Husband guilty of poisoning wife with nicotine, collecting $500,000
A former nuclear power plant engineer accused of poisoning his wife with nicotine more than two decades ago has been found guilty of murder
Paul M. Curry, 57, could face life in prison after being convicted Tuesday of murdering his wife, Linda Curry, who had also worked at the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station.
She was 50 when she died mysteriously in June 1994 at the couple’s San Clemente home. They had been married 21 months.
Prosecutors told jurors that the man some called a genius sedated his wife and gave her a lethal injection of nicotine behind the ear, then collected about half a million dollars in life insurance and other benefits.
“He thought he was smarter than everybody else,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Ebrahim Baytieh told jurors.
“And it worked for him. It worked for him for 16 years.”
Curry was a suspect early on, but the case went cold until investigators began looking into it again several years ago. The former San Clemente resident was arrested while living in Kansas in 2010.
Curry’s defense attorney, Orange County Deputy Public Defender Lisa Kopelman, argued that the case was full of holes and based on “conjecture, innuendo and suspicion.”
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