SANTA ANA — The strange murder case of Richard K. Overton is unusual for more than its twisting course and the cryptic diaries that helped persuade jurors that the Dana Point computer consultant killed his wife seven years ago.
The slaying was especially rare for the weapon used: cyanide.
Murder by poison, the stuff of Agatha Christie mysteries and palace plots, is almost unheard of in modern America. A ranking of the ways Americans kill each other puts poison next to the bottom--just above being tossed from a window. Nationwide, the FBI counted only nine poison slayings out of 23,271 homicides in 1993. There have been four poisoning homicides in Orange County since 1982, including the unsolved death of a San Clemente woman whose body was pumped with fatal levels of toxic nicotine last year.
"It's pretty rare, because we've got no gun control. We had to go to Europe to find our expert," said Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans, who won conviction of Overton in a retrial that ended Monday. "If you want to kill somebody, why fool around with poison when unfortunately you can whack 'em with a gun?"
Overton, 66, was convicted of giving a fatal dose of cyanide to his 46-year-old wife, Janet, an elected trustee of the Capistrano Unified School District who collapsed in the family's driveway on Jan. 24, 1988. He kept meticulous journals documenting the couple's failing marriage--and revealing, prosecutors said, a slow poisoning campaign using a separate chemical.
The death confounded investigators for months and initially was not classified as murder. But an ex-wife of Overton called authorities claiming he had tried to poison her nearly 20 years earlier. Though the body of Janet Overton was already cremated, further testing on tissue kept from the autopsy found cyanide.
"The guy almost pulled this thing off," said juror Art Shappy, an Anaheim machinist, after the verdict.
Poison, once dubbed "the coward's weapon," has spiced history and legend for as long as humans have killed. Socrates was forced to take hemlock. Medieval France crawled with rumors that lepers were poisoning wells. The ruling Borgia family in Italy was widely rumored to have raised poisoning of their rivals to an art form. The body of President Zachary Taylor was exhumed amid fanfare in 1991 to see if his 1850 death was due to arsenic. (It was not.)
And in 1982, when deadly cyanide killed seven people in the Chicago area who had taken Tylenol capsules, it was an age-old fear come true.
