The Woman Who Turned Pain Relief Into Poison | The Stella Nickell Story

It didn’t start with a dramatic confrontation, a weapon, or a crime scene.
 It started with something familiar… a bottle of Excedrin sitting next to a bathroom sink. Something ordinary. Something trusted.

But inside those capsules wasn’t relief, it was cyanide.
 And the woman behind it wasn’t a stranger lurking in the shadows.
 She was a wife. A mother. Someone who believed the world owed her more. She was someone who was willing to kill to get it.

In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, we dive into the chilling case of Stella Nickell, the woman whose calculated poisoning shook the country in 1986 and changed U.S. product safety forever. Her crime wasn’t impulsive, it was planned, researched, layered, and disturbingly detached. What looked like grief was performance, and what looked like coincidence was strategy.

Blog Post: https://www.gbrlife.com/blog/the-wife-who-poisoned-excedrin-the-stella-nickell-case

🎧 In this episode:
• The poverty, instability, and emotional detachment that shaped Stella’s worldview
• How entitlement replaced empathy and strategy replaced morality
• The calculated murder of her husband and the random killing of a stranger
• Why Stella escalated from murder to mass public product tampering
• The psychological profile behind offenders who kill for personal gain
• How Stella’s actions led to national reforms in packaging and safety laws

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Chapters

• 0:00 A Deadly Headache
• 3:22 The Rise of Stella Nickel
• 5:12 A Life of Manipulation
• 8:53 The Shift in Motivation
• 12:12 The Plan Unfolds
• 13:33 The Catalyst of Fear
• 15:25 The Grieving Widow
• 17:50 The Conviction
• 21:06 Outro

Transcript

1
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Kaitlyn:
It does not look like a dark alley or a stranger in a parking lot.

2
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Kaitlyn:
It looks like a normal kitchen, a bathroom light flickering on,

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Kaitlyn:
a familiar white bottle sitting on the counter that's been there for months.

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Kaitlyn:
The kind of thing that you reach for while half awake without even looking at the label.

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Kaitlyn:
Because you've taken it a hundred times before, nothing bad has ever happened.

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Kaitlyn:
In June 1986, 52-year-old Bruce Nickell did exactly that. He wasn't doing anything dramatic.

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Kaitlyn:
There was no argument, no crime scene, and no weapon.

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Kaitlyn:
Just a man at home with a headache. So he took a few extra-strength Excedrin

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Kaitlyn:
capsules for the pain and expected the day to continue.

10
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Kaitlyn:
Instead, he started to feel strange. Dizzy. Weak.

11
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Kaitlyn:
His breathing a little off. The kind of symptoms that could be stress or exhaustion.

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Kaitlyn:
The kind of thing you tell yourself is nothing. He collapsed not long after.

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Kaitlyn:
By the time the doctors were done with him, the answer they gave his family was simple and final.

14
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Kaitlyn:
Natural causes. A bad heart. A complicated history.

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Kaitlyn:
A life that had finally caught up with him. So there was no investigation and no panic. No cameras.

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Kaitlyn:
Just a funeral and a widow who played her part in a cause of death that no one questioned.

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Kaitlyn:
Months later, another woman spoke up in another home not far away and reached

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Kaitlyn:
for the same brand of relief.

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Kaitlyn:
40-year-old bank operations manager and a mother of two, Sue Snow.

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Kaitlyn:
She started her day like always. Early alarm, shower running,

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Kaitlyn:
a quick glance in the mirror.

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Kaitlyn:
But a headache blooming behind her eyes. So she shook two Excedrin capsules

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Kaitlyn:
into her hand and swallowed them and kept moving.

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Kaitlyn:
Minutes later, she was on the bathroom floor, gasping, seizing,

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Kaitlyn:
dying while the shower still ran. This time, someone asked why.

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Kaitlyn:
Toxicology found cyanide in her system. Investigators checked a bottle of Excedrin

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Kaitlyn:
in her home and found more capsules filled with poison. The company pulled entire

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Kaitlyn:
lots from store shelves.

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Kaitlyn:
The FDA issued warnings.

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Kaitlyn:
The word contamination began appearing in headlines, and somewhere in the middle

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Kaitlyn:
of all that fear, someone noticed a thin, quiet thread.

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Kaitlyn:
Another recent death in the same area. Another Excedrin bottle.

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Kaitlyn:
Another grieving wife. And suddenly, Bruce Nichols' natural death didn't look so natural.

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Kaitlyn:
Because sometimes the most dangerous person in the story is not the stranger

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Kaitlyn:
on the street. It's the person standing next to the medicine cabinet.

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Kaitlyn:
Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm Kaitlyn and you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes.

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Kaitlyn:
Where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women,

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Kaitlyn:
but why they happened and the psychology behind them.

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Kaitlyn:
Today we're stepping into the case of Stella Nickell.

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Kaitlyn:
A woman who turned over the counter pain relief into a weapon.

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Kaitlyn:
Sacrifice the stranger to cover up the murder of her own husband,

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Kaitlyn:
and force the entire country to rethink what safe looks like.

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Kaitlyn:
To understand what Stella eventually became, you have to go back long before

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Kaitlyn:
the Excedrin bottles and cyanide, because no one wakes up one day and decides,

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Kaitlyn:
poisoning strangers is an acceptable solution.

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Kaitlyn:
That kind of thing grows slowly, shaped by circumstance, and reinforced by patterns.

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Kaitlyn:
Stella Maudine Stevenson was born on August 7th, 1943, in rural Oregon,

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Kaitlyn:
into a life marked by, well, not opportunity, definitely limitation.

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Kaitlyn:
Her family didn't have much. Poverty wasn't a temporary hardship.

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Kaitlyn:
It was the environment she was raised in. There were no safety nets,

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Kaitlyn:
no soft landings, no sense of security, and her childhood wasn't defined by

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Kaitlyn:
comfort or protection. but instead instability and scarcity.

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Kaitlyn:
She grew up watching adults struggle.

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Kaitlyn:
Bills didn't get paid on time and food was not a guarantee.

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Kaitlyn:
Stability was something other families had and Stella had to learn early that

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Kaitlyn:
survival required adaptation and emotional needs were optional.

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Kaitlyn:
Affection was not constant and attention wasn't given freely.

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Kaitlyn:
And when children aren't nurtured, they don't learn empathy. They learn strategy.

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Kaitlyn:
Some children raised in those conditions become incredibly resilient.

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Kaitlyn:
They learn compassion because they know what it feels like to go without it.

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Kaitlyn:
But others, especially children who already have an inclination towards control

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Kaitlyn:
or distrust, internalize a different belief.

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Kaitlyn:
If the world won't care for you, you don't owe the world anything back.

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Kaitlyn:
By the time Stella hit adolescence, she wasn't someone who trusted easily.

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Kaitlyn:
She wasn't soft or naive. She had already learned the power of using what she

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Kaitlyn:
had gotten to get what she wanted, whether that was attention, stability, or control.

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Kaitlyn:
But at 16, she became a mother. Most teenagers would have been terrified,

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Kaitlyn:
but Stella didn't fall apart.

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Kaitlyn:
She did what she knows best. She adapted.

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Kaitlyn:
But motherhood didn't transform her. It didn't make her gentler or more patient.

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Kaitlyn:
If anything, it magnified how disconnected she was from emotional responsibility.

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Kaitlyn:
Reports later describe moments of harsh discipline, a controlling parenting

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Kaitlyn:
style, frustration rather than nurturing.

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Kaitlyn:
Love wasn't something she gave because she felt it. It's something she used

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Kaitlyn:
when it served a purpose.

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Kaitlyn:
And as she moved into adulthood, that pattern continued.

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Kaitlyn:
She didn't start with violent crime. She started with the kind of offenses that

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Kaitlyn:
tell you someone has stopped believing in rules, forgery, fraud, theft.

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Kaitlyn:
Crimes that require planning, deceit and willingness to manipulate the system.

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Kaitlyn:
Crimes rooted not in impulse, but in entitlement.

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Kaitlyn:
People who knew her back then described her as someone who could put a polite

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Kaitlyn:
face when needed, but there was always something guarded and something calculated behind her eyes.

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Kaitlyn:
She wasn't reckless. She wasn't chaotic.

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Kaitlyn:
She was strategic.

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Kaitlyn:
And strategy becomes dangerous when paired with resentment.

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Kaitlyn:
Stella wanted a better life, a more comfortable life, a more secure life,

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Kaitlyn:
but she didn't want to wait for it.

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Kaitlyn:
And she didn't want to earn it slowly. She believed that she deserved it.

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Kaitlyn:
And that mindset, the combination of entitlement and emotional detachment,

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Kaitlyn:
is one psychologists recognize in certain criminal profile.

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Kaitlyn:
It isn't about anger or passion. It's about justification.

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Kaitlyn:
The ability to convince yourself that what benefits you is automatically right.

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Kaitlyn:
And anyone who suffers because of that choice was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Kaitlyn:
When Stella eventually crossed paths with Bruce Nickell, it wasn't chemistry

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Kaitlyn:
that drew her in. It was convenience.

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Kaitlyn:
Bruce wasn't flashy or powerful, but he carried a kind of steadiness that Stella had never experienced.

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Kaitlyn:
He had a predictable rhythm, work, home, a routine.

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Kaitlyn:
And for someone raising chaos, predictability can feel like control.

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Kaitlyn:
Bruce was the type of man who believed in fixing things and working through

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Kaitlyn:
problems in building a life brick by brick.

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Kaitlyn:
Stella wasn't wired that way. She wanted the result, not the process.

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Kaitlyn:
But she recognized something useful in him. He was dependable.

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Kaitlyn:
And dependable people rarely question motives.

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Kaitlyn:
Their relationships settled into place quickly. Bruce allowed Stella to step

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Kaitlyn:
into a version of adulthood that appeared stable from the outside.

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Kaitlyn:
A marriage. A home.

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Kaitlyn:
Responsibilities. The kind of life people point to and say, she finally made

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Kaitlyn:
it. But stability didn't fulfill her.

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Kaitlyn:
And I'm sure you didn't think it would either.

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Kaitlyn:
Instead, it exposed something inside her. A resentment that simmered under the surface.

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Kaitlyn:
Bruce worked hard, and life stayed modest. Bills still mattered.

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Kaitlyn:
Choices still required compromise.

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Kaitlyn:
And Stella wasn't satisfied with enough.

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Kaitlyn:
She wanted comfort without struggle, reward without effort. The life she pictured

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Kaitlyn:
in her head never matched the one she was living.

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Kaitlyn:
And that gap between expectation and reality was a good one.

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Kaitlyn:
Became the breeding ground for motive. Bruce's attempts at self-improvement

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Kaitlyn:
only made it worse. He quit drinking.

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Kaitlyn:
He decided to become healthier and calmer and more focused.

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Kaitlyn:
And most partners would have seen that as a gift, but Stella saw that as a problem.

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Kaitlyn:
A healthy husband meant longevity, and longevity meant waiting,

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Kaitlyn:
and waiting wasn't something she did.

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Kaitlyn:
Somewhere between ordinary days and growing resentment, an idea rooted itself.

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Kaitlyn:
Not loud, not sudden, but quiet and logical in her mind.

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Kaitlyn:
If Bruce wasn't going to give her the life that she wanted while he was alive,

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Kaitlyn:
maybe he could give it to her while he was gone. That was the shift.

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Kaitlyn:
It wasn't emotional, and it wasn't impulsive.

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Kaitlyn:
It was a decision formed not out of hate, but out of entitlement,

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Kaitlyn:
which is why by the time they married officially in 1976, the foundation of

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Kaitlyn:
their relationship wasn't love.

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Kaitlyn:
It was opportunity, resentment, and quiet calculation.

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Kaitlyn:
Bruce struggled with alcoholism, and for years their relationship was marked

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Kaitlyn:
by drinking, arguments, and a rhythm of dysfunction that Stella already understood.

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Kaitlyn:
Chaos wasn't new to her, and in many ways it felt familiar.

135
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Kaitlyn:
But Bruce eventually did something Stella never expected. As I said, he got better.

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Kaitlyn:
He started that therapy, and he had quit drinking.

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Kaitlyn:
He was, more importantly, making plans about the future.

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Kaitlyn:
So, Stella began planning. She quietly took out multiple insurance policies

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Kaitlyn:
on him. Not one policy, several.

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Kaitlyn:
Layered, structured, and carefully selected. And buried inside one of the policies

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Kaitlyn:
was the number that changed everything.

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Kaitlyn:
Six-figure accidental death benefit.

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Kaitlyn:
Natural causes, well, that's a small payout. An accident, that's a fortune.

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Kaitlyn:
And that was the moment something shifted. Not suddenly, not dramatically, but permanently.

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Kaitlyn:
People like Stella didn't leap straight to murder. They justified their way towards it.

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Kaitlyn:
It starts with a thought. I mean, he's going to die one day, right?

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Kaitlyn:
Then a justification. He lived a hard life. Maybe this is just how it ends.

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Kaitlyn:
Then the final step. Why shouldn't I benefit from it?

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Kaitlyn:
After everything I've been through, don't I deserve something?

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Kaitlyn:
Once someone frames murder as entitlement instead of cruelty,

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Kaitlyn:
reality becomes irrelevant.

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Kaitlyn:
And in the months before Ruth died, Stella's behavior changed.

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Kaitlyn:
She was reading library books. Not cookbooks or romance, but titles like Deadly

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Kaitlyn:
Harvest and Human Poisoning.

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Kaitlyn:
Her fingerprints were later found on chapters specifically about cyanide.

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Kaitlyn:
She also started purchasing aquarium supplies, including a brand of algaecide,

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Kaitlyn:
containing a compound that would later chemically match the poison found in

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Kaitlyn:
the contaminated exeggen capsules.

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Kaitlyn:
These weren't hobbies. They were preparations.

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Kaitlyn:
Meanwhile, Bruce continued living his new life, unaware that every step towards

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Kaitlyn:
health pushed Stella closer to a decision that she already made emotionally.

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Kaitlyn:
So I don't know if he was really going to get out of it.

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Kaitlyn:
One day, that plan moved from theory to reality, and Stella removed capsules

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Kaitlyn:
from a bottle of excedrin.

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Kaitlyn:
She filled them with cyanide, sealed them back up, and placed them in the bottle

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Kaitlyn:
exactly where Bruce would reach without suspicion.

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Kaitlyn:
There was no dramatic moment. There was no argument.

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Kaitlyn:
There was no threat. Just a bottle, a headache, and a man who trusted his wife

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Kaitlyn:
enough not to question the medicine handed to him or left on the counter.

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Kaitlyn:
Bruce swallowed the capsules, And while his body started failing,

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Kaitlyn:
Stella didn't panic, and she didn't call sooner than necessary.

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Kaitlyn:
She didn't hover like a terrified spouse. She watched symptoms that she already expected.

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Kaitlyn:
The dizziness, confusion, the collapse.

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Kaitlyn:
All exactly the way her research suggested they would. When he died,

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Kaitlyn:
she didn't fall apart. She waited for the insurance money.

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Kaitlyn:
But the insurance company didn't pay because Bruce's death, despite the collapse,

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Kaitlyn:
despite the rapid decline, despite the eeriness of it, wasn't classified as

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Kaitlyn:
an accident. It was ruled natural.

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Kaitlyn:
That ruling wasn't just disappointing to Stella. It was unacceptable.

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Kaitlyn:
Because in her mind, she had done the work. She had taken action,

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Kaitlyn:
and she had secured her future.

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Kaitlyn:
And now the bureaucracy was standing in her way, so she did what narcissistic-driven

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Kaitlyn:
offenders do when faced with obstacles.

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She escalated. Not emotionally, and not impulsively, strategically.

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To get the insurance payout. She didn't need Bruce to die differently.

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She needed the world to believe he did.

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And for that to happen, someone else had to die in the same way.

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Someone who didn't know her.

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Someone who couldn't be traced back. Someone whose death would force authorities to re-examine Bruce's.

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Someone who became nothing more than Leverett. That someone was Sue Snow.

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Their lives didn't overlap, and their paths never cross.

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They had nothing in common except the same brand of pain relief sitting on the bathroom counter.

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And that was enough to bind them in a deadly blueprint. And on the morning of

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June 11th, 1986, Sue's death was fast and violent and toxicology confirmed cyanide.

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Not in trace amounts, but in a concentration designed to kill quickly.

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And the moment that detail reached investigators, nothing about Bruce's death

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was allowed to stay quiet anymore. Suddenly, the question wasn't what killed

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Sue, it was who took Excedrin.

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Pharmacies pulled products from the shelves. News anchors warned viewers do

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not take the medicine from any open bottles, and people lined up at hospitals demanding testing.

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Grocery stores taped off aisles like crime scenes, and for the first time,

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everyday medicine felt threatening.

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And somewhere in the middle of all that fear, Stella called police.

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She told investigators that Bruce had taken Excedrin before his death,

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and she insisted the cases were connected. She wasn't calm.

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She was urgent, emotional, making sure they understood the connection she wanted them to see.

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And on the surface level, it looked like concern.

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But investigators noticed something subtle. She wasn't asking questions and

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she wasn't making statements. She wasn't grieving. She was directing.

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And people who insert themselves into investigations don't always do it because

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they care. Sometimes they do it because they need to control the narrative.

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Still, her phone call triggered something important.

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Authorities exhumed Bruce's body. A second toxicology report was done,

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this time looking for poison. The results were definitive.

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Bruce Nickell had been killed with cyanide.

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Two deaths, same region, same product, same method. That meant someone was tampering

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with medicine intentionally.

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And the question shifted from what happened to who benefits.

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While investigators scrambled to trace product batches and contamination points,

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Stella did something unexpected.

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She stayed close, she cooperated, and she gave interviews. She suggested theories.

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She played the role of the devastated widow seeking justice.

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And she was good at it, almost too good. And for a while, that performance worked.

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But eventually, the cracks appeared. Because they always do.

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Investigators learned that only five contaminated bottles existed,

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and Stella was the only person who possessed two of them.

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Statistically, not impossible, but also kind of impossible.

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Coincidence doesn't operate with that type of precision. While the evidence

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was building, something else surfaced.

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Stella never counted on.

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Her own daughter. Remember that daughter?

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Well, she told investigators that long before Bruce died, Stella had been talking about poisoning him.

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Not once, not hypothetically, in detail. She even mentioned cyanide.

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She had mentioned insurance money.

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She had framed it as a joke, but there was nothing funny in hindsight.

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That statement cracked open the case like glass under pressure.

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Suddenly, the helpful widow looked less like a victim and more like someone

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watching to make sure the investigation didn't go sideways.

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Investigators executed a search warrant on her home, and inside they found everything

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they needed. Books on poisons.

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Her fingerprints on key paragraphs. A receipt on the exact aquarium product

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containing the same chemical compound found in the poison capsules.

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Tools capable of opening and resealing medical bottles.

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A pattern of planning that wasn't theory, it was execution.

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Forensic science doesn't speculate, it matched. And matching meant there was

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no more room for coincidence, or storytelling, or her lovely grief performance,

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because we all found intent.

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When confronted with the evidence, Stella did what she had done her whole life when cornered.

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She blamed everything and everyone except herself.

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The pharmaceutical company, the manufacturer, the government,

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and the system were all who did this.

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Anyone but the person who opened the bottle, her, and put the cyanide inside

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of the pills, her. But intent...

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Leaves fingerprints, even when hands are still.

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And Stella's fingerprints weren't just on evidence. They were on the pattern.

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They were on the motive, the resentment, the planning, the execution,

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and the willingness to kill a stranger to protect a lie.

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And in May of 1988, Stella Nickell was convicted of product tampering resulting

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in death and sentenced to 90 years in federal prison.

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She never admitted guilt. And she never apologized.

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Narcissists never do. At least not real ones. And she never stopped believing

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she deserved more than what she was given.

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Because in her mind, she wasn't a murderer.

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She was simply taking what she believed the world owed her. And cases like this

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force us to confront uncomfortable truths.

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Sometimes, the person capable of the deepest harm isn't the stranger lurking in darkness.

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It's the person who smiles, the person who blends in, and the person who believes

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their wants outrank everyone else's right to live.

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Stella Nichol didn't kill out of rage or passion or panic. She killed from something colder.

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She killed because she believed she was entitled to a different life.

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She killed because she convinced herself that she deserved the outcome more

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than her victims deserved a future.

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Kaitlyn:
And once someone reaches that level of moral detachment, justification becomes effortless.

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Bruce became a means to money. Sue became a necessary step.

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Anyone else who might have swallowed one of these tempered capsules? Collateral.

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And the FBI later testified that the bottle Stella poison contained enough cyanide

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to kill dozens of people. She didn't poison selectively, she poisoned blindly.

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Whoever picked up the wrong bottle was never part of her consideration because

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empathy wasn't part of her psychology.

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There's a behavior or pattern seen in certain offenders, especially those with

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narcissistic and antisocial traits, where personal benefit overrides human consequence.

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In that mindset, the line between inconvenience and enemy becomes dangerously thin.

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Bruce inconvenienced her future. Sue threatened her illusion.

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And Stella believed eliminating both was not only acceptable, but rational.

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That's the chilling part, not the poison, not the planning, and not even the deaths. It's the logic.

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Investigators described her demeanor throughout the trial as flat,

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controlled, detached, as if she was inconvenienced by the accusations rather

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than devastated by them.

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And even now, decades later, Stella maintains her innocence from inside the

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federal prison, not because she's misunderstood, but because in her worldview,

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she didn't do something wrong. She did something necessary.

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And her case permanently changed U.S. packaging laws.

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Safety seals and blister packs and tamper-proof caps all strengthened because

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one woman was willing to weaponize something as ordinary's over-the-counter pain relief.

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Kaitlyn:
And maybe that's the most haunting part of her story.

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It didn't take a gun and it didn't take a knife. And it didn't take force or

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threats or confrontation.

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It took trust and access and a bottle sitting in a medicine cabinet and a routine

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headache, a moment of vulnerability.

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Sometimes evil doesn't break down the door. Sometimes it waits quietly,

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right where you feel safe.

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Kaitlyn:
This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions,

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Kaitlyn:
and I'm Kaitlyn reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light.

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Kaitlyn:
Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought

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Kaitlyn:
we knew about the criminal mind.