- When Angela’s hubby made her a tasty drink, she had no reason to suspect it was deadly
- Within days, Angela was declared brain dead
- Investigators working on the case soon uncovered a chilling motive
James and Angela Craig lived the picture perfect life. Happily married for 23 years, the pair were proud parents to six children.
While James ran a successful dentistry business, Angela loved her work as a family history consultant. In her downtime, Angela adored reading and exercising. She and James would regularly work out
together before heading to work.
So in March 2023, when Angela, then 43, woke feeling sluggish, James offered to make her a protein shake with extra protein to help pep her up, before he left for the day.
But after drinking it, Angela grew faint and dizzy. Texting her husband, Angela described how it felt like her brain didn’t want to work.
My stomach feels fine, but my head feels funny and dizzy. Very strange, she typed to her husband.
James was so concerned he left work to take her to hospital.
Despite multiple tests, including an MRI and CAT scan, doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, and Angela was discharged.
I feel drugged, she texted James the following day.
She returned to hospital, there falling so ill she even needed to be resuscitated.
When Angela’s brother, Mark, heard about his sister’s declining health, he and his wife, Renee, drove to visit and help out with the kids.
Thankfully, by the time Mark arrived Angela had turned a corner, and was discharged after six days.
The next morning, James texted Renee from work, asking her to give his wife a dose of an antibiotic she’d been taking for a sinus infection.
Within 20 minutes of swallowing the pill, Angela couldn’t hold herself up.
And when Mark found her slumped over in bed, he rushed her back to hospital. There, Angela suffered a seizure and was placed on life support.
Three days later, Angela was sadly declared brain dead. When she tragically passed away, James and their children were heartbroken.
Angela had been as healthy as a horse. How could her condition have deteriorated so rapidly?
After her death, samples of Angela’s blood taken during her hospital visits were tested.
They showed that during her first hospital stay Angela’s blood had a high and toxic level of arsenic.
How could her condition have deteriorated so rapidly?
A second sample from three days later showed arsenic plus cyanide and tetrahydrozoline – an ingredient that’s used in eye drops and over-the-counter nasal sprays.
Alarmingly, the levels indicated she’d most likely had a dose of cyanide administered while she was in hospital…
Angela had been poisoned. But who on earth would want the devoted wife and mum-of-six dead?
Police received a tip-off from James’ business partner, Ryan Redfearn, after one of their office managers, Caitlin Romero, discovered James had potassium cyanide delivered to the office.
Searching online, Caitlin discovered that the effects from poisoning by the substance matched Angela’s symptoms.
When investigators searched James’ house, they found multiple protein powders and workout-style drink shakers, and two unlabelled plastic bags containing white powder.
Shockingly, they also discovered alarming web pages in James’ search history, including, How many grams of pure arsenic will kill a human, and Is arsenic detectable in autopsy?
He’d also watched several YouTube videos with titles like, ‘How to Make Poison’ and ‘Top 5 Undetectable Poisons That Show No Signs of Foul Play’ – a list that included arsenic and cyanide.
Police also found he’d used a personal email address to order different poisons, including arsenic.
But that wasn’t all…
He’d used the same account to correspond with an orthodontist, Karin Cain, who was in the middle of a divorce and who he’d been having a three-week affair with.
Emails showed that while Angela was dying in hospital, her husband had flown his mistress interstate to see him.
READ MORE TRUE CRIME: Killer babysitter: She bashed her best friend’s baby
CCTV footage also showed James holding a syringe before he entered his wife’s hospital room, just days before she’d died.
While there was no way to prove what had been in the syringe, it could potentially explain the levels of cyanide in Angela’s blood during her hospital stay.
The following day police arrested and charged James Toliver Craig with first-degree murder of his wife, which he denied.
In July this year, Craig appeared at Arapahoe County Court. During the trial, the court heard that Craig had cheated on Angela multiple times during their marriage.
Craig’s defence claimed Angela had taken her own life due to this. But prosecutors argued Craig wanted to kill his wife to get out of the marriage he felt trapped in, suggesting he wanted to avoid divorce to
protect his money and image.
They believed Craig laced his wife’s protein shakes with poison over several days. Prosecutors also alleged he’d emptied the capsules of antibiotics Angela was taking and refilled them with cyanide.
When that had failed to kill her, he gave her a final dose of cyanide when she was in hospital.
The jury rejected the notion Angela’s death had been suicide, instead finding James Craig, 47, guilty of first-degree murder, along with one count of solicitation to commit murder, for asking another prison inmate to kill the lead investigator working on his case.
Craig was also convicted of four other charges as he made several attempts to cover up the killing, which included horrifyingly asking his daughter to make a deep fake AI video of her mother asking to be poisoned.
He was sentenced to life without parole plus 33 years for the additional counts. Judge Shay Whitaker said, ‘Dr Craig unleashed a path of destruction as wide as a tornado and just as devastating.’
One of the couple’s daughters, Miriam, shared her victim impact statement with the media.
‘I was supposed to be able to trust my dad. He was supposed to be my hero, and instead he’ll forever be the villain in my book,’ she said.
