A Father’s Day 
Poisoning Daddy
How a loving daughter and star student stole barium acetate from her high school chemistry lab, put it in her father’s refried beans, and almost got away with murder.
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So why, in February 1993, while the teacher wasn’t looking, did Marie pour from a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones and the word “poisonous” in large red letters some barium acetate into a napkin, which she then hid in her knapsack? “It’s one of those mysteries—a teenager’s desperation,” said Price. “For whatever reason, Marie did feel permanently trapped. She told me that prior to the barium incident, she had been thinking that if she could burn down Steven’s apartment when he wasn’t there, she would be able to be reunited with her mother.”
But according to what Marie later told the police, she decided on the night of February 18 to put the barium acetate into his refried beans. After Steven ate his Mexican food, he went to a Wednesday night church service at a nearby Church of Christ. He returned less than an hour later, complaining of a stomachache. He began to vomit. Marie went to Hudgins’ apartment and told her that Steven wasn’t feeling well.
While Marie stayed in Hudgins’ apartment, listening to the radio with Hudgins’ young son, Hudgins rushed over to find Steven in bed, complaining that he was getting stiff in his arms and legs. “He said he couldn’t swallow well,” Hudgins recalled, “and I saw saliva coming up through his mouth. I went into the other room and called an ambulance. While I was on the phone, I heard Steven gurgling. His mouth was foaming. It was terrible. His eyes were open and he was just staring.”
Paramedics tried to get an oxygen tube down his throat to keep him alive, but his throat was completely closed. Marie came back to the apartment and stood in the doorway. “It was like she was in shock,” said Hudgins. “She didn’t tell the paramedics anything. She only stood there.” Finally, Hudgins hugged Marie and pushed Marie’s face into her shoulder so that Marie wouldn’t see her father die. Later that night, Beth and Frank came to the hospital to take Marie home to Granbury.
Shortly after Steven’s funeral—during which Marie stood dazed beside the grave—Beth took Marie aside and told her that the two of them were soon moving to Florida. “I told her that Frank and I were still having problems, and so I was moving out,” Beth said. “Marie stared at me. ‘You had this plan all along to take me to Florida?’ she asked. I told her I had found a job there, and we were moving, and we were going to be together again, the two of us. Marie looked like she couldn’t breathe.” Beth paused. “If I had only told Marie one week earlier, none of this would ever have happened.”
Indeed, by the end of March, Marie and Beth were in Panama City, Florida, where Beth had found a job working as an administrative assistant for the state division of motor vehicles. Marie enrolled in the local high school. She was so depressed, however—some days she couldn’t even get out of bed—that Beth was worried that Marie too had become manic depressive. She sent Marie to a counseling center, which did little good. Then, in June, Frank Burroughs arrived in Florida to try to patch things up with Beth.
This time, Beth said, he promised to work harder on their marriage, and Marie was ready to accept him back. But in another almost unbelievable twist to the story, weeks after his arrival Marie found a note in his pillow case from the other woman. Beth recalled, “Marie said to me, ‘Mom, you can put up with him if you want to, but I don’t have to. I miss Texas, and I’m going home.’”
Once again, Beth chose her husband, staying with him in Florida. Marie called Steven’s father, Jim, asking if she could come to Mansfield to live with him and his wife (he too was divorced and remarried). Considering that she could have gone to Beth’s relatives, going to the Robardses seemed to be a bizarre choice. “I think Marie somehow wanted to make up to the Robards family and be the best granddaughter there was,” Beth said. “She was determined to start a new life.”
Robards family members later said that Marie never cracked. “We didn’t suspect a thing,” one told me. “The only thing we thought was a little strange was that she didn’t want to go to Steven’s grave. She told us she couldn’t emotionally handle it.” At Mansfield High School, Marie was known as a straight-A type. She joined the volleyball team and the yearbook staff. “She impressed all the teachers,” said Leonidas Patterson, the yearbook teacher, “because here she was, a brand-new student, and she had this hunger to get involved. When we had our University Interscholastic League competitions, Marie was interested in everything—drama, journalism, and keyboarding.”
Some of the students were mystified by the elegant Marie because she was so reserved and unwilling to talk about her past. Some girls swore that Marie had told them her father was living, and others thought they heard her say he had died. But the always perky Stacey High, who was voted most humorous in her senior class, wondered if the reason Marie came to school perfectly dressed each day was because she was trying to hide some flaw. “I had come from an abused background, and I had been to plenty of psychologists,” Stacey said. “I could tell that Marie had gone through something too. I thought I could help her come out of her shell, teach her to have a little more fun in life.”
Soon, the two fatherless girls were inseparable. (Stacey’s father, whom she almost never saw, lived in Mississippi.) One weekend night, using fake IDs, Stacey took Marie to the country-western bars on the north side of Fort Worth, dressing her in a pair of tight jeans. Patrons at one bar were so taken by Marie’s appearance that they called her the Cowboy Barbie Doll. At school, Marie and Stacey were writing partners on the yearbook staff. Stacey was good at asking the questions; Marie liked doing the writing. “I pride myself on asking really good questions,” Stacey said, “and sometimes when we were driving around town in her Honda, I tried to get Marie to talk about her past and her dad’s death, thinking it might help her. But it was, like, a dead-end street to get her to talk.”
Strangely enough, it was Shakespeare—the writer usually considered so boring by high school students—who got to Marie. If she had been reading her Cliffs Notes on Hamlet, which she had brought along with her the night she was studying with Stacey, Marie would have read that Claudius’ soliloquy in Act III, Scene III showed him to be “an erring human being, not an inhuman monster. Claudius clearly is not a born villain; nor, however much he has sought to conceal his real self from others, does he seek to avoid moral and religious truth. . . . At this particular moment in the action, it is possible to feel some pity for this tormented man despite his appalling crimes.”
After her confession, Marie begged Stacey to tell no one. “You’re the only person who knows,” she said. But that night, Stacey went home and told her mother, Libby High, who was as close to Stacey as Beth was to Marie. Libby, who worked in nursing education, initially thought that Marie, overcome with grief about her father, had made up the story. But when Libby called the poison center number to ask if barium acetate could kill a person by closing his throat, the person on the line said it certainly could and then asked suspiciously why Libby wanted to know.
Incredibly, Libby did not call the police. She told me that after her disastrous marriage, she felt an added responsibility as a single parent to prepare her daughter for the rigors of the real world. “I wanted Stacey to know that I trusted her to make her own decision about Marie,” Libby said. “I guess I knew that this was the moment in which Stacey was going to have to grow up.”
Instead, as Stacey agonized Hamlet-like over what she should do, she came close to what she said was “a complete mental breakdown.” She spoke several times about Marie with a high school counselor, never mentioning Marie by name but referring to her as a friend of a friend. She confided in a few friends who had already graduated from high school what Marie had told her. “They said, ‘Stacey, quit lying, you need a reality check, girl,’” Stacey told me. She had nightmares that Marie was chasing her through a forest. “I could hear Marie breathing real slowly, just like it was a horror movie,” Stacey said. “And then I’d come to school the next day and there she was, this very nice person. We’d sit and talk in this little office in the back of the yearbook class, and I would tell myself that Marie had only made a teenage mistake. I kept saying, ‘Marie, I really think you need some counseling.’” At her mother’s suggestion, Stacey lied to Marie, telling her she had confessed to a priest about Marie’s secret. “Maybe I overreacted,” Libby said later, “but I thought if Marie ever wanted to harm Stacey, she wouldn’t do it because she believed Stacey had told a priest.”
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