Original subtitles

-A naval officer battles a mysterious illness below deck

on the open seas...

-He was a healthy, reasonably young guy.

It was a puzzler.

-...but loses the fight.

-They still hadn't determined yet what killed Lee.

-But an autopsy provides investigators

with a chilling answer for his death.

-We found out that he had an elevated amount

of arsenic in his blood.

You say to yourself, "Holy cow, how did that happen?"

-It could have been an accidental poisoning.

Was it a suicide?

-Somebody had painted graffiti on the ship.

Maybe somebody on the ship was trying to kill him.

-I said, "Oh, man, I hope they find out who did it,

and I hope they pay."

-All roads lead to dead ends...

-If your primary suspect passes the polygraph,

that certainly creates a roadblock

and the case becomes a cold case.

-...until investigators work towards a shocking admission.

-It's just one of the most bizarre confessions

I've had in my entire career as a prosecutor.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-In the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Spain,

the USS Forrestal cruises the open waters.

The aircraft carrier is one of the crown jewels

of the U.S. naval fleet.

-The ship itself would house about 5,000 people

and had the ability to provide services that people require.

Medical services --

There was a hospital and doctors facility on board,

a surgeon on board

because they had to be prepared to treat battle injuries in case

they were called upon to go to war.

-But below the deck,

doctors are not treating a sailor injured in battle.

They are tending to 37-year-old Lieutenant Lee Hartley,

who is battling a mysterious illness.

-His job on the Forrestal was as the disciplinary officer.

-Lee Hartley was very well respected by friends

and by the people he actually supervised.

-I got to know Lee fairly well,

and I knew that he was recently married.

I knew that he was divorced.

I knew he had a child.

He and I would talk

whenever I was in the staff judge advocate's office.

Every once in a while, he'd drop down.

We would eat dinner together in the officer's mess.

Just a good guy.

When Lee became sick,

he started to exhibit symptoms that required treatment.

-He was suffering from nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness.

-He had ulcerated areas in his mouth,

his lips, severe stomach pain.

-Mom told us that Lee was really sick.

The ship doctor thought he might have the flu.

And the flu can hold on for days at a time.

-You know, there is a lot of things they examine,

but they really weren't sure what was going on.

-While the ship was in the Mediterranean,

his situation deteriorated over time.

He had great discomfort.

He was just sick and sicker to the extent

that the ship was not capable of doing

the diagnostic work that was required to figure out

what the heck was wrong with him.

The ship said, "We just can't help him.

We got to get him home."

Lee eventually was medevaced, medically evacuated,

from the ship back to Jacksonville

and was treated at the Jacksonville naval Hospital.

-While doctors order additional tests

to determine what is ailing Lee,

his wife, Pamela, rushes to her husband's bedside.

-He'd get better, but then he'd get worse.

He was very, very ill.

It caused a severe bloating of his body.

-Dad called and said, "We got to go to Florida now."

He said, "Lee is in the hospital,

and they don't expect him to make it."

And we got there,

but Lee was not cognizant at all.

He looked like he weighed 300 pounds.

-The cause of Lee's illness remains a mystery

as his body begins to shut down.

-Lieutenant Hartley, after approximately five months

of being ill starting on the Forrestal,

ended up finally passing away on November 18th of 1982.

♪♪

-Mom got the phone call

and she called us and we got together,

and then we drove down there after he passed away,

of course,

because he was already gone and it was just devastating.

-Verle Lee Hartley was my older brother

by about 14 months.

-There are seven of us and the oldest one is Verle Lee.

We all grew up in Elwood, Indiana.

We'd play hide and go seek, tag and kick the can,

and we had a really good time.

-He was a very laid-back person.

He really was.

Wasn't a mean streak in him.

-Being our big brother who always --

when something came up, he tried to handle it.

And that's what big brothers do.

-As a teenager, Lee had ambitions to join the Navy.

At 17, with the support of his parents,

he enlisted and left home for the high seas.

-He was all Navy. He really was.

He was all Navy.

-He just really loved being in the service.

He was quite good at the job he did.

-Lee quickly makes a name for himself in the Navy,

and his high aspirations draw attention from superiors.

While stationed in Florida,

the rising star Lee Hartley falls in love with Linda Patel,

and the two are married.

Seven years later, Lee and Linda welcomed their only child,

a daughter named Stephanie.

-He thought that Stephanie was just the cat's meow.

You know, she could do no wrong.

That's a real daddy's girl, you know?

-After years of climbing the ranks,

Lee Hartley became a naval lieutenant on the USS Forrestal.

When Lieutenant Hartley turned 37,

less than a year before he died,

he experienced a little bit of a midlife crisis,

and he fell in love with his secretary.

Her name was Pamela Johnson.

She was a pretty redhead and 12 years his junior.

-When Lieutenant Hartley had met Pamela Johnson,

she actually was in the Navy and worked for him.

And then that's when they became a couple.

In the military, that actually is fairly frowned upon.

So she had left the Navy.

-Lee decides to divorce Linda, and he and Pamela

are married just a few months into their relationship.

-They fall in love. They get married.

They're making a life for themselves.

And all of a sudden, Lee subsequently passes.

-They still hadn't determined yet what killed Lee.

-He was a healthy, reasonably young guy.

It was a puzzler.

-Nothing seemed right at the time.

Why Lee?

I mean, it just didn't seem right.

They kept saying that he'd come off the ship

with flu-like symptoms.

And I said, "No, it can't be. The flu don't last this long."

And my stepmother decided that she wanted an autopsy.

She pushed enough,

the Navy decided to go ahead and do the autopsy.

-From the autopsy, the medical examiner determines

that Lee Hartley died of cardiopulmonary arrest

due to the stress that the 5-month-long

mysterious illness put on his body.

But with the cause of the sickness still unknown,

Lee's blood and hair samples

are sent to the toxicology lab for testing.

As his family awaits the results,

they prepare to lay the decorated naval veteran to rest.

-We went to the funeral in Augusta, Georgia,

at Pam's mother's home.

-But it didn't even look like him in the casket.

I mean, he was so blowed up.

His face looked like it could bust any second.

He just looked like somebody put air in him and blowed him up.

It didn't look like him.

Mom had a nervous breakdown,

complete nervous breakdown.

I mean, she shut down.

It was awful.

We should have just buried her with Verle

because it was that bad.

♪♪

♪♪

-Weeks after Lieutenant Hartley is laid to rest,

his toxicology tests arrive with unexpected results.

-When we received the toxicology report back

after the autopsy,

we found out that he had an elevated amount of arsenic

in his blood, quite elevated.

Lee had approximately a thousand times more arsenic in his body

than one would expect.

That was the cause of his death.

Well, when we found out that Lee had this high level of arsenic

in his blood, you say to yourself,

"Holy cow, how did that happen?"

It became obvious that not only

was Lee homesick for being with his wife,

but he was also a little bit jealous.

Clearly, he wanted to be with his new wife.

Maybe he was trying to be relieved from the ship

and sent home.

♪♪

-Lieutenant Lee Hartley's blood sample

shows lethal levels of arsenic,

finally giving NCIS investigators an explanation

for his months-long sickness.

-He was losing weight. He had severe stomach pains.

He was vomiting. He had diarrhea.

All of these were typical symptoms for arsenic poisoning.

-In my experience, he's the only person I know of

who has died from arsenic poisoning.

We are exposed to arsenic in the dirt

and maybe a little bit in water and other things,

but only minute amounts that don't affect us over --

even over a long lifespan.

But a thousand times more is a lot.

-It is tasteless, odorless,

but once it gets into the system, it doesn't go away.

-And so if you get a little bit of arsenic today

and a little bit of arsenic tomorrow

and a little bit more arsenic the next day,

each day that amount of arsenic is building in your body.

-Once it was determined

that Lieutenant Hartley had been exposed

and died from arsenic poisoning, at that point,

they had to look at, "Well, where did it come from?"

And the first thought is,

could it have been something on the ship?

So could it have been an accidental poisoning?

-For all we know, there might have been arsenic used

in various ways on the ship.

There might have been piles of arsenic laying around the ship

for some purpose at various times,

which would be of critical concern to the ship

because if they used arsenic on board the ship for any purpose,

well, then everybody on the ship will be exposed to this.

It would be an epidemic of people dying

if this stuff was all over the ship for some reason.

We need to find out from the supply officer

whether or not there's arsenic on board the ship

and what's it used for?

And the answer was they had no arsenic on the ship,

and they didn't use it for anything.

So, Lee, if he was exposed to arsenic,

it wasn't an environmental or an industrial issue now

for the Navy.

It was something else.

-That's when they were looking at,

"Could this have been intentional?"

-Was there some reason for somebody to want to do him harm?

The challenge that we faced

is we didn't even have all the puzzle pieces.

-With the USS Forrestal in the Mediterranean

on a 6-month deployment

holding potential clues in Lee's death,

NCIS investigators are forced to get creative,

and recent headlines spark a theory.

-In 1982, there was a number of cases

where people were poisoned by Tylenol

that they bought on the shelves.

And back then, if you took the capsules,

you could open it and put something in them.

And somebody had put potassium cyanide in a number

of different bottles in a number of different stores,

and it's never been solved to this day.

-Tylenol poisonings have just shocked the nation

after seven people died.

Only a month earlier, on October 5th,

a nationwide recall of Tylenol products was announced.

-Investigators notice in the personal effects

that came home with Lee from the Forrestal

is a bottle of Tylenol.

They're concerned that Lee Hartley could be the victim

of a similar case,

and he's unknowingly ingested capsules

purposely tainted with arsenic.

-So we seized medicines that he had

and had them examined to see if there was anything in them,

see if they'd been tainted.

None of those tests showed that there was any problem.

It didn't turn anything up.

-As NCIS agents continue to rule out possibilities

of the arsenic source,

they must determine if someone aboard the USS Forrestal

was trying to harm Lee.

To explore the theory,

they set up an interview with Lee's widow, Pamela Hartley.

-I drove up to Georgia, met the agent there,

and we then went to her mother's house.

And it was a difficult interview

because she was the grieving widow,

and we were sorry to be there talking to her

about the death of her husband, which had to be heartbreaking.

The idea would be to go and see what was his life like at home?

What happened?

-Pamela tells agents that during Lee's

final deployment in the Mediterranean,

his demeanor changed.

Lee became unusually paranoid, and in letters and calls,

he had expressed concerns for his safety.

-Because of Lieutenant Hartley's position

as a legal officer,

he was in a disciplinary role, and so there always was,

"Could this be somebody who he made so mad

that they would come back and try to kill him?"

-Was there somebody who didn't like him?

Was there somebody who had some grudge against him?

Maybe somebody on the ship was trying to kill him.

♪♪

-NCIS investigators wonder if someone on the USS Forrestal

held a grudge against Lieutenant Lee Hartley,

a grudge that would lead them to poison the naval officer.

-He was a legal aid aboard ship.

Anybody got in trouble aboard ship

had to go through Lee.

So that's what I was thinking.

Somebody aboard ship was taking it out on Lee and poisoned him.

-Somebody could be putting something in his coffee.

Somebody could be putting something in the coffee

in the office that he worked in.

Somebody could be putting something in the food

in the officer's mess.

-Investigators ask Lee's widow, Pamela,

if he mentioned any threats below deck on the high seas.

-We became aware that there were two incidents

that were reported by Lee that might be of interest to us.

First, it was in a letter that Lee had written home,

where he claimed that there was somebody

who attacked him on board the ship with a sword of some type,

and that he had managed to disarm the individual.

He had reported another time in a letter or a telephone call

that somebody had painted graffiti on a bulkhead,

a wall on the ship that said, "Hartley is a dead man."

Now, that seemed a little incredible,

because if you're on board a U.S. naval vessel

and somebody attacks you with a sword,

there's a whole lot of people in the world

who are going to want to know about that.

Lee was the disciplinary officer.

I mean, my goodness, who would not report

being attacked by somebody with a sword?

Well, curiously enough,

there was no report made of this alleged attack.

We could not imagine why he would have said that.

-Did Lee not report the incidents

because he feared for his safety?

As investigators contemplate

Lee Hartley's unsubstantiated claims,

the USS Forrestal arrives at the port

after months away.

-The Forrestal returns to Mayport after its deployment.

We execute a search of his belongings on the ship

and a search of the stateroom

that he shared with another officer,

but none of that showed that arsenic was resonant.

We had to interview various people

that might have known him on board the ship

in order to determine whether or not there was anybody

that they knew of who might have had an interest in harming Lee.

We didn't come up with anybody

who had any experience like that.

-Lee Hartley was very well respected,

both in his job but also as a friend, people he knew.

-We did, however, at one point come up with indications

that Lee had represented that he,

understandably being a newlywed,

wasn't looking forward to going on this particular deployment.

Whenever the ship pulled into port, he would go up to the USO,

where back then they had a bank of pay telephones,

and he would spend an awful lot of time

on the phone talking to his wife at home.

-He was lonely, sure,

but it's not an uncommon feeling for most of the crew

on an aircraft carrier.

-During the course of the investigation,

it became obvious that not only

was Lee homesick for being with his wife,

but he was also a little bit jealous.

He had married a pretty woman who was younger than him,

and now he's at sea for six months.

And, you know, he was just jealous that she was so pretty

and he wasn't there.

My thought at the time

was he might have been setting up a scenario

whereby it was unsafe for him to remain aboard the Forrestal

because somebody was trying to kill him

or hurt him.

By not reporting it,

he doesn't have to suffer the consequences of myself

or the other agents finding out that he was lying

and filing a false report,

or the Navy finding out that he was filing a false report

and taking disciplinary action on him,

but rather somebody at home might report

that, "Gee, Lee is under threat on the ship."

Clearly, he wanted to be with his new wife.

Maybe he was trying to be relieved from the ship

and sent home.

-And possibly the lovesick sailor was willing

to take this ruse a step further.

-And then to follow on that same line of logic,

maybe Lee was taking arsenic

so that he would be ill enough to be sent home.

-So was it maybe not intending to die,

but could he be making himself sick?

-Maybe he unwittingly took enough

of whatever the substance was to make himself sick,

without understanding that it just builds up to the point

that there's so much in your body that you die.

-So it could have been an accidental poisoning.

♪♪

-Investigators working the arsenic poisoning

of naval Lieutenant Lee Hartley

develop a theory to help explain the rare circumstances

around his death.

-Maybe Lee Hartley was taking arsenic himself,

setting the stage to be relieved from the ship and sent home.

-Desperate to return home to his new wife,

Lee may have accidentally ingested

a fatal dose of arsenic.

-But investigators also ask themselves,

what if the fatal dose wasn't an accident?

-Was it a suicide?

Lieutenant Hartley had expressed some homesickness.

Also, there was some jealousy with his wife.

-You collect anything that might be of significance.

And so one of the things you certainly want to collect

are any writings, any notebooks, any diaries,

and any letters that the person might have made.

-That's how they determine, was he suicidal?

Could this have been intentional?

-And we sent them to a psychologist

in order to have them examined

and try to get some insight into his state of mind.

The examination of those by the psychological staff

did not show any suicidal thoughts on Lee's part.

-With all their theories leading to dead ends,

investigators hope new data from Lee's autopsy

can provide answers.

The results of his hair-sample analysis have just reached NCIS.

-Through the hair,

you can actually tell when the person was exposed to arsenic.

So they were able to, month by month,

tell when he began to be exposed to the arsenic

and how it progressed to the time of his death.

So literally, you can look at the hair

and do a graph or a timeline

of exactly when he was being exposed to arsenic.

-Lee's hair indicated a level of arsenic

in his body peaked at various times.

The spikes occurred both before the cruise

and then, during the course of the cruise,

when the ship was in a port visit.

When the ship was in Benidorm, Spain,

there was a spike.

When the ship was in Naples, Italy,

there was a spike.

So we said, "What is the common denominator here

that would give us these spikes?"

-Investigators note an unsettling common denominator

associated with Lee's arsenic spikes.

-Lee's wife was sending packages to him

and visiting him when the ship pulled into foreign ports,

which was not uncommon.

Navy wives, and especially officers' wives,

will travel in groups to the port to visit their husbands.

We thought, "Well, gee,

he's getting packages and Pam is visiting him."

But at that time, we didn't have her as a suspect in this.

-I still hadn't thought about Pam.

They hadn't been married that long.

I couldn't figure, you know, why would she want to hurt him?

-Pamela was not initially considered a suspect

because Lee's poisoning began

while thousands of miles of ocean separated the couple.

But further investigation forces agents to reevaluate.

-There were more and more common denominators

that were linking her to the spikes in the levels

of arsenic in his body.

-Pamela Hartley became one of the primary suspects,

partially because you always look at the significant other.

Also, just hearing, you know, how they became involved,

the differences in age, the fact that he had been out at sea.

But also, I think some of her actions

after he died were suspicious in some ways,

because she pretty much just cut off contact with his family

and didn't want to talk about it

and moved on a lot quicker than you would think.

-And paperwork shows

that Pamela benefited financially from Lee's death.

-Pamela Hartley received benefits as the wife

of a service person that she got monthly.

She also had $35,000 through a life insurance policy.

-Investigators dig into Pamela Hartley's past,

and a job at an animal laboratory catches their eye.

-Pamela Hartley, before joining the Navy,

had been a wildlife officer,

where they did investigations into how arsenic

and other substances affected wildlife.

So she did have some scientific background.

She possibly had a little bit more knowledge

than maybe your average Joe,

but also arsenic at the time wasn't that hard to get.

You could get it through rat poison, anything like that.

-For evidence to tie her to Lee's poisoning,

the NCIS team interviews friends and neighbors of Pamela,

both inside the Navy and civilians,

to determine if she's a viable suspect.

-We learned that after Lee died,

Pamela became allegedly romantically involved

with one of the officers

who was an acquaintance of Lee Hartley.

And this was not years later, but weeks later,

after Lee passed.

During the course of the investigation,

we learned the wives not only do they travel

to the foreign ports,

but they form the Officer's Wives Club

and have dinner and drinks and things like that.

And during the course of that,

they on occasion would joke about, "Hey,

it's pretty nice not having the guys home

because we can do whatever we want.

We can stay in our pajamas all day if we want to."

And at one point, Pamela allegedly said,

"Well, you know, maybe it would be nice

if we just got a hit man and got rid of them,"

and everybody else laughed.

And all of the people that were present for that conversation

when we asked said, "Oh, no, we just took it as a joke.

Everybody was goofing around,

everybody had had a couple of drinks

and nobody thought she was serious."

-Further interviews help investigators to determine

if Pamela did the unthinkable and poisoned her husband,

causing a slow and painful death.

-Lee's roommate, who shared his stateroom,

also was sick on occasion,

but not nearly as sick as Lee was.

Then we thought if he was getting things in the mail

that was making him sick and tainted for some reason,

and he was sharing these with his roommate,

that would explain why the roommate got sick.

And at one point during one of the import periods,

Pamela cooked breakfast for everybody.

And after that again, they get sick.

And at this point,

the only common denominator left was Pamela.

She was a suspect at this stage.

We requested she takes a polygraph examination.

We're hoping at this stage of the game

that her answers will indicate deception or that she was lying.

Then prompt her to confess.

♪♪

-Pamela Hartley has agreed to take a polygraph test,

and investigators hope deceptive answers will lead her

to confess to the poisoning death of her husband,

Lieutenant Lee Hartley.

-Now, the polygraph initially would have been administered

by a licensed polygraph examiner who was also an NCIS agent.

-After analysis, investigators received the results.

-When she was asked questions particularly related

to the death of her husband,

she, in her answers, indicated no deception.

-The results were that she passed,

that she was not involved in his death.

-If your primary suspect passes the polygraph,

that certainly creates a roadblock

and a bit of a problem for the investigators going forward.

There are no more outstanding leads.

There's no logical leads to follow.

-Wasn't anything else they could do at that point.

-I was subsequently transferred away.

We went about our careers and the case sits.

-They're called going cold,

but basically they're put on the back burner.

-And I kept thinking about it,

and my younger brother Art, him and I went for a ride,

and Art looked over at me and said, "That bitch killed him."

I said, "Why would she kill him?"

And Art says, "I don't know."

But he said, "That bitch killed him."

-It had to be her.

But, you know, you can't prove anything.

You just have to wait on the law to prove who did it.

-13 years pass, and the case remains untouched

until a new directive begins to make its way

through law-enforcement agencies across the country.

-The NCIS gets interested in cold cases,

as does my office, and somebody from NCIS suggests,

"Hey, let's look at this one."

Is this something that there is a reasonably good chance

that we possibly can resolve?

There was just so much evidence.

It just seemed like a good case.

Lieutenant Hartley deserved better.

He died a very, very painful death.

And he really deserved our trying to resolve it.

The case involving the investigation of the death

of Lee Hartley was reopened in September of 1995.

-My brother Wilbur called me.

He said that they was opening the case.

I said, "Oh, man, I hope they find out who did it,

and I hope they pay dearly for what they did."

-The investigators,

both from NCIS and from my office,

as well as from the medical examiner,

pretty much start from scratch.

They go through everything.

They also, at that point, start looking at where are the people?

So particularly in this case,

where was Pamela Hartley at that point?

Where was she living?

What had happened in her life since that time?

She had returned to her hometown in Georgia.

Once they determined where she was,

they began a surveillance to determine what she's doing.

Is she working? Anything like that.

Her life had not taken necessarily the best turn.

She had received some money after her husband had died,

but I believe she was unemployed.

I think she was living with her mother.

And it turned out she had had some drug and alcohol problems,

which that's something that we look at in these cases

because does that mean

that somebody might now be ready to confess to something?

Or was that why she had these problems?

Because she was living with the guilt.

-Investigators keep a close watch on Pamela

and comb through original evidence sealed away

for over a decade.

Pamela's polygraph test,

the one in which she showed no deception,

is closely scrutinized.

-The Technical Services Division at headquarters

re-examines the polygraph results

and determines that initial determination was in error.

And in fact, it was inconclusive.

She had not failed it, but she had not passed it.

-Once we determined

that the original polygraph might have been interpreted

incorrectly, it was one factor.

It wasn't everything, but it did take away from that,

"Wait a minute. She passed a polygraph.

So are we on the right track?"

-So during the course of the initial investigation,

many, many people were interviewed.

People on the ship,

people who knew Pam, people who knew Lee, family members.

And one of the family members

that would have been interviewed was Pamela's brother,

and initially he did not indicate anything unusual.

When the cold-case people go back

and do the interviews as they do,

they reinterview Pamela's brother

and at this point, his story changes.

Now he says

Pamela approached him to be a hit man

and kill her husband.

-And he tells investigators the whole sordid story.

Pamela told him she was unhappy

and wanted Lieutenant Hartley dead.

She offered Fred a share of the life insurance money

if he would do it.

Pamela said they were going to poison her husband

while he was on the ship.

Fred wanted no part in this.

He refused to help.

-Fred tells investigators he's worried

that his sister may place blame for Lee's poisoning on him

now that the case has been reopened.

But instead of taking the fall for any involvement

in the murder,

Fred makes a proposition to save his own skin.

-And he indicates to them

that he's also willing to testify to this

against his sister.

The NCIS agents realized

that they have a good witness now in Pamela's brother.

-Investigators plan to use Pamela's brother's admission

against her for leverage to see if her story will change.

-They know that this has been a case

that was unsolved technically for years,

and they are not going to have a million chances

to close this case.

They're probably going to have one chance.

Pamela has already been interrogated

earlier in the case.

She's already taken a polygraph earlier in the case.

She's gone on with her life,

and they're going to approach her now

and try to talk to her again.

-Investigators have one goal --

to induce a murder confession from Pamela,

as it may be their only path toward getting

a conviction and justice for Lieutenant Lee Hartley.

They sit down with Pamela at her mother's home in Georgia,

and what she tells investigators is the last thing they expected.

-During her interrogation, she confesses to the killing of Lee.

♪♪

-Pamela Hartley has just stunned investigators

and confessed to poisoning her husband,

Lieutenant Lee Hartley, with arsenic.

-Pamela Hartley, according to her statement,

bought rat poison at a feed store

where you could buy feed for animals but also poisons.

So she bought this rat poison, which did contain arsenic.

And then she would administer spoonfuls in the baked goods

that she sent him.

Then once he got home, in his meals.

-Even when he was in the hospital,

Pamela would go and visit him and mix some of the poison

into the juice that she was helping him drink.

-At that point, it became obvious he was going to die.

She realized she had some evidence there,

so she emptied it and put it in a nearby lake.

Later, NCIS sent investigators or divers.

They were never able to find it.

-It's my understanding that at one point,

she also said that the reason she did it

is that she didn't want to be married to Lee anymore.

Even though their marriage was of such short duration.

-He was talking about leaving the military

and she didn't want that.

She enjoyed being the wife of a naval officer,

having the prestige, the benefits of that.

-And so, rather than hurt his feelings and divorce him,

she decided to simply kill him.

-She experienced divorce in her own family.

She knows how painful it is.

And so somehow she was sparing him by killing him with arsenic.

Just the fact

that she was witnessing what he was going through daily

for her to say, "Hey, I don't know what death feels like,

but I know divorce isn't fun,"

is just one of the most bizarre confessions

I've had in my entire career as a prosecutor.

-She killed a good man.

It just didn't make sense.

-You never think that someone that he loved would hurt him.

You know?

But when we found out that it was her,

Mom was just devastated.

-On March 2, 1996, 14 years after Lee's death,

Pamela Hartley was arrested

and charged with first-degree murder.

-Unfortunately, in this particular case,

we had evidentiary problems.

In order to go in front of a jury and prove this case

and introduce the evidence of the hair

and the arsenic, which laid out the whole case,

the public defender who represented her

would have had to have an opportunity to have it examined,

have his own expert examine it.

Because the hair was used up in the initial testing,

it didn't exist.

And so therefore, the only way

to have brought that evidence in front of a jury

would have been Lee Hartley would have had to be exhumed.

The family was adamant that they did not want that,

and that's understandable.

And their thing was, well, they're getting closure,

which is very, very important.

-On October 16, 1996,

Pamela pleaded guilty to second-degree murder

in a Florida state court,

and she was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Since the crime occurred back in 1982,

Pamela was subject to the rules of sentencing and parole

based on the laws at the time the crime occurred.

-And she ended up spending 14 years

and her mother got sick

and they let her out for humanitarian reasons

to go so she could help her mother while she was bad.

I mean, he didn't go easy.

Lee went out hard, and she had to be so hard-hearted

to do something like that.

Watch him and give him last dose in the hospital.

It just...

It made no sense to me.

-The sad thing is,

is that both lives and the lives of their family get destroyed,

and all she would have had to do is simply walk away.

Just walk away.

-And there was no reason even for Lee to even be dead.

Whenever people kill somebody else,

it's not just the person you're killing,

it's the whole family.

It does leave a big void

because you just don't ever get over that.

Because you always think about that.

I think that people would love him if they knew him,

talked to him.

What a kind, gentle, loving brother he was.

And we miss him.