Original subtitles

A fatal fall in a South Carolina mansion.

A life taken in a heartbeat.

I couldn't speak.

I had to hand the phone to my husband

because I couldn't speak.

It was not news that I was prepared to hear.

Was it simply down to natural causes?

She had said that he'd had a heart attack

and collapsed and died at the bottom of the stairs.

Or murdered?

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: My brother,

Steven Del Valle Clayton, was born on May 1st, 1954.

Steven was always the biggest personality in the room.

He was just full of joy.

And Steven was just extremely gregarious.

And he was the type of person that when you meet him,

you automatically knew that you were friends with him.

He was an accounting major at Florida State University,

and from there, it became an interesting avenue for him

to open physical therapy centers inside of hospitals

and have them separately run.

And so he began to do this with hospitals

all around the country.

My brother had great success business wise.

His dream was to retire at 40, but he was able to retire at 41

and start traveling and doing all the things

that he wanted to do.

And what Steve and Clayton wanted to do

was inspire others to success.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: After Steven retired,

Steven was a mentor to many young people

and started out in college mentoring

younger college grads.

And from there, the mentorship relationship

grew through college and then into business,

and Steve was with them all the way into their success.

Steven also liked to throw a party.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: Steven loved to entertain people,

and one of the days that was very special for him was

the 4th of July and he always had

something very special planned, live

music at his house, fireworks.

He loved to entertain and he loved to have fun with people.

And he's the kind of man that was

always there for his friends.

Steven also cared deeply for his family.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: My dad passed away 11 months

before William and I got married,

and Steve not only walked me down the aisle,

but he also served as my husband's best man.

My dad told me before he passed

to take care of my sister.

To honor you, and he loved you very much.

Despite Steven's love for his family and friends,

his own romantic life was far from perfect.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: He was married six times,

and a lot of that was because there was just

no Steven around to really keep the relationships together,

because he was traveling at least three weeks out

of every month, so it put a little bit of a dent

in some of his personal relationships,

his marriages, et cetera.

But in 2010, Steven Clayton,

now living in North Carolina, announced that he

had met someone special.

Steve said that he had met someone called Lana

online through a dating app.

Lana worked as a nurse and was originally from Oklahoma.

She had kids from a previous relationship,

and she told Steve that she'd been an Air Force veteran

and that she loved the outdoors.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: He loved her so much, he

called her his Lana Sue from Oklahoma,

and I think he wanted to make this the rest of his life.

They were married in November of 2013.

The wedding took place at their house in North Carolina.

It was a beautiful ceremony outdoors, surrounded

by Steve's beautiful gardens.

Steven was so excited to be marrying Lana.

He felt that he had found somebody, a small town

girl that he was going to finally be able to settle in

with for the rest of his life.

Soon after, the couple

moved to the banks of Lake Wylie

in York County, South Carolina.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: It's a beautiful piece of property,

and it was right on the lake, and the home itself was just--

it was very lovely, very colonial style,

in the style of Mount Vernon.

It was the perfect property for Steven to hold

his legendary July 4th party.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: Every time 4th of July came around,

Steven was just in his element, and it was just going to be

as grand an event as he always had every

time he got people together.

But after one event in 2018,

Steven wasn't his usual sprightly self.

Steve starts to feel a little bit

under the weather.

He's just hosted all of these big July 4th parties.

He's known for throwing these really epic bashes for it,

but he's all of a sudden bedbound,

feeling really dizzy, sick, really, really unwell.

As he fell ill, he even stopped communicating

with his beloved sister.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: The last time

that Steven actually replied to a message

was on the 16th of July.

And on the 17th of July, I texted

him and he didn't get right back to me, which was very odd.

And then I started calling and there was no answer.

It was going straight to voicemail.

Despite not hearing from Steven,

Rosie felt reassured that Lana was by his side.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: Lana was a nurse,

and that was the thing that made me feel the most confident

about them being together.

He had someone by his side, who was

trained to help in any sort of emergency situation.

So to me, not hearing from him for a couple of days

wasn't something that I was going to be concerned about.

On July 21, five days since Rosie

had last heard from her brother,

a motorcyclist was passing by the Clayton's mansion

when all hell broke loose.

Within minutes, emergency services

arrived on the scene with body cams,

capturing shocking footage that would eventually

be seen by South Carolina's Chief Prosecutor for York

and Union County, Solicitor Kevin Brackett.

At the bottom of the main flight of stairs leading

from the second floor down to the first,

they found the body of Steven Clayton.

Given the position they found him

in at the bottom of the stairs, it's quite possible

that he fell some distance down the stairs

and ended up at the foot of the stairs.

In a situation like this, the emergency responders

realized that heroic measures to try to restore life

to Mr. Clayton would be futile that he

had been deceased for some time,

and there was no bringing him back.

As her husband's body lay in the Hall,

an officer tried to calm a hysterical Lana.

When they asked her about him,

she told them that he had been sick for the last several days,

that he suffered from bouts of vertigo, and that--

that he had been bedridden, essentially, and

that at about 11 o'clock that morning,

she had left the house to go outside to do some yard work.

And when she came back an hour and a half,

an hour and 45 minutes later, she found her husband

at the bottom of the stairs.

As officers listened to Lana Clayton.

Stevens, police officer, nephew Nick arrived at the house

after hearing of his uncle's passing.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: He heard the address come over the radio

and immediately recognized it.

And so when he arrived there, my brother had passed away.

He was dead on the floor in front of the stairs.

The scene pointed to a tragic accident.

The deputy coroner arrived to figure out

exactly how Steven had died.

Initial signs suggested

a fatal fall down the stairs.

But the deputy coroner also noticed

that Steven's face had a grayish pallor

and concluded his probable cause of death.

Apparently, the coroner had seen a discoloration

of his skin and immediately thought

that it was a heart attack.

A simple matter of him having a heart attack

and falling down the stairs.

When the deputy coroner

offered to take Steven Clayton's body

to the morgue to run some tests,

Lana made a snap decision.

She indicated that she did

not want an autopsy performed.

She wanted to have him cremated,

so she asked that he be taken to a local funeral home.

She gave them the name of the funeral home

and the body was removed at that point.

Although Steven's body was already on its way

to the funeral home, there was still

one close family member who had not even

been informed of his death.

Nick suggested and said,

why hasn't Chris got here yet?

And he came to learn, Chris, who

was the nephew of Steven and very, very close,

like a son to Steven, had not even been called.

So he told Lana, we need to call Chris.

He needs to know.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: And when he said that to Lana,

she went berserk.

She did not want Christopher to be there.

She did not want to notify Christopher.

That was an outrage to Nick because he

knew of their closeness.

Even though Lena was very insistent

that Christopher not be called.

Nick did the right thing, and he called

Christopher immediately.

When Christopher learned of Steven's death.

He relayed the sad news to Rosie.

The first thing I heard my nephew crying like a baby,

saying, Uncle Steve is gone, Uncle Steve is gone.

And I couldn't speak.

I had to hand the phone to my husband

because I couldn't speak.

It was not news that I was prepared to hear.

He was a very good person, and he was my best friend.

And every single day I miss him.

After informing Rosie and

the rest of Steven Clayton's extended family in Florida

about his sudden death from a heart attack, which

may have led to a fatal fall down the stairs,

Steven's nephew Chris went to the family's

South Carolina home to be with his grieving family.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: Christopher

arrived at the house, his wife met him there,

and so he was coming to comfort Lana.

And Chris continued to try to reassure her by saying,

you don't have to worry about anything, Lana.

Uncle Steve has everything written down in his will.

And she immediately told him there is no will.

And this could not have been further from the truth.

Not only did Christopher know about the will,

Christopher had seen the will.

It was so large, it was practically

the size of a ream of paper.

Lana continued to insist that there

was no will, to the point that she became

infuriated with Christopher.

It was clear to them at that point

something was off.

This wasn't right, and this needed to be looked at further.

You would imagine that having been married for five years,

that Lana would be aware of the existence

of a will, especially when a husband is

financially very successful.

It does suggest a real disconnect between the family

unit and Lana.

And that kind of suggests either

that they're both receiving different information,

or that there's something else going on there that's kind

of hidden beneath the surface.

Thrown by Lana Clayton's denial

of the existence of a will.

Steven's nephews went upstairs to check out his bedroom,

where they found a shocking scene.

In the bedroom, they

see the bed is in disarray.

The bed is filthy.

There's vomit on the bed.

The mattress is soaked with urine, so soaked

that the urine has actually started

to puddle beneath the mattress, underneath the bed.

The thing you have to know about Steven

is that he was an extremely fastidious individual.

He was very clean.

He would sometimes shower twice a day.

To be lying in a pool of his own bodily fluids

is not only an undignified situation for any human being,

but it is absolutely not one that my brother

would find himself in.

The second thing was they couldn't

find his phone anywhere.

It wasn't in the bedroom, which also struck them as odd

because he was glued to his phone,

and if he was bedridden for several days,

his phone should have been right there next to him,

but it wasn't.

So things were really jumping

out to Nick at this point.

Why hadn't Lana called 911 herself?

There were two phones in the house at the time.

Why she had to run out onto the street asking

someone else to call 911.

It was also really strange that Lana

didn't give Steve CPR herself.

She was a nurse.

She was medically trained to know how to do that.

This was really unusual.

Despite Nick's misgivings,

the official verdict was that Steven's fatal fall

was caused by a heart attack and no foul play was involved.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: This was not

a suspicious enough situation.

They felt that they could rely upon the coroner, and

the coroner's perspective that because of his discoloration

in his face, that this was clearly a heart attack

and that he had fallen down the stairs.

So they had no reason to look further into it.

Later that evening, Steven's sister Rosie

called Lana to ask how Steven had gotten so ill

and why she hadn't heard from him in the days

leading up to his death.

I finally got a return call from Lana

after having called her numerous times,

and it was approximately 3 o'clock in the morning.

And she was inebriated.

She was angry, and she had no empathy for the fact

that I had just lost my brother.

She was livid that Steve's family members were letting her

know that there was a will.

When she claimed that she knew for a fact that there wasn't.

I asked her what was going on prior to this,

and she told me that he had been feeling ill,

and I asked her, where were you?

And she said, I was out mowing the lawn.

And I said, but aren't you telling

me that he was violently ill.

If he was violently ill, why were

you outside mowing the lawn?

And just as a knee jerk reaction,

she said, because he was being so needy.

When I asked her why it was that I wasn't

able to hear from him when I texted him or called him,

she said somewhat nonchalantly, I'm not sure,

maybe it's at the bottom of the lake.

That almost made my heart stop because I knew that my brother

wouldn't be without a phone.

That was the moment when I felt something was terribly wrong.

As the call progressed,

Rosie became even more shocked by what

Lana Clayton was saying.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: Lana tried to tell me that Steve

was a hardcore drug user.

I know my brother and he was not a hardcore drug user.

The reason why she started to say

what she said about the drug use

is as an excuse to have him cremated right away, so it

wouldn't be embarrassing to his family

that they would find hardcore drugs in his system.

There's now this accumulation of unusual behaviors coming

from Lana around the circumstances of this death,

and it is driving this kind of wedge

between her and the family.

Later that day after Rosie's early hours phone call,

Lana also spoke to Steven's nephew,

Chris, banning him and others from coming

to the family house.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: She said only her children

were allowed in the house.

She didn't want family members there,

and she said that there was going

to be a memorial service at some point,

and that's when I could come.

Aside from keeping everybody in the family away,

she immediately gave away all of his clothes.

My brother had a really lovely collection of watches.

None of that was found.

My brother was a collector of art and sculpture.

These things were also missing.

Imagine, my brother hadn't even been dead for 24 hours,

and she's already getting rid of all the clothes?

This doesn't make sense to me.

This doesn't make any sense at all.

Steve's sister Rosie was well within her right

to be upset and confused by Lana selling off

all of his property so fast.

It is very unusual.

It's very fast, and especially when

he has other family members who might want to be

involved in that process.

On the other hand, you could say that actually this behavior

is that of a traumatized woman trying

to rid herself of the reminders of her husband

that are surrounding her.

So there are explanations, but it is still unusual behavior.

Suspicious of Lana's behavior

and the state of Steven Clayton's bedroom, his nephews

Nick and Chris decided to take action

to find out if it was just a tragic accident

or something more sinister.

Could he even have been pushed?

They wanted to get to the truth.

They did not believe that Steve

had died of natural causes, and they

wanted to get a secret autopsy done before Lana

got Steve cremated.

Nick, of his own volition, went

to the York County Sheriff's Office

and laid out his concerns, told them

why he felt something was wrong and asked for their assistance

in getting an autopsy.

The coroner listened to their concerns

and agreed that this was a case that merited further inquiry.

So she directed that the body be

retrieved from the funeral home, taken to the morgue,

and ordered an autopsy to be performed on it.

But Nick had one more request,

and that was to run toxicology tests on Steve's blood.

A toxicologist is a specific type of scientist

who examines bodily fluids to determine

the presence of foreign chemicals

or foreign agents that may have also impacted or caused brought

about the death of someone.

So a toxicology was ordered in this case,

and blood was sent off to a toxicologist.

While they waited for Steven's body

to be collected from the funeral home for the autopsy,

his police officer nephew Nick decided

to dig deeper into the circumstances

surrounding his uncle's death.

My nephew felt that it was imperative

that we have as much information as possible and

as quickly as possible.

Nick called some contacts in the police

department to try and get them to investigate

what had happened, but he hit a brick wall.

He then decided to hire a private investigator

to look around into some of the circumstances

surrounding Steve's death.

The investigator found that Lana was trying

to liquidate Steve's assets.

They also found that she had a fire pit in her garden,

and she had been burning various documents

that belonged to Steve.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: Everything

that was in my brother's filing cabinets

and there were two large filing cabinets,

was all dumped into the fire pit.

As the investigation continued,

Steven Clayton's autopsy results

were released to police, including his nephew Nick.

Steve's autopsy results came back and

showed that he had had heart disease, which

supported the initial theory that he

had died of natural causes.

But Steve's family would have to wait

a lot longer for the toxicology report, which takes

a lot longer to come back.

Meanwhile, Steven's body was returned

to the funeral home for cremation, and on August 4th,

two weeks after Steven died, Lana held a private memorial

service at the family home.

There were a lot of Steve's mentees there,

and Steve's closest friends were there,

but there was just an air of something bizarre.

Lana's behavior at the memorial was very out of the ordinary.

She wore a red and white dress, sundress.

She didn't act like a person who had just lost somebody

that was dear to them.

She didn't interact much with many of the guests.

She only interacted with the neighbors.

There were many of us that had a tremendous amount

of suspicion, but there was absolutely

nothing that we could do until the toxicology

reports came back.

About two weeks after Stevens memorial,

the report was finally released to Stevens nephews, Nick

and Chris.

It revealed that he had the presence of a large amount

of tetrahydrozoline, which is the active ingredient in Visine

in his system 68 nanograms per milliliter,

which was a lethal load of tetrahydrozoline.

Visine is an eye drop, but there

are many different products that serve this purpose that

have tetrahydrozoline in them.

When you use eye drops to get the red out of your eyes,

that's the thing in that eye drop actually does the job.

It's a vasoconstrictor.

It takes blood vessels that are expanded and narrows them down.

It does the same thing when you ingest it

and your blood vessels will constrict.

It can make you sick by nauseating you.

It can make you dizzy.

It can make you pass out.

And ultimately, it can kill you,

because your blood vessels are too narrow

and your heart is working too hard

to try to pump blood through tubes that have

been narrowed by this drug.

Using eye drops appropriately, you

would expect to find 0.38 nanograms per milliliter

in the body.

Steven had 68 nanograms per milliliter,

which is 1,000 times more than what you would normally find.

Now, the question arises, how did that tetrahydrozoline

get into Mr. Clayton's body?

And that is not something that would naturally occur.

So somebody must have put it into him.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: The morning

that the toxicology report became available,

the phone rang, and it was my nephew Christopher,

and through fighting back tears and anger, he screamed.

She did it.

She killed him. She did it.

She killed him.

The report really said that my brother had been murdered.

That he had been intentionally poisoned.

I could barely speak with anyone

because there was no way that anyone would want

to cause that kind of harm to someone as kind

and generous and loving as Steven.

It was initially believed

that Steven Clayton had a heart attack

and potentially fell to his death

at his South Carolina home.

But a toxicology test on his blood

shockingly revealed that he was actually

killed by a lethal overdose of a chemical called

tetrahydrozoline, also known as THZ

commonly found in eye drops.

THZ constricts blood vessels, causing severe nausea.

Extremely low blood pressure, and in Steven's case, death.

When that toxicology report came back,

the police had something definitive.

Up until that point, they didn't have much.

But this report now showed that Steve had been poisoned.

Police were now dealing

with a potential murder.

But did the poison alone kill Steven?

Or was he poisoned and then pushed to his death?

Investigators were determined to find out.

On August 17th, 2018, the York County

Sheriff's Office launched an investigation

into Steve's death.

12 days later, on August 29th, 2018,

just over one month after Steven died,

his wife Lana Clayton was called to the York

County Coroner's office.

The Coroner and the Sheriff's office

agreed that the best way to conduct the interview would

be just to bring her in for the purpose of discussing

with the Coroner the results of the autopsy and toxicology.

The Coroner and the Sheriff's Office

did not want her to know that the Sheriff's office

was involved at that point.

They didn't want to arouse her suspicions.

So the police would not be in the room

where the initial interview was conducted.

They would be in an adjacent room,

monitoring, and listening to what was going on.

One of the most interesting features

of the interview with the Coroner

was the fact that completely unsolicited,

Lana volunteered that her husband used

to put a couple of drops of Visine in his morning coffee

to help keep regular, that he used that to help him

move his bowels each morning.

This was not responsive to anything in particular.

At this point in time, she didn't

even know that the toxicology report revealed what it did.

In terms of human behavior, if you're

volunteering information before being asked about it,

it's often because you're implying your innocence,

because you don't believe this is information

that can implicate you.

So in this case where Lana is volunteering information

about the eye drops, that implies

that she's trying to reassert her innocence and

the innocence of this chemical being in Steve's system.

Not long after Lana's admission,

detectives entered the room.

When the investigators entered the room,

Lana barely flinched.

It was as though she had been expecting them to come.

Detectives began to pick holes in Lana's story.

How could Steve have been putting these drops of Visine

into his coffee when she alleged that he

was so sick and bedridden.

It was at this point that Lana's tact totally changed.

She then started to blame Steve and to attack his character.

In criminology, there's a theory

called ideal victim theory that basically

says that the more tarnished someone's character is,

the less readily they're given status as a legitimate victim,

basically meaning that if someone has performed

negative X, the general population have less

sympathy for them as a victim.

And so I think this is Lana's attempt to basically reduce

public sympathy for Steve.

So people stop looking into it so much

and stop asking as many questions.

The information she's providing

about his character doesn't really

move the needle on whether or not he was murdered

or how he was murdered.

All of that is irrelevant to the central question

of how did that Visine, how did that get into his system.

As the interview progressed, Lana became more and more aware

that she was the focus of the interview

and she was an object of suspicion.

And the interview there at the Coroner's office

terminated when she invoked her right to counsel

and said she did not wish to answer any further questions

without an attorney present.

Later that day, investigators

searched the Claytons home looking for eye drops

containing THZ.

They would be looking for anything that

had any Visine residue in it.

Glasses, cups, anything like that,

that would help inform the investigation

on the circumstances of this man's death.

The police were able to find some Visine in the house.

Not unusual amounts but the bulk of the items

seized revolved around digital evidence that would help

have a better understanding of what had taken place.

At about 6:15.

Detective Moats, who had been at the Coroner's office,

arrived at the house, and the search was

concluding at about that time.

Shortly thereafter, while he was at the house,

he was approached by Lana, who asked

him if she could speak to him.

He started a recorder and recorded the conversation

that took place.

Lana admitted that she had, in fact, administered

the Visine to her husband, Steven,

that she had been the one who gave it to him.

It was very helpful that she admitted this first,

because it resolved the issue of who gave him the THZ,

but secondly, because it did so in a recorded fashion that

would be incontrovertible in court.

At that point, we had enough information

and evidence to file murder charges against her.

The police were set to arrest Lana for Steve's murder,

but then they receive a call from one of her neighbors

saying that Lana had been found unconscious.

When the police go there, the gas has been left on

and Lana is surrounded by sleeping tablets.

After going to Lana Clayton's home

to arrest her for the murder of her husband Steven,

and finding her unconscious after an apparent suicide

attempt, police rushed to save her.

When they arrived at the house,

they found her upstairs in the bed, unresponsive.

They found suicide notes apologizing for her behavior.

They were able to get her to the hospital.

She was treated there.

She was not in serious condition.

After a few hours, they were able to take her to the jail

and book her in.

Dr. HONOR DORO Lana's attempt

at taking her own life really implies

different things based on whether she's guilty or not.

If she's innocent, then this is a woman

who has experienced significant trauma, but if she's guilty,

then this is someone perhaps trying to escape from the mess

that they've created and don't seem that they can get out of.

On August 31st, Lana was taken to York County

Detention Center, where she was then charged with murder and

tampering with a food or drug.

News of Lana's arrest spread

to Steven Clayton's family and friends.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: If you ask me

how I felt at that moment, for me,

all the questions just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Because at that moment she became a real live monster,

a monster capable of taking away

a person who had represented so much good in my life

and so much good in the lives of so many people.

After her arrest, Lana continued to disparage Steven.

She continued to paint a picture of an abusive person

and make herself out to be the victim of his abuse.

She claimed that Steve had been

emotionally and physically abusive

to her, that he was a heavy drug user.

And that he had viewed child abuse images.

But the toxicology report only showed

that he had a small amount of marijuana and prescription

temazepam in his system.

And when investigators checked his computer,

there was no evidence to support

Lana's allegations that he had child abuse images.

She started accusing him

of being an abusive husband.

So one of the things we wanted to find out

was what the other women he had been married to

had experienced.

None of the wives that he had previously been married to ever

indicated that he was abusive.

They characterized him as a loving, caring husband,

and they said their time with him was some

of the best in their lives.

She said that he was abusive, but at the same time

she would send me text messages saying how very much in love

they were.

So I think she was grasping at any sympathy

that she could get from any person, and none of it

made sense.

With Lana in custody awaiting trial.

Police check through their records

for any previously reported incidents at the Clayton home.

There was only one when we did that.

One incident that the police had been called out

to the Clayton household, and when

we researched that incident report and read

through it, the already bizarre case became even more unusual.

What we came to learn after reading this incident report

was that Lana shot Steven in the back

of the head with a crossbow in 2016 at about 3 o'clock

in the morning while he lay in bed asleep.

Luckily, it only grazed him when

she was probed about this.

Officer said, had you had an argument?

She said no, everything was fine.

Steve was just asleep.

He corroborated that, said it was just

an accident, so the case was closed.

Steve's reaction to the crossbow incident

throws into question Lana's account

of him being violent towards her,

the fact that he was so readily happy to let that slide.

A really serious and significant incident.

But then, on the other hand, you

do have to wonder if it was kind of representative

of an extreme level of violence that

was becoming quite normalized in their relationship.

We were very shocked to find out that this had occurred

a couple of years prior.

The fact that we now knew that she had been doing this

well prior to what she did to take his life

was just another reason to feel sick in the middle of our gut,

because there were just too many situations where

I would get a phone call from my brother

after having tried to reach him for a day or two,

and he'd call me and say, you're

not going to believe this.

I was asleep for two days.

I had the worst sunstroke.

But now looking back, she was checking

to see what was the dose that was going to take his life.

The prosecution now had a very strong

case against Lana Clayton.

They had the toxicology report that

showed those fatal amounts of Visine in Steve's bloodstream.

They had been administered to him against his will.

They then also had the fact that Steve

had been bedridden for so long, and his mobile phone

had just gone missing.

So the question becomes, why did she do this?

Well, every woman that he'd ever been married to he

had a prenuptial agreement with.

He was a very wealthy man.

So we believe one existed with Lana as well,

but that it was destroyed by Lana after he

died along with the will.

If there's no will in South Carolina

and you die without a will, everything

you have goes to your spouse.

She's the one who stood to benefit because she was going

to be the sole beneficiary of his estate,

and that's why she did what she did.

Our options at this point was proceed

on a murder charge, which, if that was going to happen,

she would go to trial.

And then the only other option was

try to come to some sort of agreement

with the defense that would expose her

to what was the equivalent of life

without having to go to trial.

And we would spare the victim's family, the rigors of trial,

the trauma of going through this detailed description

of what their loved one went through.

We were not going to let this monster go free.

And there was a great chance that she could have.

We took the wise counsel of the people in the solicitor's

office and decided that we would

go ahead and accept a plea for voluntary manslaughter.

By accepting a guilty plea, even of a lower level offense.

That means the family have secured that there

will be some form of justice.

Whereas, going to trial on a no guilty plea

on a circumstantial evidence case

means that they'd run the risk of there not being any

justice served.

On January 16th, 2020,

Lana Clayton pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and

tampering with a food or drug.

Our objective was

to secure a sentence that was tantamount to life,

and ultimately, the judge concluded

that a 25 year no parole sentence was appropriate,

so she will remain in jail until she's 73 years old.

We'll never know for sure what took place in that house,

but I believe that Steven Clayton was

poisoned over several days.

It was clear that she had basically

held him hostage, captive, using this chemical, before he

finally succumbed to the poison that was in his system

and collapsed, perhaps falling down the last few stairs,

landing at the foot of the stairs where he was found.

This was a prolonged, torturous experience for Steven Clayton,

and a horrible one that--

that she was the mastermind and architect

for and wholly responsible.

At court, Rosie and other members

of Steven's family were given the chance

to read out their victim impact statements

in front of the now convicted murderer, Lana Clayton.

ROSIE CLAYTON-LESLIE: There was a lot of pain

and at the same time, there was a feeling of such betrayal

that I could have trusted somebody with the life

of someone so dear to me.

It was a ruse.

The fact that she was a person trained in life savings,

she used her training to cause another person harm.

She stole him from me.

And my heart pities, the agony that she must have to face.

Not just in this world, but in whatever world is to come.

But from my own brother, I learned to forgive.

And I think that that's the only place that I've

been able to find peace.

Steve is going to be remembered by everyone who loved him

for his joy and his laughter.

Steve wasn't happy unless he was making someone else happy.

And that joy is my brother's greatest legacy.

The joy that he brought to so many people, and all of them

think about him and pay that forward.