Using Eye Drops to Prank, Torture, or Kill — OK Whatever

Exactly how much tetrahydrozoline needs to be ingested before it kills differs from person to person, with every case unique unto itself.

Announcement

It took three days of eye drop poisonings by Clayton’s wife, Lana Sue Clayton, before he succumbed to his final, fatal dose. 

For others, like 49-year-old Marceline “Marcie” Jones, it can take even less. The New York woman died after a friend spiked her soft drink at an office Halloween party in 2008.   

Usually, if caught in time, death by eye drop poisoning can be avoided. The individual’s age and overall health also play a role in helping them survive the pain and other symptoms. 

• Though he was often sick, a Pennsylvania man survived being unknowingly poisoned with eye drops by his girlfriend over a period of three years. She later admitted to spiking his water around 10 to 12 times during that period because she wanted him to “pay more attention to her.” 

• Frank Shull, an 84-year-old man in Cleveland, Ohio, was poisoned by his homeless, jobless son in 2012, but didn’t die despite drinking a glass of milk containing two bottles of eye drops. 

• In 2017, when a Wisconsin woman failed to succumb to the eye drops her husband had squeezed into her can of Diet Coke, he tried to kill her using other tactics, such as strangulation and suffocation. He was not successful. She survived and he ended up behind bars. 

• In Wyoming, an unnamed woman survived a prolonged case of eye drop poisoning carried out by her 19-year-old stepdaughter in 2018. Over the course of four months, Alexis Jennings mixed about 20 bottles of Visine into the woman’s teas and coffees, leading her to be hospitalized twice. The teenager had begun administering the eye drops as a punishment to her stepmother after she revealed a dark secret about the girl to her then-boyfriend. The secret, according to the Caspar-Star Tribune, was that Jennings was a pedophile who had previously molested a young girl. 

• In 2009, Cecil Peterson survived after drinking sweet tea that had a half bottle of Visine mixed in with it. The Missouri man, whose wife had been trying to kill him, just experienced strong stomach pains. He got a temporary restraining order against her and she divorced him a year later. 

  Announcement

  

The reasons why people resort to eye drop poisonings aren’t always clear.

Clayton’s wife Lana Sue, who received a 25-year prison sentence for her crime, was forthcoming about admitting she poisoned her husband, yet she never revealed a motive.

But it’s likely money had something to do with it.

Lana Sue would have inherited Clayton’s more than $1 million in assets, in addition to his expansive Greek Revival estate valued at $822,000. According to the Washington Post, she also destroyed her husband’s will after killing him, which further suggests her motives had something to do with his finances.

In fact, money usually is at the root of many eye drop poisoning cases. A few months after Clayton’s death, another married person killed their spouse in the same way. 

Over the course of a few weeks in 2019, Joshua Lee Hunsucker, a paramedic in North Carolina, is believed to have murdered his wife and the mother of his two children by secretly administering eye drops into her drinks. 

According to Stacy Robinson Hunsucker’s toxicology report, the amount of tetrahydrozoline found in her system was “between 30 and 40 times the therapeutic level,” the Charlotte Observer reports. 

Hunsucker’s goal, his wife’s family believes, was to get Stacy’s $250,000 life insurance payout. He reportedly purchased a boat worth $80,000 to $100,000 with the money shortly after death, and used the rest to fund “multiple expensive vacations” with his new girlfriend, whom he also let move into the couple’s home, reports WSOC-TV.