Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

red herring.
    Bizarrely, many pictures of Dorothy Jones had emerged. The wife who had been happy in her marriage for many years—at least until recently; the good friend and considerate relative; the immaculate housekeeper; but also the gambler, the glamorous seductress, and possibly even the drug runner. She had been a complicated woman.
    And it was quite possible that there were facets of her daily life that she revealed to no one. Still, neither the arson investigators nor the Homicide detectives had found anyone who had a compelling reason to want Dorothy dead.
    Jim Reed talked again to Dante Blackwell, and brought forth new information. Before Blackwell got married, Dorothy had been a frequent visitor to his home. During that period, Blackwell recalled, he had received a number of weird phone calls.
    “When I answered, a man’s voice would say, ‘Where’s your girlfriend? Did she dump you?’ When Dorothy answered, there would only be breathing.
    “I figured that the man was probably someone whose voice Dorothy would have recognized.”
    On March 10, Dante Blackwell took several polygraph examinations and he, too, passed them all cleanly. Just like Carl Jones, he clearly knew nothing more than he had told the investigators.
     
    If the fire in the Joneses’ home had burned even ten or fifteen minutes longer, Dorothy Jones’s death would probably have been listed officially as accidental. But the fire was discovered in a short time, thanks to her neighbors. Arson investigators felt it was a deliberately set fire, although they were not sure exactly how that was accomplished. Their most likely method was a candle or match or other heated object held underneath the mattress of her bed.
    Somehow, someway, Dorothy had been unable to leave the room, where she died of smoke inhalation. How she was rendered incapable of saving her own life would remain a huge question—even until today, some three decades later.
    Her autopsy revealed the slight bump on her head. Perhaps she had been given a drug that could not be detected in the postmortem exam or in all the tests afterward, something that crime labs rarely tested for.
    The most likely drug that would have quickly paralyzed her and been difficult to detect on autopsy (because small amounts are normally present in the human brain) would have been succinylcholine. It is a drug routinely used in surgery to relax muscles so that a ventilating tube can be inserted into the windpipe. But it also takes away the ability to breathe or move, so oxygen must be available instantly, administered by an anesthesiologist.
    It would have been almost impossible for anyone other than a medical professional or someone with access to a hospital to obtain. In the history of crime—distant and current—there are several infamous murder cases involving succinylcholine, all of which were carried out by medical professionals.
    It is one of the cruelest ways to kill someone. Although the victims of succinylcholine poisoning cannot move even to blink an eye, they are fully conscious. They cannot will their lungs to expand and draw in air, and they suffocate.
    Dr. Carl Coppolino, a Florida anesthesiologist, served twelve years in prison for the 1965 murder of his wife, Dr. Carmela Coppolino. He had allegedly used succinylcholine to render her powerless. In 1984, Genene Jones, a San Antonio, Texas, nurse who became known as “the Angel of Death,” was sentenced to 159 years in prison for the murder of a toddler in her care and the poisoning of several other children, who survived. Her drugs of choice were succinylcholine and heparin (a powerful blood thinner).
    More recently—in July 2006—a critical care nurse in Nevada named Chaz Higgs was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Kathy Augustine, who just happened to be the elected controller of the state of Nevada, a powerful and very attractive woman. Reno detectives said that Augustine had died after being injected with succinylcholine, although it was first believed that the popular forty-two-year-old politician had suffered a heart attack.
    The mark of an injection of this drug can be hidden in a mole or birthmark, and certainly, Dorothy Jones’s burned flesh would have obliterated it.
    But it was just a theory; as far as anyone knew, she had no intense involvement with a doctor or any other person in the medical field.
    Still, it was only natural to look for far-out methods in the death of Dorothy Jones. The common