[suspenseful music]
A husband calls a press conference in Reno
to tell the world that his wife, a big shot politician,
is seriously ill.
There was a television report on Kathy Augustine
being in the hospital.
Chaz Higgs said she'd had a heart attack.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Kathy Augustine is in a coma.
She's Nevada State Controller, the woman
who holds the purse strings.
CHAZ HIGGS: Something's wrong with my wife.
She's not breathing.
911 OPERATOR: She's not breathing at all?
CHAZ HIGGS: Not breathing at all.
I need some help.
They couldn't really find any reason why Kathy, 50 years old,
never drank, didn't smoke, and worked out regularly,
would have had a heart attack.
Medics fighting to save Kathy Augustine's
life start thinking something about her sudden illness
is wrong.
Kathy's husband is nurse Chaz Higgs.
Has he killed his wife?
There was an undercurrent of suspicion surrounding
Kathy Augustine's death.
Nothing was found in the sense of a cause of death.
Half of the women killed are murdered by their partners.
I'm Michelle Trachtenberg and this is Meet Marry Murder.
[suspenseful music]
The way, Kathy and Chaz get together
is kind of unusual, well, very unusual.
Their eyes meet over her husband's death deathbed.
It's 2003.
Kathy has been married to Charles Augustine,
her third husband for 17 years.
But things have been rocky between them for a while.
Charles and Kathy Augustine were
estranged and heading toward divorce, when he fell ill.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Kathy's friends
are not surprised to hear her marriage is struggling.
Politics comes first for her.
It's something she's been into since her teens, years
before she met Charles Augustine.
Chuck Augustine's wife Kathy was born
Kathy Alfano in California.
When she was growing up, her passion
had always been politics.
And she was growing up in the '60s and '70s at a time
when women were leaving the house, attaining more,
they're more involved in politics.
And they were out in the social sphere.
Charles Augustine was 15 years her senior.
He was a strong looking man.
He'd been a football player earlier in life.
He was also a Vietnam vet and a devout Catholic.
They fell in love and got married and moved
to the Las Vegas area.
At first, it's all sunshine and roses, happy combined
family.
They buy a big luxury home in Downtown Las Vegas.
Charles adopts Kathy's daughter Dallas,
who gets on great with Charles' sons Larry and Greg.
Politics is calling.
So she joins the Republican Party
and launches her first campaign.
Kathy Augustine was very well known in the state of Nevada.
And she was known as a hard charging, very strong,
very dynamic state politician.
She reveled in politics.
She loved the rough and tumble of politics.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Back then Nevada politics was a bit
of a good old boys network, but Kathy takes
it on and she comes out on top.
First she wins a place in the state assembly,
next campaign the state Senate.
She's charismatic.
She's ruthless.
And she crushes the opposition every time.
She has run for and won election to the Office
of State Controller of Nevada.
She was actually the first female state
controller in Nevada's history.
She was the state's bill collector, more or less.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: Kathy is a hero to Republican women.
She joins all 18 of the state's Republican women's clubs
and drives miles to go to their functions.
Her outfits are like her armor, always the same bright blazers
and polished brooches.
Kathy's husband Chuck isn't such a fan.
He's not into politics.
And he doesn't get why his wife wants
to be out on the campaign trail when
she should be home with him.
Victoria Campbell is a local reporter who watched
Kathy take no prisoners.
I interviewed Kathy Augustine on numerous occasions.
She struck me as tenacious.
Very tough.
She was a very tough woman.
She just had her eyes on what she wanted.
She was ambitious.
Charles and Kathy Augustine were estranged
and heading toward divorce when he fell ill.
He suffered a minor stroke at their home in Las Vegas,
was taken to the hospital, then suffered
a major stroke in the hospital.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : So this is 2003.
Chuck and Kathy are getting a divorce.
But when he suddenly gets sick, that is put on hold.
For six weeks, she travels back and forth to be at his bedside.
While he was being treated and was seriously ill,
one of his nurses was Chaz Higgs.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : So is the critical care nurse, Chaz
Higgs, seeing dollar signs?
She was an easy route to success.
She was- she was-- she had glamour.
She had status potentially.
He thought that she was an easy route
to the fairytale ending that he believes it is his destiny.
[sinister music]
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Now if I met William Charles Higgs,
I'd be a little worried about his emotional baggage.
Not a lot is known about Charles Higgs' early life.
But between 1994 and 2002, he had three failed marriages.
He changed state and job quite a lot, and drifted.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Chaz and his twin brother Mike were
raised in North Carolina by their father,
who is in the Marines.
This is forensic psychologist Donna Youngs,
a Brit who studied bad guys.
My sense is that he came out quite a hard background,
a background where he didn't learn how
to care about other people because it was
a tough background where other people weren't
particularly caring about him.
It fits with the idea of an upbringing
led by a military man.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Just like dad,
Chaz also joins the military.
He goes into the Navy, spending 16 years in the Medical Corps,
looking after sailors' health.
He's rather unreliable though.
He moves from state to state, has three failed marriages,
files for bankruptcy many times, and finds women irresistible.
He is a player.
We've got somebody who has an inability to self-regulate,
somebody who's-- who's always looking for excitement,
somebody who's immature, and somebody
who is very emotionally fluent, is very
warm and charming and open.
Put all those things together and you get somebody
who is going to move from woman to woman very readily,
and is going to appeal to a lot of women as well.
So it's easy for him to do that.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : But everyone has
to settle down sometime right?
By this time, Higgs is in his late 30s.
By 2002 after the breakdown of his last marriage,
Chaz was living in Nevada.
He had seemed to be a bit more stable.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : He goes to college,
gets his qualifications.
And in 2002, he gets a job as a critical care
nurse at the Sunrise Medical Center in Las Vegas.
He would have been comfortable going into nursing, of holding
other people's lives in his hands,
because, not because he cared so much.
But because actually, other people's lives
were so unimportant to him, certainly much less important
than Chaz Higgs' life.
Just a few years later, Chaz Higgs' co-workers
will find out just how little human life means to him.
Any time he was busy and they'd--
one of them would say--
And all of them testify to this.
And there were several.
--one of them would say, is there
anything I could help you with?
And he'd say, yeah, get rid of my wife.
[music playing]
It sounds rather shocking, but the door to romance
opens for Chaz Higgs and Kathy Augustine
as she watches Chuck, her husband of 17 years,
take his last breath.
After six weeks, he unfortunately passed away.
But Kathy's relationship to the intensive care
team at the hospital didn't end there.
Chaz would later say that they had chemistry.
They had instant chemistry.
And when they met in the hospital, it was just--
it was one of those things.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : After Chuck dies, Kathy
can't get Chaz out of her head.
She just needs to find an excuse to see him again.
And what she comes up with is perfect.
Kathy wrote thank you notes to all of the staff.
But she forgot to write one to Chaz.
In order to make up for that, she decided
to invite him out for coffee.
And that was when their romance began
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Well Chaz isn't going to turn
down an offer like that.
A hot frantic affair is right up his alley.
His romances mirror his whole- his whole approach to life.
It's one passionate encounter followed by another.
For Kathy, who was perhaps used to more intellectual,
reserved men who was part of a calculating political world,
Chaz actually would have been a breath of fresh air
in his warmth, his openness.
Three weeks later, a wedding.
Hmm.
Why not?
I would venture to say that Kathy Augustine probably
hoped for what most people hope for,
a meaningful happy relationship.
And this being her fourth marriage,
it was not something that she had been able to have before.
She told her family, he's an angel to me,
he swept me off my feet.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Kathy's friends and family
are harder to convince.
This doesn't exactly look like a match made in Heaven does it?
The relationship between Chaz and Kathy
was not something that their friends could have predicted.
She was eight years his senior.
And they didn't really seem to have a ton in common.
He was a nurse.
She was a politician.
He hated politics.
I think it's just shocked people.
And he clearly had no interest in her career, which was
very, very important to her.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : But what else can Kathy's friends do?
They bite their tongues and wish the new couple well.
Straight out of the gate, it appeared that she was happy.
Chaz was athletic, had always been
interested in keeping up his appearance, in looking good.
Over the course of their relationship
however, he got Kathy into shape.
He got her interested in working out.
And they seemed to be taking along fairly well.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Now it's fair
to say Chaz has gotten lucky.
As a nurse, he'll never be a big earner.
But as Kathy's husband, he finds himself living it up.
He'd always been terrible with money.
And friends suspected that part of Kathy's
appeal in the first place was that she was fairly wealthy.
She had received the payout from Chuck's life
insurance, which amounted to about a million dollars.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Chaz is attracted
to the fact that Kathy is a powerful woman,
a local celebrity almost.
But he finds himself out of his depth.
Within months, Chaz starts to resent her high powered career.
He wanted her to quit politics.
When she didn't quit politics, it aggravated him.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Kathy doesn't take any prisoners.
And in 2004, that tough management style of hers
backfires.
She gets accused of misconduct in the office.
In September of that year, Kathy
was impeached for a campaign ethics violation
and was forced to pay a fine of $15,000.
That seemed to derail her political career somewhat.
And she had to work to recover her good name.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Kathy becomes the first
Nevada State constitutional officer to be
impeached by the assembly.
What's worse, she's found guilty and reprimanded.
But she manages to keep her job.
The episode hits her reputation and her wallet, hard.
She has to refinance her fancy Las Vegas home
to pay the $15,000 fine.
[intelligible arguing]
What about Chaz Higgs?
Well, his dream life is looking shaky.
Money is tighter.
His wife is no longer the respected local celeb.
And she's busier than ever, because she's had
to rebuild her ruined career.
Chaz starts getting a little mad.
The stress of that situation may have caused more
problems in their relationship.
By autumn of 2005, Chaz was really bad mouthing Kathy quite
a lot to colleagues at work.
He wanted her to lose weight.
He called her a fat bitch and that sort of thing.
I'm getting the impression Chaz is quite vain.
Kathy's friends like to poke fun at how
much he fusses over his hair.
But now he's obsessed with looking hot.
It seems to be the only thing that matters to him.
Chaz had gotten into bodybuilding
and was spending most of his nights at the gym.
He'd also gotten into steroids and were
stockpiling medicine at home.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : By early summer of 2006,
Chaz Higgs has a new project, getting out of his marriage.
He's pretty open about this in front of his coworkers.
You tell me, is he stupid or just brazen?
Any time he was busy and they'd--
one of them would say--
And all of them testify to this.
And there were several.
One of them would say, is there anything I could help you with?
And he'd say, yeah get rid of my wife.
He was saying terrible things about his wife
to his coworkers.
If I didn't have a daughter in Las Vegas, I would kill my wife
and throw her down a mine shaft.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Around this time,
Chaz the player is flirting with a colleague
called Linda Ramirez.
They're emailing back and forth, with Chaz
suggesting she book a hotel room so they
can meet and do dirty things.
Three years after they got married,
Chaz was cautioned by his superiors
for using his email, his work email,
to send flirtatious messages to a colleague.
He had joined a website called Passion.com and was
sending emails to other women.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Chief Deputy District Attorney
Tom Barb is on the case.
He finds out that some of these emails are rather disturbing.
We had witnesses as far as he was
flirting with one of the people that worked at the hospital.
You know, saying he sent her an email
and said I'm going to make Kathy--
He'd say that bitch.
--Kathy's life miserable.
This is another message.
"I hate this woman.
And I will make her break" Higgs is
always blurting out his darkest thoughts and feelings.
He really loves to vent, this guy.
His boss reprimands him for misusing his hospital email.
He confided to his supervisor, Tina, that things with Kathy
were problematic.
He described her as abusive and controlling.
And Tina started to get concerned that Chaz
might be the victim of abuse.
So she offered him a place to stay if he needed it.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Somehow this gets back to Kathy.
Convinced that Tina's making a move on her man,
Kathy loses her cool.
Kathy somehow found out and began harassing
Tina at her place of work.
Kathy wrote threatening letters to Tina.
And Tina eventually took the matter to the hospital board.
And after that, Kathy's harassment seemed to stop.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Kathy's friends and family are worried.
They notice that she's lost her sparkle.
She's acting way out of character.
Sometimes she even seems scared of Chaz Higgs.
While Chaz was making it seem to Tina that he was being
abused, the evidence seems to suggest that maybe
something else was going on.
For example, Kathy called her brother one day from the car,
crying, sobbing, and saying he's going to kill us
both because Chaz was driving erratically, crazy.
Chaz and Kathy's marriage is a mess.
So why doesn't Chaz just get a divorce?
Yes, it's another failed marriage for him.
But you accept it, and then you move on, right?
But Chaz has another plan.
And he's sure he can get away with it.
Higgs is on the telephone, 911 my wife is not breathing.
CHAZ HIGGS: Something's wrong with my wife
she's not breathing.
911 OPERATOR: She's not breathing at all?
CHAZ HIGGS: Not breathing at all.
I need some help.
[music playing]
911 OPERATOR: 911, what's your emergency?
6:45 on Saturday morning, July 8, 2006,
Chaz Higgs makes a 911 call from the house he
and Kathy Augustine share in Reno.
CHAZ HIGGS: Something's wrong with my wife.
Higgs is on the telephone, 911 my wife is not breathing,
I need help.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : He tells the dispatcher
he's found his wife in her bed.
She's unresponsive, maybe not even breathing.
To the operator, something seems off.
Chaz is the calmest caller he can ever recall.
His voice hardly falters as he gives detailed directions
to get to his home.
[sirens blaring]
He was real kind of nonchalant about the whole thing.
Everybody commented about his--
his demeanor, his tone of voice, that sort of thing.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Is this guy a great
actor or a really awful one?
Almost in a monotone he says, "Something's
wrong with my wife.
She's not moving.
I'm a critical care nurse.
I've started CPR."
On the 911 call, he didn't seem
to be too affected by the fact that his wife wasn't breathing
or anything like that.
CHAZ HIGGS: Something's wrong with my wife.
She's not breathing.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Higgs tells
the 911 dispatcher he doesn't think
Kathy has any medical issues.
But in the same call, and with reporters later on,
he makes a point of saying how much stress
she's been under recently.
CHAZ HIGGS: It's not trauma or anything.
Said she'd been really stressed.
Over the last six month or so.
Hey, I'm going to do some more CPR, OK?
911 OPERATOR: Yeah go ahead.
Chaz told paramedics that he had attempted resuscitation.
But when they arrived, they found her still on the bed.
This was suspicious because as a trained medical professional
he should know that in order to resuscitate someone
they have to be on a hard surface, not a soft bed.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : A couple of things bother
the emergency responders.
The scene just doesn't seem right, but in that moment,
their main concern is saving Kathy's life.
They did resuscitate her enough to get a heartbeat,
blood pressure, that sort of thing going.
And then they put her in the ambulance
and took her to the Renown Midsouth.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Imagine you're in the ambulance.
Sirens are blaring.
Your wife is on a gurney.
She's really sick.
You would be frantic, right?
Not Chaz Higgs.
On the way to the hospital, he was even reading a newspaper.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : And at the local hospital,
the nurses take one look at Kathy's condition and start
wondering how has this fit feisty politician
ended up so seriously ill.
Some very alert nurses thought this just didn't look right.
She's not, you know, 50 years old.
No history of anything.
Doesn't look like heart attack to me
or at least the normal heart attack protocol.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Chaz is keen
to take control of the story, maybe a little too keen.
Later the same day, he updates reporters
about Kathy's condition.
Her family was in grief.
They lined up behind him during his news conference.
And they looked grim.
And they were wearing sunglasses.
They were obviously distraught.
And they were losing someone very special to them.
Chaz appeared to be very cool, very calm, very collected
while he recounted what he had done to save his wife.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Does the stress theory ring true?
OK.
Yes, she's in the middle of a tough race
to become a Nevada State Treasurer.
And the primary is just a month away.
But still, Kathy's friends and family aren't buying it.
They knew her as a person who thrived on stress.
And something like that wasn't enough to do it.
If there had been a heart attack, except for--
I guess there are exceptions to every rule.
But if there had been a heart attack,
there would have been evidence in the heart muscle
or in the arteries around the heart, that sort of thing.
And there was none of that.
The news just became progressively worse.
She was in a coma.
She was at irreversible brain damage.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Chaz knows there isn't much time.
He wants to make sure he can cash in on Kathy's death.
Kathy was in a coma for three days.
And during that time, Chaz made sure
that her $1,100 a month state pension was signed over to him.
It would be his $1,100 a month for the rest of his life.
Now nobody thought that was extremely
large amount of money.
But I'm thinking I could live, you know,
pretty- pretty well with $1,100 a month more
than I was working for.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Once again,
Higgs is not acting like a man his
wife's life is in the balance.
And his weird behavior doesn't escape his co-workers
at the hospital either.
He was checking on her pension.
He was bringing donuts to the nurses.
He was not always, as nurses would later testify, behaving
as a husband who was deeply concerned about his wife who
was lying there in a comatose state.
[heart monitor beeping]
On July 11, 2006, Kathy's family
made the decision to take her off of life support
and she died.
[flatline beep]
I think the public felt terrible
for her and for her family.
We had lost someone who held a very high office in this state,
who had blazed a trail for female politicians,
for all politicians.
And she was gone.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : With the star of Nevada politics dead
at the age of 50, it's time for detectives to start
asking some serious questions.
Put it all together, that was the challenge.
How do you go from a healthy 50-year-old female
to a dead 50-year-old female?
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Knowing he is likely to be a suspect,
Chaz does something that shocks the grieving family.
He slits the wrists, but not very well and lays down
in the bathtub in the house that he and Kathy had in Las Vegas,
wrote a big long note, blaming other people in this world,
talking to people, talking to his daughter,
talking to Kathy's brother, signs it Sincerely, Chaz Higgs.
It says, "I'm going to see my wife."
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : How seriously would you take
Chaz Higgs' suicide attempt?
And what's he trying to escape, grief, remorse?
What's going on in his head?
The suicide attempt following the murder
is one of the most psychologically revealing
of all factors here.
It-- the fact that even this has to become about Chaz
is terribly revealing, is again just a classic symptom
of the immaturity, of the lack of self-regulation,
of self-analysis, of self-awareness,
of these type of Peter Pan psychological characters.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Kathy's autopsy draws a blank.
Doctors and cops still don't know how Kathy died.
Nothing was found in the sense of a cause of death.
Found that her heart was in good shape,
that her lungs were in good shape.
There was no evidence of a brain bleed or anything like that.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : But they do find something intriguing,
a tiny injury to Kathy's body that no one can explain.
It was a puncture wound on her hip that had turned--
it had turned black and blue a little bit, as if whoever
did it was in a rush or didn't know quite how to get it
done without hurting somebody.
Neither the hospital nor the paramedics
had administered a drug to Kathy via an injection in her hip.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Something's not right here.
When the hospital toxicologist examines Kathy's tissue
and blood samples, the only drug traces they find
are the ones the medics had administered to her.
When the autopsy was finished and there was no apparent cause
of death that resulted from that, those tests,
I think all of us knew something was up.
So it was just, I have no case.
There's nothing to prosecute.
She just died.
I didn't have enough information to question the death.
And I didn't have enough information to say, oh
she just died.
Chaz might think he's sitting pretty,
but he has no idea that the local Sheriff's
department can be tenacious when it comes to solving a homicide.
Law enforcement are not done with Kathy Augustine's death
and neither are the nurses who cared for her.
These very alert nurses took blood samples and urine samples
and put them in a refrigerator under an assumed name.
[music playing]
Chaz Higgs is hardly beating the cops doors down for answers
about his wife's death.
In fact, he seems to be pretty happy to write
it off as a random tragedy.
Unlucky for him, not everyone is ready to move on.
There was an undercurrent of suspicion surrounding
Kathy Augustine's death.
Some of the police officers implied
that there was an investigation going on behind the scenes that
really was pointing away from a natural medical problem
or cause of death.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Now here's the twist
which investigators uncover.
While Kathy is lying in a hospital
bed fighting for her life, two very important things happen.
First two nurses get suspicious about Kathy's condition
when she's admitted to the hospital and they take action.
She, or they, the two of them decided
to take the body fluids from Kathy right upon her entry
into that hospital.
These very alert nurses took blood samples and urine samples
and put them in a refrigerator under an assumed name.
This doesn't look right.
We're taking the fluids.
Thank you.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : The second thing that happened,
a couple of days later, she tells them about a weird
conversation she's had with Higgs on July 7,
the day before Kathy fell sick.
Chaz confided in a co-worker that
he was considering divorce.
Later that same day with the same co-worker, Kim Ramey,
he happened to mention a news story in which
a husband had killed his wife.
Chaz Higgs said, he did it all wrong.
If I'm going to kill someone, I'm
just going to hit him with a shot of sux or succinylcholine.
And he made the injection kind of movement with his hand.
And she said that scared her a good deal,
said the hair on her arms stood up.
He said that it would have been much better if the husband
had used succinylcholine, because that particular drug,
a paralytic that's very frequently found on crash
carts in intensive care units and emergency rooms,
isn't traceable after death.
The drug is quick acting as far as paralyzes quickly.
It's also quick acting as far as it moves out of the system
quickly.
And it was because of Kim Ramey that, you know,
the case really took off and they knew what to test for,
and they knew what to look for, because of a comment
that he had made.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Seriously, why would you choose
this way to kill your wife?
Kathy didn't have a quick or painless death.
Succinylcholine is used by anesthesiologists
to paralyze the throat muscles, the lungs,
so that they can end intubate a person
without causing too much harm and without much fight back.
I think what struck me most about this case was how cold
and how calculated this death was.
Imagine giving someone a drug that stops them from breathing,
and stops them from crying out, or calling for help, or moving,
a drug that's going to make someone
suffocate to death in front of you for six or eight minutes.
They know they're going to die and there's
nothing they can do about it.
It's an agonizing death.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : You got to hand it to him.
It's not a bad plan.
It looks like Chaz Higgs decided to inject Kathy
with succinylcholine, because it wouldn't be detected
in her blood after she died.
Those nurses who secretly took samples while Kathy was alive
are fantastic.
But is it going to bring Higgs down?
Tipped off in that call from Kim,
detectives know what to test for.
Those nurses had not gone in and gotten those fluids,
it would have been a whole lot harder, if not impossible,
to make a case against Chaz Higgs.
We sent the body, tissue samples, and the fluids
to the FBI lab in Quantico where they began testing.
And this was in July.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Now for the waiting game.
The cops have got their theories.
They've got a bit of circumstantial evidence
with Chaz badmouthing his wife at work
and boasting about knowing how to kill someone.
All they need now is good solid forensic proof.
You're waiting two months, 2 and 1/2 months,
to get evidence that there even was a crime.
We didn't know what was happening behind the scenes
as far as you know body fluids and tissue
samples being sent to the FBI laboratory in Virginia.
We didn't get the results back 'til September 26th.
I think.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : At last the detectives
get a break through.
The samples they sent to the FBI showed
traces of the anesthetic drug succinylcholine.
Police put out a warrant for Chaz's arrest.
And on September 29th, 2006 he was found and arrested
in Hampton, Virginia.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Cops have a warrant
to search his belongings.
And when they do, they can't believe what they see.
Right there in his car, all of the evidence the
need to prove beyond a doubt that Higgs has killed his wife.
It's like they hit the evidence jackpot.
There was a packet of 3 by 5 cards,
for lack of a better description.
And the very top one was a card that
dealt with succinylcholine administration,
use, that sort of thing.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Can you believe
this is the guy who bragged about
committing the perfect murder?
People like this do often get caught
by the carelessness which is typical
of such egocentric people.
They're so unconcerned with other people
that the flip side is that they're
very unaware of the clues that they're leaving.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : The prosecution has a solid case.
There's nowhere for Higgs to hide.
But in court, he's still insisting he's innocent.
TOM BARB: He just was saying what he needed to say.
And we let him, because I wasn't about to stop
him from saying anything.
Because I want to talk to him.
He said, "I love my wife.
I wouldn't do that."
Well, what are you doing with Ramirez telling her
you wanted to drive that bitch crazy?
And it was working.
And it was your goal to be rid of her.
What I wanted to do with the purpose of my cross-examination
was- was to point out to everybody
within hearing distance, that what he said
was complete and utter junk.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Higgs will
do anything to avoid another ordeal
like on the witness stand.
After his first day of testimony,
he heads back to where he's staying with friends
and cuts his wrists for a second time.
It's a dramatic play.
Mr. Higgs is in the hospital, because he had done
his second suicide attempt, as successful as the first one,
where he cuts himself and lays on the bathroom
floor in a house where he knows people are going
to be around check and they find him and get him to the hospital
before anything bad happens.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : Chaz has struck out.
Far from nearly dying, he finds himself back
in court the very next day.
We talked to the judge and said,
well, we'll just cancel the day and let
the jury know we'll call him as soon
as he's available to testify.
And oh, by the way, judge I want to revoke his bail,
because we can't have him out on the street
if he's going to try to kill himself.
That's just not good.
We don't want him dead.
We want him on trial.
Of course, when I ask that his bail will be revoked
for that reason, his attorney said I was a barbarian
and that was barbaric.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : The judge does not agree.
Chaz is locked up for his own safety, then brought back
to the stand where he's blindsided
by an old school lawyer trick.
Prosecutor Tom Barb wants to show the jury
how little harm Higgs has done to himself
with his suicide attempt.
When he first took the stand, I walk up to him
with a blank sheet of paper and a pen,
and tell him to draw me a diagram of your house,
just you know whatever it is.
Just draw me a diagram of your house.
And so he starts drawing.
And the only purpose in that is to let everybody
know that his wrists weren't immobile
or they weren't broken or anything like that.
He could draw.
And he could write.
And he did it.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG : The attorney's game
plan is to use Higgs himself to expose his character.
[gavel strikes]
He just wasn't believable in anything he said.
He was just a liar.
Chaz Higgs' trial continued through 2007.
And on June 29, 2007, he was convicted.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
And he almost immediately went on suicide watch.
Higgs' defense team attempted an appeal.
But in May of 2009, the Supreme Court of Nevada
upheld the conviction.
Got life with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Chaz Higgs was found guilty of murder
and received a life sentence, making
Kathy Augustine yet another woman murdered by her husband.
The absolute self-centeredness which made it possible,
made it easy, for Chaz to discard of Kathy also
in the end trips him up, produces
the carelessness in his behavior, which trips him up.
I'm Michelle Trachtenberg and I'll see you
next time on Meet Marry Murder.
[music playing]