Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 8:20 on the night of March 7, 2023, a camera in a kitchen in Aurora, Colorado, recorded a woman furious at her husband.
Angela Craig was 43, a mother of six. For two days she had been going in and out of medical care, weak and dizzy, and no one could tell her why. Worse, doctors had started treating her differently because of things her husband had said.
“It’s your fault they treated me like a suicide risk,” she told him, “like I did it to myself, and like nothing I said could be believed.”
Then she said something that is very hard to listen to now.
“Nobody in their right mind would ever think I would kill myself before I killed you. Nobody.”
The man in the kitchen was James Craig, a well-known dentist in Aurora and her husband of more than 20 years. Eleven days later, Angela would be dead.
The camera kept recording. He may never have realized it.
“I feel drugged”
From the outside, the Craigs looked like a big, happy family. Prosecutors would later say that James had been cheating for most of the marriage.
It started on the morning of March 6. Angela drank the protein shake James made her, part of their routine. He was at work when she texted him that her eyes wouldn’t focus.
“I feel drugged,” she wrote.
“Just for the record,” he wrote back, “I didn’t drug you.”
He took her to the emergency room. Doctors sent her home. The next day she went to urgent care and was sent home again. On March 9, after another morning shake, she was admitted to the hospital. Nobody could work out what was wrong.
All this time James was texting other people. One was Karin Cain, a dentist from Texas he had met at a conference in Las Vegas in late February. He told her that his wife was in the hospital, and he sent her a line that would sound very different later.
“Just for the record, I will never drug you.”
He also wrote to the wife of his business partner about the illness no one could solve.
“If it wasn’t my wife, this would be kind of a fun puzzle to try to work out!”
The kitchen
Angela was discharged on March 14 with no diagnosis. That evening, according to the timeline laid out at trial, James made her another protein shake.
The kitchen camera shows him at the counter in a white T-shirt with a shaker that has a pink top.
Lab tests later found poison in that pink-topped container.
The next morning she was much sicker. At 11:08 she arrived at UCHealth Anschutz.
Something else had been happening at his dental office.
On March 13 a package had arrived there. James had told his office manager he was expecting something personal and that nobody should open it. A staff member opened it anyway. The office manager, closing it back up, saw the label on the canister inside.
When Angela got worse, the employee looked up her symptoms online. What she read made her call James’s business partner, Dr. Ryan Redfearn, on the way to the hospital.
At the hospital that afternoon, a security camera filmed James Craig coming out of a bathroom with something in his hand.
He went into his wife’s room. Less than a minute later he was telling staff she had pain in her arm. On the video he puts his hands on his head and wipes his eyes as staff rush in to help her.
Angela had a seizure and her vital signs crashed. Before the day was over she was on life support. She never woke up.
The jury would be shown what the camera had caught in his hand.
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