Widow: ‘I never saw myself being old with Todd’

By Allison Hoffman - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Jan 18, 2007 9:57:48 EST

SAN DIEGO — A woman accused of fatally poisoning her Marine husband with arsenic to cash out his military life insurance policy told jurors she never saw herself getting old with him as she took the witness stand in her murder trial Wednesday.

Cynthia Sommer, 33, cried and dabbed her eyes as she recounted the death of her 23-year-old husband, Todd Sommer. She was extradited last March to California from her current home in West Palm Beach, Fla., and faces life in prison if she is convicted.

“It didn’t really seem like it was real,” she told jurors. “I told him that I loved him and then I hugged him and took his wedding ring off. I put it on my thumb.”

But Sommer also admitted during cross-questioning that she hadn’t been able to envision her future with her husband.

“I never saw myself being old with Todd,” she told Deputy District Attorney Laura Gunn.

During her brief cross-examination, Sommer told Gunn that her husband had not had any enemies that she knew of. Prosecutors have said she was the only adult who had sufficient access to Todd Sommer in the hours before his death to have poisoned him.

Sommer said her husband had run a high fever a week before his death but was not sick enough to go to the hospital.

“I wouldn’t classify him as being very ill,” she told jurors. “He got better as the week went on.”

Sommer composed herself during a lunch recess and answered questions in a clear voice — including one from her attorney about her black right eye. Sommer said she had hurt herself falling from a jail bunk bed.

She said she didn’t remember much about the night of Feb. 18, 2002, when her husband collapsed and died at their home after a family trip to the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park in Buena Park with their baby and her three children from a previous marriage.

His death was initially ruled a heart attack. Tests of his liver later found levels of arsenic 1,020 times above normal.

Sommer has pleaded not guilty in San Diego Superior Court to charges that she murdered her husband for financial gain.

According to prosecutors, she stayed out late with friends, paid $5,400 to have her breasts enlarged and quickly found a new boyfriend after her husband’s death. Prosecution witnesses described Sommer as a spendthrift who objected to family requests that she put the bulk of her husband’s $250,000 death benefit in trusts for herself and her children.

Sommer testified that her husband knew she wanted to have the breast augmentation surgery and said he had accompanied her to consultations with plastic surgeons before his death.

She read aloud in court from a Valentine’s Day card her husband gave her three days before his death in which he wrote, “Maybe next year you can get a new set of boobies.”

Her defense attorney, Robert Udell, has said her seemingly carefree behavior was consistent with a woman who had lost an ideal partner.

The pair married in 1999.

Ellie