Denver — 

Colorado dentist James Craig fatally poisoned his wife in 2023 because of his growing financial troubles and his affair with another woman, prosecutors alleged in opening statements of his murder trial Tuesday.

Prosecutor Ryan Brackley said the evidence will show Craig, 47, poisoned his wife, Angela, in March 2023 with a mix of arsenic, cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, a medication commonly found in eyedrops. Once she was in the hospital, he filled a pill with cyanide and made sure she took it, killing her, according to the prosecution.

“He didn’t go into that room to save Angela’s life,” Brackley said. “He didn’t go into that room to fight for her life or support her. He went into that room to murder her, to deliberately and intentionally end her life with a fatal dose of cyanide.”

In contrast, defense attorney Ashley Whitham said investigators had “tunnel vision” and argued the case against him was based on “speculation and assumptions.” Craig had multiple affairs throughout their 23-year marriage, she said, so the prosecution’s motive did not make sense.

“You may not like him, you may not think he’s a good husband. But that’s not what you’re here to decide,” Whitham said.

She also noted Angela Craig had said she was “broken” and “struggling,” implying to the jury that her death may have been a suicide.

The opening statements in Craig’s trial come more than two years after Angela Craig died on March 18, 2023. She had been admitted to local hospitals three times in 10 days leading up to her death. She was 43 years old, and the couple had six children.

The Arapahoe County coroner ruled her cause of death was acute cyanide and tetrahydrozoline poisoning, with subacute arsenic poisoning listed as a significant condition.

Prosecutors have also accused Craig of plotting to kill four others, including the lead detective investigating his wife’s death.

Craig has pleaded not guilty to charges including first-degree murder, solicitation to commit first-degree murder, solicitation to commit tampering with physical evidence and solicitation to commit perjury.

After opening statements, the first two witnesses in the trial testified for the prosecution Tuesday.

Dr. Ashley Peko, a physician who treated Angela Craig, testified that she performed a “suicide screening” on her in the hospital and she was “negative for concerns for suicidality.”

In opening statements, Brackley walked jurors through three key timelines he said converged in the case.

One focused on Angela Craig’s health issues and the multiple hospital trips from March 6, 2023, until her death about two weeks later. A second timeline looked at Craig’s growing romantic relationship with a Texas woman named Karin Cain. Craig met Cain at a dental convention in February 2023 and he told her he was amid a divorce, she previously told ABC News. “If I had known what was true, I would not have been with this person,” Cain said.

The third timeline examined Craig’s alleged orders of poisonous materials.

Prosecutors said Craig began to carry out a plan to end his wife’s life shortly before her first hospitalization.

Craig created a new email account on February 27, 2023, from a computer in an exam room at his dental office, a probable cause affidavit states. He used the account that same day to order arsenic on Amazon after conducting searches including “how many grams of pure arsenic will kill a human,” and “Top 5 Undetectable Poisons That Show No Signs of Foul Play,” the document says. A delivery confirmation shows the arsenic arrived at the Craig home on March 4.

Two days later, Angela was admitted to a hospital complaining of dizziness, an inability to focus her eyes and sluggish physical responses, according to the affidavit. She was discharged the same day.

Text messages between the couple, included in the document, show Angela told her husband the only thing she had consumed that morning was her protein shake. She denied feeling nauseated when he asked, and texted him, “I feel drugged.”

“Given our history I know that must be triggering,” Craig wrote back. “Just for the record, I didn’t drug you.”

The message was an apparent reference to an incident years prior when Craig allegedly drugged his wife to prevent her from stopping his attempt to commit suicide, one of Angela Craig’s sisters told investigators, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Angela was hospitalized again from March 9 until March 14 and appeared to have consumed another protein shake before that hospitalization, text messages from the affidavit indicate.

In a text conversation on March 10, James Craig told a family friend, “Yesterday, the only thing she had was a protein shake in the morning which she threw up,” along with soup for dinner which she also vomited, screenshots from the court document show.

On March 13, while Angela was admitted for her second hospital stay, investigators allege an online order of potassium cyanide was delivered to Craig’s dental practice. Craig told the company from which he placed an order that he needed it for a complex surgical procedure, but he told an office manager he would be receiving a personal package and not to open it, the affidavit says.

The office manager told investigators the package was inadvertently opened by another employee and she saw a packing slip labeled “potassium cyanide” before resealing the box, according to the document.

Investigators also uncovered “sexually explicit” email exchanges between Craig and Cain, who traveled from Texas to Colorado to visit Craig while his wife was hospitalized, the affidavit says.

Angela was admitted to the hospital for the final time on March 15. About three hours after arriving, she had a seizure and unexplained rapid medical decline, which led to her being placed on life support in the hospital’s intensive care unit, the affidavit says. She was pronounced dead three days later.

Brackley, the prosecutor, said in opening statements the government was not required to prove the motive for the jury to reach a guilty verdict.

While Craig was in jail awaiting trial in his wife’s death, prosecutors say he plotted to kill four people, including the lead detective investigating her death.

Craig tried to convince a fellow inmate to kill the detective, another unidentified law enforcement officer and two other inmates, prosecutors said during a February preliminary hearing introducing two additional criminal charges.

Craig also allegedly wrote letters to the inmate’s ex-wife, trying to convince her to “fabricate evidence,” prosecutors told the court. In one of the letters, Craig indicated he believed his case hinged on “being able to find someone to say Angela was suicidal,” an investigator testified.

Law enforcement intercepted two letters to the woman offering her money to manufacture texts, phone records and photographs to back up a story about her being friends with Angela Craig – a story prosecutors say he wanted to sell to both the district attorney’s office and Craig’s own defense attorney at the time.

That attorney, Harvey Steinberg, had abruptly withdrawn from the case last November, the day jury selection was set to begin. At the time of his withdrawal, Steinberg cited two rules of professional conduct, according to prosecutors.

The first states, “The client persists in a course of action involving the lawyer’s services that the lawyer reasonably believes is criminal or fraudulent,” and the second says, “The client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant or with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement.”

Steinberg has not responded to requests for comment.

Craig had told several people Angela was suffering suicidal ideations leading up to her death, according to the affidavit.

Craig’s dental partner, Ryan Redfearn, told investigators when he brought up the potassium cyanide purchase, Craig initially denied it, then recanted, “but claimed Angela asked him to order it,” the affidavit says.

Craig told Redfearn he “didn’t think (Angela) would actually take it,” according to the affidavit, at which point Redfearn told him to “stop talking and get a lawyer.”

A case worker with child protective services described a similar conversation to investigators, the document says.

Craig told her Angela had been suicidal “for some time,” and he believed she had been “intentionally overdosing on opioids and another unknown substance,” according to the document.

The social worker told investigators the statements were concerning because Craig never reported the incidents nor tried to get medical help, and none of the couple’s six children mentioned their mother suffered from depression.