It was a stunning moment as Cynthia Sommer walked out of jail a free woman. She's been cleared of murdering her Marine husband with arsenic so she could use his life insurance money to buy breast implants. Shockingly, it now turns out there was no poison found in his body after all.
"I knew all along that the testing was wrong and I was just waiting for that to come out," said Sommer, who was behind bars for over two years. In an interview after her release, Sommer said, "It's a hard thing to deal with, it's a hard thing to swallow, knowing that...I was facing life."
At her 2007 murder trial, prosecutors said arsenic levels one thousand times above normal were found in Sergeant Todd Sommer's body. But new test results show no traces at all. San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis told INSIDE EDITION she now believes the original results were contaminated by military doctors who performed the autopsy.
"Today justice was done, this is how the system is supposed to work," said District Attorney Dumanis at the press conference.
Sommer's husband collapsed at their home in 2002, and she made this frantic call to 911:
911 Operator: You have an emergency? Caller: Yeah, my husband just collapsed. Caller: Please don't do this to me. What am I going to do without you.
Prosecutors said that right after his death, she had breast implant surgery, began visiting strip clubs, and had affairs with several men, who were called as witnesses at her murder trial.
But Sommer, who acknowledged misjudgment in how she behaved after her husband's death, always maintained her innocence. In a jailhouse interview, she said, "If I could bring him back, I would."
Moments after her release, the mother of four spoke to one of her young daughters by cell phone, saying, "Hi, honey. I love you."
Now she'll start to pick up the pieces of her shattered life.
"I just want to go home," Sommer told reporters.
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