A Plan Gone Awry

Yazeed Essa spent nearly five years trying to delay the reckoning. In those years, he had partied on three different continents, assumed a false identity, bedded women in faraway places, lounged on beaches and gambled like a tycoon.

But no matter what he did, his fate proved inescapable: he would be brought home to the less glamorous city of Gates Mills, Ohio, to face a decidedly less glamorous fate: life behind bars for the murder of Rosemarie Essa, his wife of nearly six years, in perhaps the coldest way possible: cyanide poisoning.

It wasn't supposed to have been this way.

On February 24, 2005, Rosemarie Essa was supposed to take the short and fast route to meet her sister Deanna at the movies. She was supposed to take the highway. That way, by the time the cyanide pill her husband had given her had kicked in, she would have been going 55 or 65 miles per hour. The crash would have been full force. She would have likely died almost instantly from the injuries sustained in the accident. She wouldn't have had the time to call her friend Eva McGregor to tell her that she felt funny. She wouldn't have been able to relay that her husband had insisted she take a calcium pill before leavinga supplement since she was trying to get pregnant again.

She would have been dead on arrival. No difficult questions would have been asked. Yazeed Essa would have been a free man, free to have sex with his many mistresses, his veritable harem of nurses besotted with him, and various other so-called friends with benefits. He would have been free of the woman who was the mother of his two children, the woman he called Amana, after the refrigerator brand because, he said, he found her so icy. He wouldn't have had to pay a red cent during or after a potentially protracted divorce. In fact, he probably would have been paid insurance money.

But murderers are often cheap. And careless.

No, this wasn't the way things were supposed to turn out.