An Almost Perfect Murder (14 page)

As 2006 came to a close, Washoe Medical Center, which had changed its name to Renown Regional Medical Center, adopted new protocol for medical personnel to gain access to succinylcholine. The new procedures were put into place in part because of all the controversy surrounding Kathy Augustine’s death, in which it was generally believed that Chaz Higgs had left the hospital with some of the controlled substance in his possession. In the past, the drug had simply been stored in a refrigerator for which nurses and other medical personnel only needed to enter a password to gain access to it. Following the Kathy Augustine fiasco, it was decided that more accountability was needed for those who had access to the drug. Detective Jenkins learned that Chaz, having only recently been hired at Washoe Medical Center at the time of Kathy’s ordeal, had only worked five shifts at the hospital and had not been left unaccompanied because he was still on probation. The fact that he always had someone with him during his period of probation certainly decreased his opportunities to access the refrigerator that contained the succinylcholine, but did it eliminate such opportunities entirely? Finding out with any degree of certainty that Chaz Higgs was
never
left alone—not even for a few minutes—during his shifts would likely prove to be a difficult, if not impossible, task.

On February 14, 2007, Jenkins made it a point of his inquiry to contact Kathryn Almaraz, a registered nurse at the South Meadows Medical Center, where Higgs had previously been employed. Kathryn had been his supervisor for about a year and a half and had gotten to know not only Chaz’s nursing abilities, professionally while on the job, but had gotten to know him somewhat personally as well.

Kathryn described Chaz as an excellent critical care nurse with exceptional skills. He was very good with patients, and she had always considered him a good employee. She noticed, however, that during his last six months of employment at South Meadows, his demeanor had changed, and it began to seem like he was under stress much of the time. She said that he had, on occasion, told her that his stress was caused by Kathy. She explained that Chaz often made negative comments about his wife, and called her a bitch often. Some days he didn’t want to go home because he didn’t want to be around her. One day, she said, Chaz made a disturbing comment about wanting to get rid of his wife.

“He said to me—I actually remember it because it was so vivid—that ‘If I didn’t have a daughter in Las Vegas, I would kill my wife and throw her down a mine shaft,’” Kathryn quoted Chaz as having said.

Jenkins wanted to know the approximate date that Chaz had made that statement to her, and Kathryn, to the best of her recollection, said that it had been about a year ago, likely in February 2006. That would have been about five months prior to Kathy’s death, Jenkins noted. Even though she had described Chaz’s statement as “vivid,” Almaraz hadn’t contacted the police or anyone else because she had no way of knowing whether Chaz was just blowing off steam or whether he really meant to do something like that. Kathryn Almaraz said that she and their manager, Tina Carbone, had talked to Chaz on several occasions about the problems he said he was having at home.

“Both of us had talked to him . . . offering employee assistance programs, encouraging him to get counseling because he was so unhappy with his marriage,” Kathryn said.

She said that she had no reason to disbelieve the problems Chaz claimed that he was having with his marriage.

“She was very disruptive,” Kathryn said. “She threatened staff. She would threaten him. She would show up unannounced in the emergency room demanding for his paycheck. There were . . . verbal discussions [that] I did not hear, but I could see through the window in the parking lot. Very disruptive of his work.”

She said that even though she had not been able to hear them talking to each other, Chaz would be “pretty angry” when he came back into the department to resume his job duties. The disruptiveness of Kathy showing up unannounced regardless of her reason made it necessary for others to cover for Chaz, particularly with patient care, so that he could deal with his wife. Kathryn Almaraz said that in the marital relationship between Chaz and Kathy it had been Chaz, in her opinion, who had been the abused spouse.

“I felt that he needed help,” she said. “He needed to get in with a counselor or some type of marriage help . . . to try and figure it out.”

 

 

Recalling the details provided by Dr. Steve Mashour regarding the drug screening of Kathy’s urine having come back positive for the presence of barbiturates, Jenkins broadened his inquiry regarding the tests that had been performed on Kathy upon her arrival at the hospital on the morning of July 8, 2006. Among the people who were included in the scope of his inquiry was Lilian Casquejo, a clinical laboratory specialist at South Meadows whose position entailed clinical laboratory testing.

Lilian confirmed that she was working on the morning in question. She explained that the specimens, packaged in bags that are marked BIOHAZARDS, were typically dropped off at the lab after which they would be taken to a lab employee’s workstation, where they would be analyzed. On that particular morning, ER personnel had brought urine samples from a patient named Sarah Lambert, whose initial screening had come back positive for barbiturates. “Sarah Lambert,” it turned out, had been a pseudonym or an alias that had been assigned to patient Kathy Augustine by the hospital upon her arrival to help protect her anonymity, presumably because she was a public figure.

The positive results for the urinalysis test for the presence of barbiturates in Kathy’s body could have been one of several possible explanations of how someone could have injected her with succinylcholine without her putting up a struggle. After all, if she had been asleep after taking a barbiturate, she might not have felt the injection, depending upon how deeply she had been sleeping, or any struggle that she might have put up could have been reduced to a minimal one. However, subsequent tests that had come back negative, suggestive of an initial false positive, quickly shot down the viability of such a scenario.

Nonetheless, because of the suspicious nature surrounding the symptoms observed at the time of Kathy’s hospitalization, portions of Kathy Augustine’s specimens had been split off and packaged with identifiers, and then placed inside a freezer to preserve the integrity of the specimens in the event that additional testing needed to be completed later. They were later picked up by someone from the coroner’s office.

 

 

Tina Carbone, Jenkins learned, like Kathryn Almaraz, had viewed Chaz Higgs as the victim in an abusive relationship with his wife. Tina had been a registered nurse for fourteen years and had been employed at Washoe Medical Center for the past thirteen years. As a nurse manager with fifty-four nurses under her supervision, she was the person who had hired Chaz at South Meadows for the emergency department, just prior to that facility’s opening in February 2004. Although Chaz and Tina had occasionally talked about his personal life, he had not talked about his wife much during his first year of employment, Tina said. It wasn’t until he had been placed on probation by the hospital’s human resources department, at the time that Linda Ramirez had been fired over the e-mail exchanges between her and Chaz, that Chaz and Tina began having conversations about his wife.

Chaz was unhappy at that time because Kathy, he had said, was being very controlling and was very possessive. It had gotten to the point where Chaz began talking about moving out of their house, and had begun looking for a place to stay because their relationship was progressively getting worse. Although he had not frequently used derogatory language about Kathy in Tina’s presence, she recalled one occasion in which he had referred to her as a “bitch.” She said that because he was often at the triage desk and because her office was behind it, they’d had most of their conversations inside her office because her door was always open. His visits to her office became more and more frequent, to the point where his conversations with Tina had become “problematic,” where Tina began to feel that her job was in jeopardy—not because of Chaz Higgs but because of his wife and the power that she wielded.

Tina confirmed that although she had never used succinylcholine and etomidate together on a patient, the two drugs were kept stored inside a rapid-sequence intubation kit, basically a tray of medications and associated supplies, within the emergency department for easy access when it was needed. The kit had an orange tab or seal that had to be broken to get inside it. Succinylcholine, she said, was also stored in what was known as the “Med Select,” a storage refrigerator that the nursing staff could open by entering their password. She claimed that it would not be difficult to take a vial of succinylcholine out of the facility undetected.

At one point, Tina told investigators, Chaz’s wife, Kathy, had begun harassing her. Tina, a married woman, had offered to rent Chaz an extra room at her and her husband’s house if he decided to leave Kathy. As best as she could recall, the harassment had started around the time that she and her husband had made the offer to Chaz, or at about the time e-mails were being passed back and forth between Chaz and Linda Ramirez. Even though Chaz hadn’t moved out of the house he shared with Kathy, and had not taken Tina and her husband up on their offer, the harassment continued.

The harassment consisted of letters that Kathy had written to Tina’s administrator, and she began coming onto the hospital campus. Sometimes Kathy would wait in the parking lot for her, and she would make telephone calls to Tina, and others, at the hospital. When Tina had had enough and, in part, because she feared that Kathy would cause her to lose her job, Tina took her concerns about the harassment to the State Ethics Board and other outlets available to her, but nothing was done to make Kathy stop. It was then that she and Chaz went to human resources and had a conversation about how they might be able to make Kathy stop.

Although she had indicated that it would be easy for a nurse to walk away from the hospital with a bottle of succinylcholine or some other medicine, the controls in place at the time that Chaz Higgs had worked at South Meadows hadn’t turned up any discrepancies regarding missing or otherwise unaccounted-for medications in the emergency department.

Nancy Vinnik and Kathy Augustine were best friends, and had known each other since 1988. They had met through the Junior League of Las Vegas, an organization of women committed to promoting volunteerism and whose mission is dedicated to helping women develop their potential. They had been friends for the next eighteen years. Nancy told Jenkins and other investigators that Kathy had spoken to her frequently regarding her relationship and marital problems involving Chaz Higgs.

“I talked to her probably at least twice a month,” Nancy said. “She came down to Las Vegas from Reno frequently, and I would meet with her for lunch.”

Kathy also came to her house for dinner somewhat regularly, affording the two friends plenty of opportunities to spend time together throughout the course of Chaz and Kathy’s marriage. Nancy often gave Kathy marital advice, which had a continuing theme.

“It frequently was to (tell her to) ‘tell him to leave,’ or for her to get out, because I felt that she had made a bad decision (in marrying Chaz),” Nancy said.

Nearly every time Nancy spoke to Kathy to give her advice to get away from Chaz, Kathy always told her that she loved him. It had seemed to Nancy that Kathy wanted to make Chaz happy.

“Truthfully, it was that she . . . loved him,” Nancy said. “He would sometimes apologize to her after he had done . . . very terrible things to her. . . . I would frequently describe him to her as a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde.”

Around the time of Kathy’s funeral, Nancy said, she had traveled to Las Vegas at the request of Kathy’s family. Because it was difficult for Kathy’s family to dispose of her things at the office she kept at the Grant Sawyer building in Las Vegas, they had asked Nancy to clean it out for them. With the help of Kathy’s secretary, Nancy boxed up everything and took it over to Kathy’s house on Maria Elena Drive. It was about 4:30
P.M.
when she arrived at the house.

Several of Kathy’s relatives were there when Nancy showed up, including Kathy’s brother Phil. They had come to Las Vegas for Kathy’s funeral. Approximately twenty minutes later, Chaz Higgs and Dallas Augustine, Kathy’s daughter, showed up “very inebriated,” according to Nancy. Phil had calmly approached Chaz and asked him to stay elsewhere. According to Nancy, Phil explained that they had a very large family and that they had already arrived. Several other relatives were on their way.

Higgs, she explained, was not at all happy at that point, and became very upset—to the point of yelling and screaming, “saying that it was his house and nobody was going to tell him that he couldn’t stay at that house.” He became very volatile, she said, “when all hell broke loose in the house.” Chaz had started punching things, including the walls and doorjambs, “and was yelling, swearing, cursing.” At one point, there was a very loud noise that came from another part of the house where Chaz had gone. Everyone had initially thought that it had been a gunshot, and Nancy had been frightened to the point that she called 911.

When they investigated the source of the loud noise, they found that Chaz had ripped out the front door. Everyone surmised that what they had heard had been Chaz “pounding and ripping out the front door,” Nancy said. He had even damaged the door frame, but had not fired a gun. Just prior to Chaz breaking the door, Nancy had seen him on the phone to someone and had overheard at least part of the conversation.

“I know he was talking to Kathy’s mother,” Nancy said, “because he said, ‘Your daughter is nothing but a fucking whore and a cunt.’ And when I heard that, it really . . . was awful to hear that because . . . it was hard just losing a friend, and I couldn’t believe that he could call her mother and say something so disgusting and so despicable.... I had a feeling that she hung up on him. . . .”

Later, after Chaz had already left the house, Dallas asked everyone to leave. Nancy said that she was so nervous and distraught over all of the commotion at the house that she was unable to drive and it had become necessary for her husband to come and pick her up from a neighbor’s house nearby. She said that the entire ordeal had gone on for more than an hour. She said that she had seen Chaz return to the house about twenty minutes later, after everyone else, except Dallas, had left.

The next day, which had been the day before Kathy’s funeral, Chaz had slashed his wrists and had to be rushed to University Medical Center’s emergency department for treatment.

 

 

As winter passed and spring approached, Chaz Higgs languished in jail in Reno, waiting and hoping for an opportunity to be released on bail while waiting for his trial to begin. He had originally been held without bail, but his lawyers persisted in their attempts to get the judge to change his mind. When he was finally granted bail, both of his parents, who were divorced, each put up their respective homes as collateral to cover Chaz’s $250,000 bail. Washoe County District Court judge Steven Kosach had set bail on March 1, 2007, with a requirement that he remain in the state of Nevada and stay in daily contact with his attorneys, but it had taken until Monday, March 26, 2007, for his mother and father to make the financial arrangements. When he walked out of jail, escorted by several deputies and one of his attorneys, to a waiting car, he was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

“He’s very happy to be free,” his attorney David Houston said.

When they arrived at Houston’s office, Chaz met with his mother, who was making plans to temporarily relocate to Reno from North Carolina to help provide support for Chaz pending the outcome of his trial, which was set to begin on Monday, June 18, 2007.

“Upon arriving, we walked in and the first thing he did was hug his mom,” Houston said.

His mother, Shirley Higgs, had believed from the very beginning that her son had not killed Kathy Augustine.

“He is innocent,” she said. “That is all I will believe. I know him better than anyone. I am his mother.”

Kathy’s family, however, were very angry that Judge Kosach had decided to release Chaz on bail. They prepared a statement that Phil Alfano provided to the news media.

“My parents, my brother and I are angry that a psychopath like Chaz Higgs will be allowed to walk free for the next few months, especially given the evidence already presented and his bizarre behavior immediately following Kathy’s death,”
Phil said in the statement.
“No amount of posturing or showmanship by Chaz’s attorneys will change the facts of this case or alter the outcome. When a jury knows what we already know, he will be convicted and spend the rest of his life behind bars.”

 

 

On Tuesday, May 2, 2007, the Clark County Coroner’s Office released a statement that Charles Augustine had died as a result of natural causes and had not been killed by a lethal injection of succinylcholine or any other type of toxic material. Coroner Michael Murphy said that Charles Augustine had died of a stroke, as originally believed. Murphy’s examination showed that he also suffered from heart disease and bronchopneumonia.

“There was nothing in our investigation that would lead us to believe Mr. Augustine died of anything other than natural causes,” Murphy said at a press conference.

One of Chaz’s attorneys, David Houston, believed that the inference that Chaz had anything to do with Charles Augustine’s death had been created and suggested to police merely to taint his client’s image. Houston said that there were a lot of people “willing to believe Mr. Higgs was a monster responsible for two deaths. And, clearly, it just isn’t true.”

“They now know that Charles died of natural causes and not at the hands of the criminal,” Dallas Augustine said in a statement released to the media. “Charles was a good man. I hope this brings some measure of peace to the family.”

“We’re relieved to learn that Chaz did not murder Chuck the way he murdered my sister,” Phil Alfano said. “Thankfully, Chuck didn’t suffer the same fate.”

As a result of the findings, there was no reason for Las Vegas homicide detectives to pursue the issue any further. Similarly, the matter of the purported discrepancy regarding the time frame when Chaz and Kathy supposedly had met each other had not been brought up again. The innuendo and finger-pointing that had been going on suggesting that Chaz and Kathy had plotted Charles Augustine’s death appeared to have no substance.

Due in part to the evidence that had been collected and the witness statements that had been obtained during Jenkins’s investigation, it also did not appear that Kathy had died as a result of any kind of political intrigue perpetrated by anyone that she had been going after to expose for political corruption, despite a
48 Hours Mystery
episode that had been televised on CBS that had hinted at a murder conspiracy concocted by her Republican rivals.

“My immediate reaction (following Kathy’s death) was ‘They killed her,’” Barbara Woollen, a former candidate for lieutenant governor, stated. Woollen recalled that she’d had multiple conversations with Kathy in which death threats against her had been alleged because of her inquiries into political corruption that had involved the misappropriation of funds at a time when she had decided to run for the office of state treasurer. Woollen quoted Kathy as saying at one point: “They will do anything to keep me from getting into that office.”

The investigation just didn’t seem to support that kind of inquiry, however, and the purported political corruption had been left to other entities to deal with; in keeping with political tradition, the issues that involved allegedly corrupt politicians that she had been looking into all but disappeared.

 

 

Three weeks before his trial was set to begin, Chaz Higgs’s attorney David Houston filed a request to postpone his client’s trial. Houston claimed that the FBI laboratory had not provided its complete report to the defense team showing that Kathy Augustine had been poisoned with succinylcholine. Because so much of the state’s case against Chaz was science dependent, Houston said the complete report was needed by a defense expert. Prosecutor Tom Barb, however, argued that the initial report had been provided to the defense team in December 2006, and that they should not have waited until such a late date to decide that they needed more information for one of the expert witnesses that they planned to call.

“There’s overwhelming evidence Kathy Augustine was murdered and Mr. Higgs was the murderer,” coprosecutor Christopher Hicks said.

“There is no evidence Chaz Higgs killed Kathy Augustine,” attorney Alan Baum asserted.

“I hate to say this,” Judge Kosach said to the defendant. “But the comments you made to Ms. Ramey, if someone heard that, they would say, ‘Oh, wow.’ It’s almost like television.”

The judge sided with the state and denied the request.

“I don’t want this to get out of hand,” Kosach said. “I do not believe the interest of justice will be furthered by a continuance.”

Kosach said that the comments Chaz had made to Kim Ramey were “damning in my mind.”

Kathy’s brother Phil agreed with the judge’s ruling.

“It’s time for this to move forward,” he said.

 

 

The defense team filed last-minute pretrial motions in an attempt to keep the state’s findings on succinylcholine out of the trial. Houston and Baum argued that they had not been provided the opportunity for their own experts to conduct testing of Kathy’s blood and urine samples, and had only recently been told that there was not a sufficient amount of blood remaining for them to conduct their own tests and that the urine samples had “been allowed to deteriorate.” They also argued that their experts had not been allowed to observe the testing of the blood and urine samples, either. The defense lawyers maintained that succinylcholine can occur in the body naturally and might “be found even where it has not been intentionally administered.”

As a result,
read Baum and Houston’s motion,
the methods used to test the presence of intentionally administered doses of succinylcholine are hotly contested, and have not been generally accepted by the scientific or legal community as reliable and trustworthy.

Deputy District Attorney Tom Barb indicated that he would respond to the motions in writing, and Judge Kosach said that some time would be set aside to hear the motions in detail prior to the start of the trial.