♪
Narrator: Up next, he's young, he's healthy.
And soon he's fighting for his life.
I called 911, and it just kind of all snowballed from there.
Narrator: Family, friends and the law
want an explanation.
O'Brien: It's not something that happens every day.
We think somebody must be to blame.
Narrator: And the blame comes down with devastating consequences.
Bloom: The problem wasn't the evidence in this case.
The forensic evidence in this case was solid.
♪
Narrator: Todd Sommer had long wanted to serve his country,
so straight out of high school he signed up with the Marines.
There was four guys in his graduating class
that joined the military.
There was a couple of them that didn't make it
through boot camp.
And there was a couple that did.
He was one of them.
Narrator: Todd's first posting was at Camp Lejeune,
in North Carolina.
While there the 23 year-old met Cindy Peace,
the 28-year-old divorced mother of three young children.
What followed was a whirlwind romance.
Sommer: It was love at first sight when we first met.
We met and six months later we decided to get married.
Narrator: Soon Cindy was pregnant, and Todd
was re-assigned to a Marine air base outside of San Diego.
In February of 2002,
Todd returned home from a routine
training mission with what looked like
a run-of-the-mill stomach bug.
They diagnosed him with likely food poisoning,
sent him home, told him to rest.
He felt better, a little bit better in a few days,
until his symptoms recurred.
Narrator: And they recurred with a vengeance.
On the night of February 17th Todd went to bed,
and it was clear he wasn't well.
Sommer: He sat down in the bed, he said his heart
was fluttering.
It felt different.
Something wasn't right.
And I asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital.
He said, "No." He said, "I'll be okay."
Narrator: According to Cindy, she awoke a short time later
to find Todd staggering to the bathroom
where he soon keeled over.
I didn't know what to do. I looked for a phone.
Narrator: Minutes later paramedics arrived
and rushed Todd to a nearby hospital.
He died a short time later.
Sommer: I didn't know why. I didn't know how.
I just didn't know what to do.
There's nothing that can prepare you for that.
Narrator: Even doctors were at a loss.
As a marine, his health was regularly monitored.
His last physical showed a young man in perfect health.
So why was his body in the morgue
The official cause of death was acute
cardiac arrhythmia, not unknown for a man
in his early 20 but not exactly common either.
Sommer: I didn't know what a cardiac arrhythmia was.
I didn't know that perfectly healthy people
sometimes just die.
Narrator: Cindy Sommer found herself
a suddenly widowed-mother of four young children.
It was hard to imagine things getting worse.
Until they did.
Sommer: They had arrested me in at my work.
And told me that I was arrested for homicide, for killing Todd.
♪
Narrator: Cindy Sommer's life and the lives of her
four young children were turned upside down
by the sudden and the shockingly unexpected
death of her husband, 23 year-old marine Todd Sommer.
Sommer: When Todd had passed, my whole world ended.
Everything that I knew, everything that I lived,
everything that I breathed
and woke up to every day was going to be gone.
Everything had changed in literally a heartbeat.
Narrator: A grieving Cindy got a death payment
of $250,000, standard operating procedure
for the military, and she attempted
to move on with her life.
Sommer: Our family was just shattered.
And I had to suck it up.
I had to just...
I had to go on for the kids,
I had to still make breakfast and lunch and dinner.
They still had to go to school.
We had to still try to maintain.
And it took everything that I had to do that.
And to be brutally honest, I failed.
Narrator: Two months after Todd's death
Cindy got breast augmentation surgery,
something she claimed she and Todd
had planned before his death.
It cost $6,000.
The cost, to say nothing of the timing, raised questions.
Before Todd died, the Sommer family was practically broke.
They were living paycheck to paycheck.
Lot of folks are, lot of folks were then,
lot of folks in the military are, and were.
Narrator: Military bases are essentially very small towns.
Everyone ends up knowing everyone else's business.
And Cindy made some decisions
that got a lot of tongues wagging.
O'Brien: They found that she was engaging in a lot of partying,
that she was going out with friends,
hanging out with other marines
that she had known through her husband,
and this didn't fit their mold of how
she should have been behaving at that time.
Narrator: It turned out that on the night of Todd's funeral
Cindy and some fellow military wives went
to a local strip club.
Over the course of the next few weeks
she had brief sexual encounters
with three of Todd's marine buddies.
Bloom: She's in tears and shared a bottle of wine
and one bottle turns into two and then before you know it,
they're kissing her and they're on the couch
and they're having relations and they end up having sex together.
Now that doesn't fit what the novelist would call
the standard way of grieving, I completely agree.
Sommer: I don't know how to explain that other than there was...
Anything that I could do to make me forget
what was happening in my life was enticing for me.
Narrator: Cindy's behavior drew the attention of investigators
from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service or NCIS,
who now took a closer look at Cindy's life
before and after Todd's death.
They found she pushed to get Todd's death
payout as quickly as possible.
Sommer: I was going from having my rent paid
in a huge four-bedroom house and not paying any utilities,
to now I have four kids
on an income of a part-time Subway worker.
I-I...
I did think about money,
I did think about how I was going to raise my kids.
Narrator: That seemed reasonable.
But to investigators, the push for the money,
using some of it to pay for breast augmentation
and the sexual liaisons soon after Todd's death
added up to a potential motive: for murder.
Bloom: The first thing that you always do
when you're a cop doing an investigation,
you look at money, you look at sex,
those are kind of the two areas
that you always start with to take a look at the motive.
Narrator: But if Cindy killed her husband, how did she do it?
Todd was cremated shortly after his death.
As part of standard protocol in such an unusual case,
tissue samples from his body were saved and stored.
The pathologist took multiple samples of tissues in the body
just in case it needed to be evaluated at some later time.
Narrator: These precautions were taken even after an autopsy determined
that Todd died of natural causes.
Apparently the determination that he died of natural causes
just didn't sit right with some of the investigators,
they just felt that there was more to the story.
Narrator: To investigators these tissues were a potential smoking gun
just waiting to be tested.
♪
Narrator: NCIS investigators were convinced Todd Sommer
had been poisoned to death by his wife, Cindy.
Toxicology tests on tissues saved after Todd's autopsy
turned up extraordinarily high concentrations
in tissues from his liver and kidneys of arsenic,
a powerful poison.
Labay: Arsenic is tasteless, it's colorless,
it doesn't have an odor.
And somebody could easily put it
into somebody's food or drink unbeknownst to them.
Narrator: Nearly four years after Todd's death,
Cindy Sommer was arrested and charged
with using a massive dose of arsenic to kill him.
And I had no idea what they were talking about or why,
or how, or anything.
I didn't have a clue.
I didn't know what arsenic even was.
I didn't-- I wouldn't know how to get it.
It was a mess. Nothing made sense at all to me.
Narrator: Prosecutors contended that Cindy acted alone.
No one else was implicated in the crime.
At Cindy's trial in January of 2007,
the jury heard a lot about her behavior
in the immediate aftermath of her husband's death.
O'Brien: From the outside, right,
drinking, having sex with different men,
looks like this person is celebrating.
In reality, they might very well be just desperately
trying to feel something other than the grief
that they're experiencing.
Bonanno: I honestly don't see what it has
to do with this case at all.
It's just her behavior during her way of grieving.
It seems irrelevant to me in terms of a murder trial.
Narrator: Even worse, Cindy's original defense team
came up with a novel and deeply flawed strategy.
They chose not to challenge the science
that, according to prosecutors,
proved Cindy poisoned her husband.
Bloom: The defense attorney did not contest
the actual finding of the cause of death by arsenic,
anywhere near as much as he should have.
He simply jumped over the fact that scientific evidence
showing Todd died from arsenic was enormously faulty,
went straight to the fact that Cindy's a good person,
loved her husband,
never would've done this type of thing.
And by the way, where can you point to the fact
that she had any link to arsenic?
So that concession, in a tactical way,
was a monster blunder.
Narrator: Cindy, convinced no jury
would ever convict her if they heard her story,
testified in her own defense.
It didn't go well.
She'd been in jail since her arrest.
As she prepared for her testimony,
her fellow prisoners tried to make sure
she'd make a good impression on the jury.
Bloom: The other women helped her put mascara on.
You're not allowed to have mascara when you're in jail.
They took shoe polish and other types of crayon
and used that as a mascara.
By the time Cindy had finished testifying,
her tears had dripped this down.
So it was kind of, she looked really bad, I thought.
It just was a bad look, not a sympathetic look.
Narrator: The jury didn't buy Cindy's
testimony or her defense.
Man: We the jury in the above-empanelled cause,
find the defendant, Cynthia A. Sommer,
guilty of the crime of murder, of Todd Sommer, a human being,
in violation of penal code section 187A.
I don't feel like the jury
even looked at the science of my case.
They looked at my behavior
and all of these other circumstantial things
that the prosecution said that I did
and didn't look at anything having to do with the science.
Narrator: Cindy wasn't the only person
who thought they'd witnessed a miscarriage of justice.
Bloom: My girlfriend was watching a news program about this case
and said, "You have to get involved.
You can't let that woman be convicted."
There's lots of folks who have sadly died from conditions
where they seem completely healthy
without any precedent symptom of any kind and then they die.
Now I'm looking at life in prison.
Is it going to take me 20 years to fight to get out?
What do we do? Where do we go? Do I appeal?
Like how, what do we do?
Narrator: What mistakes did independent observers see in the trial?
For one, Todd Sommer was sick for 10 days before he died.
Bloom: The amounts of arsenic that were found
in Todd Sommer's liver and kidney would've required him
to ingest such a large amount of arsenic
that he would've been dead in a matter of hours.
He would not have lived 10 days.
Narrator: Also, arsenic attacks the entire body.
It didn't make sense that lethal concentrations were found
in just some of Todd's tissue samples.
Labay: If you have an acute dose of arsenic inside of you,
you would expect to see it in the blood.
And there was nothing in the blood.
And it causes cell leakage, it just tears you up inside.
So, you would expect to see that damage done on autopsy
and Todd Sommer didn't have any of that.
Narrator: As for Cindy's questionable behavior
in the wake of her husband's death?
Bonanno: Experts on grieving say it's not all that unusual.
We look at the ways people get through situations,
and we found that there's some things that people have
traditionally thought as bad, maladaptive, unhealthy coping,
There is no right way to get through the pain we have.
And if we define something that works in that moment,
it has done its job.
It's ugly, but it works.
O'Brien: I do believe that sexism played a huge role in this.
Part of the motivation was that she wasn't mourning
the way a woman should mourn. Right?
That she was not doing the things
that we expect a woman to do when her husband dies.
Narrator: Legal experts said there were legitimate questions
about Cindy's conviction.
But even they had to admit: it's a lot easier to put
someone behind bars then it is to get them out
once they're there.
♪
Narrator: By 2007, Todd Sommer had been
dead for nearly five years
and his wife Cindy had spent more than a year in jail
for his murder.
Sommer: It was all so surreal, the whole thing.
I just...
It was crazy.
It was unfathomable that this could be happening.
Narrator: As they prepared for a possible re-trial,
Cindy's new defense team found documents
indicating that one set of Todd's tissues
was in storage and was apparently suitable for testing.
But when the prosecution was asked to bring this evidence
forward, they said they couldn't find it.
This was enough in itself
for Cindy's conviction to be thrown out.
if the failure to preserve these tissues
was the mistake of the police,
NCIS, or the prosecution.
Then Cindy could be found not guilty.
Narrator: A search was on for the remaining set of Todd's tissues.
And it was found at the hospital where Todd was autopsied.
Bloom: They're found exactly where the tissues had been left
five years before.
And it's almost as if the caretaker of those
was basically saying,
"You know, I was wondering when you guys
were going to get around to asking for these things.
Where have you been?"
Narrator: Did prosecutors know this evidence still existed?
No one knows for sure.
Todd's tissues were tested for arsenic,
and in direct contradiction of the evidence
that put Cindy Sommer in jail, came back negative.
He had not been poisoned.
How did this happen?
The answer was alarmingly simple:
the lab that did the testing, a military lab,
didn't normally test samples from human beings.
O'Brien: This was a lab that typically did soil samples
and things like that, it wasn't something
that was really set up to examine tissue,
human tissue samples.
Narrator: Because in small amounts,
arsenic is ever-present in the environment.
This lab did test regularly for arsenic in non-human samples.
Arsenic is an element.
It's in soil, it's in groundwater,
it's even in some of the foods that we eat.
Narrator: And now investigators,
on both sides of the case,
had an explanation for why only Todd's liver
and kidney samples instead of all his samples
tested positive for arsenic:
they'd been stored next to non-human samples
that likely did contain arsenic.
Labay: Once a sample is contaminated, you can't take it away.
Contamination does happen.
It shouldn't happen, but it does.
It was not an arsenic death.
O'Brien: There was some sort of contamination in the lab.
Without that mistake, we wouldn't be here
talking about this case.
Narrator: The mystery was solved.
The original autopsy was right.
Todd Sommer died from a previously
undiagnosed heart condition.
Two weeks before Cindy's second trial
was set to start, a corrections officer
came to her prison cell.
And he goes, "You should probably go call your mom."
So he turned the phone on, and I called my mom,
and she answered the phone.
I just remember saying, "Mom..."
♪
I said, "Is it true that I'm getting out?"
And she said, "Yes," that they dropped the charges.
Dumanis: The case was dismissed because after consulting with experts,
we concluded that there was reasonable doubt,
and therefore the case was dismissed.
Man: Would you expand on that?
Tell us what the reasonable doubt was [indistinct].
Okay. First, today justice was done.
This is how the system is supposed to work.
I don't know how you can say the system works
or that justice was served when I've spent 876 days in jail.
For something that, first of all,
I didn't do, and second, wasn't even a homicide.
Narrator: The case shows the value of science,
not only in putting the guilty behind bars,
but in freeing the innocent.
It's an object lesson in the power of forensics,
for noble and sometimes not-so-noble purposes.
Justice was done in this case,
but not because of the prosecution, but despite it.
The forensic evidence in this case was enormously important.
The evidence in this case was sound.
It was solid.
Sommer: I know this is the most ridiculous thing to say,
but I'm grateful for my time in jail.
I think it taught me a lot about myself.
It taught me a lot about life.
I don't think I'd be the person that I am today
had I not gone through all of those things.
♪