News

Detectives will 'turn over every rock' to find other poisoning victims, sheriff says

By Bill Moss, Published: January 23, 2026

Detectives are “going to try to turn over every rock and tie up every loose end” to find other victims if they exist of the woman accused of the poisoning death of two people and attempted poisoning of two others, Henderson County Sheriff Lowell Griffin says.

Sheriff’s deputies on Jan. 23 charged Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel with first-degree murder in the death of Leela Jean Livis, 32, and the attempted murder of Livis’s half-sister, Maija Lacey, and Richard Evan Pegg. Casper-Leinenkugel is the mother of both Livis and Lacey. Detectives also charged Casper-Leinenkugel with first degree murder in the death of Michael Schmidt, who died in October 2007 of the same poison that killed Livis, authorities said.

“We believe there’s possibly other victims,” Griffin said. “There’s possibly other deaths associated with this suspect from over the years. Outside of this jurisdiction, there are cases that we are working with some other agencies on just to look at to see if there’s anything that may correlate with the M.O. of the cases that we have established against the suspect here.”

Griffin also said there’s no evidence that Casper-Leinenkugel is responsible for a serial-type poisoning spree.

“All of these victims were known to the suspect,” he said. “This is not something that’s random. We believe that this was all targeted to people that were known to her, and there’s nothing random about this whatsoever.”

The sheriff also said it’s possible that Casper-Leinenkugel’s two daughters may have been unintended victims at the Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday, Nov. 30. Instead, detectives believe Lacey’s boyfriend, Evan Pegg, may have been the intended target. Livis died one day later at her home in Cullowhee and Lacey and Pegg became extremely ill after all three consumed wine laced with acetonitrile, an organic solvent that gradually converts to cyanide.

“I don’t know that we’ve developed the hard evidence to be able to say which one was targeted, but one of the individuals that consumed it we believe to be the targeted individual," Griffin said. "There was one targeted individual. We believe that the others were peripheral damage that consumed some of the wine.”

When a reporter asked to clarify whether the daughters “were inadvertent collateral damage,” Griffin responded, “Exactly, collateral. That was the term I was looking for.”

Although, “we need to make sure we’re completely right on who the actual intended target was, that’s my understanding” that it was Pegg. “That’s what’s believe at this point,” he said.

The possibility that Casper-Leinenkugel may have unintentionally poisoned her daughters could be supported by her own actions in the hours after the Dec. 30 dinner was over. In their investigation into Livis’s death, detectives determined that Casper-Leinenkugel had asked Google “what to do if I accidentally ingest acetonitrile?” after learning of the illnesses of the people who attended the meal, and that she also asked the internet “Does wine turn into cyanide?” Assistant District Attorney Robert Reeves told a judge when Casper-Leinenkugel appeared in District Court for a bond hearing on Monday.

A resident of Henderson County for the past two decades, Casper-Leinenkugel was known as Linda Casper before changing her name. 

In an interview Wednesday, Griffin also explained how his office was able to connect Casper-Leinenkugel allegedly to the death of Schmidt in 2007, he said detectives cross-checked her address on Schmidt Terrace in the Big Willow community with case reports on people found deceased.

Because Livis lived in Cullowhee — she worked as a payroll specialist for Western Carolina University — her sudden unexpected death was first investigated by Jackson County sheriff’s detectives.

“Our investigators were clued in from a death originally in Jackson County that was suspicious in nature, and they started putting some pieces together here because we knew that the victim in Jackson County had actually visited here a short time period before their death,” Griffin said. “The harder they looked at it, the more leads that kind of developed, and they started following these out, which even led us to dig back up this 2007 case. We have no reason to believe that there were any victims associated with this case that would not have been known to the suspect.”

Motive may be a common one

While detectives are still trying to establish a motive for Casper-Leinenkugel’s actions, they’re looking at one that commonly arises in criminal cases

“We believe that the motive is probably going to be what the motive typically is. It’s going to be for personal gain, (as in) in many cases — property or financial gain,” he said. “I can tell you that I believe this was all motivated, if you want to sum it up in one word, by greed.”

The investigation has not yet proved whether or not Casper-Leinenkugel had taken out or was the beneficiary of a life insurance policy on any of the alleged victims.

“I do know that our investigators have worked with the (N.C.) Department of Insurance, but I don’t have these answers as they build this case if that actually happened,” Griffin said. “But everything that you’re talking about — I do know that those are areas of this case that they’re either looking into or attempting to solidify.”

'It's been all hands on deck'

While he said the violent crime detectives do not want to be overwhelmed with tips about suspicious deaths from across the country, they do want to hear from people that have an actual relevant associations with the accused murderer.

“If somebody had any specific interactions with her, any specific conversations, anything of that nature — where there’s been anything uttered, any transactions which may have seemed suspicious, personal experiences with the suspect, where people just feel like the motives were less than genuine — if they can articulate that, then we would ask them to reach out to our investigators for sure,” he said.

Five detectives in the violent crimes division are working fulltime on the case, “but we’ve had detectives from our narcotics unit, from our general investigation unit, from our special victims units — they’ve all pitched in to help with this,” the sheriff said. “It’s been an all hands on deck” investigation.

Griffin has been the county’s elected sheriff since 2018 and spent years before that in every kind of police work, from patrol to investigations. Has he ever seen anything like this one?

“Never,” he said. “I’ve heard of cases like this. I think there’s been television crime shows that kind of mirror something like this going on. But I can tell you from my seat in my 34 years associated with law enforcement, I know of nothing in this area that even remotely resembles this.”

* * * * *

Anyone who has information relevant to the case was encouraged to contact the sheriff’s Violent Crime Unit at 828-694-2938.