Word: carmela
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Murderous Motive. With surgical thoroughness, Schaub showed that Coppolino obtained a lethal amount of succinylcholine chloride - supposedly for animal experiments - from a friend a month before Dr. Carmela Coppolino's death...
Schaub had a witness testify that the death was wrongly ascribed to a heart attack because Coppolino persuaded a physician that she had suffered chest pains earlier. He called Carmela's father to relate how Coppolino claimed an autopsy had proved that a heart attack was the cause of death-though in fact no autopsy had been performed at the time...
Coppolino's deteriorating finances, Schaub charged, spurred his murderous motive. While the Coppolinos were living in New Jersey, Carmela earned $16,000 a year as a physician in a research laboratory. But when they moved to Sarasota, Fla., in April 1965 because of Coppolino's heart condition -which Schaub did his best to show was faked-Carmela flunked the state's medical examination, and could not work as a doctor. They were left to live on Coppolino's $22,000-a-year disability insurance, which was plainly not enough to sustain his high-living tastes plus...
...told a weird story of being hypnotized by Coppolino and standing helplessly aside while he smothered Farber with a pillow. Though it was Mrs. Farber who had aroused police suspicions against Coppolino after he spurned her for wealthy Divorcee Mary Gibson, 39, whom he married six weeks after Carmela's death, she had little to offer the current trial. Schaub called on a group of women who attended the same weekly bridge sessions as Coppolino and Mary; several of them testified that they were quite certain that the couple lived together before their marriage...
From experts, Schaub got all the help he needed on the obscure pharmacodynamical properties of succinylcholine chloride. As an anesthesiologist, Coppolino had had the opportunity to use it frequently on surgery patients to relax their muscles. Schaub proved to the jurors that it was also used on Carmela, injected into her left buttock in such massive dosage that it paralyzed and within minutes killed her. To carry the crux of his case, the prosecutor relied on the experts-and they came through with explicit, if esoteric evidence. Although scientists never had before been able to find traces of the drug...