A California engineer described as a "genius" was found guilty Tuesday of poisoning his wife to death with nicotine 20 years ago, the New York Daily News reported.
Paul Curry, a former engineer at a nuclear power plant, thought he outsmarted everyone when he sedated his wife of two years and then injected a lethal dose of nicotine behind her ear in 1994. Curry, 57, moved from California to Kansas, where he cashed in on his wife's $400,000 life insurance policy and remarried.
Curry's downfall came when investigators reopened the unsolved case of Linda Curry's death in recent years and arrested him in 2010, the Daily News reported. The former San Onofre Nuclear Power Station employee could spend the rest of his life in prison pending his sentencing on Oct. 31.
A medical examiner ruled that 50-year-old Linda Curry, who worked at the same plant as her husband, died of nicotine poisoning. But investigators were stumped because the woman did not smoke.
At Paul Curry's trial, jurors learned that a woman the defendant was married to before Linda experienced unexplainable bouts of sickness towards the end of their marriage. She testified that her husband encouraged the both of them to sign up for life insurance policies, the newspaper reported. She was denied the policy and the couple divorced.
The first wife's sicknesses stopped once the marriage ended, according to her testimony.
After Linda married Paul, police visited the second wife during a hospital stay on suspicion that someone put lidocaine in her IV, the Orange County Register reported.
"The only person I could think of to have a motive to do it would be Paul," Linda told police when asked if she knew anyone who would want to harm her. "And the only motive I can think of is money"
The Orange County jury heard a recording of Linda's hospital interview with police.
"I think we had a very smart jury that went through all the evidence and kept thinking that for 16 years, he was enjoying the fact that, in his mind, he thought he got away with murder," Prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh said after the murder conviction, according to ABC News.
