While She Slept

When Jill Cahill was leaving to return home after visiting with her family for a week, she turned to her sister with a grin, and said: "If Jeff kills me, you can have all my things." A few days later, she was in a coma in a Syracuse hospital, her skull shattered by a savage beating inflicted by her 37-year-old husband. Six months later, she was dead.
Jeff and Jill Cahill seemed to have it all. Two kids, a dog, a nice house of the picket fence variety. But their relationship wasn't as happy as it seemed. Jeff and Jill had been having serious financial problems and were headed towards divorce, legally separated but living in the same house until Jill could afford to move out.
But on April 21, 1996 Jeff and Jill had a torrid argument while their kids were upstairs sleeping. In the aftermath, Jeff claimed that his wife had started stabbing him with a kitchen knife-and that was the reason for his taking a Louisville slugger straight to her head. She lay in a coma for nearly six months, and just as she started to show signs of coming out of it... she received a visitor.
On October 27th of that same year, staffers at the University Hospital in Syracuse New York, noticed a strange-looking guy lurking in the hallway wearing a wig and outdoor boots. When Jill's nurse went to check on her patient, she found her gasping for air, with bruises around her mouth, and white powder (later to be determined as cyanide) flecked across her chest.

MARION COLLINS was born in Scottland and has lived in New York for twenty-six years. She is the author of The Palm Beach Murder and Without a Trace.

UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH. By 1998, Jill and Jeff Cahill's marriage was already over. With a divorce pending, his life was in shambles. Then, a pre-dawn argument between them came to an end when Jeff crushed her skull with an aluminum baseball bat. Fearing her testimony in an assault trial, he slipped unnoticed into her Syracuse hospital room and gave her a dose of potassium cyanide, killing her instantly. It took the jury only five hours to find him guilty. BUT THE CONTROVERSIAL CASE AGAINST JEFF CAHILL WAS JUST BEGINNING. Jeff Cahill's trial would provoke one of the most passionate and furious debates about the death penalty in recent New York history leaving Jill Cahill's grief-stricken family survivors to wonder... WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO SEAL HER KILLER'S FATE AS SURELY AS HE HAD SEALED HERS?

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