The journal
Rachel Staudte had written about it all.
The journal showed that she knew what was happening in the house, and that she had helped her mother research and plan how to poison her own family. Her diary showed she had known about the plan to poison her father at least two months before he died.
When detectives confronted Rachel with it, she confessed.
She told them that at first she had felt her brother’s death was unfair, and that her mother should have put him in assisted living instead. She also said she had not wanted to poison Shaun and Sarah, but had done it because her mother told her to.
Diane had told detectives she had acted alone. After Rachel’s confession, she changed her story. She said she and Rachel had planned, researched and carried out the poisonings together.
“I hated his guts”
The method was simple. Diane bought antifreeze and mixed it into drinks. She put it in her husband’s Gatorade. She put it in her children’s Coca-Cola.
Most antifreeze sold in stores contains a bittering agent, added so that children and pets will spit it out. The antifreeze Diane used had been bought online and had none. Ethylene glycol itself tastes sweet. In a sports drink or a soda, nobody would notice it.
In the interview room, she explained why.
Asked why she had not taken her husband to the hospital when he got sick, she said: “I hated his guts. I guess I’d just had enough.” She said Mark was lazy and threw things when he was angry.
Shaun, she said, “would be interfering with whatever I would do.” She called her son “more than a bother” and “more than a pest.”
Sarah was next because she would not get a job and had student loans that had to be paid, according to the probable cause statement.
And Sarah was not supposed to be the last. Rachel later told investigators the plan was to eventually poison the youngest girl in the family as well. She was 11 years old.
The charges
Within days, Diane and Rachel Staudte were charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Mark and Shaun, and with assault for poisoning Sarah. They were held without bond.
Sarah survived. But the poison left her with severe organ and brain damage. She needs a guardian and lives in assisted living. “I prefer to be a survivor than a victim,” she said later. She said she had forgiven her mother.
The youngest daughter was placed in foster care.
The pleas
In May 2015, Rachel Staudte pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and one count of first-degree assault. In exchange, she agreed to testify against her mother. In 2016 she was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole only after decades.
Diane Staudte never went to trial. In January 2016, she entered a plea to avoid a possible death sentence and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She is held at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri.
Both women later asked the courts to let them take back their pleas. Rachel said she had been afraid of men and had been coerced during her interviews. Both remain in prison.
Years later, from prison, Diane told ABC’s 20/20 that she had only said “what I was told to say,” and suggested someone else might have harmed her husband. She had never made those claims to police or to her own lawyers before. Detective McAmis said nothing in the evidence pointed to anyone else.
“There is nothing whatsoever,” he said, “to show that anybody was involved in this case other than those mentioned already.”
Sarah lived. Her father and her brother did not.
