On the morning of Saturday, July 21, 2018, Lana Clayton ran out of her house, claiming that she found her husband, Steve Clayton, dead at the bottom of the staircase in their South Carolina home. The coroner initially believed that Steve’s death was a result of a heart attack, but as time went by, his family began to notice that Lana was acting strangely. This prompted further investigation which shifted the whole picture in another direction.
Steve Clayton was a highly successful man who retired a millionaire in his early 40s after he sold his successful physical therapy business. Despite his immense professional success, Steve’s personal life was not quite as smooth & by 2013 when he was 59, he had been married & divorced six times. According to his family, Steve loved being loved, but it didn’t always work out in his favor. Those that knew & loved him described Steve as an incredibly driven, intelligent & charismatic person who was kind, loving & caring.
In the 1980s, Steve worked as an accountant, but went on to create a physical therapy business that focused on sports injuries. When he sold the business at age forty, he was financially set & ready to enjoy his life.
In 2010, Steve was immediately drawn to a woman he met online. Lana was a nurse from Oklahoma & he felt that she had a very caring spirit. The two went on to marry in 2015 in Charlotte, North Carolina, this being Lana’s second marriage.
By 2018, the couple had been married for three years & they were living in a gorgeous, waterfront mansion in Lake Wylie, South Carolina & from the outside, they seemed to be truly living their best lives.
Steve & Lana loved hosting lavish parties at their home, especially on the fourth of July. They would invite all of their close friends & family, have live music & they would end the night with a spectacular fireworks show. However, shortly after another wonderful fourth of July party, Steve’s golden years of retirement came to a tragic & sudden end on Saturday, July 21, 2018.
James Blackledge, a Vietnam Vet, just happened to be out riding his motorcycle past the Clayton’s home when he noticed a woman running across her yard, waving her arms in an attempt to flag him down. When he stopped, she immediately told him to call 911 & when he did, he told the dispatcher the situation, explaining that the woman indicated that her husband fell down the stairs & she believed that he was dead.
As James remained on the line with the dispatcher, he watched as Lana turned & ran across the street in the direction of a neighbor’s house. This was when Terry Floyd, who was a close friend of Steve & Lana’s, heard a sudden, loud knock on her screen door & saw Lana standing there. When Terry tried to figure out what was going on, Lana could only manage to repeat, It’s Steve.
Terry & Lana immediately jumped into Terry’s golf cart & rushed back to the Clayton’s front door. When they got inside, Terry asked where Steve was & Lana explained that he was at the base of the stairs in the foyer. As Terry rushed to his side, she tried to get a pulse & when she didn’t find one, she realized that Steve, who was 64-years-old, was dead.
Meanwhile as Lana sat on the front steps of the home, she explained that Steve had come down with a case of vertigo three days earlier & had basically been bedridden throughout that time with symptoms of extreme nausea & dizziness. Their bedroom sat on the second floor of the home & Lana indicated that she’d last checked on him at about 11 am that morning. He was sound asleep, so she decided to go outside to mow the lawn, but before she did, she made sure to leave water, medication & anything else he would potentially need, near his bedside, within his reach. Since Lana worked as a nurse, she was well versed on caring for those who were ill.
In the wake of Steve’s sudden & tragic death, neighbors gathered around Lana, consoling her until the York County Sheriff’s Deputies arrived. As they arrived at the mansion, they found Lana understandably distressed. She voiced her feelings of guilt for going outside to tend to the yard rather than keeping a closer eye on Steve, knowing he had been so ill.
Word of Steve’s death quickly spread & soon, his nephew, Nick French, rushed to the mansion. Nick was a police officer in a nearby town & when he arrived at the home, Lana ran to him in tears. Nick was shocked & saddened at the sight of his vibrant uncle, dead at the bottom of the steps.
The coroner, Sabrina Gast, was contacted about Steve’s death shortly after 1 pm & a deputy coroner responded to the home. They found nothing suspicious & assumed that Steve likely died of natural causes, possibly a heart attack. There were no bruises or abrasions on his body which made it clear that the fall had not been the cause of his death.
Because Nick French was a police officer, he had a keen eye & very quickly began to notice some red flags as he remained at the Clayton’s home that day. First of all, he knew that the home had two phones inside which was why he couldn’t wrap his head around why Lana had run from the house, wasting critical time to flag a stranger down to call 911 rather than calling herself. He also couldn’t understand why Lana, of all people, who was a nurse, was not actively doing CPR on Steve when first responders arrived at the scene. Lana later claimed that because of Steve’s large stature in relation to her small stature, she had been unable to move him to his back to do CPR. Steve stood at about 6’3” & was over 300#, so this seemed like a reasonable explanation at the time.
After these two thoughts clicked in his mind, he started taking mental notes. Steve was known to have his phone attached to him at all times, to the point that Nick jokingly called it his uncle’s lifeline, yet they weren’t able to find the phone anywhere. He also noticed that when the deputy coroner asked Lana about funeral arrangements, she told her, It’s just too much right now, I have no idea. With this, the deputy coroner made the decision to have Steve’s body transported to the morgue where they could run some tests.
Nick advised that this would be a good idea, but Lana’s uncertain demeanor immediately shifted & she decisively said that she would rather his body be transported to the local funeral home where Steve could be cremated. Nick couldn’t ignore just how quickly her decision had changed.
Nick wanted to contact Steve’s other nephew, Kris Phagan, to let him know that their uncle, who everyone adored, had sadly died. However, Lana insisted that she didn’t want Kris to see his uncle in such a state, but Nick was firm on the fact that he should know. With that, he walked upstairs to break the news to Kris, feeling in his gut that something about the situation just didn’t seem right. As more & more family members were notified of the terrible news, heartache & tears continued & those that loved Steve couldn’t believe he was gone.
After receiving the news of his uncle’s death, Kris contacted Steve’s sister Rosie, who lived in Florida. She indicated that she had been concerned about Steve for about three days before she was notified of his death. During those days, she had been trying to get ahold of him without any luck & because it wasn’t at all like him to be out of touch, she started to worry.
While Nick was making phone calls upstairs, he took notice of Steve & Lana’s bed which gave the appearance that his uncle had been fully confined to his bed for days, unable to get up. The picture he started to put together that day gave him a sense that his uncle’s death wasn’t as simple as it was being suggested.
When Nick addressed his concerns with Lana about the state of their bedroom & the fact that the bed was in disarray, he learned that his uncle had been bed bound for three days. Nick was stunned & saw that the bed was drenched in urine as Lana casually explained, Oh, Steve does that when he has vertigo – that happens. The extent of the urine was appalling to the extent that it had soaked through the bed & was puddling underneath, on the floor. Nick knew that there was no way that Steve would have ever willingly allowed this to happen.
In the meantime, amongst his grief, Kris recalled the good times he spent with his beloved uncle. He & Lana had only just thrown a fourth of July party at their home weeks before his death. There was a dance floor & fireworks, kids, people & dogs running all about.
Those that knew Lana & Steve saw them as a happy couple in love. They often showed affection & expressed their love of one another.
However, not everyone believed that their relationship was quite as good as they tried to portray it to be. The Clayton’s veterinarian, Dr. Nan Saye, took care of the Clayton’s dog’s at their mansion & believed it all to be a facade.
According to the doctor, she did not see a loving couple when she was with Steve & Lana & often wondered why they ever got married, indicating that Lana never spoke when Steve was in the room.
Even more concerning, in 2016, two years before Steve’s death, Lana accidentally shot him in the head with a crossbow while he was asleep in bed. Thankfully Steve’s injuries ended up being minor & he fully believed that it was a terrible accident so charges were never filed. Dr. Saye found the incident to be extremely strange & wondered why Lana had been handling a crossbow in the bedroom in the first place.
There was also the fact that two months before his death, Steve opened up to his nephew Kris & told him that there were issues within his marriage & felt that his relationship with Lana was in trouble. He mentioned that he wasn’t as happy as he imagined he would be with Lana.
When Kris arrived to the Clayton home on the terrible day that his uncle died, Lana asked if he could help with organizing Steve’s affairs. The first thing Kris wanted to do was find Steve’s will which outlined his wishes of whether he wanted to be buried or cremated. He was startled when Lana told him that Steve didn’t have a will, something he knew to be untrue since Steve had asked Kris to be the executor of his will. When Kris confronted her with this fact, Lana suddenly stood up & insisted that there was no will as she stomped into the house.
Already having the sense that something wasn’t right, Nick then overheard Lana telling outlandish stories as she stood in the kitchen. She spoke of Steve’s illicit drug use & specifically said that he was a hardcore drug user as she laughed & continued on with blatant lies. Both Kris & Nick knew this to be absolutely untrue; they’d known their uncle their entire lives & never once saw him under the influence of drugs.
With this story, she went on to say that she didn’t want an autopsy to be done because she worried about the results of the toxicology report & what dark secrets could emerge that could tarnish Steve’s reputation.
Soon, Lana demanded that everyone leave the home & as Kris climbed into his car with his wife, she immediately voiced that she believed that something was wrong. In the meantime, Nick was having a very similar conversation with his own wife about their concerns. They all believed that somehow & in some way, Lana had a role in their uncle’s death.
In the meantime, Steve’s sister Rosie was trying to wrap her head around how a simple bout of vertigo could lead to a fatal heart attack.
The day after Steve died was Sunday, July 22 & Kris & his wife were planning to help Lana locate Steve’s will until she called them & told them not to come to her home, saying, This is my house. He was my husband. I will handle everything. With that, she hung up on them.
At this point, Nick & his wife headed over to Kris’s house & were relieved that they were all on the same page with the belief that something just wasn’t right. They started by contacting the coroner’s office since Lana had arranged for Steve to be cremated the very next day. They demanded that before this be done, their uncle undergo an autopsy & a toxicology screen.
Lana was unaware of what they had done, but the autopsy soon confirmed that Steve had not died of a heart attack, although there were several health issues revealed that could have contributed to a natural death. Steve had an enlarged heart, gallbladder disease & congested lungs. However, when the toxicology report came back, rather than the hardcore drug use Lana spoke about, it showed the presence of a poison in Steve’s system. This finding was ruled the cause of Steve’s death, but at this point, it was unclear if they were dealing with an accidental overdose, a homicidal overdose or a suicide.
Coroner Sabrina Gast began to review Steve’s toxicology report & noted a chemical in his blood that she had never even heard of before, tetrahydrozoline, which is a common ingredient in eye drops such as Visine, as well as a number of other brands. Steve’s level was 68 nanograms per milliliter which is thirty times what would be normal had been using the eye drops therapeutically.
Tetrahydrozoline or THZ can be put into a person’s beverage without their knowledge in order to make them sick or incapacitated. Many think of the movie Wedding Crashers when Owen Wilson’s character emptied a bottle of eye drops into a drink, causing his intended victim extreme stomach cramping & diarrhea.
According to the Food & Drug Administration, when used as directed, these products are safe & meant to relieve eye irritation & get the red out by narrowing blood vessels. The FDA has warned that if ingested & not used as directed, it can lead to serious & life-threatening events. When ingested orally, THZ passes quickly through the gastrointestinal tract & rapidly reaches the bloodstream & the central nervous system.
Symptoms of an overdose of THZ can include altered mental status, drowsiness, respiratory issues, fast or slow heartbeat, nausea, vomiting to coma & death. If a full bottle of the eye drops are ingested, it can attack the respiratory system which becomes suppressed & can ultimately lead to death. Because it’s colorless, odorless & tasteless, a victim would have no idea that they’re ingesting the poisonous ingredient.
Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Visine made a statement in relation to the case, Using tetrahydrozoline on the surface of the eye has been demonstrated to be safe for self-use for over 50 years. Visine is clearly labeled for external use only & should never be swallowed.
Once Dr Gast had the results of Steve’s toxicology report, she immediately contacted the sheriff’s office to report her findings. Because they needed to get to the bottom of how the Visine got into Steve’s system, they started with contacting Lana for an interview.
As Lana sat down with the coroner at the sheriff’s office, the FBI was in the next room listening in. By this point, she was obviously aware of the fact that an autopsy had been performed on her husband. As Dr. Gast told Lana the results of the toxicology report & the findings of high levels of THZ, without hesitation, Lana knew that THZ was the ingredient in Visine.
When she was asked about his Visine use, she indicated that Steve would place two drops in his coffee since he’d been told that it would help him go to the bathroom, something he had been doing for years. This made absolutely no sense to Dr. Gast since it wasn’t something anyone would ever want to do. Like with any other medication, a user of eye drops should strictly follow the manufacturer’s directions which clearly indicate, should not be swallowed.
The detectives entered the interview room at this point, taking Lana by surprise. They informed her that they wanted to ask her some questions as she was read her Miranda rights. As she got to talking, she started to question if maybe Steve had tried to commit suicide since he had a mood disorder. She indicated that she was constantly walking on eggshells because Steve’s demeanor was often angry & nasty. She said he was verbally abusive & called her terrible names.
In regards to this statement, Steve’s family vehemently deny that he was ever an angry or irritable person. They had known him their entire lives & had never seen it for themselves or ever heard anything like that from anyone else.
The detectives asked Lana if she ever prepared Steve’s coffee for him & she said no, he always did it himself. She said he always had the Visine on him & she was asked if she’d seen it with him on the day he died, but she was unsure. Of course, detectives were aware that, according to Lana, Steve had been terribly sick & bedbound in the days before his death, unable to prepare his own coffee. When they pressed her on the fact that she was a nurse & should have been able to identify the effects of the Visine ingestion & the danger of ingestion, she claimed that she didn’t think it would be anything serious to his health.
Lana stopped the interview at this point & headed back to her house. Investigators obtained a warrant to search both her home & cell phone & while at the house, they continued their interview which was recorded. This time, Lana said that because Steve was sick, she set him up in their bedroom with supplies on a bedside table that included tissues, a urinal, medications & Visine. She said that she’d gotten extremely angry & squirted the entire bottle of Visine into Steve’s water while he was asleep. She elaborated that she wanted him to suffer because she was fed up with his constant demands. She claimed that she never intended to kill him, only to cause him the discomfort of diarrhea.
She went on to say that Steve was both verbally & physically abusive, claiming that he had hit her on several occasions. There was never any proof of this & again, the family maintained that this behavior was not at all in Steve’s character.
Iliana Ivanova had dated Steve for nearly three years before he met Lana & attested that he had only been loving & kind during their relationship. Investigators spoke with other former partners of Steve who also confirmed that he was never abusive in any way & some even still considered him the love of their life.
Police referenced back to the 2016 incident when Lana shot Steve with a crossbow while he slept in their bed. At this point, she admitted that this had not been an accident at all. She said that she was protecting herself & as he came at her, she picked it up & shot.
Investigators left Lana at the mansion & went to arrange an arrest warrant. This was when she attempted suicide by ingesting pills & turning the gas on. She wrote letters which indicated her remorse about poisoning her husband & stated that she could no longer live with herself.
A neighbor found Lana at the house that morning & called for assistance. Lana was transported to the hospital, quickly treated & taken into custody. Investigators believed that she had gradually begun to incapacitate Steve with increasing doses of the poison until it ramped up to a fatal dose. This would explain why Steve had been bedridden in the three days before he died. They wonder if, while Lana was out of the house tending to the lawn, he had enough clarity to get out of bed in an attempt to escape & save himself & sadly succumbed to the lethal doses of poison as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Because his phone was nowhere to be found, he was unable to call for help in time.
On August 31, 2018, a little over one month after Steve’s death, Lana was officially charged with her husband’s murder.
Steve’s family fully believe that Lana began planning his death as far back as 2016, two years earlier, when she convinced him to move from North Carolina to their current mansion in South Carolina. Lana continued to insist that Steve didn’t have a will & with his sudden death, she stood to inherit everything. Because neighbors reported seeing Lana burning a fire the day after he died, Steve’s family is sure that she destroyed his will at that time.
Only three weeks after Steve’s murder, investigators were notified of an eerily similar case 12 miles/19 kilometers away in Mount Holly, North Carolina. It was another death that was concluded to be a result of THZ poisoning from eye drops. The investigators associated with Steve’s case were contacted because it happened in the same way & in such close proximity & wondered if the suspect heard about Steve’s death & was inspired to do the same.
Stacy Hunsucker was a 32-year-old mother of two young children who was found dead by her husband, Joshua Hunsucker & just like with Steve, her death on September 23, 2018 was initially ruled as natural causes related to a heart attack. Stacy’s mom was immediately suspicious when her son-in-law quickly collected almost $250,000 from two of life insurance policies. Her mom contacted authorities on suspicion for possible insurance fraud that morphed into a full-blown murder investigation.
Stacy & Josh had been married for eight years at the time of her death & because the young mother suffered from heart issues & had a pacemaker, the idea of a fatal heart attack was reasonable. The two had been high school sweethearts; Stacy worked as a preschool teacher while Josh was a flight medic at a major hospital in the Charlotte area.
After Stacy’s death, Kailyn McDonald watched the couple’s two young children & observed that Josh never seemed sad about his young wife’s sudden death. He began dating a coworker, Jennifer Elkins & according to Kailyn, everything in Josh’s life was about Jen.
It was the fact that Josh moved forward in collecting the insurance money within as little as 48 hours after Stacy’s death that was the largest red flag for Suzie Robinson, Stacy’s mom. This did not sit well with her so she made the decision to contact the North Carolina Department of Insurance to start an investigation.
In May 2019, agents began looking into Stacy’s case; they discovered that her death was ruled to be from natural causes & her body had been cremated at the request of Josh. No autopsy had been done, also at the request of Josh who indicated that he didn’t want his wife cut up.
When agents discovered that Stacy had been an organ donor, they realized they had a break in the case. A vile of blood had been collected & stored before she was cremated which allowed for a toxicology screening. With this, they found a presence of THZ in a concentration that warranted further investigation.
On December 19, 2019, fifteen months after Stacy died, Josh was charged with her murder. Josh ended up receiving $200,000 in insurance money after Stacy’s death & his two coworkers came forward to say that he mentioned that if he were to ever kill someone, he would do so using eye drops. Allegations indicate that he had been putting quantities of the eye drops into his wife’s drinks over a period of time. After his arrest, he was released after posting a $1.5 million bond & had been wearing an ankle monitor & maintaining a curfew since.
Fast forward five years to 2024, Josh, who remained free on bail, was being accused of attempting to poison their 11-year-old daughter with the same substance, leading to her hospitalization. The 40-year-old allegedly put the eye drops in his then 10-year-old’s beverage on or around February 24, 2023 as THZ was found in her urine sample. A drug that is commonly prescribed for depression, but not approved for children, was also found in her blood. The drug was later found in his truck.
The 10-year-old was sent to the hospital after she began to suffer from low blood pressure & heart rate, extreme exhaustion & sleepiness as well as constricted blood vessels. He is being accused of poisoning his daughter in an attempt to implicate Stacy’s parents, John & Suzie Robinson, who are witnesses in Stacy’s case.
Prosecutors allege that while his daughter was undergoing treatment, he told medical professionals that it appeared she had been given eye drops. Lo & behold, the symptoms she was experiencing were correlated with an overdose of THZ.
Josh is also accused of threatening or attempting to intimidate the Robsinsons by sending a package to their home, filming & following them while out in public & driving by their church, making vulgar gestures while they were in the parking lot. He continues to demand that they drop the charges against him. He’s also being accused of staging his own kidnapping on or around February 4, 2023, claiming to have been pistol-whipped in the head multiple times while he was stopped on the side of the road to change a flat tire. He claimed that his hands were zipped tied & he was injected with an unknown substance by John Robinson. However, the Mount Holly Police Department found no evidence to support this claim.
Josh was also out on bond after he was charged with setting a fire on November 26, 2019 to a medical helicopter while he was working as a paramedic. This resulted in an emergency landing & could have resulted in many deaths. In relation to this case, he was indicted by a grand jury on September 7, 2021 & the case remains pending.
As investigators have learned of these two cases, they fear that homicidal poisonings have been going undetected because their symptoms do mimic natural illnesses & labs often don’t screen for them. Since THZ is readily available, colorless, odorless & tasteless, some feel that THZ should be part of a basic toxicology test.
Lana Clayton went on to plead guilty to tampering with food & drugs & voluntary manslaughter. Her defense team painted her as victim who was suffering PTSD as a result of ongoing sexual assault during her childhood which went unreported to authorities. Her defense team also indicated that during her time in the U.S. Air Force, she was raped by three servicemen, which was also never reported.
Lana claims that because Steve was constantly abusive, she wanted him to leave her alone, so on impulse, she squirted the bottle of Visine into his drink, only to make him sick & uncomfortable. She claims she’s never heard of Visine being deadly.
On January 16, 2020, Judge Burch sentenced Lana Clayton to 25 years in prison. Those that knew & loved Steve do not feel this was enough & continue to struggle with their loss. Lana has not been awarded any money from Steve’s estate
References:
- ABC 7: Man accused of poisoning daughter with eyedrops after allegedly killing wife same way
- CBS News: S.C. nurse who fatally poisoned husband with eye drops: “I just wanted him to suffer”
- CBS News: Did the misuse of a popular eye drop medication lead to homicide?
- Oxygen True Crime: ‘I squeezed it hard’: Wife emptied eye drops bottle into husband’s drink to poison him
- The New York Times: Woman used eye drops to kill husband, court says
- People: Man accused of poisoning 10-year-old daughter with eye drops after allegedly killing wife with the same substance: DA
