AP Features, June 17th, 2007
The mysterious death of a once-powerful politician who was attempting a comeback goes to court this week with overtones of "CSI" forensics-laden plots and Tom Clancy spy thrillers.
"It's almost like television," said Steven Kosach, the Washoe County District Court judge who will preside over the real-life drama scheduled to get under way in his courtroom Monday.
After Kosach hears a series of motions, jury selection is to begin for Chaz Higgs' trial on charges he murdered Kathy Augustine by injecting her with a paralyzing drug.
Augustine, the state controller, had been impeached by the Nevada Assembly, convicted by the state Senate of using state equipment in her 2002 campaign for the post. She was censured but was not removed from office.
Last July, as she ran for state treasurer, she suffered what her husband _ an emergency room nurse _ called a heart attack and died three days later.
Police were tipped that Higgs had told another nurse just days earlier that he intended to divorce his wife. According to the tipster nurse, Higgs also mentioned another pending Reno murder trial _ of Darren Mack, accused of stabbing his wife to death and shooting the judge handling their divorce with a shot fired through a courthouse window.
The other nurse said Higgs told her Mack "did it wrong."
"If you want to get rid of somebody ... hit them with a little `succs' because they can't trace it post-mortem," she quoted him as saying, while he gestured as if squeezing a syringe.
She testified that every nurse knows "succs" is succinylcholine, a drug used to temporarily paralyze a person before insertion of a breathing tube.
An FBI laboratory reported that tests detected succinylcholine in Augustine's system.
"There's overwhelming evidence Kathy Augustine was murdered and Mr. Higgs was the murderer," said Christopher Hicks, an assistant district attorney.
Higgs pleaded not guilty in December. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison without chance of parole.
He is free on $250,000 bail, partly because his lawyers convinced the judge no evidence has been introduced showing that the drug killed Augustine and that prosecutors can't prove paramedics didn't inject her with it.
Higgs' lead attorney, David Houston, argues a wound in her buttocks that the prosecution calls the injection site was only a quarter-inch deep, incapable of causing her death from a drug that normally is injected intravenously.
"You'd have to be Tom Clancy writing a novel for effect, because scientifically and medically there's no way to tell what would happen," Houston said in an interview Friday.
Clancy became a topic in the case at a bail hearing when Reno Police Detective David Jenkins mentioned that succinylcholine was used as an untraceable poison in the novel "The Teeth of the Tiger." He said he had no scientific knowledge of how quickly the drug would paralyze someone but said Clancy's book addressed the matter in detail.
Houston asked: "You don't regard Tom Clancy as an expert for an investigation, do you?"
Jenkins responded that said the novel "puts it out in public."
"And certainly Tom Clancy is regarded as someone who does substantial fact-checking," Jenkins said.
Houston expects the trial to last two weeks, partly because of the amount of scientific testimony scheduled about the drug and the condition of Augustine's heart.
"It is a completely unrealistic notion to believe that Tom Clancy's methodology could be effective in the real world," he said.
