A Colorado dentist is standing trial for allegedly killing his wife by poisoning her protein shakes and then trying to impede the case against him, including by allegedly placing a hit on the lead investigator from behind bars.
James Craig, 47, is accused of fatally poisoning Angela Craig — his wife of 23 years and the mother of his six kids — over the course of more than a week in March 2023.
Angela Craig went to the hospital three times in 10 days, experiencing symptoms like dizziness and headaches before her condition deteriorated and she was eventually declared brain dead. Toxicology tests later showed that the 43-year-old had been poisoned with cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, a substance found in over-the-counter eye drops and nasal sprays.
A 52-page probable cause affidavit — citing browser history, text messages, witness interviews and other evidence — accuses James Craig of buying poisons online as part of a deliberate effort to kill Angela, alleging he was facing financial troubles and having an affair with another woman.
"Based on the totality of the investigation, James has shown the planning and intent to end his wife's life by searching for ways to kill someone undetected, providing her poisons that align with her hospitalized symptoms, and working on starting a new life with Karin Cain," Detective Bobbi Olson wrote in the affidavit, referencing the Texas orthodontist he was seeing romantically, including while his wife was sick.
In opening statements on Tuesday, Assistant District Attorney Ryan Brackley said Craig may have been motivated by the payout from his wife's life insurance, and also accused him of giving her a final dose of poison even as she lay in the hospital.
"He went in that room to murder her, to deliberately and intentionally end her life with a fatal dose of cyanide," Brackley said.
Craig has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and five other charges related to his alleged actions while awaiting trial, including solicitation to commit first-degree murder, solicitation to commit tampering with physical evidence and solicitation to commit perjury.
On Tuesday, defense attorney Ashley Whitham didn't dispute that Angela had poison in her system, or that James was having an affair. But she argued that the evidence did not show that James was responsible for his wife's death, and that his affair with Cain was not a motive because he'd had numerous affairs during their marriage.
Whitham suggested Angela may have died by suicide, echoing claims James Craig had made to investigators about her mental state at the time. And the defense attorney asked the jury to "remove the blinders from this case and to look at everything."
"You may not like him, you may not think he's a good husband, but that's not what you're here to decide," Whitham said.
If convicted, Craig faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
What do we know about Angela's death?
According to the affidavit, Angela visited her sister in Utah and returned home to Aurora, Colo. — a suburb of Denver — on March 5, 2023.
The next day, before the couple's morning workout, James made Angela a protein shake with extra protein because she was feeling sluggish, a staffer at his office later told investigators. Angela grew faint and dizzy after the workout, and James took her to a hospital.
Angela said "she did not feel right in her head and that her body was responding slowly," according to the affidavit, with symptoms like dizziness and vomiting that investigators say are consistent with arsenic poisoning.
She went back to the hospital on March 9 and stayed there for another five days, with doctors unable to determine the cause of her symptoms. She was admitted once again on March 15 with dizziness and a headache.
During that hospital stay, Angela had a seizure. After declining rapidly, she was eventually placed on life support in the intensive care unit. Angela Craig was pronounced brain dead on March 18.
The affidavit includes many screenshots of texts between James and Angela before and during her hospitalizations — about their kids, his visits, her symptoms and more — including one in which she wrote "I feel drugged" and said she'd only consumed a protein shake.
James responded: "Given our history, I know that must be triggering. Just for the record, I didn't drug you."
But the affidavit alleges he did so once before, based on an interview with Angela's sister.
She told investigators that James had drugged Angela five or six years ago because he planned to commit suicide at home and didn't want her to find or stop him. She said the couple's marriage was tumultuous, with James having "multiple affairs with several women" and a pornography addiction.
But James later told investigators that Angela was suicidal, claims investigators say were not backed up in interviews with their children or anyone else.
In fact, as the Associated Press reports, during an argument captured on home surveillance after Angela's first hospitalization, she said to James: "It's your fault they treated me like I was a suicide risk, like I did it to myself, and like nothing I said could be believed."
Why was James investigated?
According to the affidavit, the police were tipped off by Craig's business partner, Ryan Redfearn.
Redfearn and his wife Michelle were also friends with the couple. They were on their way to visit Angela in the hospital on March 15 when Ryan got a concerned call from one of his office managers.
She said had been contacted by another office manager, Caitlin Romero, who happened to be working late on the night of March 6, when Angela first got sick. Romero told her boss — and later investigators — that she saw Craig sitting at a computer in one of the exam rooms with the lights off, which she said was odd because he had his own office and computer.
Romero said about 30 minutes after Craig left, he texted her saying he would be receiving a personal package and she should not open it. A package arrived on March 13, and Romero saw that a different employee had already opened it. As she went to seal the package back up and put it in James' office, she looked inside and saw a bio-hazard sticker and a circular canister labeled "Potassium Cyanide."
Romero said she had never seen that substance in the office before, so searched the internet for the uses of potassium cyanide and realized the effects of potassium cyanide poisoning were consistent with Angela's symptoms. Two days later, when she learned that Angela was back in the hospital a third time, she called her boss.
When the Redfearns arrived at the hospital, Ryan pulled a nurse away and told her his concerns about potential potassium cyanide poisoning. The nurse, as a mandatory reporter, called the police.
While Redfearn was on his way home from the hospital, the affidavit says, Craig called him to say he had heard "some disturbing information" and asked whether Redfearn had said anything to hospital staff. Redfearn admitted he knew about the potassium cyanide package.
Craig initially said the package contained a ring he wanted to surprise Angela with, but Redfearn pushed back. Eventually, the affidavit says, Craig admitted it contained potassium cyanide but said Angela had asked him to order it and he "didn't think she would actually take it."
"At that point, Ryan told James to stop talking and get a lawyer," the filing reads.
What is the other evidence against Craig?
Investigators searched Craig's home and office, finding several items of interest at each.
At the house, for instance, they noted the presence of multiple protein powders and workout-style drink shakers, as well as two unlabeled plastic bags containing white powdery substances.
They also searched the exam room computer that Craig had been spotted using, and found a history of troubling Google searches and online purchases starting in late February under an email address they say he had created at that time.
They found multiple searches related to poison, including: "How many grams of pure arsenic will kill a human" and "Is Arsenic Detectable in Autopsy?" They found a viewing history of several YouTube videos with titles like "how to make poison" and "Top 5 Undetectable Poisons That Show No Signs of Foul Play" — a list that included arsenic and cyanide.
The computer also showed multiple orders for different forms of poison, including an Amazon purchase of arsenic metal and a back-and-forth with a laboratory products distributor for an order of "Sigma 207810-25G," the technical term for potassium cyanide.
The affidavit points out that while Craig told the company that he needed the chemical compound for his surgeries, he told office staff that it was a personal package and also used a personal email address to order it. He used that same account to correspond with Cain, the woman with whom he was having an affair at the time, the affidavit states.
For example, they exchanged emails about travel plans, with Cain traveling from Texas to Colorado between March 8-10 — during Angela's second, five-day hospitalization.
"It appears James was flying this woman into Denver while his wife and the mother of his children was dying in the hospital," the affidavit reads.
Cain told ABC News in July 2023 that she had only been seeing Craig for about three weeks at that point, and he had told her he was going through a divorce and living alone.
"If I had known what was true, I would not have been with this person," she said.
What happened after Craig's arrest?
Craig was arrested the day after his wife's death in March 2023. But his legal troubles continued.
Prosecutors allege that Craig tried to pay his cellmate and others to cover his tracks, including by offering to pay them to create false testimony and kill Olson, the lead investigator.
During a February 2025 hearing, prosecutors introduced a letter they said Craig wrote to a fellow inmate, calling Olson "the worst, dirtiest detective in the world."
They allege he offered to pay that individual $20,000 each to kill Olson, another police officer and two other inmates. They also accuse him of sending letters to that cellmate's ex-wife offering her $20,000 each for getting four people to falsely testify at his trial that they knew Angela and knew she planned to die by suicide, according to the Associated Press. Prosecutors allege he made other requests, including asking his daughter to destroy a computer.
In April, Craig was hit with five additional charges in relation to that alleged coverup campaign. Whitham, the defense attorney, appeared to reference it in her opening arguments.
"His children are now on the outside without a mother, now without a father, he's anxious, and yeah, he does some not-great things in jail," she said.
But Whitham also urged the jury to question the credibility of those inmates, calling some of them "jailhouse snitches."
One of Craig's previous lawyers — he had two in a row who withdrew from his case before the trial started — said earlier that investigators didn't look into whether Craig wrote those letters himself and suggested they might have been forgeries.
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