News

Detectives seized medical records during poison-murder investigation

By Amy McCraw, Published: April 1, 2026

Investigators obtained the hospital records of a man they identified as one of the victims of a Henderson County woman accused of using poison in the murder of two people and the attempted murder of two others, according to a search warrant unsealed on Wednesday.

In response to the warrant issued late last year, AdventHealth in Hendersonville provided detectives with 552 pages of medical records and one disk of medical images related to Richard Evan Pegg and his stay at the hospital shortly after Thanksgiving.
Henderson County Sheriff’s Office detectives in January charged Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel with the murder of her daughter, Leela Jean Livis, 32, and the attempted murder of Livis’s half-sister, Maija Lacey, and Pegg.
During the course of the investigation, detectives also turned up evidence linking Casper-Leinenkugel to the murder of Michael Schmidt in Henderson County in 2007, according to a press release from the sheriff’s office
Casper-Leinenkugel, 53, is also charged with three counts of causing the “ingestion (of) a beverage which contained a poisonous chemical.”
Warrants identified the chemical as acetonitrile, a common industrial organic solvent, that when ingested “is slowly converted to cyanide, resulting in delayed toxicity,” the National Institutes of Health said in a report on the “deliberate self-poisoning by a 39-year-old woman” that resulted in cyanide poisoning 11 hours later. (Doctors saved the woman’s life by administering concentrated doses of sodium nitrite and thiosulphate.)
A 2008 supplemental report filed with Schmidt’s death certificate lists his cause of death as acute acetonitrile toxicity.
Livis, Lacey and Pegg were among 12 people who attended a Thanksgiving meal on Nov. 30 hosted by Casper-Leinenkugel, prosecutors said during a hearing in January. Hours after the meal, she received a text from her daughter, Leela, saying that she and Pegg were vomiting and feeling unwell. Maija also had gotten sick after the meal.
Leela died in her home in Jackson County on Dec. 1.
District Court Judge Abe Hudson granted the search warrant on Dec. 31 after Henderson County Sheriff’s Office Detective Joseph Tulloch applied for permission to obtain the medical records related to Pegg’s stay at AdventHealth in Hendersonville shortly after the Thanksgiving meal at Casper-Leinenkugel’s home at 15 Schmidt Terrace in Hendersonville.
Henderson County’s Sheriff’s detectives began investigating on Dec. 19 after they were contacted by Jackson County’s sheriff’s office, according to the application for the search warrant.
Jackson County investigators told Henderson County detectives about the Thanksgiving meal.
“After the party concluded, it was learned that two individuals became violently ill, leading to the death of one individual and hospitalization of Richard Pegg,” according to the application for the search warrant. “During interviews, it was discovered that the only item these two individuals consumed that differed from the rest of the partygoers was an open bottle of wine. The medical examiner reached out on or about the 19th of December to Jackson County detectives to inform them that the preliminary toxicology report for the deceased individual showed high levels of the chemical acetonitrile. This chemical, when metabolized by the body, turns into cyanide. During follow-up interview, it was learned that the hospital had told Richard that he appeared to have cyanide or methanol poisoning.”
Pegg’s medical records would be useful in the investigation into what occurred during the Thanksgiving meal, according to the search warrant application.
“It is believed that with the deceased individual having the chemical compounds for acetonitrile and the hospitalized subject having possible cyanide poisoning, the metabolized version of acetonitrile, there was some sort of contamination or poisoning that occurred in the food or drink that was served at the party. I believe Mr. Pegg’s medical records will help move this case forward.”
The search warrant does not describe what information investigators received in the hundreds of pages of medical records or on the disk of medical images related to Pegg’s stay at the hospital.
But the search warrant indicated that detectives intended to seize protected health information for Pegg from Nov. 30, 2025 “until present.”
Investigators wanted access to laboratory reports and notes from the hospital’s emergency department and urgent care center as well as nursing, clinic and progress notes. They also intended to seize Pegg’s health history and physical records, provider orders, consultations and radiology reports.
Imaging support and any scans including CT, MRI and Radiology were also among the items investigators sought to obtain.
Hudson sealed the search warrant for 90 days after he issued it on Dec.31 at the request of investigators and the district attorney’s office.
In its request to have the search warrant sealed, the district attorney’s office said the warrant needed to be sealed for law enforcement to maintain the integrity of an ongoing investigation, the right of the state to prosecute the defendant and/or the right of the defendant to a fair trial, the privacy rights of innocent third parties and the protection of witnesses and other third parties.
Tulloch also filed an affidavit in support of the state’s request to seal the search warrant.
“I am requesting that this search warrant be sealed to prevent any destruction of evidence that could occur if others learn of this ongoing investigation,” he wrote.
In addition to the investigation into Casper-Leinenkugel in Henderson County, detectives in Sawyer County, Wisc., are looking into the 2017 death of her husband, Elroy Albert Lund Jr.
Lund and Casper-Leinenkugel married in March 2017. Two months later, Lund died in his home at the age of 72.
His obituary at the time said he died “in his sleep from natural causes.”
But detectives in Wisconsin confirmed this week that they have opened an investigation into Lund’s death.