A locked suitcase, Strychnine poison, and the unsolved death of Rosslyn McQueen: Karina Berger Pt. 2

Okay, quite a few things to, uh, unpack there.

The fact that the toxicology came back three months later with, uh, strychnine found in, uh, Roz's system, that changes the dynamics completely on, uh, what was assumed up, up first to be a death by natural causes.

You're looking at this investigation, I'll talk generally about investigations.

The worst thing you can do as an investigator for a, uh, a death is, uh, to write it off as natural causes when it hasn't been shown.

Every situation, like a relatively healthy woman found deceased in a home should have been treated as suspicious until it be c- be proven otherwise.

And it, it might have been as soon as the autopsy was performed, uh, they might have found something, a, a problem that she had with a heart or, or a cause for the, the death by natural causes.

We sit here in the benefit of hindsight and go, "Well, they should have done this, should have done that." Strychnine, in my time as a homicide investigator, or I think it was before I was even in homicide, I've only come across a, a death w-with the use of strychnine once, and it was a gentleman that, uh, h-had, uh, committed suicide, left a note, and we found where he sourced the strychnine from.

But I still remember the crime scene, and it is a very painful and inevitable death when it, it's been consumed.

Is there any reason, like the first question I ask un-unpacking it, just trying to understand this investigation, any reason why Roz would, uh, take her own life?

Look, not that we know of.

Um, I mean, she, she was facing a challenging situation because her husband was infatuated with a teenage babysitter and friend of the family at the time, and she was fighting for her marriage.

She was concerned about this closeness of her husband, Ray, with a teenager called Donna.

So we do know that that was in play.

But everybody has said, in-including Ray McQueen himself, that she would not have committed suicide, and she would not have taken her own life.

And what's really extraordinary, as we started to discuss earlier, is that she was pregnant with a baby boy.

She was twenty-two weeks pregnant, so not only was her own life lost, but the life of her unborn child was also taken.

And she was at home with her toddler, a little two-year-old girl, at the time of her death.

So the thought of a mother committing suicide with a toddler at home and exposing your toddler to such an agonizing death with convulsions and muscle spasms, and it's supposed to be excruciating, is just quite hard to accept.

And then the, the possibility of leaving your toddler with your body for an unknown period of time, you know, they'd be unsupervised.

It just seems quite unlikely to me that a mother would do that.

I, I know that mothers do commit suicide, like various, and pregnant mothers.

It does happen, but, um, it does just seem very odd.

And a-another thing that happened after Roz's death was that her husband had gone off to work that morning.

He was an insurance agent with National Mutual and worked twenty-odd minutes down the road in Bendigo.

And he, when he was at work, he said he was working on an insurance quote, and he realized that he'd forgotten some information, and he said he'd left it at home by the home telephone.