Original subtitles

[news] Angela Craig went toú the hospital three times.

[news] They say she was lookingfor doctors who could help her.

I will never forget this case.

It is so bizarre in so many respects.

[chilling music]

My name's Kevin Vaughan, úl'm an investigative reporter

in Denver on 9News.

You know, I can't really recall the initial story on a Sunday.

Nothing was really jumping out, but as time went on,

just in the first 24 to 48 hours,

it was just chock full of revelations.

The shocking case, a more unusual case,

really, than I've seen in a long, long time.

[narrator] It's a chilly March, ú 2023 in Aurora, Colorado.

At home, Angela Craig, aú 43-year-old mother of six,

feels sick.

In early March, úAngela Craig starts beginning

to experience these symptoms

and she's feeling worse and worse.

She texts her husband Jim and says she's dizzy.

She said her head feels weird.

She starts experiencing nausea.

[Kristin] She ends up going to the hospital,

and they're doing every test.

They cannot figure out what's wrong with her.

And she starts feeling better.

You know, when she's in the hospital.

And she goes home.

Then she went the next day to another medical facility,

what we call an urgent care, sort of with the same symptoms.

And, you know, they did check her blood pressure

and they did all those kinds of things.

And nothing was really jumping out

to believe there was something seriously wrong.

She ended up going home for a couple of days.

[narrator] Work colleagues don't anticipate

how quickly Angela's condition will worsen.

Then she went to the hospital again,

and they ended up keeping her for five days,

did a bunch of tests.

They had cardiology, they had internalists,

they had general practitioners.

They performed CT scans, MRIs, ú I mean, repeated blood work.

I mean, they kind of did it all,

and it, again, turned up really nothing.

[narrator] Angela's sudden decline is at odds

with everything her friends know about her.

[Joni] And after, you know, five days,

they end up discharging her again.

But she quickly begins to feel sick again,

and she's back in the hospital.

And she is so ill,

more ill than she's ever been.

And doctors have no idea what's happening with her.

She was a seemingly healthy woman

who was very active physically in her early 40s,

lived in a nice home,

mother of six kids, husband's a dentist.

There's nothing that the average person

would see on someone like that walking into an emergency room

that would make them think,

you know, there's something amiss here.

They are so frustrated trying to figure this out,

as is, of course, Angela's family.

[Kevin] So she goes back to the hospital on March 15.

One of the nurses is talking about

wanting to finally get this figured out

and get well so that she can get home

and return to her kids and so forth.

And then suddenly about, you know,

in the middle of the afternoon, she crashes.

Blood pressure falls and her heart rate falls.

She becomes unconscious

and she never really wakes up from that.

[Ryan] Her vitals plummeted. She was in trouble.

The bells and whistles went off

and medical staff hadú to rush into the office

and essentially save her life.

But they still couldn't figure out what was wrong with her.

With no diagnosis, they just didn't know.

8:30 that night that doctors decided that Angela Craig

would never regain consciousness.

And they broke that news to James Craig and his children.

This terrible, tragic moment of his life.

Her family says they are overwhelmed

by the love and supportú from people who knew her

and grateful for theirú compassion and concern.

[Kristin] Angela Craig was very well known

by everybody in the community.

Angela and James end up having six children together.

Angela is very active in her local church,

the Church of Latter-day Saints there in Denver.

She was the choir director.

[Bobbi] If you wanted to get the honest answer,

you went to Angela.

If you wanted advice, you went to Angela.

If you wanted a sarcastic, funny,

again, give it to you, real, you went to Angela.

I don't know that anybody said a bad word about Angela.

[Ryan] The Craig household was kind of the central place

for all the neighbourhood kids to meet.

Very strong parents with a-kind of the-kind of

the perfect couple.

Aurora, Colorado is a-

it's a very family-oriented place.

[Joni] Angela and Jim Craig,

they'd been married for 23 years, since she was 20.

And they had raised this large family together.

He was an upstanding father.

He was a very good dentist.

He seemed to be kind to her.

They joked around.

They played pranks on each other.

I think that people who didn't know them that well

felt like they had a very strong marriage.

But her sister, Toni, in particular,

was a big confidant of Angela's.

And she knew that Angela had been unhappy for years.

She had caught Jim in multiple affairs with other women

over the years.

And him apologizing or saying it was over,

he would never do it again.

He was committed to their marriage.

And then, of course, you know, it happens again.

And Angela, she had actually been telling her sister that,

"I've had it. I mean, I just...

I'm just not sure I can stay in this marriage any longer."

She continued to deal with the challenges

and the things that he was doing

while also putting on aú happy face for her kids,

but internally she was struggling.

James Craig was a very popular dentist

here in Aurora, Colorado.

He ran a popular great practise.

His patients loved him.

You rarely hear about people who enjoy going to the dentist,

but people enjoyed seeing James Craig.

He specialized in people whoú were afraid of the dentist

or uncomfortable.

There were some commercials that were run,

and he's very engaging.

[narrator] A promotional video for his dental practise

presents Craig as a professional and personable family dentist.

Hi, I'm Dr. Jim Craig withú SummerBrook Dental Group,

here to answer a questionú many people have wondered.

What is it that really causes bad breath?

People looked up to him.

It was a very sad situation, ú and I never want to see

that happen to you or any other patients.

[Kristin] He has what people think

is a thriving dental practise.

He's obviously well-educated.

Dentists typically make pretty good money.

So he appears to everybody to be a guy

who really has it together.

What people don't see is that on the side,

his business is failing.

He had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars

in cryptocurrency

and filed for bankruptcy in 2021.

He had filed bankruptcy

and a partner came in hisú dental practise in 2022,

but he was nearing theú brink of another bankruptcy

two years later.

He was in debt for at least $2 million.

So he was very much struggling financially.

He was spending above his means,

and yet he continued to spend on whatever he wanted.

[Ryan] He wasn't putting enough hours.

He was travelling a lot.

He just wasn't turning his practise around.

So his partners were talking about possibly cutting ties

with Dr. James Craig in the business sense.

[narrator] On the evening of March 15th, 2026,

as Angela Craig lies on life support,

Aurora Police beginú receiving new information

from people connected to Jim's dental practise.

The office manager at the dental clinic

said James Craig told me

that he was getting a package delivered here

and that I shouldn't open it.

But unfortunately, or fortunately,

depending how you want to look at it,

it was erroneously opened.

That package came, I did open it,

it said potassium cyanide on it.

She packaged it up and made it look like it never was open

and gave it to him.

[narrator] The office manager calls a friend of the Craigs

who is already on her way to the hospital

with her husband, Jim's business partner.

[narrator] On arrival at the hospital,

they encounter Jim Craig in the waiting area.

As soon as he had a chance to pull a nurse aside

away from James Craig, he told her,

"He had cyanide delivered to our dental clinic.

You should check to see if Angela Craig was poisoned."

So that was the moment

when Angela Craig was actually still alive.

[narrator] After warning medical staff

about the cyanide package,

Craig's business partner leaves the hospital.

Not long afterwards, Craig calls him.

And James Craig says, well, it's a ring.

It was a surprise for Angela,

and that was why I told nobody to open it.

But as that conversation went on,

James Craig finally says that it was cyanide.

And kind of that was the first,

kind of, I guess, kickoff of that.

She had asked him to do it

because she didn't have the credentials to buy the poison.

And this takes this mysterious illness

in a completely different direction.

They begin doing toxicology tests.

This toxicology test comes back for potassium cyanide.

That's at twice the lethal dose.

It also comes back for a couple of other poisons.

[Bobbi] I was on call that day.

I got a call from our sergeant and said

that a dentist had come forward and told a nurse

his dentist partner may have poisoned his wife,

who was still in the hospital.

I mean, we respond to University Hospital frequently, right?

But it's usually for gunshot wounds, stabbings,

never for, you know, alleged poison.

There were a lot of our own officers from Aurora

that were clients of James Craig.

He was a well-known, you know, dentist within the Aurora area.

[news] Patients of his for over a decade

have been posting online,

sharing how shocked they are.

Certainly a lot of questions

we still wanna have answered on this one.

Kelly, thank you.

You don't hear very often of somebody being poisoned,

not on purpose.

[Molly] And it had a lot of media attention

from the very beginning.

Early morning hours of March 16, 2023,

I had come into the office and they had said,

"Hey, we're gonna need more bodies."

I was kind of tasked as Detective Olson's new co-lead

in this case.

[Bobbi] Molly's my ride or die.

We are together a lot.

We worked a lot of cases together and we just mesh.

It's such a unusual or unique case.

We have someone who is on life support,

suffering, if you will, for, you know, weeks at this point,

but you couldn't interact with her,

you couldn't have conversations, you couldn't get information.

The poison ultimately sent her into a state of shock,

and she would never regain brain function.

It was too late.

The doctors who said, "If only we knew what was happening,

we could have saved her life."

She had had blood samples taken at several of her medical visits

the week before and earlier that day,

and those blood samples were preserved.

[narrator] Blood tests don't routinely screen for cyanide,

and by the time doctors realize what they're dealing with,

it's often too late.

On March 18th, they make a critical decision.

[news] She was taken offú life support this weekend.

Investigators found the detailsnof this case to be suspicious.

[narrator] The days leading to Angela's death

have created an urgent fear for investigators.

[Bobbi] The clock was definitely ticking for us.

We have an alleged poison, poisoning.

We now learn that he has six children,

four of which live at home.

Are the kids in danger?

We had to figure out if he was involved or not.

Is there more poison?

We recognized very quickly that

we needed to search their residence.

[police]úWe got the husband right here.

[Molly] We were looking for any unusual containers,

any sort of something that might be potassium cyanide.

And we took shaker bottles that had like a debris

of protein shake in it.

I mean, anything that we felt that was useful.

Very quickly while we were in the residence,

we observed that there was actually cameras

affixed throughout the residence.

And it appears unbeknownst to the Craig family

that they were still operational.

Immediately, you were able to visibly see

the decline of Angela Craig.

I mean, she goes from her Peloton workout

to slowly like crawling across the ground

while her daughter's like assisting her

to get back to the hospital.

There was actually audio in the kitchen camera.

I'd like to say that there's like a perfect response

as far as a reaction to your loved one

either being in the condition that she was.

I mean, most people want to know what was going on,

but he, you know, he wasn't wanting to talk

with detectives initially.

He gave us the phones,

he gave us their passwords to the devices,

and we were like,

"Okay, we're gonna leave now."

But you can see kind of how panicked he was.

[narrator] The police searched the couple's phones and emails

looking for a possible motive behind Angela's death.

When they got some of the digital evidence,

they came across this incredible secret romantic life.

The text messages that were happening

within minutes of each other,

and it was absolutely astonishing

to see just the deception.

[Kevin] James Craig had had multiple affairs

with other women.

I mean, in Angela Craig's last days,

he was sending messagesú back and forth with a woman

that he had just met a few weeks earlier.

[narrator] Police identify a woman they believe

James Craig had become involved with

and set out to learn more about their relationship.

Police say he had a romanticúrelationship with another woman

and it appears he even flew her to Denver

while his wife was dying in the hospital, guys.

She legitimately thoughtú that she was going to be

in a loving, healthy relationship.

They spent two or three daysú together at the conference

and then immediatelyú started texting each other,

constantly, all day.

And after three days of meeting,

James Craig told her that he loved her.

It's certainly possible thatú somebody could be suicidal

and obviously present to family and friends,

that they're acting in kindú of the normal parameters

that they're used to.

But she was looking up her symptoms.

This is not somebody who is in on a suicide plot

trying to cover their tracks.

Definitely when she went home from the hospital

the second time,

she was on her computer for hours

doing searches of her symptoms

and trying to sort of self-diagnose.

The doctors hadn't been able to tell her anything.

And so she clearly was very worried about it.

[news] The investigator today said

there were fourú life insurance policies

taken out on his wife,

a total of $4,424,315.

Craig was struggling financially.

[Bobbi] We looked into insurance policies on Angela

and $4 million?

I don't know any stay-at-home mom that is worth $4 million.

[Molly] Seemed certainly motive for us.

You know, he was spending money right and left.

And if he were to divorce,

he couldn't maintain that financial responsibility.

[narrator] Aurora Policediscovered Jim has been involved

with multiple other women.

All these other girls that he was with,

he found, you know, on seeking.com,

on these kind of sugar daddy websites.

They knew what they were getting into.

The financial motive,

in addition to what they learned about other women,

they had a strong sense of motive

as to why somebody would want to do this to their wife.

[narrator] But a troubling account from a member of staff

adds a new dimension to the investigation.

You had the testimony from the people

in the dental office

that he was on this computer that he never uses,

and you have the police going on that computer

and they're finding all these searches

and the orders for the cyanide.

He did an internet search

that said something along the lines of,

"How to make murder look like a heart attack."

"How long does it take somebody to die from arsenic poisoning?"

That sort of thing.

Doing that manual search of the computer

from exam room number nine,

it's just unbelievable.

We find his correspondence with the manufacturers

and suppliers of several different chemical substances.

And he is on these people

about, when am I going toú get my tracking information?

When is this going to be here?

I mean, there is a sense of real urgency.

The Google search history, it's things like,

how to make murder look like a heart attack.

Top five undetectable poisons that show no signs of foul play.

Then there are YouTube videos explaining different poisons

and how they work.

He's a man on a mission.

That was the treasure trove of, like, wow,

he really is behind this.

They arrested him early on Sunday morning.

[police] So Jim's under arrest.

Detectives believe thatú he's the man responsible

for poisoning and killing his wife.

[narrator] On March 19, 2023,

Jim Craig is arrested.

When investigators question James Craig about the cyanide,

he says that Angela wanted to take her own life.

It was almost like he was trying to, like, smooze me,

like, manipulate me.

He leaned forward at one point and was like,

Detective Olsen, like I trust you.

What would you do if you were in my situation?

[Bobbi] Like, I can't give you legal advice, bud.

I think he thinks he can talk

his way out of anything and everything.

He ultimately decided he didn't want to give us a statement

and wanted his attorney there.

[reporter] James Craig was set for trial

in the poisoningú death of his wife, Angela,

charged with murder.

[reporter 2] Craig's defenceattorneys argue all the evidence

is circumstantial.

[narrator] While the legal teams

compile their evidence ahead of trial,

Jim Craig is held in Arapahoe County Jail.

18 months into his stay there,

prosecutors are approached by one of Jim's cellmates.

A Sunday night, one of myúsergeants called me and said,

Jim Craig was basically asking someone,

um, yeah, to kill me.

I was just like, "Wow."

I had broken my ankle

about a week before, I couldn't walk.

I can't really defend myself.

And so for that, it was scary to me

because there was a lot of, like, truths

and reality to the threat.

There was a plan.

Extremely shocking.

He's going after the personú who is working this case

and trying to provideú some semblance of justice

for his wife.

Our head is already on a swivel as police officers,

but it was certainly more so during that time frame.

You know, when is this going to stop?

[news]9News Investigates

reported about an alleged murder plot.

One of them was a detective whoúbuilt the case against Craig.

He thought he could talk this guy in the jail

into killing the detective.

[narrator] In July, 2025,

the trial of James Craig begins.

James Craig is chargedú with first degree murder

in the poisoning death of his wife, Angela.

He's also accused of trying to arrange the murders

of witnesses and other crimes.

This is a one-off in my career, this case,

because it is so bizarre in so many respects,

so tragic, and so painful for the victim.

And, you know, we wanted toú do justice to Angie's memory

is to disproveú the multiple narratives

that were being advanced by James Craig,

that Angela had done this to herself.

[news] Her daughter testifiednot only was she not depressed,

but that the two of them had talked about

a long time dream they had

and were making plans to carryit out, to renovate an old home.

[narrator] At trial, the prosecution reveals

that Jim Craig has written letters to his daughter.

He tried to get one of his daughters to create

"a deep, fake video"

that would show Angela Craig

expressing suicidal ideas and thoughts

with the idea that, oh, the investigators

would find this video and think it was real

and say, oh, maybe this was a suicide after all.

[Bobbi] And in there, he's like,

I know that this is going to be hard to hear,

but she wanted me to do this.

If you ever want to hug your dad again,

you're gonna have to do this for me.

Just all the things, it's mind blowing

that you would do that to your own child.

You're in your teens and now testifying

in your dad's murder trial for your mom.

Like it's just...

it's unimaginable.

[daughter] I was supposed to be able to trust my dad.

He was supposed to be my hero

and instead it will forever be the villain in my book.

He thought he could just about talk anybody

into anything, right?

He thought he could talk his daughter

into making this video.

He thought he could talk these other people

into destroying evidence.

He thought he could talk this guy in the jail

into killing the detective.

And so it seemed to me like there was a decent chance

that he might take the witness stand

and think that he could tell a story

that might get him acquitted of the most serious charges.

Reporter Kevin Vaughan is in there.

In the end, though, he chose not to testify,

so we don't know what he might have been thinking, you know?

[narrator] Prosecutors present

surveillance footage to the court.

They have a conversation in their kitchen,

which is being recorded on a camera inside the house.

Prosecutors suggested that maybe James Craig

didn't think that camera was working or was on.

And you can't hear all of the conversation.

You particularly can't hear James Craig,

who's standing farther away from the camera at times.

You hear Angela Craig say, no one in their right mind

would think I would kill myself before I would kill you.

[Kevin] She says, nobody.

Name one person.

And that was a striking piece of audio and video.

Craig wanted out of his marriage,

but was unwilling to faceú the consequences of divorce.

[Kevin] The primary theory of investigators

was that he poisoned her in her protein shakes.

She worked out all the time, he made her shakes.

And they laid out a timeline where, you know,

he got up one morning, made her a shake,

they worked out, and then after the workout,

she's complaining of a splitting headache

and dizziness and just not feeling good.

[news] A camera James Craig

may not have realized was recording.

That's him making his wife a protein shake.

Lab tests later showed there was poison

in that pink topped container.

One of the pieces of video they showed, the jury,

was a piece of video fromú that camera in the kitchen

that shows him making one of these shakes.

[ Mike] And you can kind of see him preparing drinks

and then carrying them to the bedroom.

Definitely, you know, food and drink

is one avenue of delivery.

[news] They discovered this was in fact a, quote,

"heinous, complex, and calculated murder."

Through the hospital,

we recovered quite a few blood samples,

and there was a spike of the potassium cyanide

that she had a much higher level than when she entered.

The first one was March 9th, and it was positive for arsenic.

And then there was one earlierú in the day on March 15th,

where they found cyanide, arsenic,

and a substance called tetrahydrozoline,

which is an ingredient in eye drops

that are available over the counter here.

And in large quantities, it's poisonous.

And then they had a blood sample after this event she had,

and the cyanide level was much higher.

It was a lethal dose of cyanide.

Autopsy report foundú lethal amounts of cyanide

and another chemicalú typically found in eye drops

killed Angela Craig.

James Craig delivered

that deadly dose of cyanide to Angela

while she was in the hospital,

while she was surrounded by nurses and doctors

who were trying to save her life.

The prosecutors presented this video

to the jury at the trial.

It shows James Craig, who's wearing scrubs.

He goes into a bathroom.

He's in there for a little bit.

He comes out, he's got a device in his hand.

It's not crystal clear,

but the prosecutors suggested to the jury

that it's a needle, it's a hypodermic needle.

He goes into Angela Craig's room.

He's in there for less than one minute,

and he comes out and he's pointing to his left arm,

and he's telling them that something's wrong.

And you can tell from the video, which doesn't have audio,

but you can tell from the video

that it is an emergency situation.

And then he goes back to the hospital

in the middle of the afternoon

and kills her with a fatal dose of cyanide.

And then the next day, he goes on a date.

[heart machine flatlines]

Can you imagine feeling sick

and the person that you would go to first,

likely being your significant other,

trying to get answers and you have no idea

that they're the person that's doing this to you.

[news] It took jurors about nine hours

to convict James Craig inúthe murder of his wife Angela.

It wasn't something done in the heat of passion.

It was deliberate.

So he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Angela

and that carries with it a mandatory

life without parole prison sentence.

And then he was convicted of soliciting first degree murder

of Detective Olsen.

[news] The judge sentencedú Craig to life in prison

without the chance of parole

and an additional 33 yearsúfor other felony convictions.

Angela Craig's familysays tonight justice has served.

[family] You were supposed to be her protector, her advocate.

She just didn't know that you were the perpetrator.

You just wonder at the thought process

that led to all these actions,

some of which just...

you know, I don't generally psychoanalyze,

but it's almost like you wonder,

was he just screaming out to get caught?

I'm just thankful to get that justice for them,

getting that verdict for Angela.

Not that it'll ever bring Angela back,

but within their faith,

they know that they will see Angela again.

And... I just have to believe that as well,

that, you know, Angela is still with us,

and that I will be able to meet her one day,

and that they'll be able to see her again one day.