Allegheny County

Researcher Guilty in Wife's Cyanide Murder

A University of Pittsburgh researcher charged in the cyanide poisoning death of his wife last year was convicted on Friday of first-degree murder.

Dr. Robert Ferrante faces a mandatory life sentence in the April 2013 death of 41-year-old neurologist Dr. Autumn Klein.

The jury agreed with Allegheny County prosecutors who accused Ferrante of lacing his wife's creatine energy drink with cyanide he bought through his lab using a university-issued credit card two days before she fell suddenly ill.

The 66-year-old Ferrante denied poisoning his wife. 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.

Ferrante said the cyanide he bought was for stem cell experiments he was conducting on Lou Gehrig's disease, because the toxin can be used to kill of neurological cells and thus simulate the disease in the lab.

But prosecutors said Ferrante was a ``master manipulator'' who 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.

The key to the prosecution's case was a test on Klein's blood that revealed a lethal level of cyanide. The blood was drawn while doctors at UPMC Presbyterian hospital tried in vain for three days to save her life, though the results weren't known until after she died and her body was cremated.

Ferrante did online searches on cyanide poisoning and how it might be removed by the medical treatments Klein received or detected by a coroner after her death. He said that the queries were related to his research and that the other searches were made simply as he tried to understand the treatment his wife received.

The life sentence is mandatory in any first-degree murder case. Prosecutors declined to pursue the death penalty because they said they found no aggravating circumstances that would have made it a capital offense.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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