A Missouri woman is facing multiple charges for allegedly spiking her husband’s Mountain Dew with Round Up herbicide because he was unappreciative of the birthday party she had thrown for him.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and one Missouri man learned that first-hand after incurring his wife’s wrath for not being appreciative enough of the 50th birthday party she organized for him. On June 24, the man, whose name has not been revealed for personal privacy reasons, notified the Laclede County Sheriff’s Office that he had reasons to believe his wife was trying to poison him. He had noticed that one of the bottles of Mountain Dew in the refrigerator had a bizarre taste, and after experiencing troubling symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting, he decided to check the surveillance system which showed his spouse tampering with his soda bottle and a container of Round Up weedkiller.

Photo: Qimono/Pixabay

The victim told police that he first noticed the “odd” taste of the Mountain Dew in his garage fridge on May 1st, but decided to ignore it. After about a couple of weeks, he started vomiting, coughing up “brown/yellow mucus” and experiencing diarrhea and throat soreness. Then, at one point, he noticed that whenever he drank Mountain Dew outside the house, it had a normal taste, while the bottles in his garage fridge had the same odd taste.

Suspecting that someone might be putting something in his favorite drink, the victim decided to check the camera surveillance system. He was shocked to see his 47-year-old wife Michelle “taking a two-liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew out of the garage refrigerator and a bottle of Roundup weed killer into the house,” before returning with them and putting them back in their respective places.

Afraid for his life, the man made a copy of the CCTV footage and gave it to someone he trusted, in case he died from the poisoning. He also changed his routine, but whenever he put a new Mountain Dew bottle in the garage fridge, his wife would spike it with herbicide. She had used so much of the toxic substance that the first container was almost empty and another one popped up on the shelf one day.

Photo: (Laclede County Sheriff’s Office)

When the man decided to go to the cops, on June 24, he took with him a recording showing his wife spiking his Mountain Dew bottle a day before. Asked what her motives for poisoning him might be, the 50-year-old said that she might be after the payout from his $500,000 life insurance policy, or that she might be having an affair and want him out of the picture. Little did he know her real motive was much more trivial.

During her first police questioning, Michelle denied poisoning her husband’s drink, instead claiming she was combining Mountain Dew with Round Up to test a new weedkiller recipe she had found on Pinterest. However, after being shown the recordings of the many times she had tampered with the victim’s soda bottles, she admitted everything, adding that she  “should have just divorced him”.

“Michelle again admitted to putting the insecticide from the basement in the two-liter Mountain Dew bottle and placing it into the garage refrigerator during the evening of 6-23-2024. Michelle said she was mad at (her husband) because she had thrown him a 50th birthday party and he was not appreciative,” police said in an affidavit, adding that the woman claimed she just wanted to be “mean” to her husband.

 

Interestingly, every time her husband mentioned that he was feeling unwell, Michelle always told him that “he probably had COVID and to stay away from the grandkids,” despite knowing full well that she was poisoning him.