What was in the package
The label on the canister said potassium cyanide.
Redfearn did not believe the tears he saw at the hospital. He pulled a nurse aside and told her about the package. She was required by law to report it, and she called the police. Within hours Aurora’s homicide unit was on the case, while Angela was still alive.
James told Redfearn the package was a ring for Angela. Redfearn said someone had seen the container. Then the story changed: Angela had asked him to order it, James said, but he “didn’t think she… would actually take it.”
Redfearn told him to stop talking and get a lawyer.
Police went to the Craig home that night. Body camera video released after the trial shows officers telling family and friends in the front yard that the house was now a crime scene. James at first seemed willing to go in and talk. Then he said it would have to wait until he had an attorney.
On a computer in Exam Room 9 at the practice, investigators found what had been going on. An email account had been created there on February 27. It had been used to search “how to make murder look like a heart attack” and “how long does it take to die from arsenic poisoning,” and for a fatal dose of tetrahydrozoline, the active ingredient in eye drops.
Arsenic had been delivered to the house on March 4. The cyanide was ordered on March 8, two days into her illness. Nineteen packages of eye drops were bought on his credit card over two nights.
Angela was declared brain dead at 4:29 p.m. on March 18. James told her sister he did not want an autopsy. If doctors couldn’t figure it out while she was alive, he said, he would not let them “poke her more.”
The autopsy found lethal levels of cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, and toxic levels of arsenic.
On March 19, hours after she was taken off life support, James Craig was arrested for murder.
58 seconds
Part of the case came from the hospital’s own lab work.
A blood sample taken at 11:50 that morning showed cyanide. A sample taken at 8:21 that night showed more than twice as much, even though she had been in the hospital all day. Prosecutors said that pointed to a second dose, given inside the hospital.
That was why they played the bathroom video. The thing in his hand, they said, was a syringe loaded with cyanide. They said he injected it into her IV line. KUSA 9NEWS, which obtained the footage, put his time in the room at 58 seconds.
The copy released to the public is grainy. The defense said the images were blurry and that the needles police recovered held no poison. But the reporter who covered every day of the trial said the image shown in court was clearer, and “it looked like a syringe.”
The letter
James Craig spent more than two years in jail waiting for trial, and he did not spend it quietly.
A former cellmate, Nathanial Harris, testified that James asked him to “source out somebody” to kill Detective Bobbi Olson, the lead investigator on the case.
The cruelest moment came from his own daughter. She told the jury he had sent her a handwritten letter from jail with step-by-step instructions. She was to buy a cheap laptop, pay with a prepaid gift card, and create a deepfake video of her dead mother, saying she had asked James to order the poisons so she could take her own life. Then she was to destroy the laptop and tell detectives she had found the video on a thumb drive in her mother’s bag.
She did none of it. She took the letter to the police.
“A path of destruction”
The trial opened in Arapahoe County in July 2025. The defense argued that Angela had taken her own life, and that nobody could prove who put the poison in those shakes.
“Twenty-some years of him cheating on Angela Craig,” his lawyer told the jury. “He broke her.”
Prosecutor Michael Mauro answered that head on.
“Angela Craig is innocent,” he said. “She had no part in her death, and the only person who says otherwise, is this man.”
On July 30, 2025, the jury found James Craig guilty of first-degree murder and five other counts, including trying to have the detective killed.
He said nothing before he was sentenced. Judge Shay Whitaker gave him life without parole, plus 33 years.
“Dr. Craig unleashed a path of destruction as wide as a tornado and just as devastating,” she said.
One of his sons thanked the judge. “You’ve been really important to me and my siblings,” he said.
Six children lost their mother. Their father will spend the rest of his life in prison.
