Eliot KleinbergConvicted of poisoning his third wife, he may have killed more.
For Michael Nelson, the “evil genius” who was convicted of killing his third wife in 1979 in Palm Beach County, and was suspected in more poisoning deaths, the end came quietly last year in a South Florida hospital.
Although he was the victim of a vicious assault two years earlier in prison, the official cause of death was a raft of natural causes, reports show.
Nelson, who would be in jail for 42 years, more than half his life, died at 78 in August 2024 at a hospital in Homestead, south of Miami, according to reports by the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner and Miami-Dade Police.
Nelson was convicted in October 1980 in the Sept. 12, 1979, murder of his wife, Linda, 32, at their Delray Beach condominium. One reporter described the self-employed financial consultant as “one of the smartest men ever convicted of murder in Palm Beach County.”
Police and prosecutors said Nelson’s weapon of choice was aconite. The “queen of poisons” affects the heart, and at one time was either difficult or impossible to detect.
Nelson’s prosecutor in that case, now-retired U.S. Magistrate Ann Vitunac, told The Palm Beach Post in 2017 she believed Nelson likely fatally poisoned his mother as well as his first wife, who survived.
“The world is a safer place without Michael Nelson. The prison guards and his fellow inmates are safer without him,” Vitunac said in an April 1, 2025, email for this story. “It appears from the investigation of Michael Nelson’s life that he was always planning his next murder.”
Nelson’s mother, Jeanne Myers, 46, died suddenly in Orlando in May 1969. Her cause of death was listed as a brain hemorrhage.
First wife Sherrie Braswell testified at Nelson’s 1980 murder trial that soon after she bought a large life insurance policy, she had five medical emergencies and asked Nelson point-blank if he was trying to poison her. She said Nelson “said he loved me, and I wouldn’t ask him such a thing if I loved him.”
The couple divorced in 1974.
Some time after that, police said, Nelson married a woman from Pakistan named Mia Querashi. Nelson later would say she got cancer and returned to her homeland. Authorities were unable to learn her whereabouts.
Everyone wanted this guy locked up
Nelson’s third wife was Linda Eileen Ingles Sachsenmaier. Recently relocated from upstate New York to Boca Raton’s IBM complex, and fresh off a divorce, she answered a lonely-hearts ad and met Michael Nelson.
“Linda was like Bambi in Times Square,” her sister, Donna Trombly, told The Palm Beach Post in 2017 from Southern California. “He was very clever, and he saw a sitting duck,” Trombly said in April 2025 from California. “You can’t discern people’s ulterior motives until sometimes it’s too late.”
Prosecutors argued Nelson twice tried to poison Linda for a life insurance policy worth $80,000 — about $350,000 in 2025 dollars. When the poisoning didn’t work, police said, Nelson held her underwater in the tub until she died.
Jurors recommended the death penalty, but Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Marvin Mounts instead sentenced Nelson in the murder to life with no parole for 25 years, and for an attempted murder two weeks earlier, another 30 years, to run after the life term ended. His “presumptive parole release date” was Nov. 29, 2050, when he would have been 104.
Richard Lubin, Nelson’s defense lawyer in the 1980 trial, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
In a four-page handwritten letter, Nelson told The Palm Beach Post in October 2017, “I’ve murdered no one,” adding, “nor ever had any real intent to do so.”
In advance of a 2006 parole hearing, Vitunac wrote state officials to say, “If released from custody, Michael Nelson will kill again.”
And in advance of a 2011 hearing, she called him “the personification of an evil genius.”
His next parole hearing would have been in November 2024.
The Florida Department of Corrections confirmed Nelson’s August 2024 death on its inmate database, but, in response to a December 2024 inquiry for this story, refused to provide any details, including the location, circumstances or cause.
The department cited the exemption for “an ongoing criminal investigation.” It did not elaborate.
The agency has not responded to subsequent requests that it reconsider.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has not responded to an inquiry about whether it is or was the investigating agency.
The corrections department also has not responded to a December 2024 request for Nelson’s prison file that was accompanied by a processing fee.
Nelson’s final years in custody
According to the Miami-Dade County medical examiner and police reports, in 2022, when Nelson was an inmate at Dade Correctional Institution in Homestead, an officer saw a fellow inmate, James Campbell, straddling and pummeling him. Prison records show Campbell is serving a life sentence for two Miami-Dade felony murder convictions.
Nelson was taken to a nearby hospital with “major trauma post assault” and was diagnosed with “subarachnoid hemorrhages,” bleeding into the space between the brain and the thin membrane that covers it. He stayed in intensive care for three months, then transferred to the prison infirmary for another three months before returning to a cell.
He would refuse to provide authorities a statement and would sign a waiver of prosecution.
In July 2024, the police reports said, he was transported to Homestead Hospital for “complaints of worsening shortness of breath and altered mental status.”
He died in the early hours of Aug.13, 2024.
Reports say police initially discussed whether this was a “delayed homicide” from the 2022 beating. The medical examiner ruled the official cause of death was pericarditis, an inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart.
Reports said Nelson, 5-foot-7 and 127 pounds, also had a history of high cholesterol, hypertension, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), acute respiratory distress syndrome, and artery disease.
Reports said authorities were not able to find any friends or relatives and said most of what police could find about Nelson came from a 2017 Palm Beach Post story.
Nelson was cremated.
Florida native Eliot Kleinberg, author of the Civil War historical novel “Peace River,” the “Adventures of Nate Moran” novels, and the original “Weird Florida” books, spent nearly a half century reporting on local news for The Palm Beach Post and writing about Florida and Florida history. He produced two history columns, wrote 14 books — and co-wrote or contributed to several more — all of them about Florida.
