Original subtitles

(Richard Shepherd) When a murder is committed,

it's always a race against time to find the truth,

to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer,

and to make sure that justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd.

And I've spent my entire career as a forensic pathologist,

performing nearly 23,000 autopsies.

I've learned that the dead don't hide the truth,

and they never lie.

Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim.

With the aid of a state-of-the-art laboratory using ground-breaking

technology, I'll be investigating a series of intriguing crimes,

where from the victims' bodies are revealed to you

the truth behind these murders.

(camera shutter clicking)

On the 10th of June 1994, Linda Curry was found dead at her home

in San Clemente, California, but doctors didn't know why she died.

It would be 20 years before the truth was finally discovered.

(line ringing)

(Richard) Emergency services

received an urgent call from a home

in the Californian beach resort of San Clemente.

They got a 911 call that a person was down.

(Richard) 50-year-old Linda Curry was struggling to breathe.

Paramedics raced to the scene.

(Yvonne Shull) They arrived at the house.

And they found Linda in the master bedroom on the bed

with vomit on the bed with her.

She had no heartbeat, no breathing.

(Richard) Linda was rushed to a nearby hospital.

(ticking)

At about 1:00 in the morning, Linda passed away.

(Richard) Mysteriously, just months before her death,

Linda reported to police that someone

could be trying to kill her.

(Richard) Linda Curry's troubles

began in the summer of 1993.

She was struck down by an unexplained illness.

For a year prior to her death, she was sick

or had symptomology of diarrhoea, vomiting, nauseousness.

(Richard) Linda's friend Merry Seabold

was often at her side.

(Merry Seabold) She was in and out of a couple hospitals.

Her stomach was bothering her.

I saw her in between two hospital visits,

and she was noticeably shaky.

Her hands would just shake like she had

Parkinson's disease or something.

Linda had gone to every doctor.

She was going to a gastrointestinal.

She had tests done.

She had scopes done.

She had blood tests done.

The doctors didn't know the root cause of it.

They could never determine it.

(Richard) For those who knew Linda,

her sickness seemed out of place.

Linda was a relatively healthy person,

ate a lot of food and never gained any weight.

She was active.

She was peppy, always doing something,

and seemed to always have energy.

(Yvonne) She was impeccably dressed at all times.

She was like a fashion model.

She had a perfect house and the perfect person

to have as a friend.

Mary said that they were like long-lost sisters

from the very beginning when they first met.

Linda and I were both Southern California Edison employees.

She was in the book-keeping department,

and I was in the customer service telephone centre.

And we met in the break room because

we both ate like crazy people when we were young.

And we would always cook big pizzas in the oven

and have them for break and make all the other girls jealous.

And that was really our first connection,

was over food and pizzas in the microwave oven.

Anyone that knew Linda would say that she was the nicest,

most fun person in the world.

She always had a smile on her face.

She would do anything for anybody.

She would give you the shirt off her back.

She just didn't talk badly about people

and just was an all-around good person, just a good person.

Everyone loved Linda.

(Richard) In 1989, Linda was working at the nearby

San Onofre Nuclear Power Station.

Linda met Paul Curry at San Onofre,

where she had transferred to.

I think it was kind of attraction right from the very beginning

because Paul is a very charming young man.

And he was a nuclear physicist there at San Onofre,

and that was impressive alone.

Their friendship started, and then ultimately they started dating.

(Yvonne) People that he worked for described him

as extremely intelligent.

Linda herself, that was one thing

that she said she was attracted to Paul for, that he was very smart.

(Merry) Paul won about $64,000 on the programme "Jeopardy!",

which is a TV programme

that obviously talks about a lot of things...

history, and movies, and everything.

You have to be very smart to win that kind of money.

And she was impressed that way.

She liked smart people because really all of her boyfriends

prior to that were very intelligent.

(Richard) Soon, the couple got married in Las Vegas.

Linda was 48, and Paul was 35.

My husband and I met him a couple times,

actually went to their house.

And when we walked in, he was actually seated at the piano.

And he just went right for it.

And he played like he just was Liberace.

It was, again, impressive.

He had these things he could do that just blew you away.

And that was one of his gifts.

He had, you know, maybe not the best looks in my book,

but he could be charming, and funny, and bright.

And all those things were things that attracted Linda.

Not long after Linda married Paul Curry,

she started having very serious abdominal problems

that often landed her in hospital.

Now, the causes of diarrhoea, vomiting, and abdominal pain

are very difficult to diagnose.

And in Linda's case, the doctors couldn't

work out what was wrong with her.

Linda worked at a nuclear power plant

where she could have been exposed to radiation.

So one possibility they considered

was that she might be suffering from radiation sickness.

Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea

are all symptoms of radiation sickness.

And that's because the radiation damages

the delicate lining of the intestines.

But all the tests came back negative,

leaving doctors still baffled as to what was making Linda so sick.

There was something troubling her friends too.

It was about three or four months into their marriage.

And Linda called me one day.

And she says, you know, Paul wants me to have

a million-dollar life insurance policy taken out.

Lin, I said, you're going to have a million-dollar

life insurance policy taken out on him as well?

And she said, well, you know, what Paul says

is since I'm several years older than him,

it really isn't necessary since he's a younger person.

So we're just going to take the policy out on me.

I said words I can't even say.

Are you kidding me? That's crazy, Linda.

That's crazy.

He felt that because her house in San Clemente

was so expensive that he needed a safety net

in case something were to happen.

Why did she have such a large life insurance policy

when she didn't really have any debt except for her mortgage?

It was always Paul says, Paul says.

That was the first time a red flag went up for me.

(Richard) But there were yet more to come.

Linda called me one day and said, hey, Mer,

I've got something to talk to you about.

I got a call from Paul's ex-wife,

and she wanted to know where the check was.

And when Linda inquired what check,

she said, well, the child support check.

He had adopted her two children

and was paying child support on an ongoing basis,

of which Linda knew nothing about.

(Richard) To add to that, questions still surrounded

Linda's unexplained illness.

I just knew something was going on in that house.

50-year-old Linda Curry had been very ill with vomiting,

nausea, and diarrhoea.

Linda's friends suspected her husband

Paul was somehow behind it.

His high living had put the couple in serious debt,

and he tried to take out a million-dollar

life insurance policy in her name.

Linda had also discovered that Paul had

hidden payments to stepchildren she didn't know he had.

To make amends, Paul took his wife on a cruise.

While they're on the cruise, there was an outbreak of hantavirus.

And many people, including Paul and Linda, were ill.

The symptoms were nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea,

just what Linda had had before.

Now, most people got over it in a day or two.

And indeed, Paul recovered quickly.

But Linda ended up in hospital for several weeks, gravely ill.

And then her symptoms simply disappeared,

leaving doctors, once again, none the wiser.

But months later, Linda's sickness returned.

I went to see her at her home in San Clemente.

And I remember her hands shook like a 90-year-old woman.

I said, Linda, what's wrong with your hands?

And she goes, I don't know. I just kind of am shaky lately.

(Richard) Linda revealed more to her friend.

She said, I just want you to know that if anything happens to me,

I'm not going to be committing suicide.

Just know that.

And you may want to look into it if anything happens to me.

And again, another red flag.

(siren blaring)

(Richard) But Linda's symptoms took a turn for the worse.

She was rushed into the Good Samaritan Hospital

in San Clemente.

I had talked to Linda on the telephone when she was

admitted to the San Clemente Hospital,

and she sounded not like Linda.

So I told my husband...

I said, honey, we have to go see her.

And we went into the hospital.

And kind of taken back because as we went in,

we saw Paul right there in the lobby.

And of course said, hi, Paul.

How you doing?

Oh, I'm OK.

I wish Linda was feeling better.

And I said, are we able to see her?

And he goes, I think you can.

When I walked in and I saw Linda in that bed, she was laying back.

Her eyes were closed.

She had no colour in her face.

And it looked like death warmed over.

And it was just hard to even get her to speak or whatever.

I think she knew we were there.

I'm not sure.

Hardly said anything.

And as we left, it was such an emotional thing.

I said, Paul, do you mind if we just crash at your house?

And so we ended up spending the night.

I went into their spare bedroom.

And as I walk in, on the dresser,

a bunch of papers all laying out, folders and stuff.

And they looked official.

And so as I looked at them, I saw a couple other various

life insurance policies.

And I thought,

everything here is related to death and money.

And I thought, what's he doing with all this stuff out?

She's in the hospital.

She didn't pull it out of her file.

I just had this feeling.

I just feel like Linda Curry's going to die

because I feel like her husband is trying to kill her.

(medical machine beeping)

The nurse at Samaritan Hospital heard an IV alarm go off

and went to Linda's room and found that the IV bag,

the liquid appeared to be cloudy,

and the bag appeared to be puffy or expanded.

An IV bag or intravenous sack like this

is essential for giving a sick patient

the salts and fluids they need whilst in hospital.

They can also be used to supply medication.

The question was, had Linda been given something

potentially life threatening?

The nurse immediately stopped that IV

and took that IV bag off, put a different new IV bag on.

And she called her superiors and made a report.

After she removed the bag, Linda became septic.

(medical machine beeping)

(Richard) Linda's heart rate soared,

and her blood pressure plummeted.

The nurses phoned Paul,

advising him to come to the hospital immediately.

(phone ringing)

But there was no response.

(phone ringing)

(Yvonne) She went into septic shock

and went to the intensive care unit,

nearly died of septic shock at that time.

(siren blaring)

(Richard) Paul didn't visit his wife

until the following morning.

Linda pulled through, but there were questions

about the intravenous sac giving her fluids.

IV tampering at Samaritan Hospital in San Clemente

was reported to the police.

The investigator interviewed the nurse

who had found the IV bag tampered with

and interviewed Linda.

(Richard) Detectives were taken aback at what they heard next.

(Richard) Tests revealed the bag contained a drug

Linda hadn't even been prescribed.

In large doses, this anaesthetic lidocaine

could cause seizures and prove fatal.

But nobody knew who had administered it.

The police investigation continued.

Linda was eventually discharged, but months later,

her sickness and vomiting returned.

After the IV bag incident at Samaritan Hospital, Linda and Paul

both decided that she would go to a different hospital

so that there would be no problems.

So any time she went to the hospital,

she went to Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.

In New Year's Eve, she was sick again.

The nurse was walking down the hallway.

Paul passed her and told the nurse, she's OK.

And he left the hospital.

The nurse then went into Linda's room,

and she thought the IV looked suspicious.

The port on the IV bag at Mission Hospital was actually broken.

She found an injection mark in one of the ports.

And she knew that there was nothing ordered for her,

so there shouldn't be an injection mark in there.

So she felt it was suspicious, stopped the IV,

put a new IV bag up, and made a report.

After the second time that Linda was in the hospital

and the IV bags were tampered with,

I truly felt that something was happening to her

in her own home that she was unaware of.

(Yvonne) At Samaritan Hospital,

Paul's the only person in the room.

Mission Hospital... 15 miles up the road,

no similar staff, no similar visitors.

Paul's the only one.

So we have two different hospitals,

two different nurses,

and the only common denominator is Paul.

(Richard) Paul was interviewed by detectives

about both incidents.

Although they had their suspicions,

there was not enough evidence to charge him.

After Linda was out of the hospital,

I actually had a conversation with her that was honest and truthful.

And I said that I really thought, Linda,

that Paul was trying to kill her.

There were just too many red flags that I saw

and that she saw that I couldn't account for.

And you know, she's still kind of just wanting to think the best,

but probably knowing there's something going on.

And he's the person that's making it go on.

(Richard) Linda's friends hatched a plan.

(Merry) I said, Linda, we'd like to put our money together for you,

even though we know she's got money,

but we'll make it even better.

And we will rent a place for you in Orange County near San Onofre

so that you can go in and out to work and not worry about anything,

and get out of the house.

She said, OK, Mer, I'll do it.

And I was so happy she's going to do it.

And the next day, the very next day,

she called me and said, Paul's too good of a husband.

I can't do it.

(Richard) Linda Curry had been

struck down by a mystery illness.

After two separate attempts to tamper

with Linda's intravenous line in two different hospitals,

police opened an investigation.

Linda's friends suspected her husband

Paul was trying to poison her.

I did pretty much cut off communications with Linda

after the second experience in the hospital.

It was just too painful to deal and talk to her

all the time because I knew what was happening,

and I couldn't do anything about it.

I got an email from Paul at work.

And it just said, Mary, I'm really worried about Linda.

She's working overtime, 12-hour days.

She's wobbly.

She doesn't look fit for duty.

I'm really worried about her.

And I was in my office.

And two of my officemates were there.

And I said, you know, ladies,

I have to tell something... somebody this.

I just feel like Linda Curry is going to die

because I feel like her husband's trying to kill her.

I just feel like something's going to happen to her.

(Richard) That same night,

it was Paul Curry who called paramedics

saying his wife was unconscious.

(line ringing)

(Operator) 911. What's your emergency?

(siren blaring)

(Richard) Once again, Linda was rushed to hospital.

My husband and I are at a conference the very next day.

And he... and I'm in the room, waiting to go to the next session.

And he comes in and says, Mary, Linda Curry died.

And that's when I found out.

(Yvonne) Linda passed away at the hospital

of undetermined causes.

So she had an autopsy at the Orange County coroner's office.

And the autopsy was inconclusive

because they couldn't find a cause of death, and it became pending.

(Richard) But Linda's autopsy

did reveal something intriguing.

Hidden from view behind the right ear was a small mark.

There was a suspicion that this was the puncture wound from a needle.

Could it be that Linda had been injected with a substance

that induced a fatal reaction?

To add to this, Paul had started receiving

initial life insurance pay-outs of more than $300,000.

Detectives went to Paul's home

to interview him about his wife's death.

(Richard) But Paul seemed more evasive when asked how much

he'd benefited from Linda's death.

(Richard) As the police investigation continued,

Paul hastily prepared Linda's funeral.

(Merry) I really will remember that funeral.

It was really something.

There was a lot of people there.

And I can remember standing outside in kind of an open area,

and Paul was inside in the funeral home.

And he was just standing there all by himself,

nobody around him.

And it was so strange because I think by now,

there was enough rumour out there

because people had heard about the IV bags.

And the word spreads.

And then Paul sat in the front row.

And I remember he used to say Linda is his angel.

And I gave the eulogy, and I had an angel that I bought.

And I wanted to continue to be friends with him

because I wanted to make sure he got caught

for what he did because I knew he killed her.

And I gave the angel to him in this eulogy

and so that he would think that I still didn't have any suspicions

for him, which I totally did.

Paul's acting like the remorseful husband.

It was just a drama.

It was an unbelievable drama in the worst sense,

nobody consoling him.

So I think everybody thought he probably murdered her,

even though there was no proof.

(Richard) But soon, Linda's body revealed

the truth behind the rumour.

Test results on her blood uncovered something untoward.

Toxicology showed that Linda had, in fact,

died from nicotine poisoning.

Nicotine is a powerful stimulant of many of the nerves of the body.

High doses, it's very toxic.

It affects the heart.

It affects the muscles of respiration,

leading to paralysis and cardiovascular collapse.

The toxicology tests showed that Linda had an extraordinarily

high concentration of nicotine in her bloodstream,

1,120 nanograms per ml.

That's far, far more than you'd ever find,

even in the very heaviest of smokers.

And here's an interesting fact... Linda didn't smoke.

So how did all that nicotine get into her body?

Faced with the realisation that she'd been poisoned,

police launched a murder investigation.

Leading nicotine expert Professor Neal Benowitz

was enlisted on the case.

I was contacted in the early 1990s

by District Attorney Baytieh, who said,

we have a murder case where there's a question

about nicotine poisoning.

He contacted me because I had published a lot of research

on the human pharmacology of nicotine,

and my laboratory did assays of nicotine

and its breakdown products.

So he first contacted me saying, can your laboratory confirm tests

that other laboratories have done showing

there is high levels of nicotine?

So in 1994, we got 10 blood samples

and urine samples from him.

They wanted us to confirm the levels of nicotine.

And then we also measure its breakdown product, cotinine,

which turned out to be an important aspect

of the analysis of the case.

(Richard) After weeks of testing,

Professor Benowitz's lab confirmed the investigators' suspicions.

So we found important information in Linda Curry,

both in her blood and her urine.

So the first thing we found, in the blood,

there was a phenomenally high level of nicotine in the blood,

50 times to 100 times higher than those seen in a smoker.

She was not a smoker.

The second observation, which was critical,

is that the level of cotinine, which is a breakdown product,

was similar to that of a smoker.

Normally, cotinine levels are 10 times higher

than nicotine in a smoker,

but it takes time to convert nicotine to cotinine.

So the fact that her nicotine level was phenomenally high

and her cotinine level was not

meant there was not much time to metabolise nicotine.

So she must have gotten the nicotine

and then died shortly after getting the nicotine.

(Richard) And there was more evidence from Linda's body

that she'd been poisoned.

Fluid was found in her lungs.

That's usual when people die, but Linda had vomited and aspirated,

which is a common effect of nicotine poisoning

and very uncommon in non-smokers.

This suggested foul play.

And the autopsy also revealed a cocktail of other drugs

to explain Linda's mystery illnesses

in the lead-up to her death.

And again, her autopsy, levels of cadmium, which is a metal,

was found 10 times higher than what you expect

with industrial exposure.

She was in the hospital.

She had a metallic taste and then suddenly lost consciousness.

And she had no known exposure to cadmium.

So right there, there were questions

about something bad was going on.

(Richard) In the meantime,

Paul had received the first pay-outs from Linda's life insurance

and bought himself a brand-new Cadillac.

But the authorities still didn't have

enough evidence to file charges.

They needed hard proof that it was Paul who was behind the poisoning.

You know, it was strange when Linda passed away that

nobody really had an answer why.

I know that people were looking into it, but there was just the...

it was just an unresolved reason.

The initial investigator that had this case

felt that it was a very suspicious death,

but he kind of got stuck on some red herrings in the case,

like the cadmium, like other stuff.

And because he got stuck with the red herrings,

he never made any progress in the case.

(Richard) Paul Curry slipped off

to start a new life in Nevada,

and Linda's murder investigation was put on hold.

Sergeant Yvonne Shull of the Orange County Sheriff's Department

would reopen the case.

(Yvonne) I was a detective at the time.

I was working in the cold case unit.

And my sergeant at the time brought the case to me

and asked me to look at it.

He told me that a detective who had retired

had the case in his garage for several years,

and he brought it back to the sheriff's department

as an unsolved.

So I went upstairs with the case number

and pulled every forensic report that was done.

So I pulled all of those and took them downstairs to read them.

(Richard) Yvonne had the toxicology results reviewed

to see what more Linda's corpse could reveal about her killing.

In the meantime, something else drew the investigator's attention.

My decision was to listen to all of the tapes

and try and make a decision on could we work the case, yes or no?

While I was listening to the interview,

the investigator asked Linda,

if somebody was trying to kill you, who would it be?

And at that time, I thought, wow,

she's talking to us from the grave.

She's telling us Paul did this, and it was for money.

So let's look further into the case.

Eight years after Linda Curry's 1994 murder,

the Orange County Sheriff's Department

reopened their investigation.

Linda's autopsy revealed she'd been poisoned

by a fatal dose of nicotine.

The prime suspect was her husband Paul,

but the cold case unit had to prove he was behind Linda's demise.

We had no scene, but because it's a homicide

and because it's an unsolved homicide,

all of the toxicology samples are kept.

So I could request further toxicology be done

on samples from the autopsy.

There was another twist in this tale.

Further tests showed a toxic level of Ambien in her system,

a drug used to treat insomnia.

(Yvonne) I was concerned at the time that

she was maybe overdosed on Ambien,

which I can never find a prescription for Linda for Ambien.

(Richard) So is Ambien the true cause of Linda's death?

So I was kind of concerned about that

when I first started working the case.

What I found out is, later, when I talked with the toxicologist,

is her level was high for Ambien,

but the Ambien did not kill her.

(Richard) With Ambien ruled out,

investigators turned back to nicotine

as the agent of Linda's poisoning.

(Yvonne) I'd never heard of nicotine poisoning before.

I never knew so many types of nicotine existed.

When I met the expert on nicotine,

Dr. Neal Benowitz in San Francisco,

he educated me on nicotine.

(Neal Benowitz) You could purchase it from a commercial source

because nicotine is used as a chemical, research.

It's used in different smoking cessation products.

So it's conceivable someone could buy it.

The easiest way, actually, is just to make a tea with tobacco leaves.

(Richard) To pinpoint the method of Linda's murder,

Professor Benowitz reanalysed the samples from her body.

One of the things that he did for me

is he ran a test on the blood serum

to find out, was it tobacco nicotine,

was it pharmaceutical nicotine, or was it pesticide nicotine?

Because I felt I needed to determine that in order to say,

where do you get it from to kill her?

Well, what we found out is the nicotine was

a crude extraction from tobacco.

(Neal) So you boil tobacco leaves.

Nicotine is water soluble.

It goes into the tea.

You then concentrate it, boil it down,

and you can get a very concentrated nicotine liquid.

And her husband Paul Curry was a nuclear physicist,

and he was thought to be a genius.

And I think this was thought to be a genius idea

of how to get nicotine to kill someone without being detected.

(Yvonne) A co-worker of Paul's told me

that Paul used to brag that he knew how to kill someone

without the police ever knowing.

He could grow flowers of different colours

by adding different things into the soil.

So I think that Paul was very smart.

He's smart enough to do it.

(Richard) If Paul Curry concocted

a crude form of liquid nicotine,

how did he poison his wife with it?

Perhaps the answer could lie in the strange puncture mark

found behind her ear at the autopsy.

In this area of the skull, there are only small blood vessels

and the solid bone of the base of the skull.

But even entering these small blood vessels behind the ear,

a drug could be administered that would make its way

quickly into Linda's bloodstream.

So could it be that Linda had been injected with nicotine?

(Neal) Nicotine is a very potent poison.

So if you smoke a cigarette, you take in about 1 milligram.

If you have a millilitre, which is a pretty small volume,

that's 1,000 milligrams.

So you can easily just take a portion of a teaspoon

and inject it, and give them a massive overdose to kill them.

So it's very easy to kill someone with liquid nicotine.

(Richard) Now police could explain the presence of Ambien

in Linda's body.

Paul Curry had given his wife this drug

to sedate her so that he could administer

the fatal dose of nicotine.

But detectives needed more evidence to prove Linda's husband

was a potential killer.

So Yvonne tracked down women from Curry's previous relationships.

His ex-wife Leslie,

whom he met working as a pianist on a cruise ship,

revealed something sinister.

Leslie told me that prior to Paul leaving

for about a year that she was sick

and that she felt that she had Lyme disease.

However, when she described her symptoms to me,

it was not symptoms of Lyme disease.

She described her symptoms as nauseousness,

diarrhoea, vomiting.

Well, those are symptoms consistent with poisoning.

She was getting ill.

And somehow they separated.

And after separating, all of a sudden, she was fine.

So I think he was trying with her originally.

It didn't work.

With Linda, he got a bingo.

Paul wanted Leslie to get life insurance.

And she applied for life insurance,

but she was denied the life insurance.

But I spoke with a underwriter.

What he told me was that the most common reason

for people to be denied life insurance

is because they test positive for nicotine in their blood test

and have written that they are a non-smoker.

Well, Leslie told me that she's a non-smoker

and that she answered no to the nicotine question.

(Richard) Now police suspected

Curry's previous wife was a victim of nicotine poisoning.

Detectives delved deeper into his past.

(Yvonne) When I started looking into Paul's background,

I found that his background was all fake.

He said he had a college degree from Columbia University,

but that was incorrect.

It was a mail order degree from Columbia University of Louisiana.

(Richard) Curry's claim of being

a qualified nuclear physicist was a complete fraud.

(siren blaring)

And his account of the night Linda died didn't stack up either.

I interviewed the paramedic who responded to the scene

on the night that she died.

When I spoke with the paramedic,

he told me that he felt that Paul was aloof.

He says that he started CPR.

According to the paramedic,

CPR was not being done when he arrived.

(Richard) After building her case against Curry over seven years,

Yvonne tracked him down to his new home

in Salina, Kansas.

She brought him in to the local sheriff's office for questioning.

When I interviewed Paul, he's very cocky

and very condescending when he first comes in.

He's sitting straight up in his chair.

As the interview goes on and as I confront him about Linda's death,

you can see his body language change.

Do you have a physics degree?

No. No?

Did you ever tell anybody you had a physics degree?

I've told people that in the past.

Yes. How come?

Self-inflation, bragging.

(Richard) Now Curry himself had admitted he was a fraud.

I know that you got a substantial amount of money

from life insurance.

It just seems to me that your financial benefit

on Linda's death...

(Richard) Yvonne questioned him about the evening Linda died.

(Yvonne) And what I found out from Paul

is that she came home from work.

They were the only people in the house.

Nobody broke into the house.

There was nobody living in the house except them.

In the end, Paul Curry sealed his own fate.

When interviewed by the police,

he was adamant he had been alone with Linda

in the six hours before her death.

The dose of nicotine she had received

would have killed her within half an hour.

And so by his own admission,

he was the only person who could possibly have poisoned her.

(Yvonne) Then I pull out my badge and tell him,

you're under arrest for the murder of Linda Curry.

Stand up, and turn around.

And I put handcuffs on him.

(Merry) When I found out that Paul Curry had been arrested,

best day of my life.

And it made me think I wasn't crazy.

All my feelings and all the red flags, they were right.

They were right. And he was the murderer.

(Richard) Paul Curry was charged

with the murder of his wife Linda.

He finally faced justice in a three-week trial

at Orange County Superior Court.

He was found guilty of murder, murder for financial gain

and insurance fraud, and sentenced to life

without the possibility of parole in the California state prison.

When I heard what the jury came back with

and they were all like smiling at me almost, I was elated.

He's an evil person.

He doesn't deserve to see life out of prison

because he would do it again,

and he'll find some victim like Linda that's easy prey.

This is one of those cases that could very easily

have been a cold case forever.

The guy was a pianist on a cruise ship.

He was a nuclear physicist.

He was a chameleon.

You don't know what he's going to do next,

but he's smart enough to carry it off.

He's got to stay in prison the rest of his life.

He has to.

For almost 20 years, Linda Curry lay dead

while her husband spent her money and carried on with his own life.

The evidence in Linda's body would eventually catch him out.

There was the toxicology report showing how he sedated her

with one drug, the injection mark behind her ear

where a fatal dose of another drug, nicotine, was administered.

And the only person who could have done that

was Paul Curry, for money.

But when the truth hidden in her body was revealed,

he could no longer escape justice,

and the jury had no doubt that he had killed her.

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