the cause of death.
But the pathologist
did find something odd...
a small,
barely detectable wound,
possibly a tiny puncture,
behind Linda's right ear.
There wasn't much
significance to it, initially.
There was nothing about it
that indicated
that it had anything to do
with the cause of death.
The autopsy report described it
as a small hemorrhage,
so medical examiners moved on
to standard toxicology tests
in an attempt to find out
what k*lled Linda.
These all came back negative for
lethal amounts of any poison,
but there was yet another
surprise finding.
The autopsy results
showed high levels
of a sleeping pill,
a very widely used
sleeping pill.
Her levels were 10 times
the usual therapeutic level.
The dosage of this
sleep medication was not lethal
and had never been
prescribed to Linda.
Still searching for answers,
analysts conducted tests
on Linda's tissue samples
and were stunned
by what this revealed...
a massive amount of nicotine.
The nicotine levels in her blood
were extraordinarily high.
We measured a concentration of
For comparison,
in a cigarette smoker,
the highest levels
you would expect to see
would be maybe 20 or 25.
Linda Curry didn't smoke,
but there was no question...
nicotine k*lled her.
So her levels probably
were a hundred times higher
than those of a regular
cigarette smoker.
When you die from nicotine,
you basically die
because your breathing muscles
are paralyzed.
You stop breathing, and you die.
Doctors finally had
their cause of death...
nicotine poisoning.
Detectives finally had
their manner of death...
homicide.
And this finding
of nicotine poisoning
might explain the odd wound
behind Linda's right ear.
It was possible someone
injected her with nicotine,
which, until very recently,
was nearly impossible
for the average person
to get in liquid form.
There've been some poisonings
from electronic cigarette liquids
that people have swallowed
that contain nicotine.
The only poisoning death
I know of
was one that was reported
in 1850
involving a Belgian count
who was trying to k*ll
his brother-in-law.
As for Linda's
family and friends,
they were convinced,
despite the absence
of any physical evidence,
that Paul Curry was responsible.
I sure was 95%
that the only person
that her death
could be pointed towards
would be Paul.
He was the one that stood
to gain, monetarily,
great amounts of money,
so I had no doubt.
Oddly, even Linda,
in one of her police interviews,
acknowledged she'd been
warned about Paul.
Detectives were in a hard spot.
If it was Paul, how would
he get liquid nicotine?
And even if he could get it,
how did he get that big a dose
into Linda's body?
The small hemorrhage
behind Linda's ear might,
or might not,
be connected to her death.
No syringe had been found
in the house.
And at the time, no one thought
to test the dishes
or eating utensils.
There was no physical evidence
to charge Paul or anyone else.
They had no evidence,
so there was nothing.
They weren't able
to prove anything.
They felt that there was
no more leads.
Like a lot of cold cases,
they work it
until they can't
work it anymore,
and then new things come up,
and so it kind of
just languishes.
Was Paul Curry
the genius he claimed to be?
Maybe so, because doctors, detectives,
and almost everyone close
to the victim had to admit...
if he k*lled Linda,
it sure looked like
he'd gotten away with it.
He was an actor.
I mean, he fooled everybody.
Shortly after
Linda Curry's death in 1994,
her widower husband, Paul,
had a job change
at the San Onofre
Nuclear Power Plant.
As part of standard procedure,
human resources re-checked
his background.
This was a more rigorous test
than the one conducted
when Paul first got the job.
And it exposed a secret.
In reality, he was a fraud.
He hadn't even gone to college.
He didn't even have
a college degree.
He had faked his résumé.
He was not a nuclear physicist.
He had two ex-wives
and three children,
something apparently
unknown to Linda
at the time of their wedding.
The thing is,
the guy was brilliant.
He was smart.
He was slimy and smart.
And, uh, he fooled us all.
Exposed for lying
about his credentials,
Paul was forced to resign.
But it didn't matter.
He had the big financial payout
from Linda's
life-insurance policy.
Paul Curry thinks
he's outsmarted everyone
and has gotten away with m*rder.
He moves out to the Midwest
in Kansas
and starts a whole new life.
He marries a new woman,
he adopts a child,
and he's working
as a building-code inspector.
Nearly a decade passed.
Then, Sergeant Yvonne Shull,
a homicide investigator
with the Orange County
Sheriff's Office,
reopened the case.
Like every investigator
in the country,
she'd never seen a case
with nicotine
as the m*rder w*apon
and wanted more information.
I finally got ahold of
Dr. Neal Benowitz
in San Francisco,
who is the world-renowned
nicotine expert.
He's the one who writes
the book on nicotine.
The main question
Sergeant Shull
wanted answered...
a question not addressed
in the original investigation...
was, how much time would
a massive dose of nicotine
take to k*ll Linda Curry?
Dr. Benowitz had the answer.
Linda Curry d*ed probably
within 20 or 30 minutes,
at the most,
after being exposed.
So I knew that I needed
to determine
who was with Linda
that she was given the nicotine
until she was deceased.
That person would
appear to be Paul Curry,
who was, apparently,
the only person alone with Linda
before she d*ed.
He was smart enough to realize
there was nothing he could do
to stop himself
from being a suspect.
Paul Curry did not care
about that.
He just did not want to have
sufficient evidence
in the hand of law enforcement
to charge him with a crime.
It was a good plan,
and it worked for 16 years.
But the question of when
the nicotine was administered
could break open the case.
A lot of time had passed,
and to nail Paul Curry down,
investigators came up
with a plan to outsmart the man
who claimed to be a genius.
The ruse was that
Sergeant Shull would pose
as a local police officer,
from Kansas,
who'd been asked by police
back in California
to tie up some loose ends
on the Linda Curry case.
So, in his mind, he knows,
"Hey, I was able
to fool them back then."
So now the people that we put
in place to try to interview him
are not even the investigators
on the case.
"How hard is it gonna be
to talk to these two locals
that know nothing
about the case?"
The goal was
to get Paul to admit on tape
that he was the only person
in the house with Linda
on the night she d*ed.
Paul, apparently, had no idea
what investigators were after
and fell right into the trap.
With that, Paul Curry
unwittingly confessed
that he was the only person
who could have k*lled his wife.
Investigators were confident
the mystery
of how Linda Curry d*ed
had finally been solved.
I pulled out my badge and I.D.
and introduced myself,
told him that my name
was Yvonne Shull,
and I was from
Orange County, California,
and he's under arrest
for Linda Curry's m*rder.
And I had him stand up
and turn around
and put handcuffs on him.
One question remained...
How did Paul get his hands
on liquid nicotine?
Incredibly, he likely extracted
a lethal amount of poison,
in a method that won't be
revealed on this program,
from just 20 cigarettes.
If you extracted nicotine
from a pack of cigarettes,
you could get enough that you
could probably k*ll somebody.
Investigators believe Paul
regularly laced Linda's food
with liquid nicotine.
He likely varied the doses
to make it seem
like she was fighting
a protracted illness.
Six months after
her second hospitalization,
prosecutors think
he slipped a large dose
of sleeping medication
into something she ate or drank.
As she lay unconscious,
prosecutors believe
Paul injected a lethal amount
of nicotine behind her ear,
disposed of the evidence
as she lay dying,
and then called 9-1-1,
ultimately creating the timeline
that exposed him
as the only person
who could have administered
the fatal dose.
The first thing I'll
ask her when I see her in heaven
will be,
"Linda, why didn't you leave?
Why?"
And I want that answer,
because I don't understand why,
you know, to this day.
In September of 2014,
Paul Curry was found guilty
of first-degree m*rder
and got life without parole.
He may be the smartest person
in the room,
but for the rest of his life,
that room will be
a 6-by-8-foot prison cell.
Forensics was the key to it.
If we didn't have forensics
and the work that they did,
we would never solve this case
because they never would have
found the nicotine.
Paul Curry
underestimated science.
This person that faked
being a scientist,
that faked being
a nuclear engineer,
underestimated the importance
of science
and the importance of the truth.