Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Seattle Excedrin Poisonings

Breaking the case

In January 1987, Hamilton, now grown, approached police with information: her mother Nickell had spoken to her repeatedly about wanting Bruce dead, having grown bored with him after he quit drinking. Nickell, Hamilton claimed, had even told her that she had tried to poison Bruce previously with foxglove hidden in capsules. When that failed, she had begun library research into other methods and hit upon cyanide. Hamilton also claimed that Nickell had spoken to her about what the two of them could do with the insurance money if Bruce was dead.

Records from the Auburn Public Library, when subpoenaed, showed that Nickell had checked out numerous books about poisons, including Human Poisonings from Native and Cultivated Plants and Deadly Harvest. The former was marked as overdue in library records, indicating that Nickell had borrowed but never returned it. The FBI identified Nickell's fingerprints on cyanide-related pages of a number of the works she had checked out during this period. By the summer of 1987, even Nickell's attorneys acknowledged that she was the prime suspect in the case.

Arrest and trial

On December 9, 1987, Nickell was indicted by a federal grand jury on five counts of product tampering, including two which resulted in the deaths of Bruce and Snow, and arrested the same day. She went on trial in April 1988 and was found guilty of all charges on May 9, after five days of jury deliberation. Nickell's legal team sought a mistrial on grounds of jury tampering and judicial misconduct. One of the jurors had been a plaintiff in a case involving a pill baked into Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers. While it was deemed to be a manufacturing error, the defense thought that it involved product tampering, and therefore should have been disclosed during jury selection. However, the motion was denied. Nickell was sentenced to two terms of 90 years in prison for the deaths of Bruce and Snow, and three 10-year terms for the other product tampering charges. All sentences were to run concurrently, and the judge ordered Nickell to pay a small fine and forfeit her remaining assets to the families of her victims. Nickell became eligible for parole in 2018, when she was 75 years old.

As of April 2019 Nickell is housed at female-only low security/minimum security Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, California, just east of San Francisco. Her release date is given as July 10, 2040. No parole hearing dates are provided.

Appeals and subsequent petitions

Nickell continued to maintain her innocence after her trial. An appeal based on jury tampering and judicial misconduct issues was rejected by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in August 1989. A second appeal, beginning in 2001, was filed by Nickell's new attorney, Carl Park Colbert, based on evidence obtained by private detectives Al Farr and Paul Ciolino, requesting a new trial on the basis of new evidence having been discovered that the FBI may have withheld documents from the defense. The appeal was denied, though Nickell and her team continue to assert her innocence. Nickell claimed that her daughter, Hamilton, lied about her involvement in the case in order to reap the $300,000 of reward money being offered. Hamilton eventually collected $250,000 of that money. Nickell also alleges, among other things, that the evidence actually points to another person as the killer, and that the testimony about various smaller details in the case, such as the store owner who testified about her having purchased Algae Destroyer, was influenced by promises of payment.

FDA regulations

After the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, new FDA regulations went into effect which made it a federal - rather than just a state or local - crime to tamper with consumer products. Local and state authorities are not, however, prevented from also filing charges in such cases. Under this law, Nickell's crime was prosecutable as a federal product tampering case as well as a state murder case, and she was not convicted of murder, but of product tampering that caused the death. The possibility of state charges for the actual murders of Bruce and Snow continues to exist.

In media

Seattle author Gregg Olsen wrote about the Nickell case in his 1993 book, Bitter Almonds: The True Story of Mothers, Daughters and the Seattle Cyanide Murders. The case was also featured on episodes of Autopsy, Forensic Files, The New Detectives, Mysteries at the Museum, and Snapped, as well as two episodes of Deadly Women. Nickell's murders are also discussed in the Jodi Picoult novel House Rules, published in 2010. It was also featured in episode 93 of Casefile True Crime Podcast in August 2018. The case was referenced in an episode of In Plain Sight called Kill Pill which aired November 23, 2018 on the Investigation Discovery channel.

A 2000 made-for-tv, Who Killed Sue Snow?, was to be made about the Nickell case to air on USA Network, but it was cancelled shortly before production began. One factor was strong objections from advertisers, including Johnson & Johnson owner of the Tylenol brand of painkillers which had been affected by the 1982 Chicago case. Additionally, network executives feared the film would inspire copycat crimes. The film was to have been directed by Jeff Reiner and starring Katey Sagel as Nickell.