(James Toliver Craig. Picture credit: CNN)
*Please be aware that I will be sharing some disturbing details in this post. I have aimed as always to be as sensitive as I can be with the details, without taking away from the details of the case. If you would like to discuss this post or any of the previous cases I have covered on this blog, please email me at jocaledoniankitty@gmail.com*
You know, I've always said that it doesn't matter how well you think you know someone, even if you've lived in the same house with them for years, decades.....you never really know someone completely. Now, imagine being married to someone for 23 years, you met in your early 20s, you had six beautiful children together, travelled together, gone through life's highs and lows, supported each other through thick and thin. After 23 years you would consider that person a soulmate wouldn't you? A huge part of you? An important piece of your family, A huge part of your life, so many memories, so many experiences together! No doubt you would trust that person, you've basically grown with that person. Well, what if this wife or husband out of the blue decided that, after decades of your constant love and support, that it was time for you to exit the stage?
We've seen this happen to both men and women. I've written about such cases before (Betty Broderick, Mitchell Quy, Blanche Taylor Moore, John List amongst many others) where so called picture perfect marriages have turned out to be anything but the sort. The face of evil pictured above is that of so-called devoted Mormon, Dentist and pillar of the community....James Toliver Craig. This manipulative, cold-hearted philanderer (based in Aurora, Colorado) was a talented Dentist but horrific businessman who liked to live beyond his means. He built up a successful practice in the beginning with a partner but it all soon fell to the wayside with his mishandling of finances. James had been married to the beautiful Angela since 1999. They first met when he was 21 and she was just 20. It was a romance that blossomed pretty quickly and before anyone knew what was happening, they were married. In their faith (Angela was also Mormon) this was not unusual, people often married young and started families quickly. Angela was the youngest of 10 children and was always the life and soul of the party. She was always family orientated and amazing with children.
It was clear that despite James being quite an intelligent guy, for some reason he just couldn't get the hang of managing money. He had issues with his finances early on in the marriage but Angela was determined to stand by her husband, even when she suspected he was having multiple affairs, which he was. The fact that this beautiful, intelligent and devoted woman would put up with this may baffle a lot of people but to Angela, the thought of divorce was the last thing she would ever want. Her faith and belief in the family unit and forgiveness was so strong that she couldn't bring herself to walk away from him. To leave James would mean that the family would be broken up and to her it would have been embarrassing to be seen as a divorced woman. So the red flags were there for years and Angela knew about them but she chose to just confide in her sisters and her friends. She was convinced that she could change James and that the marriage was worth fighting for.
Angela was known for wearing her heart on her sleeve. The church was an important part of her life and she wasn't just a devoted mother and wife, she was a choir director, a teacher and youth leader who was well known for supporting others, being a fantastic friend and helping raise money for good causes. Angela was not a fake person, she actually was someone who had a pure heart so much so that she took every single one of her marriage vows seriously, even if it was tremendously difficult. It wasn't just herself that she was thinking about, she was thinking about her children and wanted them to continue to have a solid relationship with their father.
It's unclear how many affairs that James had but he was like an addict who would gamble whatever money they had left causing Angela the task of trying to keep the family afloat. They ended up using the family home as a safety net just so that the practice could stay open. The financial situation was in crisis but Angela was determined not to give up and James continued to work hard. At the Dentist practice, James came across as Mr Friendly, everybody's pal! He was popular with his patients and staff and was known to hand out cookies to everyone. Angela and the children would often visit him at work and staff would later say that the family were always smiling and seemed very close.
James and Angela both liked to appear in public as a contented family but behind the scenes all was not well. This went on for years, going through the motions and hanging on financially by a thread until 2023 rolled around and things just went from bad to worse. Something had to be done because James was facing financial ruin and at this point Angela was fed up with the lack of love and support from her husband. They agreed to separate but live in the same house because money was so tight. James slept in a spare bedroom as they tried to figure out what their next step was going to be. He attended a conference in Las Vegas and it was there that he met an orthodontist named Karin. The pair hit it off and seemed to have a lot of things in common. He told her he was separated and she said she had been going through a divorce. They exchanged phone numbers.
You'd think that the circumstances in which James found himself in (or should I say, put himself in), marriage crumbling, financial nightmare going on etc that the idea of getting into a new relationship with someone else, would be the last thing on his mind. In my opinion he saw Karin, who was older at the age of 49, as a potential meal ticket. Karin who was another innocent party in this, had no idea that this buffoon in front of her was a lying, manipulative scumbag and future murderer. I think he saw Karin as a fresh start for him, he could work in her practice, use her to help straighten out his finances, probably marry her so that he could guarantee that his feet would be right under the table. This guy didn't do anything out of the goodness of his heart....if he even has a heart!
It's unclear how long he was actually thinking about and planning to murder Angela but just after this conference in Las Vegas things sprung straight into action. He'd become fixated on Karin and what started off as general 'how are you doing' texts soon began to heat up. Apparently they exchanged 4,000 texts in the space of 18 days. He was determined that he was going to start a new life with Karin but there were problems, finances and Angela! He hadn't a dime to his name and there was no way that Angela was going to give him a divorce. The monster decided that instead of coming to his senses, cutting the crap and pulling his socks up and focusing on becoming a decent husband for once in his life, he came up with a despicable plan. Spending hours upon hours hovering over his laptop googling poisons and life insurance details, he decided that he was going to kill his wife, inherit her life insurance and run off into the sunset with Karin in Las Vegas.
Angela and this demon were living under the same roof whilst James was secretly planning his wife's demise. It's utterly terrifying to think that the very man who is the father of your children, who you thought you knew for so many years, could be stood there thinking about how he's going to end your life and spend your life insurance money with his new found victim. Who know's what would have become of Karin either? this guy was capable of anything.
Like a lot of women, Angela was trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle and enjoyed a regular workout routine. Part of this routine was her protein shakes, however she began to notice that her favourite workout drinks were starting to make her feel a bit queasy, she put this down to overdoing things at first. At the age of 43 she attributed some of her dizzy feelings to possible peri-menopause and tried not to worry too much about it. It did cross her mind briefly that James had been messing about with her drinks again, apparently years before, he had tried to put something in her drink. She caught on to it straight away at the time and questioned him about it. He came up with this pathetic excuse that he was feeling suicidal and determined to take his own life so he wanted to drug her so that she wouldn't be able to stop him. Shockingly, Angela fell for this excuse and was either in denial or he'd managed to manipulate and gaslight her in such a way that he could've said that moon was made of green cheese and she would've believed him. This is no disrespect to Angela, these types of psychopaths are clever at getting inside people's heads, especially if they have known you for decades on a personal level, which is even more terrifying. He knew Angela's strengths and weaknesses so he could play with them to control her.
After having a protein shake, Angela would become very ill with migraines, she couldn't understand as she'd had these drinks so many times before with no issues. The symptoms got worse with Angela vomiting, rushing to the bathroom and doubled up in pain. She tried to manage it herself but it was clear that this wasn't just some stomach bug or per-menopause symptoms. James, pretending to care would stand there watching his devoted wife in agony and suffering and would just let it continue. He would drive her to the hospital and callously watch as the medical staff would rush around trying different tests on Angela to find out what was wrong. He would hold her hand whilst she was terrified but too weak to cry from all the pain and suffering, he just stood there and let it all happen without a thought for anyone but himself.
A whole saga of Angela being in and out of the hospital would play on. You may remember the Blanche Taylor Moore case which I wrote about back in September of last year (2025). Blanche's victims would be poisoned by her dinners and baked goods, end up in hospital at death's door and then make positive improvements when she was away from them. Then, the minute they were released from hospital and back home with Blanche, they would mysteriously fall dangerously ill again and back to the hospital. You may remember that Blanche started going into the hospital to 'visit' her victims and would bring in her 'homemade' cooking and cakes cause she was determined to finish these poor people off. James ended up poisoning Angela in hospital because she was such a fighter, her body was trying to fight back but in the end he just gave her more and more poison.
As Angela lay in her hospital bed fighting for her life as Doctors were frantic that her organs were shutting down and they were running every test they could think of, whilst trying to keep her alive...James was in bed with Karin. He arranged for Karin to come to Colorado for a few days, they went out for romantic dinners, did some shopping and sightseeing, curled up on the sofa and watched movies together. I'm sure Karin looks back to these times and is thoroughly traumatized, to know that she was unknowingly part of a horrific set of circumstances that she had no idea about. James Craig's level of evil is just beyond the beyonds! How could you do that to a stranger let alone your own wife of 23 years? the mother of your children? How could he be in bed with someone else, enjoying himself, drinking glasses of wine whilst his wife was in a hospital bed losing her life? Putting his children...Angela's family and friends through hell? All of this for money? Did he ever really love her? Even if the marriage had turned sour, what about friendship? What about the fact that Angela gave him 6 beautiful children? What about all those years? What about all the good times? the memories? the endless times she stood by him? How could nothing mean a thing to him? He was an utter cold hearted psychopath and rotten to the core and I can think of even worse things to call him than that.
Back at the Dentist practice, James's colleagues noticed a change in him, they knew that Angela was in and out of the hospital and he was under stress but something else was just not right. One of his colleague's Caitlin noticed he was acting odd, packages were being sent to him and he'd guard these with his life. He'd show up at odd hours and looked like he was up to something. He told the staff that a package was going to be arriving for him but to put it to the side and under no circumstances are they to open it. A few days later, either Caitlin forgot that she wasn't supposed to open this particular package that had arrived (or she knew fine well and purposefully opened it anyway) but she opened it and there it was, Potassium Cyanide!
He was having the poisons delivered to the practice along with the usual supplies that were regularly ordered. Caitlin knew about Angela's health troubles and rumours has been going around about his financial problems. She began to do some digging into what Angela's symptoms were and could they in anyway be related to those of cyanide poisoning? Turned out, all of Angela's symptoms were an exact match for someone who had been poisoned with Cyanide. Caitlin informed her colleagues and the police straight away.
Sadly Angela, who had put up such an incredible fight, had sadly passed away in hospital at the age of 43 on the 18th of March 2023. The medical staff and the police had been informed the day before that colleagues of James had found bottles of Cyanide at the practice and were suspicious that he had been poisoning his wife. An investigation was in full swing so they had James in their sights just before Angela had died but it was too late. The poison had caused so much damage to her internal organs and she had been poisoned by James numerous times, he was trying to kill her over and over and over again! An autopsy confirmed everything, she had a combination of Potassium Cyanide and Tetrahydrozoline. Tetrahydrozoline is commonly found in eye-drops but if swallowed can cause blood pressure to drop dangerously low as well as causing respiratory failure.
When the investigation switched from suspected attempted murder to full blown first-degree murder, investigators arrested James and searched both the Dentist practice and the Craig family home. They found poison, tons of empty bottles of eye drops, evidence of receipts for poisons and evidence on and in Angela's favourite protein shaker bottle.
Karin was investigated and completely cleared of any knowledge or wrongdoing. Nobody else was involved in this, it was all the evil doing of James Toliver Craig. James did try to contact Karin after Angela's death telling her not to believe anything she heard about him, he told her he was innocent.
He had the nerve to plead not guilty and even behind bars the lies never stopped! He tried to paint a picture of Angela being depressed and claimed that she told him to poison her. When nobody fell for that, he tried to manipulate one of his daughters into lying for him by asking her to make an AI video of her own mother saying that she wanted to poison herself. And to add to the madness, he tried to persuade a fellow inmate to murder the lead investigator in his case to what ends that he thought this would help him, nobody knows. The man (look who I'm calling a man), the monster, didn't know when to shut up and to be honest, he was just telling on himself with all of that. He'd completely lost the plot but did he ever have it to begin with?
He stood trial in July of 2025 and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Angela's children and family later filed a lawsuit against James, his practice and Midland Scientific (the company which sold James the poison), they won their case.
James Craig is currently serving his sentence at Bent Correctional Facility in Las Animas, Colorado. Understandably, his children have severed all ties with him.
James Craig may have had money problems but at the end of the day he had a beautiful wife and children, more than anyone could have asked for. He had a loving, family home and instead of appreciating that, he threw it all away and caused so much pain, heartbreak and misery. Where did it all get him? In a prison cell for the rest of his miserable life. He didn't deserve a lovely wife and children, he deserves nothing. He should've got the death penalty in my opinion (I know there are some readers who will disagree with me), he stood there and tortured his devoted, innocent wife of 23 years so that he could get rid of her and steal her money, that's not a human being, that's a monster, a demon. So many people have been horrendously hurt by him. Even Karin, who only knew him for a short period of time but the guy was so toxic that any contact with him, no matter how much, left a horrible scar. He was and is, no good to anybody. I'm so grateful that Angela's children have each other and a strong community of support.
Angela left an incredible legacy behind and along with the numerous kind-hearted things she had done and the joy she brought to others, I think about how incredibly brave and strong she was fighting for her life in hospital. In all honestly it's actually incredible how much of a fight her body put up because she kept fighting back.
So many beautiful pictures, stories, memories left behind and her 6 children are carrying on their mother's legacy. She did an incredible job raising them, her light will never fade. RIP Angela, you will never be forgotten x
Further Reading & Sources:
- James Craig: Article | BBC News
- James Craig: Article | Sky News
- James Craig: Article | Court TV
- James Craig: Article | NBC News
- Karin Cain: Article | ABC News
- Aurora, Colorado | Wikipedia
- Colorado Department of Corrections
Thank you as always if you are a regular reader of my posts, I always appreciate it. Thank you also if you are new to my work, I appreciate you being here too. I write about a lot of dark things on this blog but I want to remind you, that there is a lot of good in this world, amazing people, amazing things. We live in a beautiful world where so many wonderful things happen. For the horrific husbands like James Craig, there are millions of others husbands out there that are like the Milk Tray man (Tongue in cheek commercial superhero from back in the day who delivered a box of chocolates 'Milk Tray' to his beloved. Retro TV commerical). I thought I would try to end on a positive note! Anyway, there is good and bad and I hope after reading this that you do something relaxing that'll make you smile .
Come and say hi on my Socials! Stay safe and I hope you will join me in my next post x
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