True Crime Society - Poisoning Cases

ALFRED RUF POISONED HIS WIFE SO HE COULD SLEEP WITH HER DAUGHTER

Indiana man Alfred Ruf has been sentenced to four years in prison after he attempted multiple times to murder his wife Lisa Bishop.

Alfred allegedly wanted to kill Lisa so that he could marry her daughter. I believe that Alfred is around 20 years older than Lisa – he is around 71 and we believe she is 51.

Lisa first called police on January 3 2022. She told them that she suspected Alfred had been trying to poison her.

She said she’d been hospitalized six times over the past weeks with unexplained headaches, drowsiness, diarrhea and more.

Lisa said that she tested positive for MDMA, cocaine and benzodiazepines while at the hospital. However, she denied ever having used the drugs that were found in her system.

When they went to Alfred’s home to question him, police reportedly heard him say that had indeed been “spiking” his wife’s drink with an “unknown substance” given to him by his wife’s daughter. The wife was able to provide police with a pill bottle full of the off-white powdery substance and a Coca-Cola can with an off-white residue.

Alfred told police that Lisa’s daughter and a friend of the daughter knew about the poisoning attempts. Alfred said they suggested it and would “put on a show” for him when Lisa fell asleep.

This info is from Fox59:

Ruf allegedly told police how his wife’s daughter from a previous marriage had given him a pill bottle with a white powder inside around three months ago. The daughter — who Ruf admitted he had been having sex with — reportedly told him to put the powder into his wife’s drink.

“Ruf stated that the substance would then make [his wife] go to sleep for approximately 13 hours or so,” court docs read. “He stated that he would do this to eventually kill her.”

Police said Ruf explained how the daughter and a friend had told him to sprinkle the powder into the wife’s Coke can and wait for her to fall asleep. The daughter and friend would then reportedly come to Ruf’s house and “put on a show,” Ruf said.

Lisa’s daughter is aged around 31.

Alfred said that while he was having sex with one of the women, the other would go through the home and steal Lisa’s personal belongings. Alfred said he paid the women for sex.

The daughter reportedly told Alfred that they should “get mom out of the picture” and inherit the life insurance policy. Alfred also claimed that the daughter would want to get married to him after they “took care of” his wife.

Alfred admitted to police that between September and December 2021, he attempted to poison Lisa 12 times. Alfred took Lisa to the hospital following 6 of the poisoning attempts.

Every time, he said the daughter and her friend would come over once the wife was asleep.

“Ruf stated that he knew the substance would eventually kill his wife… and that it was [their] ultimate goal to kill her,” police wrote.

There are two versions of the story about how Lisa found out about the poisoning. One version says that Alfred admitted it to her ‘because he felt bad.’ Lisa’s version was that she confronted Alfred after becoming suspicious and that he admitted to “drugging” her so that he could sleep with the daughter and friend.

In July 2024, Alfred pleaded guilty to aggravated battery. In August 2024, he was sentenced to four years in prison and five years of probation.

MASON HERRING PUT ABORTION PILLS IN HIS PREGNANT WIFE’S BEVERAGES

The next poisoning case is regarding a pregnant woman who was poisoned by her husband in an attempt to induce an abortion.

In March 2022, Texas woman Catherine Herring was seven weeks pregnant with her third child.

Catherine and her attorney husband Mason had been having marital issues. They had been married for over a decade but Catherine had started to suspect that Mason was having an affair.

As some background into them, Mason was a personal injury attorney and Catherine is an artist who makes custom invitations and stationery.

Mason had asked Catherine for a separation around a week before she found out she was pregnant.

When she first told Mason, she said he had a ‘negative reaction, and after that evening, he sent her text messages expressing that he was not happy about the pregnancy and did not know what to do,” the criminal complaint says.

He allegedly told her that the pregnancy “would ruin his plans and make him look like a jerk.” Their counselor suggested that the two spend spring break together, according to the complaint.

Catherine spoke about that time:

“Everything was going along as normal in a married life,” she said. “We’d been on a trip the weekend before. … But he was open to marriage counseling and was telling me everything was fine. He was like, ‘Don’t worry, don’t be upset. I need to work on myself, and everything will be fine.’”

Mason and Catherine had recently moved to Houston with their other two young children, and they were “still decorating the house together and picking out new furniture.”

After they spent spring break together in March 2022, Mason said to Catherine ‘I noticed during spring break that you don’t drink enough water, and I think you should start every day with a big glass. It’ll make you feel better.”

Catherine became violently ill after she drank a glass of water that Mason had poured for her. She went to a doctor and nobody could figure out what caused her to be so sick. She became suspicious. She started collecting the drinks that Mason would prepare for her and she set up cameras outside their house.

She asked Mason once why a drink that he gave her was cloudy and said that it was probably due to dirty pipes or perhaps that the cup was dirty.

Catherine saw Mason on the CCTV putting out the trash and she went to check the garbage can. In there, she found a package for a drug that induces abortions, misoprostol. She then hired a PI and put cameras in the air conditioning vent in the kitchen.

That same day, she says, “my husband came to my house and made me [a] drink in the kitchen” — and his actions were caught on camera.

The video captured Mason pouring juice into a pink plastic cup, and then pulling a Ziploc bag out of his pocket containing crushed-up pills, which he dumped into the cup, she says.

“The amount that he was using was just shocking,” she says. “You could see it, half an inch to an inch, on each drink.”

After that, Mason “just casually walked [the drink] up and left it on my bedside table,” Catherine says.

Catherine was deeply upset by the video.

“There was a lot of emotion,” she says. “To actually see him doing it was shocking.”

“I desperately wanted to be wrong,” she adds.

Mason was initially charged with felony assault to induce abortion but accepted a plea agreement in February to charges of injury to a child and assault of a pregnant person. He was sentenced to 180 days in jail and 10 years of probation.

As of March 2024, Catherine and Mason’s divorce was proceeding in court. For Catherine, the sentence of 180 days in jail isn’t sufficient.

Their daughter Josephine, she says, was born 10 weeks premature in Aug. 2022 and has spent more than three months in the hospital.

“I just don’t think 180 days is justice for attempting to kill your child seven separate times,” she says. “This was intentional, it was knowingly done. This wasn’t a crime of passion, or something like that. This was over the course of two months, and seven rounds of attempted murder. If you divide it up, he’s serving less than 26 days per attempt to kill my child.”

Josephine attends therapy 8 times per week and she has developmental delays.

After he was sentenced, his attorney, Dan Cogdell, said the punishment was reasonable.

“It’s a sad situation and Mason has accepted his responsibility,” Cogdell told the court, the AP reported.

Despite this statement, in April 2024, Mason appealed to be released from jail early. The judge denied the request.

Mason was due to be released from jail at the end of August 2024.

LANA CLAYTON MURDERED HER HUSBAND BY POISONING HIM WITH EYE-DROPS

Lana Clayton has been found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and charges of tampering with food or drugs following the July 2018 death of her husband Steven Clayton.

Lana admitted that she poisoned Steven by putting eye drops in his water.

As some background into Steven, he was born on May 1, 1954 in Miami, Florida. worked his way through college as a construction laborer. He would study and become a Certified Public Accountant. He founded a sports rehab company called Physical Therapy Resources and was able to retire at the age of 41. According to his obituary, he then pursued his love of world travel.

By the age of 59 in 2013, Steven had been married and divorced six times.

After the sixth divorce, he met Lana. Lana was a nurse from Oklahoma, and Steve was said to be attracted to her ‘caring spirit.’ They got married in 2015 and moved into their home in Lake Wylie, South Carolina.

Steven was 64 when he was found lying on the ground, unresponsive at the bottom of a staircase in the home.

Lana said that she had been mowing the lawn and found Steven when she came inside. She ran for help and flagged down a motorcyclist to call 911. Weird.

When police arrived at the home, Lana told police that Steve had been ill and in bed for two days. She said he refused to see a doctor. She also said she had not been able to do CPR on him because he was too heavy for her to turn onto his back.

Steve passed away and his body was taken for an examination. A preliminary exam by the coroner revealed no signs of bruises or abrasions, and it was clear from the examiner’s assessment that the fall hadn’t caused the death, according to investigators. Discoloration of his body suggested that he’d had a heart attack.

Lana requested that no autopsy be performed. She claimed that she was worried the autopsy would reveal that Steve had been smoking marijuana and would be embarrassing for his family to find out. Steve’s body was released to the funeral home.

However, an investigator who worked the case who knew the family made unsettling observations. Signs showed that Steve had been in his bed so long there was a puddle of urine underneath it.

Investigators were unable to find Steve’s phone.

Lana also claimed that Steve did not have a will, which other family members expressed doubt about. As their suspicions grew, Steve’s family asked Dr Sabrina Gast, York County Coroner, to carry out an autopsy.

This autopsy revealed that Steve had several health issues that may have contributed to a natural death — an enlarged heart, gallbladder disease, and congested lungs.

But in mid-August, the toxicology report came back and immediately raised a red flag. There was a significant presence of tetrahydrozoline, a chemical found in eye drops.

Steve’s body had 30 times what would be normal had he been using eye drops therapeutically. If ingested, tetrahydrozoline can cause cardiovascular and respiratory issues — and “it can cause death,” said Dr Gast.

After these findings were released, police began to look deeper into Lana and Steve’s relationship. In 2016, Lana apparently shot Steve with a crossbow while he was sleeping.

During the crossbow incident, Lana told police she was “trying to load a crossbow” when it accidentally went off.

“She said he woke up yelling and bleeding from the wound,” a 2016 report obtained by The Herald in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Steve told authorities at the time that it had been an accident. No charges were filed in connection with that incident.

Lana met with police to discuss Steve’s death on August 29, 2018. Lana said that she knew what tetrahydrozoline was. She told police that Steve put the eyedrops in his coffee on a regular basis. They asked her, that why as a nurse, she would let Steve put poison in his coffee.

She said she didn’t think eye drops could “be anything serious.” When detectives pushed Lana, she became defensive and asked for a lawyer.

Police said that there were inconsistencies in Lana’s story about what she did after she found Steve at the bottom of the stairs.

Police went back and searched the home again. Lana admitted to them that Steve was controlling, manipulative, and prone to anger. She also said, “I did put Visine in his water.”

She also then said that Steve was violent and that he had hit her. She also claimed that she fired the crossbow to protect herself.

A coworker, she alleged, told her that she could get even with someone by putting Visine in the drink and that it would simply cause diarrhea. She admitted that she emptied a container of the eye drops into Steve’s water.

“I squeezed it hard,” she said. “I was so angry. I just wanted him to have diarrhea to just be miserable.”

She admitted to putting the eyedrops in drinks up to two days prior to his death. She said she knew the drops would be colourless and tasteless and that her husband would not detect the substance in his drink.

Lana told police that she never wanted to kill Steve, or even to do him harm.

“The family is shocked and mortified at the cause of Steven’s death,” a statement from the Clayton family obtained by WSOC-TV in Charlotte read at the time. “All of our family and friends know how much he loved his wife, Lana, and how devoted he was to her.”

Solicitor Kevin Brackett alleged that Lana had killed Steve for money. He claimed that she burned his will and threw his phone in a lake so he could not call for help.

Lana’s trial began on January 17, 2020.

Lana’s attorneys said their client had been a victim of sexual abuse in her past and that Steven “hit her, kicked her and choked her” during their five-year marriage. Lana Clayton told the judge “I wanted him to leave me alone.”

Rosemarie Clayton-Leslie, Steven’s younger sister, disputed Lana’s claims that her brother had abused her.

“He was so funny. And he was so affectioniate and caring,” she said in an exclusive interview with “Good Morning America. “My brother was the type of person who loved romance. He was a hopeless romantic. He was a wonderful man — a wonderful brother and an amazing friend.”

She said she’s convinced that Lana began poisoning him long before he died with the intention of killing him slowly.

“My brother was strong and he was healthy. He had gone through multiple bizarre illnesses over the last few years since he had been with Lana, but we really chalked it up to him just having ear problems or benign positional vertigo. My brother was very much a proponent of traditional Chinese medicine.”

She said her brother spent a lot of time with “an incredible acupuncturist” in the Charlotte area who she spoke to frequently after his death.

“I had many conversations with him and he was also perplexed because as many treatments as he tried on him, they couldn’t get to the nitty gritty of why he continued to do so poorly,” she said. “And I think that it was the perfect combination for her knowing that he was not a person who relied on traditional Western medicine.”

“She knew that he wasn’t going to go out and have blood drawn and they weren’t going to find the things that she was putting into his system, which were more than just tetrahydrozoline,” she added.

“How can you maintain you did this to teach him a lesson, when it is obvious from the facts that you let him suffer for three days,” Judge Paul Burch told Lana in court. “You ignored him.”

Lana pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and tampering with a food or a drug causing death. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison without parole.