Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006 | 7:44 a.m.
Clark County District Attorney David Roger remembers the first time he saw Chaz Higgs - it was at a campaign event in fall 2002 and Higgs was sitting alone with a scowl on his face.
"He wasn't very talkative," Roger said. "He seemed somewhat standoffish, and it appeared that he didn't want to be at the function."
But he was there - with state Controller Kathy Augustine - several months before the couple later claimed they met.
The fact that Higgs and Augustine seemingly knew each other months before they let on didn't mean much to Roger at the time. But today, it's one of the reasons the district attorney is working to have the body of Charles Augustine exhumed - preferably within the week.
An argument could be made, Roger said, that the couple's discrepancy about the dates of their courtship could be a motive for criminal activity. Beyond this, the district attorney would not comment.
"We have a reason to open an investigation and exhume the body," he said.
Augustine told the Sun in September 2003 that she met Higgs only two months earlier, when he was working as a critical care nurse tending to her first husband, Charles, who had been hospitalized for a stroke in July of that year. In August, some six weeks after Augustine claimed she met Higgs, Charles Augustine died. Three weeks later, on Sept. 19, Higgs and Augustine were married during a Hawaiian vacation.
Higgs, 42, was arrested Friday in Hampton, Va., on a charge of killing Kathy Augustine with an injection of succinlycholine, a powerful paralytic drug. Augustine died July 11, but toxicology tests conducted at the FBI's national laboratory, which found the presence of the drug in her system, didn't come back until Wednesday. A police affidavit filed Friday said Higgs had access to the drug through his nursing job and told a co-worker that he would use the drug if he ever wanted to kill someone. A search of the BMW that Higgs was driving when arrested Friday yielded materials and information about the drug.
Higgs' arrest, paired with the fact that he reportedly cared for Charles Augustine before he died, and seemingly lied about the start of his relationship with Augustine, are all factors that Roger says have prompted the district attorney's office to push for the exhumation.
An Associated Press report issued Monday said the exhumation would take place on Wednesday at Charles Augustine's Las Vegas grave. Roger would not confirm whether a date has been set.
"There are certain things that we need to investigate first," Roger said. "First and foremost, we need to make sure there is a body to exhume."
Clark County code allows the coroner to exhume a body without a search warrant or a court order. Roger is meeting with Metro homicide detectives to discuss exhuming the body, although the coroner's office could independently decide to exhume the body sooner, without word from the police or the district attorney.
A spokesman for the coroner's office would not comment on whether Coroner Michael Murphy was exhuming the body, although a toxicologist for the coroner's office said he expected samples to be submitted for testing within the week.
John Hiatt, a clinical and forensic chemist for Quest Diagnostics, a laboratory that does contract toxicology for the coroner, said the paralytic drug can be detected in body tissues even after decomposition, although it may take from one to three months to make a determination if succinlycholine is present.
Normal toxicology tests do not screen for the drug, so tissue samples must be sent to an outside lab for analysis, Hiatt said.
Hiatt has been performing toxicology analysis for the coroner's office since 1983 . But this is the first time he remembers being asked to test for succinlycholine.
"It's very rare, because this is a drug that is only available to some medical personnel and so these cases, these requests, are few and far between," Hiatt said.
Children of Kathy and Charles Augustine have called for the exhumation of their father's body since the state controller died in July. At that time, Higgs told the media that he had nothing to do with his wife's death, but the somber husband was one Roger recognized from four years earlier - the same man he had seen at Augustine's side, looking angry and sitting by himself.
In 2002, when Roger saw Higgs for the first time, records indicate the critical care nurse was living in a recreational vehicle park on Boulder Highway. Augustine was then married to first husband Charles, although friends of the late politician say the marriage was shaky, and on the last day of the year, records show Kathy Augustine purchased a home in Reno in her own name.
Roger remembers little of the 2002 political event where he first saw Higgs - he thinks it was perhaps for a Republican women's group, and doesn't remember many other people who were there, but he definitely remembers seeing both Higgs and Augustine.
"It's a blur, the whole campaign was a blur," he said. "But I remember his face, and I immediately remembered him when I saw him on the news, and we'll find other people who remember."
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