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| Tianle Li |
A woman was arrested, charged and convicted of murder related charges after killing her husband with a lethal dose of poison after he wanted to divorce, according to court proceedings in New Jersey.
A Middlesex County jury convicted a 44-year-old former chemist of Bristol-Myers Squibb of fatally poisoning her husband 2 years ago with thallium, a tasteless, odorless and highly lethal drug, after having attempted to divorce.
Tianle Li, a Chinese citizen, faces life in prison. Superior Court Judge Michael Toto, who led the six-week trial in New Brunswick, said that the woman will be sentenced later this year.
The lack of emotion at the culmination of the six-month investigation and the trial was in stark contrast to Li’s stormy relationship with her husband and her victim, Xiaoye Wang, 39. The testimony revealed that police had been called to their Monroe home 16 times to intervene in internal conflicts, and Wang told officers after his wife had poisoned him.
Li did not testify in her own defense. Her lawyer, Steven Altman, told the jury that there was no evidence that she ever poisoned her husband or gave him thallium.
The authorities accused Li of poisoning her husband and continued to do so even as he was in a hospital bed.
Wang was admitted to the University Medical Center of Princeton, complaining of abdominal pain, the day the couple was to finalize their divorce in a New Brunswick court. He remained hospitalized until his death, the day after doctors receive test results showing that he had lethal amounts of thallium, a heavy metal, in his system.
Li tried unsuccessfully to return to China with her son and an aunt, just before the death of her husband, but was not able to pay for tickets.
She was charged with obstruction, two days after Wang died, after she told police she had never worked with thallium, only to be contradicted by the records obtained by investigators from Bristol-Myers Squibb. She was charged with murder several days later.