Joann Curley Case Study

Dead Without a Trace: The Joann Curley Case
Joann Curley was a middle aged woman who appeared to have fallen in love instantly when she met her future husband, Robert Curley. After they married in the summer of 1990, the couple, including her young daughter Angela, moved into her home in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. By all outward appearances they seemed to be the picture perfect family. Robert received a promotion at his job as a foreman for the chemistry laboratory he worked for. As a family it appeared they had a bright future ahead. Everyone was happy and in love, or were they? Soon after, Robert fell ill for the first time in August 1991 and in less than two months he rapidly deteriorated until his death on September 27, 1991. Robert’s sudden death was a shock to everyone including medical staff. At first doctors could not figure out what had caused Robert to become so severely ill. Was this an accidental work related illness, something genetic, or the deliberate acts of something more sinister?
Joann met Robert Curley immediately following a tragic automobile accident that claimed the life of her first husband, John Chopack, in 1988. Robert was a young and handsome man who fell for the heartbroken
Forensic toxicology tests were done on fragments of Robert Curley’s hair. Forensic expert Fredrick Reiders commented, "Hair is, for many things, a time line, it is a repository of what circulated in the body. If you take an aspirin, what will grow out of your head will be a strand of hair on which a tiny portion will have a little aspirin." Reiders went on to state, “Since hair grows at an approximate rate of one-third to a half-inch per month, scientists can start at the hair's root and work backward in time. Using highly sophisticated equipment, the tests pinpointed at least seven separate occasions during the last 11 months of his life that Robert Curley ingested thallium,” (Henson,