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In June 1986, 52-year-old heavy equipment operator Bruce Nickell returned to his home in Auburn, Washington, with a severe headache. His wife, Stella Nickell, handed him an Extra-Strength Excedrin capsule from their medicine cabinet. Minutes later, Bruce collapsed unconscious on the floor and died at Harborview Medical Center. ​The county medical examiner attributed Bruce's sudden death to emphysema and heart failure. ​To anyone else, that would have closed the matter. But for Stella, it was a financial disaster: ​She had taken out multiple life insurance policies on Bruce totaling $176,000. ​A crucial clause guaranteed an additional $100,000 payout if Bruce died an accidental death. ​A natural heart failure ruling meant she forfeited the accidental death indemnity, leaving her with only the base coverage. ​Six days later, 40-year-old bank manager Susan Snow woke up with a headache in nearby Auburn, took two Extra-Strength Excedrin capsules from a newly opened bottle, and collapsed dead on her bathroom floor. ​During Susan Snow’s autopsy, the medical examiner detected the telltale odor of bitter almonds: ​Toxicology screening revealed a massive, lethal concentration of potassium cyanide in her blood. ​Police tested the Excedrin bottle in Snow's kitchen and found three remaining capsules packed with cyanide powder. ​The FDA and manufacturer Bristol-Myers launched an immediate regional recall, pulling hundreds of thousands of pain relief bottles off retail shelves across the Pacific Northwest. ​Seeing the news coverage, Stella stepped forward: ​She walked into the police station reporting that her husband Bruce had died days earlier after taking Excedrin from a bottle in their home. ​Detectives exhumed Bruce's body and tested the brain and tissue samples: his body contained lethal concentrations of cyanide. ​Stella handed over two bottles from her home, both contained cyanide-spiked capsules. ​Federal investigators noticed a startling statistical anomaly: Out of hundreds of thousands of recalled bottles across the entire state of Washington, only five tainted bottles were ever found: two in retail stores, one in Susan Snow’s home, and two inside Stella Nickell's house. ​The mathematical probability of one household purchasing two separate poisoned bottles from two different stores at random was calculated at one in several billion. ​Forensic science and federal agents unraveled the murder scheme: FBI laboratory microscopists analyzing the seized capsules discovered green speckles mixed into the white cyanide powder. Spectroscopic analysis identified it as algae destroyer used in domestic fish tanks. Stella owned a large home aquarium. In her kitchen, she had crushed the cyanide using the exact same mortar and pestle she used to grind fish algaecide tablets, transferring microscopic traces into the poison. ​The Library Trail: Federal subpoena records revealed that someone had borrowed books on poisons and toxic chemicals, including Human Poisoning and Deadly Harvest, from the Auburn public library. The checkout cards bore Stella Nickell’s signature, and FBI latent fingerprint examiners lifted eighty-four of Stella's fingerprints from the library book pages detailing cyanide extraction. ​Stella's adult daughter, Cindy Hamilton, took the stand, testifying that her mother had spent months openly researching ways to murder Bruce for the life insurance payouts. ​In May 1988, Stella Nickell was convicted in federal court of five counts of product tampering, including two causing death, marking the first time in US history that the Federal Anti-Tampering Act of 1983 was successfully used to convict a killer of murder. She was sentenced to ninety-nine years in federal prison.