The Antifreeze Murders

Diane Staudte was a registered nurse in Springfield, Missouri, a churchgoer with four children and a husband, Mark, who played guitar in local bands. On Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012, Mark was found dead at home. Five months later, on September 2, their son Shaun died at twenty-six. Shaun had autism and a seizure disorder. Both deaths were written off as natural, and both men were cremated.

In June 2013 their daughter Sarah collapsed and spent days in intensive care with organ failure and bleeding on the brain. The family’s pastor noticed that Diane seemed untroubled at her daughter’s bedside, and that Sarah was the third Staudte to go down the same way. He called the police. Testing found ethylene glycol, the sweet-tasting compound in antifreeze, which Diane and her twenty-one-year-old daughter Rachel had been stirring into Gatorade and soda.

Rachel’s journal had predicted her father’s and brother’s deaths a year in advance, and she admitted helping plan them. She told detectives that the youngest child in the house, then eleven, was to be next. Rachel pleaded guilty in May 2015 and was sentenced in March 2016 to concurrent life terms with parole eligibility after roughly forty-two years. Diane entered an Alford plea in January 2016 and received three life sentences without parole. Sarah survived with permanent brain and organ damage.