A shot in the dark

On July 15, 2006, Nevada State Controller Kathy Augustine was laid to rest. A pall of grief hung over the mourners, but so did a pall of suspicion.

Questions were swirling across the state. Had a heart attack killed her? Or was it something more sinister?

Word had spread about an unsettling discovery during her autopsy -- a mysterious mark on Kathy's left hip. It was a possible injection site that had no medical explanation. Could that be the cause of Kathy's mysterious collapse? And if so, who could have done it? And how?

Certainly, Kathy had made her share of political enemies. Her friend Heidi Smith says the rumors were rampant.

Hoda Kotb: Like what? What were some of the ones kicked around by people?
Heidi Smith: That she had stepped on too many toes and had to be eliminated. We had rumors of every kind.

And some rumors hit much closer to home. At those funeral services, someone was noticeably absent: Kathy's husband Chaz. He had slit his wrists the day before the funeral.

Was this the action of a distraught, grieving husband, or could it have been a sign of something more?

Higgs recovered after a few days. But by then people were beginning to believe there was more to the story about the morning he called 911 than he was letting on.

Phil Alfano: I sat down with my mother and just told her, "I've got a gut feeling that he did something to her." And my mom said, "I've been thinking the same thing."

Police were becoming more suspicious than sympathetic.

Lt. Jon Catalano (Reno police department): Because of the suspicious circumstances surrounding Ms. Augustine's death we started taking a look at her husband.

As the police delved deeper into the marriage of one of the state's top officials, a more complicated portrait of Chaz Higgs began to emerge.

Before his life collided with Kathy Augustine's political rising star, Chaz Higgs had spent much of his career in the Navy. He trained as a Navy SEAL and spent 15 years as a medical corpsman. Along the way, there were three previous marriages and divorces and a string of bankruptcies.

Kathy's brother says he knew there were problems in the marriage.

Phil Alfano: I know that, at some point he had overdrawn their checking accounts pretty significantly. I also learned at some point Kathy asked him to leave and then took him back in.

And there was another incident Phil now says he wished he'd paid more attention to. Just months before Kathy died, Kathy called her brother sobbing while on a drive with Chaz.

Phil Alfano: She said, "Chaz is trying to kill us." Not "me" or "himself" but "both of us." And that he was driving very erratically.
Hoda Kotb: She sounded terrified?
Phil Alfano: She was hysterical. Yeah. Yeah. I had never heard her that upset before. You look back at it and you say, just .. You say (crying) "Is there more I could have done?"

Suspicion hung in the air. Turns out the very day Kathy Augustine died, police here in Reno received an intriguing phone call. It would change everything.

Victoria Campbell: A nurse calls, a fellow nurse of Chaz Higgs, and says, "You know, I think you need to know something."

That nurse met Chaz Higgs for the first time at this hospital the day before Kathy Augustine was stricken. The nurse said Chaz made an off-hand comment about a murder case in the news involving a husband accused of stabbing his estranged wife.

Detective David Jenkins: He described the suspect as stupid for having committed the murder in the manner in which he had.

The tipster, nurse Kim Ramey, told police Higgs said there was a much better way to commit murder.

Det. David Jenkins: And then made specific reference to succinylcholine as a drug that would have been much wiser to have used because it was virtually undetectable.

Succinylcholine. If used correctly, it paralyzes respiratory muscles to allow the insertion of breathing tubes. But it is a powerful drug that if mis-used can cause organ failure and even death. It quickly dissipates from the bloodstream and leaves few traces.

Police launched a full-blown investigation. They quietly requested an arrest warrant and sent Augustine's blood and urine samples to the FBI crime lab in Virginia.

Two months later, the FBI lab confirmed that Kathy Augustine had succinylcholine in her urine. In September 2006 Chaz Higgs was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Higgs pleaded not guilty.

Hoda Kotb: Your first reaction when the cops busted him?
Phil Alfano: Relief.

But if Kathy Augustine did die by an injection of succinylcholine, it's even more disturbing to everyone who knew her because the effects on the victim are so terrifying.

Greg Augustine (Kathy's stepson): It saddened me a lot to think that she was possibly given a drug that paralyzed her internal organs, so she suffocated and starved her brain and heart of oxygen. I can't think of a worse way to go.

But Kathy's suspicious death got Greg Augustine thinking about another sudden death -- that of his own father, Kathy's third husband Charles. When Charles died from complications of a stroke in 2003, Greg assumed his father had simply taken a turn for the worse.

But now he wondered: Was there a chance his father's death was not due to natural causes?

In light of Kathy Augustine's death and the murder charges against Chaz Higgs, Greg Augustine set out demanding answers to his father's death. What really happened to his dad Charles? Could he have been killed the same way Kathy Augustine allegedly was?

Greg Augustine: Any prudent person would have to go through the decision to exhume their father. Because Chaz was his nurse in the hospital.

Three months after Kathy died, Greg had his request honored. Police in Las Vegas exhumed Charles Augustine's body to see if he also had succinylcholine in his system. Greg and the police waited for answers as Chaz Higgs prepared to stand trial for his wife's murder.