Not long after his wife's death, Dr. William Sybers began a new life.

Judy & Bill Sybers

 

Judy Ray, the younger woman whom he had called after leaving his house the morning of Kay Sybers' death, the same woman he had at first denied having an affair with, had moved in with the doctor a few months after his wife's death.

In due course, she became the second Mrs. Sybers, and the couple left Florida - he was free on $300,000 bail at the time - and though it was slightly unorthodox, with the blessing of the authorities, they moved to a prim home atop Malahot Mountain in northwest British Columbia.

It had always troubled Harry Shorstein that Sybers had lied about the affair with Judy Ray, almost as much as it troubled him that Judy Ray Sybers had lied about it as well.

To Shorstein, convinced as he is that Kay Sybers was the victim of foul play, the whole idea of the relationship and its final consummation just heaped more suspicion on the doctor.

"Forget the science," Shorstein said in a recent interview. "Forget that for a moment, what we've always known is that we had a woman lying in bed with two injection marks, the explanation for which really makes no sense... people had heard for 18 months prior to Kay's death that she had classic heart symptoms, pain down the left arm, shortness of breath, pain in the chest... she was mildly obese and had been a smoker... she had all these symptoms, you know but, he said he could never get her to go to the doctor and he couldn't call 911 because 'she wouldn't let me.'"

To Shorstein, the whole notion was preposterous.

"If your wife, whom you love, is having what you think is a heart attack, I don't care whether you're the world's leading cardiologist or a dummy who's never been to school, there are only two things you can do; that's call 911 or take her to the emergency room.

"But here... it's 5 or 5:30 in the morning, and you're sticking needles in your wife... You're that concerned and... what do you do? You just say 'I'll see you later,' and he goes and calls his girlfriend."

But, as distasteful as Shorstein may have found Sybers' behavior after the death of his wife, he could not prosecute on that alone. There is no statute in Florida, or anywhere else in the United States for that matter, prohibiting a spouse from acting like Hamlet's mother. Still, Shorstein knew that a jury in Florida was likely to look askance at the behavior, and that might help him build a circumstantial case if it ever came to that.

The syringe, the instrument that he alleged was a murder weapon and which Sybers had insisted was an implement of mercy, also took on vast significance as Shorstein plotted his prosecutorial strategy.

To Shorstein, the fact that it had never been found was virtual proof that it had been used for no good. "That's the most critical part of the whole case,' Shorstein said. "If we have the syringe, the case is over because his story is that he stuck the syringe in and couldn't draw blood, our position is that he injected something into her.

"Now, if you had the syringe, it would either have residue of blood on it, you know, a drop or two, or it would have the remainder of the poison. No matter what you did, unless you sterilized it, it would have the poison," Shorstein said.

In his construction of events, Shorstein theorized that Sybers disposed of the syringe in a nearby dumpster, knowing that it would never be found, and to the prosecutor, that was almost tantamount to an admission of guilt. "He... throws the syringe into a dumpster... you don't do that, it's very hazardous." In Shorstein's mind, if Sybers was simply being careless with a potentially contaminated medical sharp he would in all likelihood have dumped it in the kitchen trash can or someplace like it. Why didn't he? To Shorstein the answer was simple. "Because we might find it if it was in the kitchen."

It was hardly an airtight case of course. As Dershowitz would later put it, it was almost routine for Sybers to both draw blood from ailing family members and for him to dispose of the syringe in the Dumpster. "You had extensive testimony that this was the way that they did it always, not just in this situation... They didn't have garbage collection at the house. There was a bin and they threw stuff into the bin; this was a common occurrence." And as far as the affair was concerned, "if everybody who committed adultery killed their wives there'd be a lot of people in jail,' Dershowitz said. "Well," he added, "there are a lot of people in jail but there'd be a lot more."

To Shorstein, the adulterous affair coupled with the absence of the alleged murder weapon simply bolstered his circumstantial case against Sybers. All the same, he didn't drag the doctor and his new wife back to Florida for trial.

Though he now insists that he could have made the case without ever identifying the chemical he contends was fatally injected into Kay Sybers' arm, Shorstein and his investigators continued to search for it.

And finally, in December 1999, Dr. Kevin Ballard, director of research development at National Medical Services, a laboratory in Pennsylvania, came up with what Harry Shorstein took to be the smoking gun he had been looking for.

Ballard, using another novel and largely untested technique, concluded that significant concentrations of the chemical succinylmoline were in tissue samples taken from Kay Sybers. It was a technique that Ballard had also used in another case, that of Richard Williams, a former nurse who was accused of using it to kill 10 patients at the Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital in Missouri in 1992, and according to prosecutors, it was a test that had been successfully repeated in both cases by technicians for the FBI.

The chemical, prosecutors argued, could only be produced through the disintegration of a paralyzing drug, succinylcholine. In other words, Shorstein was certain that he now had the proof he needed to convict Bill Sybers.