Dateline Presents: Trace of Suspicion
3/10/20264 min
Hey Dateline fans! As a bonus, we’re giving you a special preview clip of our new podcast series, Trace of Suspicion.
After seemingly healthy 23-year-old Marine Todd Sommer dies unexpectedly, his widow Cindy’s lavish spending, cosmetic surgery, and wild partying raise investigators’ suspicions. They accuse her of poisoning him with arsenic for his life insurance, setting off a criminal case that takes a stunning turn... Josh Mankiewicz sits down with the woman at the center of it all in Dateline’s newest podcast.
If you like what you hear, just search Trace of Suspicion...
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJosh Mankiewicz· Host0:00
[suspenseful music] Hey, it's Josh Mankiewicz from Dateline with a special preview of my new podcast called Trace of Suspicion. [whoosh] [suspenseful music] Death comes for us all eventually. We can never know exactly when, where, or how. What is known is that the grim reaper is always out there, waiting, checking our names against a list, like some bill collector on commission. United States Marine Sergeant Todd Sommer had every reason to think his appointment with death was still decades away. After all, he was only 23. Except sometimes the years don't matter. [fire crackling] As he got ready for bed that night in February 2002, the reaper was watching. Todd had been battling some kind of bug for more than a week. Nausea, diarrhea, stomach pains, chills, fever, the full menu of misery. The doctors at the Miramar Marine Base in San Diego thought this might be food poisoning, maybe that gas station egg roll he had eaten. We do not know how much sleep Todd Sommer actually got that night. We do know that at about 1:30 in the morning, his wife Cindy was awakened by the sound of her husband