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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In February 1994, on the anniversary of Steven’s death, Marie’s grandfather took Marie and Stacey to the Macaroni Grill for dinner. Jim Robards tried to make a couple of toasts to Steven, but Marie wouldn’t listen. “I asked her if she wanted to put flowers on her daddy’s grave,” Stacey said, “but she said to me she didn’t even know where his grave site was. She told me she was over her father’s death and didn’t want to think about it.” Like Claudius, Marie could not repent.
A few weeks later, after having more nightmares, in which she heard Marie’s father calling to her from the grave to save him, Stacey went to her high school counselor’s office and asked the counselor to call the police about Steven’s death.
The investigation should have been simple enough. All the medical examiner’s office needed to do was retest Steven’s blood. (The office keeps blood samples from autopsies it has conducted.) A deputy chief examiner, however, later said that it took almost three months to find a laboratory with a machine that could run a test to check for barium acetate, and then another few months passed before the test results were sent back. A possible explanation was that the overworked Fort Worth homicide unit had more important things to do than investigate a preposterous-sounding story from an overwrought teenager about her best friend poisoning her father.
The longer the police took, the more Stacey second-guessed her decision. She and Marie never spoke about Steven’s death again. Eventually, Stacey dropped out of the yearbook class so she wouldn’t have to see Marie every day. She began missing school, staying out late, and as she put it, partying too much. In April Stacey checked in to an after-school program at a private psychiatric treatment center in Mansfield. “I walked in and told them my life was swirling down the toilet.” But at the prom, she did pose with Marie for a photograph. “She was so beautiful that night,” said Stacey, “that I couldn’t believe she had ever done anything wrong. I kept thinking, ‘Maybe we can all just forget this ever happened.’”
After graduation, Stacey went to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, about a three-hour drive from the University of Texas at Austin, where Marie was. The two never spoke, and Stacey tried to concentrate on her education. But late one night in October, a detective called to tell her that he would be arriving the next morning to take her statement. The tests had shown that Steven Robards had 250 times the amount of barium acetate normally found in a person’s blood. Stacey was so panicked that she got out of bed, went to her dorm’s vending machine, and ate five Snickers bars.
Marie was let out on bond, and she went back to Granbury, where her mother and Frank, still together, had moved earlier that year. (Frank had been offered a job as a deputy sheriff for Hood County, and Beth worked as a clerk for the city.) While waiting for her trial, Marie got a job as a waitress at a TGI Friday’s in Fort Worth. A film director hired to shoot a Friday’s commercial was so impressed with Marie that he used her in a scene serving drinks to customers. “What’s so tragic is that total strangers could meet Marie and see something special in her,” said Beth, breaking into tears. “She felt trapped, and I let her feel that way. I didn’t give her any hope.”
Using the life insurance money that Marie had received after Steven’s death—more than $60,000—Beth hired two veteran Fort Worth defense attorneys, Bill Magnussen and Ward Casey, whose strategy was to convince the jury that Marie didn’t know that barium acetate could kill a person. If the jury believed that she had not intended to kill, then Marie had the chance of receiving a lighter sentence for manslaughter rather than murder. “She only wanted to make her daddy sick overnight,” Casey told the jury in his old-fashioned oratorical style. “She only wanted to go home to Mama.”
Each day of the trial, the courtroom was packed. (One high school civics teacher thought it would be educational for his class to sit through testimony. The students listened for a while and then began to write notes. One girl sitting beside me wrote her boyfriend a letter that began, “I am psycho in my love for you! Do you hear my heart pounding.”) Spectators craned their necks to get a look at Marie, who by then was nineteen years old. She had cut her hair in a short nunlike bob and wore sleeveless, flower-print blouses and loose-fitting pants. Throughout much of the testimony, she put her right hand on her cheek and sobbed silently. During breaks, her mother, who could not watch the proceedings because she was a potential witness, came into the courtroom and wrapped Marie in her arms. Frank sat outside on a bench, speaking to no one. Members of the Robards family sat stone-faced on the right side of the courtroom.
One of the more emotional moments in the trial came when Jim Robards took the stand and said that as upset as he was over the death of his son, Marie should be forgiven and offered a probationary sentence. Randall Price arrived to testify that Marie was not deranged but was so consumed with remorse over Steven’s death that she was experiencing a version of posttraumatic stress syndrome, unable to express her emotions. Price was also going to say that he believed Marie never wanted her father to die, but the defense attorneys, for reasons that remain unclear, did not call Price to the stand, which gave the prosecution an unhindered opportunity to rip into Marie, telling the jury that she cavalierly poisoned her father and never tried to help save him when the paramedics arrived.
The prosecution’s most important witness, of course, was Stacey High. Wearing a green dress, brown loafers, and white socks, she came to the stand, nervously sucking on a breath mint, and said that Marie had told her during one of their conversations that she knew the barium acetate would be fatal. At one point, Stacey turned and looked at Marie. They locked eyes, then Marie dropped her head.
In the end, the jury was apparently swayed by prosecutor Mitch Poe when he said in his final argument, “Just one stomachache wasn’t going to get Marie back to her mama’s place . . . Steve Robards had to die.” The jurors convicted Marie of murder, which left them with the question of deciding her sentence. The defense attorneys felt they had no choice but to have Marie testify.
She nearly stumbled as she walked to the stand. In a squeaky, trembling voice, she told the jury she had never been convicted of a crime. She said that her only contact with the Robards family since her arrest was a birthday card she had sent her grandfather.
Then Casey asked, “Marie, did you love your dad?”
“Very much,” she said.
“Are you sorry you killed your dad?”
It was time for her to repent. Bursting into tears, she turned to the side of the courtroom where the Robardses were sitting and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Poe said Marie deserved a life sentence because she gave her father a death sentence. The defense attorneys begged for probation for a girl they said would have to live with the guilt of her father’s death for the rest of her life. The jury split the difference, giving Marie a 28-year sentence—she will have to spend at least seven years in state prison before being eligible for parole. (Claiming that the prosecution used improper testimony about Marie’s state of mind during the trial, her attorneys have filed a motion for a new trial. If that fails, they will appeal the verdict.) Outside, in the courthouse hallway, Poe told the local press that Marie was a “teenage narcissist.” Surrounded by television cameras, Stacey High dramatically said, “I’m ready to wrap up this phase of my life, hopefully major in neuropsychology in college, and be a wonderful citizen of the United States.” Beth and Frank were the last ones to leave the courtroom. For nearly an hour after the sentencing, they sat alone on the front row, holding hands. “Frank and I have made our mistakes,” Beth later told me, “but we’re going to be strong together. We’ve got to go on. Our marriage will survive this.”
For several days Marie remained on a suicide watch at the county jail. But a week after the verdict, Price went to see her. “Marie asked me if she could get her college degree while she was in prison. She told me she was anxious to start some kind of schooling, to improve herself, to accept her punishment and move on,” Price said. “She was wearing these paper clothes, which the jailers give prisoners on a suicide watch, and she was shivering in her cold jail cell. But she told me she had no right to complain about her own problems because she had already caused so much suffering. It was sort of amazing to listen to her.”
From jail, Marie also called her mother collect every night. In one of those phone calls, she told Beth that she hoped Stacey didn’t feel badly about going to the police. She still liked her, Marie said. After all, she added, the two of them had once been best friends.
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