An Almost Perfect Murder (7 page)

As the Reno Police Department continued its probe of Kathy Augustine’s sudden and untimely death, the state’s Division of Investigations, which falls under the domain of the Nevada Department of Public Safety, began helping them out at their request by conducting inquiries at the state capitol. The fact that they undertook that part of the investigation, which was responsible for interviews within the controller’s office, while at the same time looking for any potential evidence there, somewhat explained their requested involvement. It seemed to an outsider looking in that the RPD officials did not want to step on any toes at the state level by appearing to move outside their jurisdictional boundaries. Even though there was some overlap and duplication of efforts, everyone hoped that the involvement of the Division of Investigations might turn up something significant that might otherwise inadvertently get overlooked, due to the implied jurisdictional boundaries, since Kathy’s office, as well as those with whom she worked, was located at the state capitol, which was in Carson City, not Reno. According to the governor’s spokesman, the state investigators would also be looking into whether anything was missing from Kathy’s office.

According to Steve Frady, spokesman for the Reno Police Department, the death investigation was still being looked at as “noncriminal,” and that “no one has been identified as a suspect or a person of interest.” At least, that’s what they were releasing to the public days after Kathy’s death. Frady reiterated that the coroner’s office had ordered the autopsy on Kathy’s body due to the fact that her medical history was not sufficient to explain her sudden death. The police wouldn’t say publicly at that time whether Chaz Higgs was a suspect in her death, but spouses usually are at the top of the list of potential suspects in murder cases, until they can be ruled out. But the cops in this case were being careful not to use the term “murder” loosely—at this point, they were officially only investigating a suspicious death. Nonetheless, the fact that the police would not release Higgs’s 911 telephone call to the public, because it was being used as part of the investigation, was an indicator that things were heating up as far as Higgs was concerned.

 

 

On Friday morning, July 14, 2006, police and paramedics were called to Kathy Augustine’s 5,500-square-foot three-bedroom house on the 1400 block of Maria Elena Drive, just off East Charleston and Maryland Parkway. The large two-story house, with three pillars in front, is situated at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in one of Las Vegas’s swankier, older neighborhoods, only a few miles from where the state maintained a second controller’s office at the Grant Sawyer building, where Kathy had often performed her duties. Kathy’s daughter, Dallas Augustine, met the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) officers and the paramedics when they arrived, and led them to a bedroom inside the house, where they found Chaz Higgs bleeding from wounds on his wrists.

According to Metro Police reports, sometime the previous evening, Higgs had locked himself inside one of the bedrooms of the home, which he had shared with Kathy, by tying the door shut with a necktie. He purportedly drank two bottles of alcohol and had taken some pills, the specifics of which were not publicly released. At approximately ten-thirty the next morning, Dallas went to his bedroom to check on him, but he would not, or could not, respond to Dallas, who had urged him to come out. Concerned about his welfare, Dallas kicked open the bedroom door where she found Higgs, unconscious and bloody. Although Chaz Higgs was dressed in a suit, Dallas could see that he had slit his wrists. She found a suicide note inside the room, and it was later determined that he had used a razor blade to open his veins.

Unconscious, Higgs was bandaged up and rushed to University Medical Center, about two miles away, where he was admitted through the emergency department. When he regained consciousness, he told his nurses that he wanted “to die to be with my wife.” Although people who attempt suicide can be held for observation for up to seventy-two hours without a court order, Higgs was patched up and released that same day after being evaluated by the hospital’s psychiatric department. Although his note was kept under wraps, Dallas Augustine confirmed to reporters that “it was a suicide note. It wasn’t a confession.”

In Higgs’s suicide note, he began by greeting the media and asked them to “please continue the investigation against Brian Krolicki, Mark DeStefano, and Bob Seale. These are the people that ruined my wife’s life. Please don’t let this die with me.” He addressed his brother-in-law Phil Alfano and Dallas Augustine in the suicide note, and said good-bye to his young daughter, who lived in Las Vegas with her mother. He signed off by saying,
I’m going to Heaven to be with my wife.

Higgs later spoke to CBS News reporters and told them that he had tried to kill himself because he was despondent over Kathy’s death. He described how he had slashed his wrists.

“I actually did it over and over, because I wanted to make sure,” Higgs told CBS. “I laid down and said, ‘Good, now I can be with my wife.’ And that was the last thing I remember.... I was hurting. I just couldn’t handle the pain anymore. I loved my wife. And I just couldn’t believe that she was taken away from me.”

When asked if he thought the police were looking at him as a suspect, he acknowledged that he thought they were, but he indicated that he could not understand how people believed he had something to do with her death.

“I asked for the autopsy,” Higgs said at one point. “I want to clear it up. My wife was a healthy fifty-year-old woman who dropped dead. I want to find out what happened. People don’t know what went on in our home. She was frazzled and stressed-out.”

Higgs indicated that he welcomed the police investigation into his wife’s death, but was bothered by all of the foul-play speculation that was being bounced around. Higgs said that he believed that the police were ignoring other potential suspects and were instead focusing on him. He said that because his wife was controversial, she had made a lot of enemies. Higgs claimed that he had nothing to gain financially from Kathy’s death, because she had left her entire estate to her daughter, Dallas.

When asked to comment about Chaz Higgs’s attempted suicide, Governor Kenny Guinn said, “You never know what goes through another person’s mind.” He said that he would wait until the investigation into Kathy’s death had been completed before making additional statements.

 

 

A traditional Catholic funeral for Kathy Augustine was held the following day, Saturday, July 15, 2006, at the Guardian Angel Cathedral located on Cathedral Way and Las Vegas Boulevard, the famed “Strip,” where about two hundred mourners showed up to pay their last respects. Besides Kathy’s family, among those in attendance were Governor Kenny Guinn, Representative Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, and Secretary of State Dean Heller. Although none of her family members spoke during the service, several people who had known her offered words of praise.

“I never thought in a hundred years I’d be here standing before you for the funeral of Kathy Augustine,” said Reverend Mike Keliher. “The sudden and unexpected death of Kathy Augustine confronts us all.”

Lonnie Hammargren, former lieutenant governor and retired neurosurgeon, known as a colorful personality around Las Vegas, described Kathy as spunky and feisty, and said that he was still considering voting for her for state treasurer. Her name was still on the ballot, and would not be removed due to the fact that May 22, 2006, had been the last date in which a candidate could have their name removed from the ballot. Hammargren also said that he believed that Higgs was only grieving and was not really suicidal when he slit his wrists.

“Nurses know you can’t kill yourself by slashing your wrists,” Hammargren said.

One person who was not in attendance at the funeral was Kathy’s husband, Chaz Higgs. A private burial followed the funeral. Since it was closed to the public, it was not immediately known whether Higgs was in attendance.

 

 

Two days later, Greg Augustine, thirty-six, Kathy’s stepson, publicly stated that he believed his stepmother’s death was suspicious, and that he had a lot of unanswered questions about the death of his father, Charles Augustine, that would not go away.

“He was getting better,” Greg said, “and then suddenly all his organs failed. There never was an autopsy.”

He said that depending upon how the toxicology tests being conducted by the FBI turned out, he and his family had begun looking into what it would take to get his father’s body exhumed to have similar toxicology tests performed on his remains. He indicated that he was suspicious because Higgs had been his father’s critical care nurse at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center and had married his stepmother three weeks after his father suddenly died. But he was also quick to not rush to any unfounded conclusions.

“A person is innocent until proven guilty,” he said. “But I am not surprised that he tried to kill himself. . . . I have complete confidence the truth will be revealed.”

However, he said that if it turned out that his stepmother had not died as a result of natural causes, his family was prepared to move forward with their plans to get his father’s body exhumed.

Greg Augustine, along with additional family members, urged restraint on the part of the news media and the public in general to avoid speculation, which had been rampant, about Kathy Augustine’s death. Similarly, Dallas Augustine asked through an intermediary that inference and speculation should be avoided to give investigators time to do their jobs properly.

“She just lost her mother,” said her spokesperson. “All of it is so shocking to her. When the autopsy (toxicology report) is released, she will make comments at an appropriate time.”

 

 

It is fairly common knowledge among homicide investigators that when one spouse kills another for whatever reason—be it for financial gain or because of an impending threat of divorce, or any number of other reasons—the suspect will often attempt to divert attention or suspicion away from himself by acting the part of the grieving husband or wife. After having planned and carried out the murder, the suspect will often set himself up to play the part of a victim as well in an attempt to make himself appear sympathetic to the family and the cops investigating the murder. Sometimes this is accomplished by attempting suicide.

Was Chaz Higgs’s suicide attempt genuine, done because he was grieving over his wife’s death? Or had he slit his wrists to divert attention away from himself? Jenkins didn’t know at this point, nor did anyone else—except Chaz Higgs.

After Chaz Higgs’s suicide attempt, he appeared to disappear from public view. He had not attended his wife’s funeral in Las Vegas, nor had he attended a memorial service for her in Carson City. No one had seen him at the house he had shared with Kathy in Las Vegas, and the vertical blinds on the front side of the house had remained closed. Neighbors had not seen any vehicles coming to or going from the house, and there had not been any cars parked in the driveway in recent days. Higgs had not returned telephone calls to reporters for Las Vegas newspapers, some of whom had left notes at the Las Vegas home, and telephone calls to the home in Reno had also gone unanswered. Similarly, the police in Reno had not had any contact with Higgs for several days. Although it seemed that Higgs had vanished, Reno police did not seem particularly concerned because there was not any evidence that a crime had been committed, and Higgs was officially not a suspect in his wife’s death. And if the toxicology tests being conducted by the FBI came back negative, the case would be closed, according to Lieutenant Jon Catalano.

Nonetheless, as Detective David Jenkins continued looking into Chaz Higgs’s background, an interesting picture of the grieving husband began to emerge. Jenkins learned that Higgs had been living inside a small travel trailer in a Boulder Highway trailer park in Las Vegas when he had met Kathy Augustine while he worked as a critical care nurse at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center. Jenkins also knew that Kathy and Charles Augustine had planned a trip to Hawaii in 2003, but when Charles died and Kathy began seeing Higgs, she had asked him to go with her instead. The detective turned up information indicating that it may have been
after
they had arrived in the islands that Kathy had asked Higgs to marry her—despite the fact that she barely knew him. Of course, he had readily accepted, and they tied the knot while there.

When Charles Augustine died, he left Kathy the Las Vegas home they purchased on Maria Elena Drive in 1990 for approximately $350,000, which had a value of nearly $1 million at the time of his death, along with a $1 million insurance policy on his life. Financially, he had left her in very good shape. For whatever reason, Kathy had not placed her new husband on the deeds to either of her properties.

When Kathy’s friends found out about the marriage, they told her that she was crazy. And when some of them met him, they could see that, yes, he was handsome, and he was buff. He didn’t talk much, and many of Kathy’s friends felt that he was self-centered and totally into himself. None of her friends could understand why Kathy would marry someone like Chaz Higgs, and they certainly hadn’t liked him.

“Chaz couldn’t even pay his bills,” said one of Kathy’s friends. “We all wanted her to get a living trust. We didn’t want him to drain her of everything she had.... She kicked him out once, and then took him back. She talked frequently about divorcing him.”

Jenkins also learned that Higgs had three wives prior to Kathy, and each of them characterized Higgs in much the same way that Kathy’s friends had sized him up. In addition to appearing to be someone who was always finding himself getting into whirlwind marriages, Higgs was also financially irresponsible. He was known to run up considerable credit card debt, and had filed for bankruptcy twice before meeting Kathy Augustine.

Along with his twin brother, Higgs was born on June 2, 1964, and grew up in Virginia and North Carolina. The two boys were raised by their father, William “Bill” Higgs, who was in the U.S. Marines, and they moved around a lot because of their father’s military affiliation. As far as Jenkins had been able to determine, Higgs’s childhood had not been particularly remarkable. When he was nineteen, shortly after graduation from high school, Higgs enlisted in the navy, where he remained for the next sixteen years. It was while training as a corpsman at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, that Higgs met his first wife. The couple was married on September 15, 1984.

His first wife described him as athletic, someone who enjoyed weight lifting and bodybuilding and, like Kathy’s friends, said that he was very much into himself. At one point during their short marriage, Higgs’s wife caught him in bed with another young woman inside their home. Although she had attempted to make their marriage work despite Higgs’s infidelity, he couldn’t remain faithful to her. In 1985, shortly after transferring to Jacksonville, Florida, Higgs began an affair with a married woman who had an infant child. After divorcing his first wife, Higgs eventually married the woman with whom he had been having an affair, following her divorce from her husband. It was in 1989, while still living in Florida, that Higgs filed his first bankruptcy. Following his marriage to wife number two, Higgs legally adopted her infant child.

In the autumn of 1990, Higgs had received a transfer to San Diego, California, where he was to report for duty on a medical ship. His second wife had opted to get out of the navy so that she could be a full-time mother to her child. While on their way to San Diego, Higgs left his wife in Las Vegas, a 5½-hour drive to his duty station. She found work as an apartment manager near the Strip, and the two seldom saw each other afterward. They were divorced in the summer of 1992, and Higgs was ordered to pay $400 per month in child support for his adopted child.

For the next few years, Higgs remained single, until he was transferred for duty in Manama, Bahrain, where he remained from July 1993 to February 1997. While stationed in Bahrain, however, Higgs met the woman who would eventually become his third wife. She was the mother of a two-year-old child. While it wasn’t clear where the marriage occurred, public records show that Higgs and his third wife filed for bankruptcy on October 29, 1998, in Alexandria, Virginia, a year and a half after returning from overseas.

Higgs was discharged from the navy on March 1, 1999, after sixteen years of service. At the time of his discharge, he was an E-6, the rank of a medical corpsman. After his discharge, Higgs and his third wife relocated to Louisville, Tennessee. They didn’t remain there long. That same year, they moved to Las Vegas. Possessing an associate’s degree in nursing, Higgs continued his education by taking courses from the University of Phoenix via the Internet, where he reportedly received a bachelor of science and a doctoral degree. Higgs and his third wife divorced at some point during the time that they lived in Las Vegas, where both remained afterward.

Armed with his degrees, Higgs took the examination for his nursing license in Nevada in 2002, passed it, and went to work a short time later at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, where he met Kathy Augustine, who would become wife number four.

At some point, Higgs changed his birth name, William Charles Higgs, to Chaz Higgs, because he thought that Chaz was a more fashionable name and sounded trendier. Because there were no public records documenting a legal name change, it could not be determined when or where the name change occurred, or if it had actually been done legally.

In the midst of all of the questions and uncertainties about his past, one thing stood at the forefront: Chaz Higgs was a real piece of work.