A Connecticut woman ingested a fatal amount of antifreeze just hours before she was slated to be sentenced for killing her husband, officials said.
Authorities found Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi dead inside her home in Burlington the morning of July 24, after her lawyer, Patrick Tomasiewicz, requested they perform a wellness check. She’d been due in court later that day, where she was slated to learn her fate for the 2017 slaying of her husband, 84-year-old Pierluigi Bigazzi, NBC Connecticut reported.
The Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on Monday confirmed Kosuda-Bigazzi’s cause of death was ethylene glycol toxicity and her manner of death was listed as suicide.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ethylene glycol is an “industrial compound” found in consumer products like “antifreeze, hydraulic brake fluids, some stamp pad inks, ballpoint pens, solvents, paints, plastics, films, and cosmetics.”
Kosuda-Bigazzi in March pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of her husband, who worked as a professor of laboratory science and pathology at UConn Health. She also pleaded guilty to grand larceny for continuing to receive her husband’s paychecks following his death, according to the Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice.
Authorities found the professor’s body in the basement of the couple’s Burlington home while responding to a welfare check call from his employer, who had not heard from him for several months, prosecutors said. They also learned checks from Bigazzi’s employer were deposited into the couple’s joint checking account from his death in July 2017 until the discovery of his body in February 2018.
Her husband’s death was ruled a homicide by blunt injuries to the head, the medical examiner’s office said at the time. According to writings found in her house, Kosuda-Bigazzi claimed she killed her husband with a hammer in self-defense.
Kosuda-Bigazzi, who’d been free on $1.5 million bail, was expected to be sentenced to 13 years in prison.