Transcript of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun New

It was one of those days in March when spring is in the air. The daffodils are up. Cherry blossoms are beginning to bud. The young chemist trudging across the Walter Reid Army Medical Center campus that morning would probably have wanted to savor the moment because once he entered Building 54, home to the armed Forces Institute of Pathology, he knew he would be completely shut off from the outside world. Unlike those quaint rose brick Georgian buildings elsewhere on the Walter Reid campus, Building 54, well, this place was unique, unlike any other building on campus. Indeed, unlike any in the country. Building 54 is a massive five-story white block with three basements below ground. Not a window or decorative curlicue on it. With steel blast-proof doors and walls that were 2 feet thick, Building 54 was built in the 1950s to survive a hydrogen bomb blast. To be a presidential refuge if it came to that. Grim and graceless? All of the above. Just inside, the building contained brightly-lit labs that were a pathologist's dream. All the best equipment. There was a brand new tissue analyzer, clunkily named Inductive Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. Very expensive. There were microwave digestive systems for prepping samples, top-notch chemicals and compounds, high-purity re agents.

All of it was intended to help the military pinpoint toxins, contaminants and environmental risks that might threaten the nation's soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. After buzzing through security on that spring day in 2003, the chemist, Todor Todorow, took the elevator down to the basement to his lab, the Department of Environmental and Toxicologic Pathology. It was there he had spent months analyzing tissue samples that had been harvested from the body of Marine Sergeant Todd Summer. The labels on the sample containers he pulled from the freezer indicated this particular Marine had died a little more than a year earlier. However, the labels said nothing about the circumstances. The chemist did not know the Marine had left a wife and four kids behind. He did not know a lot of NCIS investigators had been left scratching their heads. One thing he did know was that NCIS wanted Todd Summer's tissue samples tested for toxins and trace elements. He had never tested human tissue before, but he was eager to give it a go.

Elements we tested for arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum, cadmium, and mercury.

It took hours for the Big gray analyzer to quietly run its cleansing and calibration cycles and then analyze each sample. When it was done, the numbers showed elevated levels of arsenic in the liver and kidney samples. That is not quite as shocking as it sounds. The chemist knew arsenic is a natural compound that's present in practically everything. Most people have minuscule levels of arsenic in their body. This wasn't that. The data points now blinking at him from his computer screen were astounding. When he showed his lab director the results, the boss said Do it again. And he did. And then he did it again. And the results came out the same. The arsenic levels in Todd Summer's tissues were astronomical. More than a thousand higher than the normal range in the liver, more than 200 times higher than what would be expected in the kidney. This is a level that should be looked into because it's a high level of arsenic. How did that much arsenic get into the system of a 23-year-old Marine who had apparently dropped dead from a heart attack? The chemists in Washington did not know. That was a job for the NCIS investigators in San Diego to figure out.

Had Todd Summer accidentally ingested arsenic on the job? Or had someone deliberately poisoned him?

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.

In this episode, you'll ride along with investigating investigators searching for an answer to that question.

One of the things that we had to do was interview a whole circle of people who hadn't been interviewed after Todd Summer's death.

And you'll learn what they found when they took an up-close and very personal look at Todd Summer's widow, Cindy. She lost her balance emotionally.

She lost her bearings. And quite frankly, none of that has to do with whether or not she's guilty of the crime.

I'm Josh Mankowitz, and this is Trace of Suspition, a podcast from Dateland. Episode 2, Girls Just Want to Have Fun. It was February 2004, when NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger reached across a pile of investigative reports on his desk and grabbed a stack of dog-eared files marked Summer. It now his job to head up that investigation. Leaping through them, he reviewed the timeline of the case. February 2002, a 23-year-old Marine drops dead. The medical examiner certifies natural causes, cardiac arrhythmia, heart attack. May 2003, the lab reports revealed very high levels of arsenic in some of the tissues harvested from the Marine's body. Now it was early 2004, and the investigators who had been working the case suspected homicide. Their noses told investigators the widow had something to do with it, guilty of conduct unbecoming a Marine Corps widow, if nothing else, said some. She hosted loud parties and spent the dough from her husband's life insurance policy like it was going out of style. He was dead. She was partying. Cops don't believe in coincidences. Flipping through the file, Terwilliger could see how his predecessors on the case had collected witness statements from all the first responders who had come to the summer's home the night Todd Summer collapsed.

The medical records and doctor's statements were there. Arseneck, arsenic, arsenic. Murder? That seemed to be A popular theory among the investigators. As Special Agent Terwilliger closed the file and headed home that night, his mind likely spun with thoughts of what he should do next.

Once it became apparent that there was a potential homicide, once we got those test results back, the idea was that, Well, we had this two-pronged investigation.

That's Special Agent Rob Terwilliger.

The question was, Was this accidental? Was it environmental? Was it occupational? We're looking at those avenues, but at the same time, is there someone out there who wanted to hurt Sergeant Summer and who benefited directly from his death?

The investigator saw from the file how some of that work had already been done. Other agents had consulted with experts on the lab results. All agreed that the levels of arsenic in Todd Summer's body were extraordinary. But one in particular investigator went further. That expert, a toxicologist, told the investigator who met with him that there must have been some mistake made at the lab. It was impossible, the expert said, for such high levels of arsenic to be found in some of Todd Summer's tissues, but not in others.

I believe you're referring to Dr. Alphonse Poclis, and he's a toxicologist out of Virginia Commonwealth University, and Dr. Poclis has said, Well, you might want to look at occupational exposure, environmental exposure. Start looking at those things. That was, again, the context of the conversation. Those were the things that were subsequently done.

Turns out Todd Summer had not worked with arsenic or been anywhere where he could have breathed in or ingested arsenic. On top of that, no one who had worked with Todd had become sick. There seemed to be There's only one conclusion to be drawn from that. The arsenic in Todd Summer's tissues had not arrived by accident.

We even made attempts to recontact Dr. Poclis, essentially through the San Diego County Medical Examiner, because medical examiner said, We should go back to this guy and talk to him again and see what he thinks. Well, it was done to no avail.

No avail. We do not know how hard it was to find Poclis, who, as far as we know, was not living underground. What is clear is that he and NCIS never reconnected. Either agents could not find him, or maybe he didn't call them back, or maybe they did not look very hard. Anyway, investigators reasoned, Todd Summer had to have died from arsenic poisoning. All of his symptoms leading up to the night he died pointed to it. The vomiting, the diarrhea, even the heart attack.

You had a substance in his system that was at a lethal level, which would account for the symptomology and the result in cardiac arrhythmia. And that was based on what our initial consults with pathologists were telling us. This is a known side effect of arsenic poisoning cardiac arrhythmia.

This was murder. No question about it. The medical examiner even changed Todd's death certificate to read Homicide. And who did the deed? Well, investigators could imagine only one suspect, the wife, Cindy Summer. After all, who else could it have been?

What chance is there that someone else gave Todd the arsenic? Some other person. Did he have any enemies?

Based on the witnesses we spoke with, he had no enemies.

So it all keeps coming back to Cindy?

Yes.

Now, the question was why. And the way the investigator saw it, Todd Summer's death had been a financial windfall for Cindy Summer.

You have lethal levels of arsenic and a perfectly healthy young man, and only one person benefited from his death. He benefited to the tune of a $6,000 immediate death gratuity, $250,000 in a service members group life insurance policy, and a lifetime of VA benefits.

Judging from the canceled checks and credit card bills in the file, Agent Terwilliger could clearly see how Todd and Cindy had been financially strapped before he died. Their money melting away like snow in a heavy rain.

A lot of expenditures weren't going towards the maintaining of the household, the needs of the children. Didn't see a whole lot of finances going out towards groceries and necessities versus wants. And that's where we saw the discrepancy.

A clear lack of financial discipline, Terwilliger thought. He was not alone in that assessment. While leafing through the file, he had seen that once, while Todd was away on deployment, Cindy had asked the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society for help making a car payment, and Navy Relief had turned her down.

Navy Relief denied that based on her unwillingness to modify her spending patterns and her use of Sergeant Summer's pay.

So if she wasn't spending the money on the house and the kids, what was she spending her money on?

Based on what Navy Relief saw and what we saw in the finances, fast food, unnecessary expenses in the form of restaurants, The fact was, Todd's salary of $1,800 a month had simply not been enough to support their lifestyle. He's a young Marine. He's a sergeant. At the time, he was a corporal. And living on a corporal salary with four children to take care for is it's hard enough to do it with one.

As a result, the agents learned the couple frequently asked Todd's parents for money, for food, and for other essentials.

We saw large influxes of money coming in from Todd's father. We saw large amounts of money going out of the accounts, and with no explanation as to where those funds were going.

For the NCIS investigators, the Summer family family finances seemed like a big red flag snapping in the San Diego sea breeze.

Their bank account was, at the most, a few hundred dollars at that time. And starting to look at the financial picture and coupled with all the behaviors that had been documented by witnesses, it appeared that there was a financial motive, and there was only one person who had that financial motive.

That person, of course, was Cindy Summer. Thorough in the way she behaved and then later spent her husband's death benefits. And well, none of it struck NCIS as the actions of a grieving wife or innocent widow. Those were the actions they thought of a murder suspect. People are creatures of habit. They tend to use the same ATMs, shop in the same stores, and unless they're traveling, their bank records will show transactions that are closer to home. A break in that routine is to a detective what cheese is to a mouse. Irresistible.

So starting to look closer at the finances and notice that there was one particular transaction that jumped out from the rest.

In the homicide investigation that was now focused on Cindy Summer, it was an ATM withdrawal she made on February 8, 2002, that started Agent Terwilliger's nose twitching as if it had caught a pungent whiff of chatter. You see, that was the day that Cindy's husband, Todd, first reported feeling ill.

In this particular case, there was an ATM transaction that took place in La Jolla, and it jumped out of me as this was something that was not in their spending patterns. So we went out to that particular ATM machine, noted that it was in the Xymed building, which is a medical building, which is on the campus of Scripps La Hoya Medical Center.

That struck the investigator as odd, not just because that ATM was 12 miles from where Cindy and Todd lived, but because the ATM was in a private health care facility. Typically, military families get their health care from military-sponsored medical clinics and hospitals because it's free.

So there would have been no reason for her to have to go to this building to get medical care?

Yes, unless there were some referral, and then based on my review of their medical records at that time, there had been no such referral.

Puzzling. The investigator staring at the building's office directory, trying to guess from all the specialists listed on that wall, which one Cindy Summer might have come there to see. And then it hit him. Surgery, cosmetic. There were several listings on the wall directory for plastic surgeons. That must be it, he thought, because he remembered somewhere in the pages and pages of interviews NCIS agents had done with potential witnesses, there had been references to the fact that shortly after Todd Summer's death, Cindy had splurged on breast implants.

We noted that some of those individuals had talked to us. They said that that had been something that she had wanted prior to Todd's death.

A search of Cindy's canceled checks from the spring of 2002 soon gave the investigator the name he'd been looking for. In April of that year, she'd written a big check to Dr. Scott Miller, a board-certified plastic surgeon. Miller's name had been listed on that building directory in La Hoya, near the ATM where Cindy Summer had withdrawn money.

And once that connection had been made, the question was, what was she doing there on Friday, February eighth? Because that date jumped out at me in the sense of their finances, because it was also the same day Todd began to exhibit the symptoms of the poisoning.

So the same day that Todd first got sick?

Yes.

Cindy, at a time when they had almost no money in their bank account.

No more than $300 in their bank account.

Was at a plastic surgeon's office talking to him about breast augmentation?

That's correct.

That was just a hunch, of course, but a good one. When the agent petitioned a court for a warrant to see Cindy Summer's medical records from Dr. Miller, his request was granted.

And sure enough, when we reviewed the medical record, she had been in the office on that day, on Friday, February eighth, doing a consultation.

An operation that must have cost, what, $5,000, $6,000?

I believe it was around $5,600. At that time, again, they had no more than $300 in their combined bank accounts. They couldn't even afford to pay for a vehicle. They had no credit history to speak of. And so now you have someone in that type of financial environment looking at getting a cosmetic procedure that has no medical benefit. There is no medical reason for it.

Two months after Todd Summer died, Cindy got her new breast implants. A few weeks after that, she left the kids with a sitter and spent a wild weekend in Tijuana, showing off her new acquisitions.

Sometime in April, when we had gone down there and we were at the club dancing, and I remember looking up and they were doing a bikini contest, a thong contest, and she was in it.

That's Chandra Wells, one of Cindy's friends from her job at the Subway Sandwich Shop.

What was she doing?

She was tripping, pretty much.

Taking her clothes off?

Oh, yeah.

This was how long after her husband died?

Three or four months.

That strike you as inappropriate?

Puzzling, anyway?

I mean, I don't see anything wrong with going down there. I think what she was doing while she was down there was inappropriate.

Now, here's the thing. Questionable behavior is not illegal, not unless it leads to or covers up a crime. However, it does attract attention. It can even make the innocent seem guilty. And once investigators shine the black light of suspicion on Cindy's past, well, they found more than enough reason to believe this A 21-year-old mother of four could be a murderer. The trouble started at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. At least that's what investigators were hearing from the friends and military wives who had known Cynthia Cindy Summer back then. It was during Todd's second six-month deployment to the Mediterranean, they said, that Cindy began to display a side of her personality that was shocking.

He started to see her in the company of other men, specifically going out there, doing things of a sexual nature with cameras and the computer.

That is NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendon. He joined the summer investigation in 2005.

It starts to break down at that point, but it's, again, when Todd isn't there to enforce the rules of the house.

What do you think changed between them?

Just he was away too much? I think it was a sense of what being a military wife was really like. He is away. She is left there in the home with all the responsibilities.

And that's Special Agent Rob Terwilliger again.

There had been an allegation of child abuse, and then when CPS went into the home, they found the home totally in acceptable condition.

Things were such a shambles, investigators learned, that the Marine Corps actually cut short Todd's deployment so that he could come home and deal with Cindy.

He heard him in the sense that you're leaving a deployment early. You're leaving your unit behind. Nobody wants to do that.

That's anathema to any Marine. Right.

He was an NCO in this unit. These are the young Marines that were looking up to him, and now he's got to come home because of an issue that was caused, not that happened. It was just the culmination of all these strains going on back home with Cindy.

For investigators, it seemed the troubles Todd and Cindy had had in North Carolina came with them to California.

It was in one of their financial transactions, and it was an adult single's website. Specifically, Cindy established an account in her Her name, her user ID, her credit card number for a company operating under the pseudonym errodicy. Com, which is an adult singles website. So think of it as a dating website that's a little more graphic than, say, a Yahoo personals website.

Errodicy. She was on this website how long before Todd died?

The account was established on February third, I believe. So that would have been five days before he started to get The optics of a married woman seeking sexual hookups just days before her husband dies are not good.

Now, NCIS wondered what Cindy had been like before she married Todd.

Cindy has had a colorful life. It's pretty much some of the things we've found throughout the course of the investigation. Before she was married to her first husband, She had some problems as a young teenager in and out of substance abuse centers.

It was while Cindy was in one of those drug rehabs that she met Dan Peace, a cousin of one of the other patients.

I met Cindy in late 1987. I was 19. She was 14, something like that.

That's Dan Peace. He was Cindy's first husband and the father of her three oldest children. Ncis agent Rendon and another investigator from the San Diego DA's office interviewed Dan Peace at his apartment in London. He told them he had moved to England after he and Cindy divorced, in part to avoid paying her child support and alimony.

Before you start asking me questions, can you explain to me a bit about why you're here? Sure. Why we're here is we needed to talk with you, not your ex-wife.

It was a long story, one that took Dan Peace three hours to tell on that chilly November afternoon in 2005.

We became a couple, I'd say, late 1988, something like that.

Because of the difference in their ages at the time, remember, Dan was 20 and Cindy, only 15. Cindy's mom obtained a restraining order to keep Dan away from her daughter. It didn't work. Cindy ran away from home. She and Dan hit the road.

We went on a winter Grateful Dead tour.

There were some legal scrapes along the way.

She was arrested in Arizona for shoplifting.

In 1991 came an unplanned pregnancy that led to marriage.

My oldest child was born in October of 1991, and we got married shortly after Christmas, 1991.

In the presence of God and witnesses, they They promised to be there for each other in good times and bad. Can't bring anything to drink? I have water. Dan told the investigators how less than a month after the wedding, he got the feeling that the bad times part of that had arrived early.

Our marriage was horrible. She wasn't coming home at night.

According to Dan, those nights out turned into days. There were loud arguments, followed by icy silences.

I knew what she was doing? Yeah, I do know what she was doing. She was out partying. Cindy's whole thing in life is that she never got the childhood that she wanted, and she never got the freedom to be a kid that she wanted. She feels that she was unfairly forced into adulthood.

And so it went year after unhappy year. Oh, there were good times, times when Cindy seemed to settle down. But Dan says those times were the exception, not the rule.

She just started disappearing again. This is a cycle that repeated itself all through the time I knew her. Between those times, I had no complaints. I was completely happy. She was a good wife. She was a good mother. Could you get along with?

Dan told the investigators it was during one of those periods of calm that he and Cindy added two more children to their growing family, both of them boys. Those Those were the stable times, times when Dan entered law school and Cindy finished her GED. But according to Dan, Cindy never really settled down.

She basically conducted a series of affairs that I didn't find out about until much later. Do you know any of the people that she had these affairs with? Yeah, I guess I knew them all, pretty much. There were a lot of them.

Dan told investigators once he finished law school, he got a at a law firm that was about an hour away from their home in Dearborn. Those were 14-hour days for Dan. For Cindy, they must have felt like years.

So I started working these long days, and Cindy had to take care of the kids. This didn't work for longer than about two weeks or so. She couldn't deal with being home with the kids. It drove her crazy.

So Cindy and Dan put the kids in daycare. That solved one problem, but from Dan's point of view, it created a new one. He said Cindy now had time on her hands and seemed to be spending a lot of it on the Internet.

She got into online chat, was a social outlet at this point, and struck up certainly online relationships with men. She had a soldier fetish. She used to participate in a chat room called Girls for a Military Man or something like that.

At the mention of Cindy possibly having a soldier fetish, fetish. The investigator's ears perked up.

When you say she had a soldier fetish, is that general or was it more focused towards sailors, marines, airmen?

She likes marines. Yeah, I don't know. She likes marines. Yeah, she prefers marines to army types, but at the... How do you know that? Oh, just because she told me. I don't know exactly how it came about that she told me, but she's got a uniform thing in general.

According to Dan, it was sometime during the week between Christmas 1998 and New Year's 1999 that he realized he had reached the end of his rope with Cindy.

There was a night where I finally looked at myself in the mirror and said, I'm not going to have any more self-respect if I ever deal with this person again. I made her a final ultimatum, and she blew me off. It was over.

There were still the details of their divorce to be worked out, of course. But Dan told the investigator that by January of 1999, Cindy had already moved on. Dan says she told him about a Marine she was interested in, a Marine who was based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. That Marine was Todd Summer.

Todd seemed like a decent guy to me with no idea what he was getting into. I don't know. I must have met Todd that summer.

As the investigators sat listening to Dan Peace, they couldn't help feeling as if they were watching a Coming Attractions trailer for the Todd Summer story.

You see this pattern develop, and we see these things start to snowball, much like they did in her previous marriage. And ultimately, she's on the Internet again, literally days before Todd starts to get sick, and establishing a profile by which she could meet other people on the Internet. And it seemed to be following that same pattern that she had exhibited in her first marriage.

Just as the investigators were about to leave Dan Peace's apartment, Special Agent Rendon asked one last question.

One thing, just... I don't know. As many adjectives or as few adjectives as you can describe Cindy.

Dan Peace took a long pause, gazed at the floor, and then said this.

I know you're not asking me if I think she did it, but Cindy doesn't strike me as the person to commit the perfect crime. Every time I've ever caught her in anything, there wasn't any particular effort to cover her tracks. I think that if Cindy had done something like this, either the evidence has been destroyed or you've re-found it.

As the investigators boarded their flight back to the States, they no doubt wondered if Dan Peace had been right. Perhaps the hard evidence they'd been looking for would never be found. But like hounds on the scent, they could not bear the thought of giving up. No. Two weeks later, another set of investigators boarded a flight to Florida. That's where Cindy Summer now lived. And just maybe the evidence they'd been looking for was there. Coming up on future episodes of Trace of Suspition.

Until you're in someone's shoes, you don't know how you would respond. I started drinking, and that was my priority.

Until we went to Florida, we had no clue that there was even a trust fund in the picture.

What am I being arrested for?

There was some foreign substance that was found in his body.

Are you trying to me for murder?

You're...

Oh, my gosh. Are you serious?

Where do you think she got the arsenic?

There's really no way to say.

This podcast is a production of Dateland and NBC News. Tim Beacham is the producer. Marshall House Dufeld, Brian Drew, and Meredith Kramer are audio editors. Molly DeRosa is associate producer. Rachel Young is field producer. Adam Gorfane 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.