she also told the er doctor in the ohio hospital that ray had been threatening to kill himself. it was looking like suicide. ray s children didn t buy it. what were you thinking? the only thing i was thinking was i didn t believe the whole he drank something sweet, it was antifreeze. my dad would never do that. all of us knew that. and so when ray kotomski died, the wheels of justice began to slowly spin. taylor cleveland is a detective with the county sheriff s office. we received a call from the erie county coroner s office, and they wanted to give us the earliest heads up that they could that there was probably something in this case, raymond kotomski s death, that was not natural, something that was quite possibly a homicide. if this was homicide, investigators had plenty of work to do. raymond had been a corrections officer. yes.
even with ray on the day the state says she poisoned him. she may have been wrong about that, correct? she could have been wrong about that. this was suicide, he argued, not murder, and what practically proved it according to the defense was the fact that ray did nothing to save himself. and one can conclude if someone gave you poison and you became ill, what would be the first thing you would do? you would call the police or you would call a hospital. that never occurred. hentemann then attacked the state s most glaring weakness, a total lack of physical evidence connecting his client to containers of antifreeze. lead detective taylor cleveland was cross-examined about the absence of any forensics. did you find any dna on the part of mrs. kotomski? no, we found no dna of mr. kotomski or otherwise. and you found no fingerprints of mrs. kotomski on the can,
from the joy of hand-them-back-when-they re- crying grandparents to the daily grind of surrogate parents to 2-year-old gavin and baby helena. then not long after her daughter s death, another blow. her daughter was diagnosed with cancer. they did the right thing. they were soon spending alternating weeks at a cleveland hospital where she was being treated. ray even shaved his own hair when the little girl lost her hair from the chemo. helena s cancer went into remission but ray and teresa s relationship suffered collateral damage. according to teresa s family, the strain of becoming a father again had made ray toxic. he was, they said, angry and drinking more beer than usual. mom was scared. so mom couldn t tell him to cut back on his drinking. i mean he was stressed out or