Poisoned With Love
Behind a mask of Hill Country gentility lurks a gothic tale of homicide, manners, and Riopan Plus.
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By then the Nobleses had moved out of the trailer park and into a modest brick home in the Grape Creek community north of San Angelo. While Leita helped Scoggin at the store, Olgie spent most of his hours in his private room at the rear of the house, smoking, drinking whiskey, and thinking up new hiding places for the stacks of money he had squirreled away. Neighbors told Leita that Tim Scoggin sometimes dropped by during the day to talk to Olgie—about what, she couldn’t imagine. One day Scoggin told Olgie that he had spotted two prowlers trying to break into a shed where Olgie had stashed a blue bag containing $33,000. Relieved that his young friend had prevented the theft, Olgie hid the blue bag somewhere else. To this day no one knows where.
The Norton sisters telephoned the store regularly. Leita had begun to recognize their voices. Later she recalled a particular conversation—she heard only Scoggin’s side of it, but he said something about needing poison to kill coyotes on Cordelia’s ranch. Leita remembered too that John Posse, a subcontractor who installed coolers for the Nobleses, had a permit to buy strychnine and offered to get some for Scoggin from a dentist he knew who raised cattle. Ranchers in Llano County say there hasn’t been a calf attacked by a coyote in living memory, but nobody in San Angelo knew that.
Four days before Christmas 1987, on his regular run to the liquor store, Olgie Nobles totaled his pickup truck and very nearly himself. Doctors had to completely reconstruct his face; for weeks he ate nothing except baby food. Leita quit work to take care of him, though she wasn’t feeling well either. For a long time she had suffered from ulcers, and lately they seemed to be worse, much worse. They were bleeding, and she had diarrhea too. She practically lived on 7-Up and stomach remedies like Maalox and Riopan Plus. Scoggin was a godsend, bringing mail, groceries and medicine.
By late March Leita thought Olgie was on his way to recovery, but she was wrong. She returned home one morning to find him violently ill. His system had been traumatized by the wreck three months before, but this was something different. Without warning he had uncontrollable vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach cramps. The second day, he was much worse, and she called the doctor. She wanted to take him to the hospital, but Olgie wouldn’t hear of it. By the third day he was in a stupor, and on the morning of the fourth day she found him dead.
One of the first things Leita did was to contact Scoggin, who was visiting his parents in Midland. Scoggin had seemed mildly depressed since the deaths of the Norton sisters a month earlier. Leita thought his depression was because of the will: The sisters left their entire estate in a trust to benefit the Llano city park and cemetery. In character, however, Scoggin hurried back to San Angelo and made himself useful. A few days after Olgie was buried, he came out to Leita’s house and addressed all of her thank-you cards.
Leita’s vomiting and stomach pains got worse. In early May Scoggin drove her to see a doctor in Brownswood. The doctor diagnosed the problem as bleeding ulcers and ordered Leita to be hospitalized and given blood transfusions. During her two-week confinement, Scoggin telephoned the hospital every day, not to speak to Leita but to check on her condition. When she was released, Scoggin drove her home. Within a week she was worse than ever. “I woke up one morning,” she said, “and when I tried to climb out of bed, it felt like a rock was tied to my feet.”
On May 28, three months after the death of the Norton sisters and two months after the death of Olgie Nobles, Leita was admitted to Shannon Medical Center in San Angelo, paralyzed and obviously suffering from something more severe than bleeding ulcers. Doctors began running a series of tests to find out what. While Leita was in the hospital, her bank notified a friend who was picking up her mail that nine checks written between May 12 and July 28 had suspicious signatures. Five were written while Leita lay paralyzed in the hospital. The checks amounted to $38,700 and had been deposited into Scoggin’s account.
To the astonishment of nearly everyone, the tests established that Leita Nobles had been poisoned with arsenic. Few members of the hospital staff had ever encountered a case of arsenic poisoning. The medical examiner in San Antonio said that he hadn’t seen such a case in twenty years. And still no one suspected murder.
Whoever tried to kill Leita Nobles made two big mistakes. First, the killer miscalculated the modus operandi of the poison. Administered in sufficient amounts—a gram is more than enough—arsenic begins its deadly work in a few hours. Victims experience a slow, agonizing demise: vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, convulsions, stupor, coma, and finally death from circulatory collapse. Unlike strychnine’s dance of death, which kills almost instantly, arsenic’s can take from 24 to 72 hours. But here’s the snare: If arsenic is taken in small amounts over long periods an intended victim builds up a tolerance. During Victorian times arsenic was called the inheritance powder because of the propensity among family members to use it on one another. In the classic plot, a killer first built up his own tolerance by taking small daily doses, then invited their heirs to a feast liberally spiked with the powder of eternal sleep. The beauty of the plot was that arsenic is odorless and tasteless.
Arsenic has another property that the killer may not have considered. It is a heavy metal. Though the poison clears the bloodstream in four days, traces persist in hair and fingernails indefinitely—even a body that has been cremated can be tested for arsenic. In the case of Leita Nobles, hair samples established that she had been given small doses of arsenic over a long period, starting about mid-December 1987, just before Olgie’s near-fatal accident, and continuing until she was hospitalized in late May. Forensic pathologists were able to read a strand of Leita’s hair as one would read tree rings. The outer band of the hair sample showed that the first dose of poison was a weak concentration of 8.5 parts per million (ppm). A segment representing late May—the time her paralysis appeared—registered a whopping 130.1 ppm, a dose that should have been fatal. (Apparently Olgie died from a massive dose; a subsequent test of a hair sample taken from his exhumed body established a concentration of 99.8 ppm.) By attempting to poison Leita with small doses, the killer inadvertently gave her a tolerance for the poison. Otherwise her death would have been marked off like the others—one more old person dead from natural causes.
But then the killer made his second big mistake: failing to realize that the victim’s nephew was a district attorney in a nearby county. He was Ron Sutton, the toughest prosecutor in the Hill Country. The only child of Junction’s fur-and-pecan merchant, Leonard Sutton, Ron was a burly, rumpled man with an eagle eye and a bulldog tenacity. His district included Kimble and four other counties. He had prosecuted some of the Hill Country’s most sensational murder cases—the Slave Ranch trail in Kerrville, for example, and the bizarre case of Genene Jones, the nurse convicted of killing babies entrusted to her care. Sutton had become something of an expert in toxicology, and when he learned that someone had tried to poison his Aunt Leita, he started his own investigation.
“Until I heard what happened to my aunt,” Sutton told me, “I had no reason to think that my uncle’s death was anything but natural. He’d almost been killed in a car wreck. He was a hard drinker and had smoked all his life. But when my aunt told me that Olgie died of exactly the same symptoms that had put her in the hospital, I knew it had to be murder.”
Once Sutton convinced the two lawmen in charge of the investigation—Tom Green County sheriff’s investigator Bill McCloud and San Angelo-based Texas Ranger George Frasier—that they had a case of attempted murder, there was never any suspect except Tim Scoggin. According to Leita, Scoggin admitted writing checks on her accounts at the Citizens State Bank in Miles. “He came by the hospital with his lawyer and begged me to get him out of his mess at the bank,” she said. “I said no. He ought to have come to me before he did what he did.” Scoggin had also begged Mark Heinze, an officer at the bank, to allow him to pay back the money to Leita instead of filing charges. Seeing Scoggin face to face, Heinze remembered a telephone call shortly before the forgeries were discovered. A woman identifying herself as Leita Nobles called and asked questions about the Nobles account—at least Heinze thought the caller was a woman. Suddenly he wasn’t sure.
Though San Angelo was not part of Ron Sutton’s district, the prosecutor drafted papers to have his uncle’s body exhumed. Then he helped lawmen subpoena Tim Scoggin’s financial records. In interviews with his aunt, Sutton learned of Scoggin’s friendship with the Norton sisters and of their almost simultaneous deaths in February. Frasier called fellow Ranger John Waldrip in Llano. Waldrip remembered Scoggin from an investigation in 1983, when the Norton sisters had reported that someone stole a small safe—a lockbox, really—from their home. The safe contained about $40,000 in cash and fifty Krugerrands. There were also some stocks and bonds from their father’s estate, but the sisters had no idea of their value or even what they were.
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