Woman who poisoned husband with milkshake denied parole

Elizabeth Fuentes-Ortiz, 40, was also convicted of concealing a child and the special allegations of concealing a child, inflicting great bodily injury and torture. On April 22, 2002, she was sent to prison for life with the possibility of parole. Her appearance before the Board of Parole Hearings at the Valley State Prison For Women at Chowchilla was her first and its members deemed her unsuitable for release for another five years.

Fuentes-Ortiz’s trial came a decade after the she delivered the tainted beverage to her then-husband Gilbert Ortiz at his Toys "R” Us workplace in Redwood City.

During the 15-day trial, she claimed she feared her husband because he was abusive and that he raped her the night before the poisoning. After two days of deliberations, the jury’s verdict showed they believed otherwise.

In 2004, Ortiz appealed the conviction on grounds the jury was not instructed to consider it an act of self-defense. The three-person state Court of Appeal unanimously rejected the argument.

"The prosecutor’s questioning effectively pointed out that if she had actually feared harm at the hands of the victim, reasonably or unreasonably, she had access to an automobile and had the entire day to take the couple’s child and get to a place of safety,” Justice Ignazio Ruvolo wrote in the decision.

Ruvolo added that "the evidence overwhelmingly suggested that the appellant was simply enraged.”

On March 11, 2002, Fuentes-Ortiz brought her husband the milkshake laced with Ortho-7 insecticide. She told him it was a protein shake intended to help him build muscle mass. Gilbert Ortiz testified that the drink tasted "like chocolate but sour and burning.”

Ortiz fell to the ground in convulsions, slipped into a 10-day coma and suffered multiple organ failures, a heart attack and was incommunicative. He testified he has residual health problems from the poisoning.

While her husband was comatose, Fuentes-Ortiz gave Redwood City police conflicting stories of from where the poison originated — once she said a masked man tried to kill her husband; another time she claimed it was a suicide attempt.

By the time Ortiz could tell authorities who had given him the questionable shake, Fuentes-Ortiz had fled to Mexico with their 2-year-old son, Jonathan. She was profiled numerous times on the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries” over the eight years it took FBI agents to arrest her in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

Jonathan remained missing until Fuentes-Ortiz’s mother brought him to the county jail to visit his imprisoned mother.

Fuentes-Ortiz told the court that by poisoning her husband she meant only to incapacitate, not kill him, to escape an abusive marriage that included sexual abuse.

"There’s no motive, no explanation for anything other than domestic violence,” defense attorney Joseph O’Sullivan said during his closing arguments.

Prosecutors argued, though, that the murder attempt was fueled by jealousy and anger over his long work hours.

Michelle Durand can be reached by e-mail: michelle@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 102.