Transcript of Trace of Suspicion - Ep. 1: A Death in the Family New

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Death comes for us all eventually. We can never know exactly when, where, or how. What is known is that the Grim Reaper is always out there, waiting, checking our names against a list like some bill collector on commission. United States Marine Sergeant Todd Sommer had every reason to think his appointment with death was still decades away. After all, he was only 23. Except sometimes the years don't matter. As he got ready for bed that night in February 2002, the Reaper was watching. Todd had been battling some kind of bug for more than a week. Nausea, diarrhea, stomach pains, chills, fever— the full menu of misery. The doctors at the Miramar Marine Base in San Diego thought this might be food poisoning. Maybe that gas station egg roll he had eaten. We do not know how much sleep Todd Sommer actually got that night. We do know that at about 1:30 in the morning, his wife Cindy was awakened by the sound of her husband gasping for breath.

He got up and he walked towards the bathroom and turned around and just looked at me and like just couldn't catch his breath.

Years later, the memory of that night is still fresh for Cindy.

I went over to him. I'm like, what's the matter? He just looked at me and he said, I'm all right. I'm okay. I'm fine. And then he just fell down and I just kind of freaked out. Come on.

That is Cindy back in 2002 on the phone. To 911. 911, dear one.

What happened?

What happened?

He just collapsed.

He went back into the burning class.

Okay, the paramedics are on the way, Cindy.

I'm doing it.

Summer, I'm going to it right now. Cindy remembered the basics of CPR from her days as a swimmer in middle school and says she did what she could.

I'd never done it before other than on a dummy, so I really wasn't sure. The exact sequence of how things should go.

A platoon of paramedics, EMTs, and cops were only minutes away, but by then it seemed the Grim Reaper had her husband in a death embrace.

Then police and fire got there, and it was just— they had taken me out of the room, and it was just all a blur from there.

This story is about the why and the how of Todd Sommer's death that night.

What? I love you.

I love you, baby. What am I going to do without you? It is about the wife he left behind and the questions that have persisted for more than 20 years.

Well, we learned that they had some money issues.

It is a story about private behavior and public shame.

She started having a lot of people over and a lot of parties shortly after his funeral.

I understand everybody says it's the sex. We understood how it doesn't look good. The experts say that people do some pretty strange things when they're grieving.

And it is the story about investigators who found reasons to believe Todd Summers' sudden death was really a cold and calculated case of murder.

This was really strange for a 23-year-old seemingly healthy Marine to die. So why don't we run one more test? Because poison could have been an option here.

I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and this is Trace of Suspicion, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 1: A Death in the Family. The phone woke Susan Beach from a dead sleep. Without her glasses, she couldn't tell what time it was, but she knew the voice on the other end of the phone. It was Cindy Summer, the mother of one of her daughter's friends.

She told me that her husband had collapsed on the floor, that she called the paramedics and they were on their way, and she needed somebody to stay with her children.

Susan quickly dressed, woke her two kids, and hustled them out to the car for the 10 to 15 minute drive to the Summers' home.

I noticed that the ambulance and the MPs hadn't arrived yet, and I had to figure out where to park. I didn't want to park near her house to be in the way of the paramedics.

Susan did not see Cindy when she and her kids arrived, so she walked in past the stairway that led to the upstairs bedrooms. She assumed Cindy was up there with Todd. Straight ahead, Susan saw Cindy's 4 kids. In the living room.

The kids are talking. I talked to them, but I just can't remember the conversations. I eventually sat on the floor because there was no place to sit.

Although Susan did not see the first responders arrive, she says the children heard them coming through the door.

They were curious, and I think they heard them come, and I, uh, Had to tell them to stay out of the way.

I was relieved when they were there because I felt like they could fix everything.

That's Cindy.

I guess because they didn't put him on a stretcher and take him right away, you know, I'm like, why aren't they taking him? You know? And I didn't realize that he wasn't stable, that they had to transport when they were stable.

Todd Sommer was far from stable. Cindy says she was ushered out of the room. Never saw the EMTs frantically performing CPR. She didn't see defibrillator paddles applied or the intravenous drugs paramedics pumped into Todd's body, hoping to restart his heart.

I didn't know what to do, you know, and I, I guess I grew up thinking that once the paramedics have them and they go to the hospital, that things turn out okay.

After about 45 minutes, Todd's body was strapped to a gurney and taken out the front door to a waiting ambulance. Cindy was outside chain-smoking nervously when the gurney rolled by. It was then she turned to an MP who was standing there and blurted out a comment about Todd's military life insurance policy, which was worth about a quarter of a million dollars. They joked about a lot, but you never thought that you would actually see it An innocent comment? Sure. I mean, probably. Well, years later, when Cindy's life went under a microscope, that comment and some others she made that night would be remembered and written down as evidence.

I'm not thinking I need to cover anything up. I'm not thinking I need to have a filter for anything. I'm not thinking along those lines at all.

Shortly after the ambulance pulled away, Cindy walked back to the house. And told Susan Beach that one of the MPs was going to take her to the hospital. The house was chilly, and so once Cindy left, Susan went upstairs in search of pillows and blankets for the children.

I looked in the kids' room and I noticed there was no sheets or blankets or anything. And then I walked over to Cindy and Todd's room and I peeked in.

The room was just as first responders had left it. Lights on, an unmade bed, the place littered with discarded medical packaging from the trauma that had played out on the floor. It was a desperately sad scene, made all the more haunting by some evidence of life the way it had been.

The only thing I really remember was two wine glasses sitting on one of the dressers near the bed. They look like they were half full.

Because none of the first responders who were there that night had the slightest notion that Todd Summers' death might one day be considered suspicious, or that his home might have been a crime scene, no photos were taken of the room where he died. The contents of those half-empty wine glasses were never tested. And Susan Beach was never questioned. As it turned out, more than a year would pass before investigators and some others would realize that doing those things on the night Todd Sommer collapsed might have made all the difference.

Who gets to be a citizen of the United States at birth? When it comes to sports in school, who gets to compete with the girls? And how much power does the president actually have to hire and fire at independent agencies? These are some of the key questions before the U.S. Supreme Court this term. And as any good lawyer knows, whether you win or lose in the highest court depends on the facts. The evidence, and how you frame your arguments. But that's not the only thing that matters. I'm Laura Jarrett, senior legal correspondent at NBC News, and this month in a new series for our Here's the Scoop podcast, I'm talking to legal experts and lawyers whose past legal victories are now the building blocks for the biggest cases still left to be decided. I want to know how they convinced the court they were right when the stakes were high. What special sauce locked it in? And what could be different this time around. Join us for Here's the Scoop: Supreme Court Edition. New episodes every Saturday. You can find Here's the Scoop from NBC News on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with one of the most influential voices in the country right now, Mel Robbins. On her rise from rock bottom to an empire with a top podcast, bestselling books, with the message, "Let them." You can get my conversation with Mel for free wherever you download your podcasts.

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Cindy Summers' mind was racing when she climbed into the front seat of an MP's patrol car. Her husband had just collapsed. She had to notify family. What about the kids? What to tell them? And if Todd did not pull through, how would she survive? So many thoughts flashing like Morse code, like an SOS.

I was working at Subway at the time, part-time while the kids were in school for 3 or 4 hours a day. You know, do I have enough to eat tomorrow?

And Todd, she thought, what about Todd? He'll be okay. Sure, yeah, he'll be okay.

I remember feeling like they were gonna— they were gonna fix him. And when he got to the hospital, that I wouldn't be able to go right into the room anyway.

You know, they—

it wasn't— you don't follow the person into the into the ER, into, you know, the trauma room.

Cindy dug around in her purse for a pack of cigarettes. There were only a couple left.

I'm just like, I just need a cigarette.

You ask the MP who was driving you to get—

if I could get some cigarettes. I'm ADHD. I like— I am, and I need something to focus on. My brain needs to have— it's not wired right.

After the cigarette stop, Cindy's mind slowed a bit. She called Todd's mom, her mom, various sisters and brothers, close friends of the family. Todd had collapsed, she told them. She did not know why. Yes, he was unconscious. We're on our way to the hospital now. Yes, I'll let you know.

Get to the hospital, and I remember He was still in the trauma room, and they had put me in, like, a room off to the side. All I knew was that they had said, "Come in here. You know, a doctor will come and speak with you shortly, and you just sit and wait." And you don't know whether that was 5 minutes or 5 hours. It seemed like an eternity, yeah.

You remember the doctor telling you that Todd was dead?

But yeah, I remember them coming in and, you know, telling me that they had tried everything they could. I don't know if I asked them why or how. I don't— I don't remember any of that anymore.

It had only been an hour since Cindy first called 911. One hour. And in that time, Everything had changed. Cindy asked to have a few moments alone with her husband's body. She told Todd she loved him. Then she took the wedding band from his finger and placed it on her thumb. As she was leaving the ER, a senior Marine officer approached and asked if there was anything the Corps could do for her. That's when Cindy said the second thing that would later come back to haunt her. She asked the officer if she would have to give back Todd's re-enlistment bonus.

Thinking back now as to why I would have said things like that or thought things like that would just really be— I've lost basically our only source of income. I have 4 kids. We can hardly make ends meet now.

Indelicate, perhaps. Unbecoming under the circumstances, maybe. But Cindy Summer didn't need to be clairvoyant to see that she had no hope of supporting her family on what she earned working at a sandwich shop. Once assured that no, she would not have to return Todd's re-enlistment money, Cindy called Susan Beach, who was still at her house watching the kids.

She told me that Todd was gone, and there was a pause of silence because I was, you know, I was pretty shocked about it. And the next thing I remember is asking her how she was, and she told me she was fine at the moment and that she had come to terms with it, or she has accepted it. Something to that nature. She sounded normal.

Cindy told Susan she was coming home, home to the children and home to the new realities of a world quite different from the one that had existed when she climbed into her own bed just a few hours earlier.

The only thing I recall when she got back is that she wanted to hold the youngest child, and she's holding him, and she sat down in a chair and she was staring at a picture of Todd.

One can only imagine what Cindy must have been thinking as she looked at that photo of Todd.

Got married barefoot on the beach. You know, really wasn't a very big wedding.

It had been a true whirlwind romance beginning in January of 1999. Cindy was living in Dearborn, Michigan at the time. She had 3 kids ages 8 to 3, a girl and 2 boys. And she was in the midst of divorcing her first husband, Dan. And Todd? Well, Todd was a young Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Cindy had gone down to North Carolina to visit a different Marine she had met online, but ended up falling for that guy's roommate, Todd Sommer.

We were all hanging out and I met Todd and we just There was an instant connection, and we just spent that weekend together.

Soon, Cindy found herself driving 400 miles south from Dearborn to meet with Todd, who was himself driving 450 miles north from Camp Lejeune. They would rendezvous in Charleston, West Virginia.

I think we both had like an 8-hour trip or, you know, 7-hour trip or whatever, but that was like kind of the closest that Yeah, and we would only really get— I mean, he would leave Friday after work and I would leave and we would meet there late Friday night and he would leave on Sunday morning. So we would— we didn't have a whole lot of time.

You know, when you're, uh, when you're in that kind of relationship where you're only with the other person for this little tiny focused amount of time, that can make things pretty intense.

Yeah. Yeah.

These days, Cindy looks much as she did back then, still slender, still with long brown hair parted in the middle and still brimming with restless energy. Cindy no longer smokes to help her maintain focus. She does have a close relationship with a vape pen. You remember when he proposed?

He didn't do a get down on one knee and propose. I think it was more of a we're going to get married kind of a thing. And I think it was, you know, this is what, this is what we're gonna do. I mean, we, I mean, within a couple of months we had started talking about it and we didn't, we weren't dating for that long.

In July 1999, just weeks after her divorce was final, Cindy and Todd married in the Florida Keys.

His family was from Isla Morada, Key Largo area, so, so they, they were all there. So yeah, there was, they were there and then some, some of his friends from high school were there and Your side. The kids were there.

It had been a glorious day. Cindy radiant in her blue satin dress. Todd decked out in his Marine dress blues.

I mean, I don't know a whole lot of girls that don't think a man in his dress blues is not sexy.

Unfortunately, Cindy did not get to spend much time with that sexy Marine on the beach.

I was still living in Michigan. He was still living in the barracks at Camp Lejeune. Once you get married, it takes a while for housing and for all of that stuff to go through and all that. And he was getting ready to be deployed when I found out I was pregnant.

It is a tough way to start a marriage, but Cindy says each separation was met with a surge of affection. While Todd was aboard ship in the Mediterranean, They kept in touch with passionate letters and emails, fervent imaginings of how perfect their lives would be once they could all live together. The baby, another boy, was born in April 2000, a month after Todd returned. 7 months later, Todd deployed again. That is the job. Cindy's new life involved living on a Marine base far from home. And raising 4 kids on an enlisted man's salary.

Groceries, insurance, cell— you know, when we had cell phones. I think that we lived as much as we could within our means, but it's hard to do on that type of salary.

Shortly after Todd returned from that second deployment in the summer of 2001, he was handed transfer orders to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. So the family packed up again and moved to Southern California. And it was there, in that pink stucco house on the Miramar base, that this young family finally seemed to find their groove. By all accounts, Todd loved hanging out with the kids and being a dad. He was so close with Cindy's children from that first marriage that Todd even talked of adopting them.

He loved them. He, from the minute he met them, he loved them, and the kids loved him, and he looked at them as his own and treated them as his own.

A lot of guys, particularly guys in their early 20s, would not be so anxious to marry a woman who came complete with a family, right?

I think for me, the allure of that was— was great. You know, I was coming out of a terrible relationship, so meeting somebody that was interested in the things that I was interested in and loved the family and loved the kids, I was drawn to that. And I think that he was drawn to kind of the instant family.

Then came February 8th, 2002, 10 days before Todd died. On that Friday, Todd and some other Marines went to El Centro, about 100 miles east of San Diego. The assignment was to scout a location for an upcoming training exercise.

This wasn't something that he had never done before or anything. Um, came home and was not feeling well and thought— they stopped at a roadside gas station, and he had gotten egg rolls, and—

And he thought maybe that made him sick.

Thought maybe that made him sick.

Do you remember what he said about his symptoms?

His symptoms were food poisoning. He just— he had diarrhea, vomiting. Then it turned into almost like a flu to where he had fever. And I couldn't— I remember I called my mom because I couldn't get the fever down, and I couldn't get him to hold down any liquids.

Had it been that egg roll that made Todd sick, or had it been something else? Maybe something he came in contact with while in El Centro? Hard to say. None of the other Marines on that trip got sick. Whatever the cause, for the next 10 days, Todd felt lousy. He missed a few days of work. When he went to the base clinic, the doctors did some tests and gave him a prescription.

And he had started to get better after, I believe, the second trip to the clinic. He had started to get better and was feeling well enough that he wanted to take the kids to Knott's Berry Farms. In LA.

Knott's Berry Farm is an amusement park— rides, roller coasters, the works. The Summer family made a weekend of it. Cindy says Todd and the kids had a ball.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he seemed to— yeah, he seemed to kind of be over that hump. Wasn't 100%, but enough to where— I mean, it wasn't like I had to drag him out of bed, and he was into it. He was into it. He was ready. He wanted to go. He drove, you know, we kids had a great time. They rode roller coasters.

Sunday, February 17th was their last day at the amusement park, and as it turned out, the last day of Todd Sommer's life. That trip had taken a lot out of him. He asked Cindy to take the wheel on the drive home.

Yeah, he always did the driving, but I don't know if that raised any flags just because I knew he had been sick and being a human, you know, like, oh, you've been sick and you just had a big day. Yeah, I'll drive. You rest, kind of a thing. And the kids fell asleep in the car, drove home, got home and got everybody tucked into bed and went up to bed.

A few hours later, Cindy woke to the sound of her husband gasping for breath.

I'm like, what's the matter? He said, I'm all right. I'm okay. I'm fine. And then he just fell down.

Cindy says that's when she made that call to 911. Come on. 911.

Let me up in the flat.

That was the moment her life changed. It was also day one of an investigation that would last another 5 years.

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The day after Todd Sommer died, investigators from NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, came to the Sommers' home. You might know of NCIS or its reputation for conducting thorough, science-driven investigations from the long-running TV show. The agents assigned to this case interviewed Cindy took a look around the house, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. This appeared to be a routine death investigation, the kind that is performed anytime an active duty service member dies on a Naval or Marine base. Standard toxicology tests showed no sign of illegal drugs or anything else suspicious in Todd's body. The doctor who did the autopsy concluded concluded he had died from heart failure. That is unusual in a man of 23, but not unheard of. With no hint of foul play, all that was left to be done was to have an NCIS review panel sign off on the final report.

What happens is, is that the panel will review it, find that all the investigative leads have been followed, and then they would recommend it for closure.

That's Rob Terwilliger, one of at least a half dozen NCIS agents who would work this case over the next 3 years.

With that recommendation, that case would undergo a second tier, and then they would close the case in Washington, D.C.

In the meantime, the machinery of military death and grief ground on. Samples of Todd's organs and blood were preserved for future analysis. The rest of what had been Todd Sommer was cremated. 3 memorial services were held for Todd. One at Miramar Marine Base where he died, one for relatives in Tennessee, and another in Florida where his parents lived. This is Cindy speaking at one of them.

'Kids, Lisa, I love you.

I'll see you in the morning.' So your prayers—

he would always do that to me.

Cindy's financial fears were also put to rest, at least temporarily, by the prompt payout of Todd's death benefits. She received a $6,000 death gratuity from the military the day after Todd died and a $250,000 life insurance payout a month later, at the time the standard for the armed services. After consulting with Todd's family, she decided to use half the money to establish trust funds for the children.

There was talk of just buying a house or, you know, what was going to happen, and we decided on setting up trust funds for the children.

You've heard different people grieve in different ways. That's what experts say whenever someone veers off script and starts behaving in unexpected or unsettling ways after a death in the family. In retrospect, that could certainly be said of the way Cindy Summer dealt with the sudden death of her 23-year-old Marine Sergeant husband.

I'm really good at avoiding and, you know, just compartmentalizing. I think really that's what I did after Todd died was just compartmentalize and put it, put it in my brain that he was on deployment.

Compartmentalizing may have been Cindy's way of coping, but over the next 3 months, her behavior struck many as conduct unbecoming a Marine widow. Some would call it disrespectful. Disgraceful even. Others called it suspicious. It all started on the night after Todd died. Cindy left the kids with Todd's mom, Yvonne, who had just flown in from Florida, while Cindy went out with her friends.

And it got to be late.

It was after midnight. And I did call her cell phone.

And I believe I suggested that she come home, which she did.

That's Yvonne Summer, Todd's mom.

But when she came home, she came into the room where I was staying, and she told me to mind my own business, that she would grieve Her way, and I could grieve my way.

Cindy's way of grieving, it appeared, was the equivalent of accelerating past the funeral procession and flooring it in the fast lane.

You'd expect her to be depressed and staying at home, and that wasn't happening.

That's Chandra Wells, one of Cindy's friends from the Subway shop where she worked.

She went to the strip club down the road the day of her husband's service.

She went to the strip club down the street the day of her husband's funeral? Alone? With other people?

With some of her girlfriends.

Once Cindy received the death benefit checks, friends say she began spending money like it was on fire. Designer clothes, fancy dinners, whatever they said. Cindy was picking up the checks.

Yeah, I bought a Tiffany's ring and I'm wearing it right now.

I see, it's very pretty.

Yeah, I thought that it would make me feel better. I liked the way that it felt. I touch it all the time, you know, and it's, and it's a reminder of where I've been.

As for her neighbors at Miramar, well, they said Cindy's children seemed always to be outside and largely unsupervised after Todd's death. That, while Cindy's home became party central.

Once she started having a lot of people over and a lot of parties shortly after his funeral, a lot of the neighbors and people that lived around was just like, you know, what's going on over there? And she got over that pretty quickly.

That's Denicia Vivia Parra, one of Cindy's neighbors.

A couple months after, when it just kept on going and There's just a lot, a lot of people over there all the time and other guys driving her husband's cars. And that was just kind of odd for me to have, you know, other men driving his vehicles and coming in and out all the time. But, you know, I never said anything to her about it. I just noticed it and just went on my way.

That is just what people could see from the outside. Behind closed doors, Cindy kept herself busy with multiple lovers. Some were male, some were female, some were Marines who had known Todd.

I'm not ashamed. I mean, having a threesome isn't anything that's out of the ordinary or that doesn't happen. Why does it matter? I didn't grieve how people thought I should. I didn't do the things that they thought I should. I did things that they didn't agree with. I— my moral compass may have been off.

According to the medical examiner, Todd Sommer had died of natural causes— heart failure, pure and simple. Still, the case had lingered, in part because the cast of NCIS special agents investigating it kept changing. There were transfers, reassignments, and retirements— personnel changes that every few months required someone new to review the file, get up to speed, and take the final steps necessary to close the case. Todd Sommer had been dead for more than a year by the time the file finally made it to the desk of the resident field agent in charge for final review. And it was at this moment that the agent in charge Balked. A young, healthy Marine was suddenly dead. Insurance money. And based on what investigators had heard from other Marines at Miramar, the wife had not exactly acted as a grieving widow was expected to act. Something about this case, he thought, didn't pass the smell test.

In this particular investigation, the consensus was this was really strange for a 23-year-old, seemingly healthy Marine to die.

That's NCIS Agent Rob Terwilliger again.

The lead agent there, uh, the resident agent in charge of the field office, when he reviewed that case on the death review panel, agreed there's, there's something that just begs the question here. So in his mind, why don't we have, uh, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology run one more test? Because poison could have been an option here.

Remember, the initial toxicology report had only checked Todd Sommer's body for street drugs or high levels of prescription drugs, not for poisons. So frozen samples of blood, urine, liver, and kidney that had been harvested from Todd Sommer's body were pulled from cold storage and packaged for shipment to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.

And so they took the tissues of Sergeant Sommer and, uh, tested those for heavy presence of heavy metals.

And it was then, in the spring of 2003, more than a year after his collapse, that the death investigation of Marine Sergeant Todd Sommer took a wild unexpected and utterly bizarre turn. Next time.

My theory is that somebody put this colorless, odorless, tasteless substance into something he ate, or more likely something he drank, and it killed him.

Cindy's had, um, a couple of life, uh, pretty much some of the things we've found throughout the course of the investigation.

This case started because of the breast implants. Think about it, if she had a nose job, would we even be talking about it?

This podcast is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Tim Beecham is the producer. Marshall Housefeld, Brian Drew, and Meredith Kramer are audio editors. Molly DeRosa is associate producer. Rachel Yong is field producer. Adam Gorfein is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is executive producer. And Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Rich Cutler. I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers!

Cheers!

Cheers!

I've always been a glass half full kind of guy, and now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges. Their stories are funny and quite candid, so I hope you hope you'll join me each week, and who knows, you might just come away with your own glass half full.

Search Glass Half Full with Craig Melton from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.