
SAN DIEGO — A prosecutor told jurors Thursday that 33-year-old Cynthia Sommer was the only person greedy enough to murder her husband for his military benefits and close enough to poison him to death with arsenic.
"Arsenic is, in many ways, the perfect poison," Deputy District Attorney Laura Gunn said during opening statements in Sommer's first-degree murder trial. "It is colorless, odorless, tasteless. It's lethal in very small doses ... it is accessible to the general public: You can get it." (VIDEO)
Within one month of the death of U.S. Marine Sgt. Todd Sommer, defendant Cynthia Sommer — a mother of four who earned minimum wage at a Subway sandwich shop — received $250,000 in life insurance.
Prosecutors claim she killed her husband and wasted no time spending the money on shopping sprees, wild parties, and breast implants.
Investigators admit, however, that they have no evidence linking Sommer to the poisoning.
"There is not one document. Not one piece of physical evidence to connect Cindy to arsenic, or even an attempt to get arsenic. Nothing," defense attorney Robert Udell said during his opening statement.
Udell said Sommer was deeply in love with her 23-year-old husband — whose first name is tattooed on her right shoulder — and promised to show jurors the love letters the couple had written each other.
"Cindy was happy as a lark. She was living the life she's always wanted to live," Udell said. "The evidence will show that her dream in life, her goal in life, was to be the wife of a Marine." (VIDEO)
Cynthia Arlene Sommer has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and the special circumstance of murder by poison and murder for financial gain.
She was extradited in March to California from her home in West Palm Beach, Fla., and is being held in prison without bond. If convicted, she faces life in prison without parole.
Defense attorney Udell called Todd Sommer a "knight in shining armor," who married the defendant in July 1999 after a six-month courtship.
"She could not have asked for a more perfect man: A military man. God-fearing ... he was the man of her dreams," Udell said.
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