Authorities in Missouri say a woman spiked her husband’s Mountain Dew with Roundup weed killer and insecticide over and over again to be “mean” to him. She has been charged with multiple felonies.
In May and June, Michelle Y. Peters, 47, of Lebanon is accused of putting Roundup in the 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew that her husband kept in the fridge in the garage. The Laclede County Sheriff’s Office and a classified probable cause statement of facts filed this week by the sheriff’s office say that she also added insecticide to the drink on Sunday.
Court records say Peters was arrested on Monday and is officially charged by county prosecutors with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. Both of these charges are felonies.
A person from the jail said that she was being held at the Laclede County Detention Center on Friday afternoon without bond.
It wasn’t clear right away if Peters had a lawyer.
The probable cause statement says that Peters told police, “She was mad because she had thrown him a 50th birthday party and he wasn’t appreciative.” This was the day she was arrested. There was a chemical in the basement that Michelle thought was Roundup. She put it in the Mountain Dew bottle just to be mean.
According to the probable cause statement, Peters told the officer at first that she wasn’t putting Roundup in the soda bottles. Instead, she said she was mixing Mountain Dew with Roundup to use as a weed killer, which was an idea she got from Pinterest.
But she later admitted that she put poison in a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and put it in the fridge in the garage, which was what the probable cause statement said.
According to the sheriff’s office, there is video proof that Peters messed with the Mountain Dew bottles.
The victim thought the soda had been messed with after getting sick, the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “The victim let the sheriff’s office watch them on video.”
Her husband, whose name was left out of the probable cause statement, told the officer from the sheriff’s office that he drank Mountain Dew on May 1 and thought it tasted funny, but he kept drinking it. Court papers show that after a couple of weeks, he started to feel sick. He had a sore throat, coughed up brown and yellow mucus, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting.
Some people who eat Roundup can get “increased saliva burns, pain in the mouth and throat, along with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea,” according to the probable cause statement, which quoted WebMD. Court records show that people who ate the poison died.
The husband of Peters also told the police that on June 11 or 12, he drank a small bottle of Mountain Dew and thought it tasted fine, but when he drank Mountain Dew from his own fridge, it didn’t taste right.
The likely cause statement said that Peters’ husband looked at video footage from his garage on June 12 and saw his wife taking a bottle of Roundup and a 2-liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew out of the fridge. The probable cause statement says that Michelle Peters then put the Roundup back on the shelf in the shed and put the soda back in the fridge.
Court records show that Peters’ wife told him he might have Covid when he told her he was sick.
Based on the probable cause statement, Peters’ husband told the detective that he didn’t know if his wife was cheating on him or was “trying to collect his $500,000 life insurance policy.”
The probable cause statement said that Peters’ husband said he didn’t think his wife was cheating on him, but his wife has been taking less money out of their business account and putting it into their shared account.
The detectives said Michelle Peters said that she and her husband were having problems with their marriage.
