It was four in the morning and Kay Sybers was tossing in her bed, trying desperately to manage what the doctors, in their characteristic understatement, would call "discomfort," though that's probably not the word Kay would have used.

Kay and Bill Sybers

Her husband had given her a sleeping pill a few hours earlier - she had taken it after downing two bottles of Chardonnay with him over a dinner of prime rib and pompano. But now it was wearing off, and whatever slight relief it might have given her had long since vanished into the darkness of her Florida bedroom.

She still was having trouble breathing. Her chest was tight and there was a shooting pain down her left arm. Those were all warning signs, symptoms of a serious heart problem. Perhaps she was even having a heart attack.

It would hardly be a surprise. Although Kay was still comparatively young - she was just 52 - she was overweight, she was not particularly active, and of course, she had been a smoker, though she had given it up years earlier. All the same, she was, by anyone's estimation, a prime candidate for a coronary.

Her husband, Bill Sybers, certainly should have been able to recognize that.

He was, after all, a doctor, a respected pathologist, the chief medical examiner for the district around his Panama City home. When someone died of unexplained causes in and around Panama City, it was up to Bill Sybers to discover why. He was schooled not just in the practice of medicine, but, in a way that no physician who treats living patients can be, he was schooled in the consequences. A man with his training and experience would certainly recognize the symptoms of a potentially fatal heart attack, wouldn't he?

If she really were in danger, he'd call 911, or perhaps rush her to the emergency room at the local hospital, over her objections if necessary. Isn't that what anyone would do?

It's not what Bill Sybers did.

It was not, he would later say, the first time he had seen Kay like this. For months, she had been complaining of similar symptoms, although, because of her aversion to doctors, other than the one she married, he was the only physician who had heard her complaints.

As was his practice whenever a family member took ill, Bill Sybers said he tried to draw blood from his ailing wife. He planned, he would later say, to take it to the lab with him that morning to run a few tests. He grabbed a syringe, he explained, and tried to find a spot in his wife's corpulent arm to stick it. He jabbed her once, and came up empty. He tried again, and again, but he could not find a vein.

He gave up, tossing the syringe in a nearby dumpster as he left the house that morning. A creature of routine, he did take a few moments to make his regular 6 a.m. cell phone call, a call authorities later traced to his girlfriend's cell phone.

A few hours later, on the morning of May 30, 1991, he sent a couple of his employees back to the house to check in on Kay Sybers. It was too late. "She's gone," his friend told him on the telephone.

It's been more than a decade since Kay Sybers died. But to this day, the circumstances surrounding her death remain shrouded in controversy and even now, despite all the advances in forensic science, in mystery as well.

Did she die, as her husband claimed, of natural but unexplained causes, perhaps a combination of a weak heart and a lung condition? Or did Bill Sybers, an admitted adulterer who stood to lose millions of dollars in a possible divorce, slip his wife a harmless sleeping pill the night before she died, and then, as prosecutors later claimed, inject her with a deadly dose of undetectable poison, taking care to dispose of the syringe so that it would never be found?

Some fervently believe that Bill Sybers, now 70 and suffering from a variety of illnesses, a man who had battled lung and bladder cancer as well as diabetes and heart problems, is a cold-blooded killer. Perhaps even his youngest son was one of them. He killed himself in 1993, and according to police, he did it after telling a girlfriend that he could not stand to live with the thought that his father might be a killer.

Bill Sybers

 

But there are others, among them Kay Sybers' own family in Iowa and her two surviving children, who believe that he is an innocent man who has been hounded and jailed and harassed and humiliated by a judicial system in Florida.

In the years since Kay Sybers' death, Bill Sybers has been tried and convicted for her murder, though a jury decided not to recommend the death penalty, sparing his life and sparing him the irony of dying from the same lethal cocktail of drugs that prosecutors insisted he used on his wife.

In early 2003, in a decision that thrust the case again into the headlines, Sybers' conviction was set aside by an appeals court, which ruled, among other things, that the science prosecutors used to convict him was perhaps flawed and was certainly unproven.

A few months ago, the ailing doctor pleaded guilty, not to murder, but to manslaughter in connection with her death.

Nathaniel Dershowitz

But even that plea has not ended the controversy or the mystery. Through his attorney, the noted criminal lawyer Nathaniel Dershowitz, Sybers maintains that he had nothing to do with his wife's death, and that he pleaded guilty only to end what he sees as years of persecution by an overzealous prosecutor.

Suspicion. It is an ugly and ravenous thing. It taints everything it touches.

There's no question that almost from the moment Kay Sybers died, suspicion took root around the case and in almost no time, it seeped into every crevice of Bill Sybers' life.

For 10 years it would stalk him, and eventually it would damn him. And even now, despite his protestations of innocence and the appeals court's ruling, despite Sybers' own admission to something less than murder in the death of his wife, the suspicion, and its minion, doubt, persist.