Angela Craig and the poisoned protein shakes

What happened

Angela Craig was 43, married for 23 years and the mother of six children when she started getting sick in March 2023. She was dizzy. She had headaches. Doctors in the Denver suburbs ran tests and found no cause, and sent her home.

It kept happening. She went to the hospital three times that month. After the first visit, a home security camera in the family’s kitchen recorded her confronting her husband, James, a dentist. She was furious that hospital staff had treated her like a suicide risk, and she blamed him for suggesting it.

Prosecutors would later say that James Craig was the reason she was sick. They said he had been poisoning her protein shakes for about 10 days, that he had bought arsenic online around the time her symptoms began, and that he searched online for how to make a murder look like a heart attack.

The cyanide

On March 13, 2023, an employee at Craig’s dental practice in Aurora opened a rush shipment of potassium cyanide. Prosecutors say Craig had ordered it, claiming it was for surgery. Two days later, as Angela went back to the hospital for the third time, the employee told the office manager.

Craig’s business partner, Ryan Redfearn, told a nurse treating Angela that he was worried she had been poisoned with the cyanide. The nurse called police, and detectives opened an investigation that same day.

It was already too late. According to evidence shown at trial, hospital security images captured Craig holding a syringe before he walked into his wife’s room. Prosecutors said he gave her the fatal dose through her IV, walked out, and texted a fellow dentist he was having an affair with. Her condition collapsed and she was declared brain dead. The coroner found she died of poisoning from cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, a chemical found in over-the-counter eye drops.

From jail

Craig was charged with first-degree murder. From jail, prosecutors said, he kept working on his case in the worst possible way. He tried to get a fellow inmate to plant forged letters in his home to make Angela look suicidal. Another inmate said Craig offered him $20,000 to kill the lead detective. He wrote to that inmate’s ex-wife offering money for anyone willing to testify falsely that Angela had planned to die. He asked one of his daughters to make a fake video of her mother asking to be poisoned.

The trial

The trial opened in July 2025 in Arapahoe County District Court in Centennial. Craig’s defense suggested Angela had taken her own life, and his version was that he had helped her after telling her he wanted a divorce over his affairs. His attorneys argued police had locked onto him too early. Craig did not testify, and the defense called no witnesses.

On July 30, 2025, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and of the charges tied to faking evidence and the plot against the detective. Judge Shay Whitaker sentenced him to life without parole, the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder in Colorado.

Before the sentence, Angela’s family spoke. Her oldest daughter said her father was supposed to be her hero. Her son said that two weeks after his mother died he set a phone alarm for 10 p.m. every night, labeled Mom, and it still goes off. After court, the two families, who had sat on opposite sides of the room, hugged.