Robert Ferrante

A respected University of Pittsburgh researcher has been found guilty of first-degree murder by handing his wife a drink to boost her fertility – after lacing it with cyanide.

Prosecutors said Ferrante concocted the plan to kill his wife after she pressured him to have a second child and because he may have feared she was having an affair or planned to divorce him.

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His lawyers made the case that she might not have been poisoned at all, citing three defense experts who said that couldn’t be conclusively proved.

‘At a minimum we established very clear reasonable doubt,’ defense attorney William Difenderfer said, referring primarily to testimony from celebrity pathologist Dr Cyril Wecht, who said he couldn’t determine how Klein died because he thought a test that showed cyanide in her blood was unreliable.

Source : Daily Mail, 8 November 2014

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News

8 February 2015

Defense attorney Chris Eyster wrote in an appeal filed yesterday that prosecutors presented ‘not one shred of evidence’ that Ferrante administered poison to his wife.

‘A conviction based on conjecture cannot stand,’ he said.

Mr Eyster also argued that prosecutors failed to show that Klein, 41, had lethal amounts of cyanide in her blood, citing disagreement among expert witnesses as to whether she died of the poison or a sudden heart dysrhythmia.

Documents

• Thin-White-Line
• Metabolic-argument-Ferrante-Sept15