by Seamus McGraw

(Continued)

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Authorities believe killer ignored the dying woman's last frantic call

Authorities have alleged that the doctor provided his wife with calcium pills she reportedly told her friend on the night she died that Essa had insisted that she take them and authorities have determined that the pills were laced with cyanide, a poison that starves the body of oxygen and causes a painful, convulsive death.

On Feb. 24, 2005, the poison did its work, authorities believe. While driving to meet her sister to catch a movie matinee, Rosemarie Essa became severely ill, so ill in fact that she lost control of her black Volvo SUV and slammed into an oncoming car. It was not a high-speed or particularly damaging accident, but when authorities opened the car, they found the woman dead, the interior of the car splattered with her vomit.

Authorities quickly learned of the two telephone calls that Rosemarie Essa had placed in the moments before her death. On the phone with her friend, she confided that Essa had urged her to take the pills, and as a former nurse, she apparently realized what he was allegedly trying to do her.

The second call, the one to her own home, went unanswered, though authorities told reporters last week that they believe Essa was in his $590,000 Gates Mills home at the time and simply did not answer the phone.

Within days, authorities began to suspect Essa. He is said to have blanched when he learned that police knew of the telephone calls.  They seized the remaining calcium pills and tested them, determining that they had in fact been spiked with cyanide. And while awaiting the results of toxicological study on the woman's body  it found that she had cyanide in her system and that the manner of her death was homicide Essa fled.

Authorities have since learned that Essa bought a plane ticket that would take him from Toronto to Cyprus, a hub from which he could easily slip into the Middle East and out of reach of American law enforcement. But they believe that the doctor, whose assets have been frozen since soon after he vanished, may have returned to the country.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net