Bitter Almonds : The True Story of Mothers, Daughters, and the Seattle Cyanide Murders - Softcover

Olsen, Gregg

3.57

4,003 ratings by Goodreads

9780312982003: Bitter Almonds : The True Story of Mothers, Daughters, and the Seattle Cyanide Murders

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312982003 ISBN 13: 9780312982003

Publisher: St. Martin's True Crime, 2002

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Stella Nickell's small-time world was one of big-time dreams. In 1986, her biggest one came true when her husband died during a seizure, making her the beneficiary of a $175,000-plus insurance payoff―until authorities discovered Bruce Nickell's headache capsules had been laced with cyanide. In an attempt to cover her tracks, Stella did the unconscionable. She saw to it that a stranger would also become a "random casualty" of cyanide-tainted painkillers. But Stella's cunning plan came undone when her daughter Cynthia notified federal agents. And troubling questions lingered like the secret of bitter almonds...

What would turn a gregarious barfly like Stella into a cold-hearted killer overnight? Why would Cynthia, a mirror image of her mother, turn on her own flesh and blood? Did Cynthia reveal everything she knew about the crimes? The stunning answers would unfold in a case that sparked a national uproar, dug deep into a troubled family history, and exposed an American mother for the pretty poison she was.

Gregg Olsen's Bitter Almonds is true crime writing at its best.

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About the Author:

Gregg Olsen has been a journalist and investigative author for more than twenty years. He is the recipient of numerous writing, editing, and photojournalism awards, including citations of excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists (Sigma Delta Chi), the International Association of Business Communicators, Washington Press Association, Society of Technical Communication, and the Public Relations Society of America.

A resident of Washington state, Olsen has been a guest on dozens of national and local television shows, including educational programs for the History Channel, Learning Channel, and the Discovery Channel. Olsen also appeared several times on CBS's 48 Hours, MSNBC's Special Edition, Entertainment Tonight, Sally Jesse Raphael, Inside Edition, and Extra. He has been featured in USA Today, Salon Magazine, Seattle Times, and the New York Post.

CHAPTER 1
Sue Snow’s free-spirited oldest daughter, Exa, was off at the Pony Soldier Inn with a man she had just met who was going through a drug-treatment program.
“Should I worry about your creepy sister?” Sue asked with a rueful smile when she saw her youngest daughter, Hayley, that morning.
It was true that Exa Snow, always the independent one, could take care of herself—even if she didn’t exercise the best judgment. Sue had always treated her eldest more as a friend than a daughter. And because of that, Exa pushed the line to the limit. But when push came to shove, as it often did, Sue Snow was still Mom. And Mom was in charge.
Hayley hugged her mother good morning.
“No, Mommy, don’t worry about her.”
Even though fifteen, Hayley Snow still called her mother “Mommy.” Sue was proud that her daughter had the guts to use the name, when all her girlfriends had switched to the less endearing, albeit more grown-up, “Mom.” Yet Hayley’s friends understood. To them, Sue really was a “Mommy.”
She kissed her daughter and called “I love you” as she went down the hall to her bathroom located off the master bedroom. Hayley closed her bathroom door. As she stepped into the shower she heard her mother turn on the faucet to her sink.
It was just after 6:30, June 11, 1986, when she heard the noise.
“I heard something drop while I was in the shower,” Hayley later recalled. “At first I panicked, the first second I heard it. Then I thought, That’s really stupid, she’s not going to just fall on her face. So I ignored it, got out of the shower, and put on my bra and underwear.”
Hayley was applying eye makeup when she realized that the water in her mother’s sink was still running. She knew her mother’s pattern from hearing her every morning through the bathroom walls. Something was wrong. Hayley went to see what was going on.
Then she found her.
Sue, wearing her zippered purple robe with a white stripe down the front, lay on her back. The water was nearing the top of the sink, so Hayley turned the spigot off before dropping to her knees beside her.
Her mother’s pretty hazel eyes were fixed, frozen at the corner of the room. Her head rested on the sliding track of the shower door; her hand was across her breast. Her red lacquered nails accented fingers curled backward sharply and unnaturally.
Hayley struggled as she tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
She noticed that the curling iron was by the sink, then checked her mother’s head, pulse... she tried to remember what she had learned in health class. There was a pulse, but it was faint. She bent her mother’s fingers back to a normal position, because it looked as if they hurt.
Then she realized her mother wasn’t breathing. Hayley got ready to do CPR when her mother gasped for air. Yet she didn’t exhale. Hayley had learned that if a person is breathing on her own, do not do CPR.
She called Karen Inoue, a friend from their old condo complex, just down the road. Karen told Hayley to call 911 and she’d be over right away.
“What’s the matter?” asked dispatcher Brenda Deeds, a Valley Comm 911 operator, when Hayley’s call came at 6:43 A.M.
“I think my mother fell while I was in the shower... and she’s breathing and everything, but something’s wrong with her.”
The dispatcher asked the address and Hayley told her it was 1404 N. Street N.E., Auburn. She calmly provided their phone number.
“Okay. Is she able to talk to you still?”
“I don’t know. It’s like she’s sleeping with her eyes open.”
“Is she able to talk to you at all?”
“She’s not talking,” Hayley answered, her voice now beginning to quaver. “She’s lying in the bathtub... I mean she’s lying in the bathroom... and her head is in the shower.”
The dispatcher told Hayley to go back to her mother and try to get her to talk. She also told her to check on her mother’s breathing.
The receiver picked up Hayley’s scared cries as she called: “Mommy, Mommy...”
“She’s breathing, but it’s kind of weird,” Hayley answered.
“Is she able to talk to you yet?”
By now the fifteen-year-old was in tears. “She didn’t talk...”
“Did she move at all or do anything?”
“She just took a deep breath.”
“I want to make sure she’s breathing normally, though. How is her coloring?”
“Um, hold on a sec, okay?”
“Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“Shake her hand. Tell her to talk with you. See if she will. Come back and tell me.”
“Okay. Hold on...”
Again she went to her mother, sprawled out on the bathroom floor. “Mommy, Mommy, please talk to me. Mommy...” Her voice got louder as she tried to wake her. “Mommy, won’t you please talk to me? Mommy. Mommy, please talk to me.”
“She won’t talk to me...” she cried into the phone.
The dispatcher did what she could to reassure the girl. “We’ve got the aid car on the way, okay? I want you to keep on the phone with me. What is she doing now? Is she still breathing normally?”
“It’s not really normal. It’s just breathing.”
Karen Inoue arrived and Hayley left the phone for a second to let her in. The dispatcher told Hayley she wanted her to stay on the phone and to check her mother again. Did she know CPR?
Hayley said she did. She had learned it in health class. As she spoke, the doorbell rang and the fire department arrived.
It was 6:47 A.M.
In tears, the girl directed the men to the bathroom, where they found Sue Snow lying on the floor in agonal respiration, a gasping, snorting respiration. Sue’s eyes were open, fixed, and dilated.
The firemen attempted to ventilate her by using a bag mask, a device with a face piece fitting over the nose and mouth and a plastic reservoir the EMT squeezes to facilitate breathing.
But Sue Snow was deteriorating.
It was near the end of her shift when paramedic Debbie Ayrs and Medic 6 officer Randy Bellon answered the call of a “woman down” in Auburn. They arrived just after the fire fighters. Hayley Snow took them to her mother, still sprawled on the upstairs bathroom floor. The fire fighters lifted Sue Snow, arms dangling, from the bathroom to the bedroom, where there would be more room to work.
Debbie remembered it all years later: “We started doing our resuscitation, but it wasn’t going right. We would give her something to help her cardiac rhythm and it wouldn’t help. She was neurologically intact, she was acting like a head injury, but she wasn’t exhibiting any of the things that go along with that.”
“Has this ever happened before?” she asked the girl.
“No.”
“Does she have any history of depression? Suicide attempts?”
“No.”
“Was your mother on any drugs?”
“No.”
They asked if she thought her mother had slipped while going into the shower. Again, the answer was no. Hayley explained that Sue Snow took her showers in the evening.
Debbie made a sweep through the cabinets for drugs, shaking bottles rapidly to determine if Sue Snow might have overdosed.
Hayley volunteered that her mother took Excedrin each morning, and Debbie Ayrs asked for the bottle. When Hayley brought it out of the kitchen, Debbie shook it, but it was full.
Airlift Northwest was summoned from Harborview Medical Center. Debbie Ayrs and Randy Bellon hadn’t a clue about what had caused Sue Snow to collapse.
They put a tube down Sue Snow’s trachea.
It was hard for Hayley to watch and at the same time hard not to watch, as the paramedics swarmed over her mother. She went to the phone and called the bank to leave a message that her mother had fallen down and wouldn’t be in that day.
She was asked again about possible drug use.
“No. My mother’s not a druggie,” the girl responded incredulously.
The garbage in the bathroom was examined to see if anything was there. There wasn’t.
An unresponsive Sue Snow was loaded onto a stretcher for the ride to the landing zone on a tiny stretch of runway passing for Auburn’s small municipal airport. No one thought the woman was going to survive.
Hayley gathered up her math homework for the trip to Harborview with Karen Inoue. Why she brought her schoolwork, or how she ever thought she could even work at it, was something she would never be able to recall.
Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center is the Northwest’s best trauma center, and the county hospital where the indigent come for care. Gang fights. Knifings. Murder. It is a place where the saddest of stories often end. Desperate measures were used to save Sue Snow’s life when she was airlifted there that morning.
Hayley and Karen arrived before 7:30. Clutching her math homework, the fifteen-year-old plainly did not understand the seriousness of her mother’s condition. She sat in a waiting area, staring at her book.
She did not know where her sister was; her mother’s husband, Paul Webking, was at work and someone had contacted him; and her own daddy, Connie Snow, was on the job at Boeing in Auburn—not the easiest place to track someone down.
A doctor came in and told the girl that something was the matter with her mother’s brain. It was swollen, she thought she heard the man say.
A few minutes later, the doctor returned and said Sue was still in a coma.
“We’re trying everything we can,” the doctor said. “We’re going to run s...