Trace of Suspicion - Ep. 2: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Summary

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Dateline Originals: Trace of Suspicion

Episode 2: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Release Date: May 22, 2026
Host: NBC News, narrated by Josh Mankiewicz

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Episode Overview

This episode delves deeper into the mysterious 2002 death of Marine Sergeant Todd Sommer, focusing on the investigation that followed after pathologists discovered lethal levels of arsenic in his body. The story centers on the growing suspicion aimed at his widow, Cindy Sommer, as NCIS agents piece together a complex portrait of financial struggles, questionable behaviors, and a past full of red flags. The narrative pursues not only the forensic evidence but the psychology and motivations of everyone involved, with a strong Dateline touch for atmosphere and suspense.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Forensic Breakthrough

• [01:00] The case opens with chemist Todor Todorov at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, tasked with analyzing tissue samples from Todd Sommer in a secure, high-tech lab (“Building 54 was built ... to survive a hydrogen bomb blast.”)
• The analyzer found astronomically high arsenic levels—over 1,000 times the normal in the liver, 200 times in the kidney.
  • “When he showed his lab director the results, the boss said, do it again. And he did. And then he did it again. And the results came out the same.” — Josh Mankiewicz [04:05]
• Elevated arsenic was not typical environmental or occupational exposure; the implication: deliberate poisoning.

2. Launching the Homicide Investigation

• [06:24] NCIS focused on how and why arsenic entered Todd’s body. The primary suspects?
  • “One of the things that we had to do was interview a whole circle of people who hadn’t been interviewed after Todd Sommers death.” — NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger [06:30]
• [09:10] NCIS approaches the case with a two-pronged investigation: was it accidental/environmental, or was there a direct beneficiary with motive?

3. All Eyes Turn to Cindy Sommer

• Cindy’s behavior after Todd’s death seemed off. She spent the death benefits quickly, held loud parties, and drew widespread suspicion.
  • “Their noses told investigators the widow had something to do with it. Guilty of conduct unbecoming a Marine Corps widow.” — Josh Mankiewicz [07:10]
• No evidence Todd had enemies, so suspicion centers on Cindy:
  • “Based on the witnesses we spoke with, he had no enemies. ... So it all keeps coming back to Cindy.” — Terwilliger & Host [12:45–12:52]

4. Financial Motive

• [13:04] Cindy received substantial life insurance and VA benefits post-Todd’s death. Yet financial records show constant money troubles and questionable spending both before and after.
  • “A lot of expenditures weren’t going towards the maintaining of the household... Didn’t see... finances going out towards groceries and necessities versus wants.” — Terwilliger [13:39]
• Cindy's denied request for support from the Navy Relief Society due to “unwillingness to modify her spending patterns” [14:21].
• “Their bank account was, at the most, a few hundred dollars at that time. ... it appeared that there was a financial motive. And there was only one person who had that financial motive.” — Terwilliger [15:34]

5. The Plastic Surgery Clue

• [18:30] An ATM withdrawal at a plastic surgery office in La Jolla occurred the exact day Todd first got sick, even though they had little money.
  • Led to records showing Cindy consulted for breast implants on February 8, 2002.
  • “So the same day that Todd first got sick ... Cindy ... was at a plastic surgeon's office talking ... about breast augmentation.” — Host and Terwilliger [21:31–21:46]
• Shortly after Todd’s death, Cindy had surgery and went on a party weekend to Tijuana.
  • “Sometime in April ... we were at the club dancing... and she was in [a bikini/thong contest].” — Chantra Wells, Cindy’s friend [22:50]
  • “Three or four months [after her husband died] ... pretty much stripping.” — Chantra Wells [23:06]

6. Behavioral Patterns and Past History

• [26:11] Agent Rick Rendone discusses Cindy's troubling behavior during Todd’s deployments, including company with other men and explicit material online.
• Child abuse allegations and unfit home conditions led the Marines to cut Todd’s deployment short.
  • “He’s got to come home because of an issue that was caused ... the culmination of all these strains going on back home with Cindy.” — Rendone [27:11–27:22]

7. Online Single Life and Infidelity

• Cindy established an account on an adult singles site days before Todd’s illness.
  • “Think of it as a dating website that’s a little more graphic than, say, a Yahoo personal’s website.” — Terwilliger [27:48]
  • “The account was established on February 3, I believe. So that would have been five days before he started to get sick.” — Terwilliger [28:19]

8. Glimpses into Cindy's Past

• Interview with Dan Peace, Cindy’s first husband, reveals a life of instability, substance abuse, running away, and repeated patterns of infidelity and restlessness.
  • “Cindy’s whole thing in life is that she... never got the childhood that she wanted, and she never got the freedom to be a kid. She feels that she was unfairly forced into adulthood.” — Dan Peace [31:27]
  • “She basically conducted a series of affairs that I didn’t find out about until much later... There were a lot of them.” — Dan Peace [32:40]

9. Psychological Profile & Patterns

• Investigators note Cindy’s pattern: excitement, affairs, online relationships, especially with military men, then moving on.
  • “We see these things start to snowball, much like they did in her previous marriage. ... establishing a profile by which she could meet other people on the Internet.” — Terwilliger [35:41]
• Dan Peace’s final assessment:
  • “Cindy doesn't strike me as the kind of person to commit the perfect crime... If Cindy had done something like this, either the evidence has been destroyed or you would have found it.” — Dan Peace [36:29]

10. Transition to Future Episodes

• The episode closes with the investigation moving to Florida, where Cindy is living.
  • “Until you’re in someone’s shoes, you don’t know how you would respond. I started drinking, and that’s ...” — Cindy Summer [37:44]
  • “That was my priority until we went to Florida. We had no clue that there was even a trust fund in the picture.” — Terwilliger [37:53]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The arsenic levels in Todd Summers tissues were astronomical. More than 1000 times higher than the normal range in the liver.” — Josh Mankiewicz [04:10]
• “Their noses told investigators the widow had something to do with it. Guilty of conduct unbecoming a Marine Corps widow.” — Mankiewicz [07:10]
• “You have lethal levels of arsenic in a perfectly healthy young man. And only one person benefited from his death.” — Terwilliger [13:04]
• “Sometime in April... we were at the club dancing... and she was in [a thong contest]... pretty much stripping.” — Chantra Wells [22:50–23:08]
• “I know you’re not asking me if I think she did it, but Cindy doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to commit the perfect crime...” — Dan Peace [36:29]
• “The optics of a married woman seeking sexual hookups just days before her husband dies are not good now.” — Mankiewicz [28:28]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment Topic | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|---------------| | Forensic arsenic discovery | 01:00–06:00 | | NCIS launches murder investigation | 06:24–09:40 | | Suspicions mount against Cindy | 12:16–16:31 | | Financial motive and spending | 13:04–15:56 | | The plastic surgery lead | 18:08–22:35 | | Cindy’s post-death behavior | 22:50–23:33 | | Child abuse and marital breakdown | 26:11–27:40 | | Cindy’s history and previous marriage | 28:44–36:29 | | Dan Peace’s closing perspective | 36:29–37:44 | | Teaser for next episode | 37:44–38:12 |

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains Dateline’s signature narrative: atmospheric, suspense-laden, and deeply investigative. Interviews are woven with narration, coloring the case with psychological depth, forensic detail, and sharp character portraits. The language is often evocative (“hounds on the scent,” “a big red flag snapping in the San Diego sea breeze”), reflecting the storytelling tradition of true-crime journalism.

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In summary:
This episode tracks investigators' tireless effort to understand the mysterious death of Sgt. Todd Sommer, converging on Cindy Sommer as a prime suspect due to compelling forensic, financial, and behavioral leads. Listeners are left with a tantalizing blend of hard evidence and human complexity, setting the stage for revelations in upcoming episodes.

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Transcript

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[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

It was one of those days in March when spring is in the air. The daffodils are up, cherry blossoms are beginning to bud. The young chemist trudging across the Walter Reed Army Medical center campus that morning would probably have wanted to savor the moment. Because once he entered Building 54, home to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, he knew he would be completely shut off from the outside world. Unlike those quaint rose brick Georgian buildings elsewhere on the Walter reed campus. Building 54, well, this place was unique. Unlike any other building on campus. Indeed, unlike any in the country. Building 54 is a massive five story white block with three basements below ground. Not a window or decorative curlicue on it. With steel blast proof doors and walls that were 2ft thick. Building 54 was built in the 1950s to survive a hydrogen bomb blast. To be a presidential refuge if it came to that. Grim and graceless all of the above. Just inside the building contained brightly lit labs that were a pathologist's dream. All the best equipment. There was a brand new tissue analyzer, clunkily named Inductive Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. Very expensive. There were microwave digestive systems for prepping samples. Top notch chemicals and compounds, high purity reagents. All of it was intended to help the military pinpoint toxins, contaminants and environmental risks that might threaten the nation's soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. After buzzing through security on that spring day in 2003, the chemist Todor Todorov took the elevator down to the basement to his lab, the Department of Environmental and Toxicologic Pathology. It was there he would spend months analyzing tissue samples that had been harvested from the body of Marine Sergeant Todd Sommer. The labels on the sample containers he pulled from the freezer indicated this particular Marine had died a little more than a year earlier. However, the labels said nothing about the circumstances. The chemist did not know the Marine had left a wife and four kids behind. He did not know a lot of NCIS investigators had been left scratching their heads. One thing he did know was that NCIS wanted Todd Summers tissue samples tested for toxins and trace elements. He had never tested human tissue before, but he was eager to give it a go.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Elements we tested for arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum, cadmium and mercury.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

It took hours for the big gray analyzer to quietly run its cleansing and calibration cycles and then analyze each sample. When it was done, the numbers showed elevated levels of arsenic in the liver and kidney samples. That is not quite as shocking as it sounds. The chemist knew arsenic is a natural compound that's present in practically everything. Most people have minuscule levels of arsenic in their body. This wasn't that. The data points now blinking at him from his computer screen were astounding. When he showed his lab director the results, the boss said, do it again. And he did. And then he did it again. And the results came out the same. The arsenic levels in Todd Summers tissues were astronomical. More than 1000 times higher than the normal range in the liver. More than 200 times higher than what would be expected in the kidney. This is a level that should be looked into because it's a high level of arsenic. How did that much arsenic get into the system of a 23 year old marine who had apparently dropped dead from a heart attack? The chemists in Washington did not know that was a job for the NCIS investigators in San Diego to figure out. Had Todd Summer accidentally ingested arsenic on the job? Or had someone deliberately poisoned him?

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[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

In this episode, you'll ride along with investigators searching for an answer to that question.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

One of the things that we had to do was interview a whole circle of people who hadn't been interviewed after Todd Sommers death.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

And you'll learn what they found when they took an up close and very personal look at Todd Summers widow, Cindy.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

She lost her balance emotionally, she lost her bearings, and quite frankly, none of

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

that has to do with whether or

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

not she's guilty of the crime.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

I'm Josh Mankiewicz and this is Trace of Suspicion, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 2 Girls just want to have fun. It was February 2004 when NCIS special Agent Rob Terwilliger reached across a pile of investigative reports on his desk and grabbed a stack of dog eared files marked Summer. It was now his job to head up that investigation. Leafing through them, he reviewed the timeline of the case. February 2002, a 23 year old Marine drops dead. The medical examiner certifies natural causes. Cardiac arrhythmia, heart attack. May 2003. The lab reports revealed very high levels of arsenic in some of the tissues harvested from the Marine's body. Now it was early 2004 and the investigators who had been working the case suspected homicide. Their noses told investigators the widow had something to do with it. Guilty of conduct unbecoming a Marine Corps widow. If nothing else, said some she hosted loud parties and spent the dough from her husband's life insurance policy like it was going out of style. He was dead. She was partying. Cops don't believe in coincidences. Flipping through the file, Terwilliger could see how his predecessors on the case had collected witness statements from all the first responders who had come to the Summers home the night Todd Summer collapsed. The medical records and doctor's statements were there. Arsenic. Arsenic. Arsenic murder. That seemed to be a popular theory among the investigators. As Special Agent Terwilliger closed the file and headed home that night, his mind likely spun with thoughts of what he

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

should do next once it became apparent that there was a potential homicide. Once we got those test results back, the idea was that, well, we have this two pronged investigation.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

That's Special Agent Rob Terwilliger.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

The question was, was this accidental? Was it environmental? Was it occupational? We're looking at those avenues, but at the same time, is there someone out there who wanted to hurt Sergeant Sommer and who benefited directly from his death?

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

The investigators saw from the file how some of that work had already been done. Other agents had consulted with experts on the lab results. All agreed that the levels of arsenic in Todd Summers body were extraordinary. But one in particular went further. That expert, a toxicologist, told the investigator who met with him that there must have been some mistake made at the lab. It was impossible, the expert said, for such high levels of arsenic to be found in some of Todd Sommers tissues but not in others.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

I believe you're referring to Dr. Alphonse Poklas. And he's a toxicologist out of Virginia Commonwealth University. And Dr. Poklas had said, well, you might want to look at occupational exposure, environmental exposure, start looking at those things. And that was again, the context of the conversation. And so those were the things that were subsequently done.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Turns out Todd Sommer had not worked with arsenic or been anywhere where he could have breathed in ingested arsenic. On top of that, no one who had worked with Todd had become sick. There seemed to be only one conclusion to be drawn from that. The arsenic in Todd Summers tissues had not arrived by accident.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

We even made attempts to recontact Dr. Pokelist, essentially through the San Diego county medical examiner, because medical examiner said we should go back to this guy and talk to him again and see what he thinks. Well, it was done to no avail.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

No avail. We do not know how hard it was to find Pokolas, who, as far as we know, was not living underground. What is clear is that he and NCIS never reconnected. Either Agents could not find him. Or maybe he didn't call them Matt. Or maybe they did not look very hard. Anyway, investigators reasoned Todd Sommer had to have died from arsenic poisoning. All of his symptoms leading up to the night he died pointed to it. The vomiting, the diarrhea, even the heart attack.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

You had a substance in his system that was at a lethal level. Which would account for the symptomology and the resultant cardiac arrhythmia. And that was based on what?

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

You know.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Our initial consults with pathologists were telling us this is a known side effect of arsenic poisoning. Cardiac arrhythmia.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

This was murder. No question about it. The medical examiner even changed Todd's death certificate to read homicide. And who did the deed? Well, investigators could imagine only one suspect. The wife, Cindy Summer. After all, who else could it have been?

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

What chance is there that someone else gave Todd the arsenic? Some other person? Did he have any enemies?

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Based on the witnesses we spoke with, he had no enemies.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

So it all keeps coming back to Cindy.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Yes.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Now the question was why? And the way the investigators saw it, Todd Summers death had been a financial windfall for Cindy Summer.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

You have lethal levels of arsenic in a perfectly healthy young man. And only one person benefited from his death. Benefited to the tune of a $6,000 immediate death gratuity, $250,000 in a service members group life insurance policy, and a lifetime of VA benefits.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Judging from the canceled checks and credit card bills in the file, Agent Terwilliger could clearly see how Todd and Cindy had been Financially strapped before he died, their money melting away like snow in a heavy rain.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

A lot of expenditures weren't going towards the maintaining of the household, you know, the needs of the children. Didn't see a whole lot of finances going out towards groceries and necessities versus wants. And that's where we saw the discrepancy.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

A clear lack of financial discipline. Terwilliger thought he was not alone in that assessment. While leafing through the file, he had seen that once while Todd was away on deployment, Cindy had asked the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society for help making a car payment, and Navy Relief had turned her down.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Navy Relief denied that based on her unwillingness to modify her spending patterns and her use of Sergeant Summers pay.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

So if she wasn't spending the money

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

on the house and the kids, what was she spending her money on?

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Based on what Navy Relief saw and what we saw in the finances. Fast food, unnecessary expenses in the form of restaurants.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

The fact was, Todd's salary of $1,800 a month had simply not been enough to support their lifestyle.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

He's a young Marine. He's a sergeant. Well, at the time, he was a corporal. And living on a corporal salary with four children to take care for is. It's hard enough to do it with one.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

As a result, the agents learned the couple frequently asked Todd's parents for money for food and for other essentials.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

We saw large influxes of money coming in from Todd's father. We saw large amounts of money going out of the accounts. And with no explanation as to where those funds were going.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

For the NCIS investigators, the Summer family finances seemed like a big red flag snapping in the San Diego sea breeze.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Their bank account was, at the most, a few hundred dollars at that time. And starting to look at the financial picture. And coupled with all the behaviors that had been documented by witnesses, it appeared that there was a financial motive. And there was only one person who had that financial motive.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

That person, of course, was Cindy Summer. Throw in the way she behaved and then later spent her husband's death benefits. And, well, none of it struck NCIS as the actions of a grieving wife or innocent widow. Those were the actions they thought of a murder suspect.

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People are creatures of habit. They tend to use the same ATMs, shop in the same stores, and unless they're traveling, their bank records will show transactions that are closer to home. A break in that routine is to a detective what cheese is to a mouse. Irresistible.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

So, starting to look closer at the finances and notice that there was one particular transaction that sort of jumped out from the rest.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

In the homicide investigation that was now focused on Cindy Summer. It was an ATM withdrawal she made on February 8, 2002 that started Agent Terwilliger's nose twitching as if it had caught a pungent whiff of cheddar. You see, that was the day that Cindy's husband Todd first reported feeling ill.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

In this particular case, there was an ATM transaction that took place in La Jolla. And it jumped out at me as this was something that was odd in their spending patterns. So we went out to that particular ATM machine, noted that it was in the Zymed building, which is. It's a medical building, which is on the campus of Scripps La Jolla Medical Center.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

That struck the investigator as odd. Not just because that ATM was 12 miles from where Cindy and Todd lived, but because the ATM was in a private health care facility. Typically, military families get their health care from military sponsored medical clinics and hospitals. Because it's Free.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

So there would have been no reason

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

for her to have to go to

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

this building to get medical care.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Yes. Unless there was some kind of referral. And then, based on my review of their medical records, at that time, there had been no such referral.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Puzzling. The investigators stared at the building's office directory, trying to guess from all the specialists listed on that wall which one Cindy Summer might have come there to see. And then it hit him. Surgery Cosmetic. There were several listings on the wall. Directory for plastic surgeons. That must be it, he thought, because he remembered that somewhere in the pages and pages of interviews NCIS agents had done with potential witnesses, there had been references to the fact that shortly after Todd Summers death, Cindy had splurged on breast implants.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

We noted that some of those individuals had talked to us. They said that that had been something that she had wanted prior to Todd's death.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

A search of Cindy's canceled checks from the spring of 2002 soon gave the investigator the name he'd been looking for. In April of that year, she'd written a big check to Dr. Scott Miller, a board certified plastic surgeon. Miller's name had been listed on that building directory in La Jolla, near the ATM where Cindy Summer had withdrawn money.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

And once that connection had been made, the question was, what was she doing there on Friday, February 8th? Because that date jumped out at me in the sense of their finances. Because it was also the same day Todd began to exhibit the symptoms of the poisoning.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

So the same day that Todd first got sick.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

Yes.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

Cindy, at a time when they had almost no money in their bank account,

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

no more than $300 in their bank

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

account, was at a plastic surgeon's office talking to him about breast augmentation.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

That's correct.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

That was just a hunch, of course, but a good one. When the agent petitioned a court for a warrant to seize Cindy Summers medical records from Dr. Miller, his request was granted.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

And sure enough, when we reviewed the medical record, she had been in the office on that day on Friday, February 8, doing the consultation.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

An operation that must have cost, what, five, $6,000?

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

I believe it was around $5,600. And at that time, again, they had no more than $300 in their combined bank accounts. They couldn't even afford to pay for a vehicle. They had no credit history to speak of. And so now you have someone in that type of financial environment looking at getting a cosmetic procedure that has no medical benefit. There is no medical reason for it.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Two months after Todd Sommer died, Cindy got her new Breast implants. A few weeks after that, she left the kids with a sitter and spent a wild weekend in Tijuana showing off her new acquisitions.

[Chantra Wells (Friend of Cindy Summer)]

Sometime in April, when we had gone down there and we were at the club dancing, and I remember looking up and they were doing a bikini contest. A thong contest. And she was in it.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

That's Chantra Wells, one of Cindy's friends from her job at the Subway center sandwich shop.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

What was she doing?

[Chantra Wells (Friend of Cindy Summer)]

Stripping? Pretty much

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

taking her clothes off.

[Chantra Wells (Friend of Cindy Summer)]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

This was how long after her husband died?

[Chantra Wells (Friend of Cindy Summer)]

Three or four months.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

That'd strike you as inappropriate?

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Puzzling.

[Chantra Wells (Friend of Cindy Summer)]

Anyway, I mean, I don't see anything wrong with going down there. I think what she was doing while she was down there was inappropriate.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Now, here's the thing. Questionable behavior is not illegal. Not unless it leads to or covers up a crime. However, it does attract attention. It can even make the innocent seem guilty. And once investigators shine the black light of suspicion on Cindy's past, well, they found more than enough reason to believe this 31 year old mother of four could be a murderer.

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[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

I sold my car in Carvana last night.

[Carvana / Lemonade Pet Insurance Advertiser]

Well, that's cool.

[Carvana Customer]

No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.

[Carvana Conversationalist]

So what's the problem?

[Carvana Customer]

That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to Spirit smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.

[Carvana Conversationalist]

Maybe there's no catch.

[Carvana Customer]

That's exactly what a catch would want.

[Carvana Conversationalist]

Me to think, wow, you need to relax.

[Carvana Customer]

I need a knock on wood. Do we have. What is this table wood?

[Carvana Conversationalist]

I think it's laminate.

[Carvana Customer]

Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Car selling without a catch.

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Sell your car today on Carvana.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Pickup fees may apply. The trouble started at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. At least that's what investigators were hearing from the friends and military wives who had known Cindy summer back then. It was during Todd's second six month deployment to the Mediterranean. They said that Cindy began to display a side of her personality that was shocking.

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

He started to see her in the company of other men. Specifically going out there, you know, doing things of a sexual nature with cameras and the computer.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

That is NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendo. He joined the summer investigation in 2005.

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

It starts to break down at that point, but it's again when Todd isn't there to enforce the rules of the house.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

What do you think changed between them? Just he was away too much.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

I think it was a sense of what being a military wife was really like. He is away, she is left there in the home with all the responsibilities.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

And that's Special Agent Rob Terwilliger again.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

There had been an allegation of child abuse. And when CPS went into the home, they found the home in a totally unacceptable condition.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Things were such a shambles. Investigators learned that the Marine Corps actually cut short Todd's deployment so that he could come home and deal with Cindy.

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

It hurt him in the sense that you're leaving a deployment early, you're leaving your unit behind. Nobody wants to do that.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

That's anathema to any Marine, right?

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

He was an NCO in this unit. These are some young Marines that were looking up to him. And now he's got to come home because of an issue that was caused. Not that happened. It was just the culmination of all these strains going on back home with Cindy.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

For investigators, it seemed the troubles Todd and Cindy had had in North Carolina came with them to California.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

It was in a. One of their financial transactions, and it was a. An adult singles website. Specifically, Cindy established an account in her name, her user id, her credit card number for a. For a company operating under the pseudonym Eroticy.com, which is an adult singles website. So think of it as a dating website that's a little more graphic than, say, a Yahoo personal's website.

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

And she was on this website how long before Todd died?

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

The account was established on February 3, I believe. So that would have been five days before he started to get sick.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

The optics of a married woman seeking sexual hookups just days before her husband dies are not good now. NCIS wondered what Cindy had been like before she married Todd.

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

Cindy's. Cindy's had a colorful life. Pretty much some of the things we've found throughout the course of the investigation. Before she was married to her first husband, she had some problems as a young teenager, in and out of substance abuse centers.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

It was while Cindy was in one of those drug rehabs that she met Dan Peace, a cousin of one of the other patients.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

I met Cindy in late 1987. I was 19, she was 14, something like that.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

That's Dan Peace. He was Cindy's first husband and the father of her three oldest children. NCIS Agent Rendone and another investigator from The San Diego DA's office interviewed Dan Peace at his apartment in London. He told them he had moved to England after he and Cindy divorced, in part to avoid paying her child support and alimony.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

Yeah. Before you start asking any questions, can you explain to me a bit about why you're here? Sure. Why we're here is we needed to talk with you, not your ex wife.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

It was a long story, One that took Dan Peace three hours to tell on that chilly November afternoon in 2005.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

We became, you know, a couple. I'd say late 1988, something like that,

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

because of the difference in their ages at the time. Remember, Dan was 20 and Cindy only 15. Cindy's mom obtained a restraining order to keep Dan away from her daughter. It didn't work. Cindy ran away from home. She and Dan hit the road.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

We went on a winter Grateful Dead tour.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

There were some legal scrapes along the way.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

She was arrested in Arizona for shoplifting.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

In 1991 came an unplanned pregnancy that led to marriage.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

My oldest child was born in October of 1991, and we got married shortly after Christmas 1991.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

In the presence of God and witnesses, they promised to be there for each other in good times and bad. Dan told the investigators how, less than a month after the wedding, he got the feeling that the bad times part of that had arrived early.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

Our marriage was horrible. She wasn't coming home at night.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

According to Dan, those nights out turned into days. There were loud arguments followed by icy silences.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

I know she's doing. Yeah, I do know what she was doing. She was out partying. Cindy's whole thing in life is that she. She never got the childhood that she wanted, and she never got the freedom to be a kid. That she wanted. She feels that she was unfairly forced into adulthood.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

And so it went, year after unhappy year. Oh, there were good times. Times when Cindy seemed to settle down. But Dan says those times were the exception, not the rule.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

She just started disappearing again. This is a cycle that repeated itself all through the time. I knew her between those times, she was. I had no complaints. I was completely happy. She was a good wife. She was a good mother, good to get along with.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Dan told the investigators it was during one of those periods of calm that he and Cindy added two more children to their growing family, both of them boys. Those were the stable times, Times when Dan entered law school and Cindy finished her ged. But according to Dan, Cindy never really settled down.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

She basically conducted a series of affairs that I didn't find out about until much later. Do you know any of the people that she had these affairs with? Yeah, I mean, I guess I knew them a little, you know, pretty much. There were a lot of them.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Dan told investigators once he finished law school, he got a job at a law firm that was about an hour away from their home in Dearborn. Those were 14 hour days for Dan. For Cindy, they must have felt like years.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

So I started working these long days, and Cindy had to take care of the kids. This didn't work for longer than about two weeks or so. She couldn't deal with being home with the kids. It drove her crazy.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

So Cindy and Dan put the kids in daycare. That solved one problem. But from Dan's point of view, it created a new one. He said Cindy now had time on her hands and seemed to be spending a lot of it on the Internet.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

She got into online chat as a social outlet at this point and struck up certainly online relationships with men. She had a soldier fetish. She used to participate in a chat room called Girls for military men or something like that.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

At the mention of Cindy possibly having a soldier fetish, the investigator's ears perked up.

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

We say she had a soldier fetish.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Is that kind of general, or was

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

it more focused towards sailors, Marines, Airmen she likes.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

Yeah, I don't know. She likes marines. Yeah, she prefers marines to army types. But at the.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

How do you know that?

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

Oh, just because she told me, you know. You know, I don't know exactly how it came about that she told me, but she's got a uniform thing in general.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

According to Dan, it was sometime during the week between Christmas 1998 and New Year's 1999 that he realized he had reached the end of his rope with Cindy.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

There was a night where, you know, I finally looked at myself in the mirror and said, I can. I'm not gonna have any more self respect if I ever, you know, deal

[Interviewer / Podcast Host]

with this person again.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

And, you know, I made her a final ultimatum and she blew me off. And, you know, so it was over.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

There were still the details of their divorce to be worked out, of course, but Dan told the investigator that By January of 1999, Cindy had already moved on. Dan says she told him about a marine she was interested in, A marine who was based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. That marine was Todd Summer.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

Todd seemed like a decent guy to me with no idea what he was getting into. I must have met Todd that summer.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

As the investigators sat listening to Dan Peace, they couldn't help feeling as if they were watching a coming attractions trailer for the Todd Summer story.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

You see this pattern develop, and we see these things start to snowball, much like they did in her previous marriage. And ultimately, she's on the Internet again, literally days before Todd starts to get sick, and establishing a profile by which she could meet other people on the Internet. And it seemed to be following that same pattern that she had exhibited in her first marriage.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Just as the investigators were about to leave Dan Peace's apartment, Special Agent Rendone asked one last question.

[Liberty Mutual Partner]

Just.

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

Well, as many adjectives or as few adjectives as you can't describe, describe Cindy.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Dan Peace took a long pause, gazed at the floor, and then said this.

[Dan Peace (Cindy's Ex-Husband)]

I know you're not asking me if I think she did it, but Cindy doesn't strike me as the kind of person to commit the perfect crime, you know, I mean, every time I've ever caught her at anything, there wasn't any particular effort to. To cover her tracks. I think that if Cindy had done something like this, either either the evidence has been destroyed or you would have found it.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

As the investigators boarded their flight back to the states, they no doubt wondered if Dan Peace had been right. Perhaps the hard evidence they'd been looking for would never be found. But like hounds on the scent, they could not bear the thought of giving up. No. Two weeks later, another set of investigators boarded a flight to Florida. That's where Cindy Summer now lived. And just maybe the evidence they'd been looking for was there. Coming up on future episodes of Trace of Suspicion.

[Cindy Summer (Suspect)]

Until you're in someone's shoes, you don't know how you would respond. I started drinking, and that's.

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

That was my priority until we went to Florida. We had no clue that there was even a trust fund in the picture.

[Cindy Summer (Suspect)]

What am I being arrested for?

[NCIS Special Agent Rick Rendone]

There was some foreign substance that was

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

found in his body.

[Cindy Summer (Suspect)]

Are you threatening of murder?

[NCIS Special Agent Rob Terwilliger]

You're.

[Cindy Summer (Suspect)]

Oh, my gosh. Are you serious?

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

Where do you think she got the arsenic?

[Carvana / Lemonade Pet Insurance Advertiser]

There's really no way to say.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

This podcast is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Tim Beacham is the producer, Marshall Housefeld, Brian Drew and Meredith Kramer are audio editors. Molly DeRosa is Associate Producer, Rachel Young is field producer, Adam Gorfin is co executive producer, Paul Ryan is executive producer and Liz Cole is senior executive producer from NBC News. Audio Sound mixing by Rich Cutler.

[Liberty Mutual Partner]

Folks knew the colonel approved of his new Honey, Chili Crisp and Jalapeno Ranch sauces the moment he tasted them and said,

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

that's right.

[Liberty Mutual Partner]

No notes, just absolute silence. Turns out some flavors don't need explaining, they just need dipping. It's saucy season at KFC with new Honey, Chili Crisp and Jalapeno Ranch. Get dipping with a boneless bucket today.

[Narrator / Josh Mankiewicz]

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