Colorado mother-of-six Angela Craig knew something was desperately wrong after a routine bike ride on the first Monday of March.
It was 2023, and the fit and healthy 43-year-old had just returned from a genealogy conference in Utah, and done nothing out of the ordinary that day.
She just enjoyed her usual exercise, cared for her daughters and drank a protein shake prepared by her dentist husband, James Craig, 47.
After he left for work, however, she started feeling weird. Heavy. Like everything was moving in slow motion.
It got so bad that, a few hours later, her husband left work to take Angela to the emergency room – but they were sent home with no answers. She went to an urgent care the next day, but still didn’t receive an explanation for her symptoms.
Meanwhile, Angela was getting worse. She frantically researched her symptoms and messaged friends and her family text chain, wondering what could be ailing her and whether she was finally showing signs of the diabetes that plagued much of her extended family.
At one point, Angela’s daughter, then a senior in high school, found her on the floor of the bathroom at home. She was admitted to the hospital for a five-night stay on March 9, 2023.
The devoted mother complained about feeling ‘shaky inside’ – and she had researched ‘mini seizures’ and ‘high blood pressure’ online. And through it all, Angela was texting her husband, who claimed to also be in the dark despite his medical training.
At one point, Angela’s high school senior daughter found her on the floor of the bathroom at home
Angela, 43, shared six children with her dentist husband James Craig
One hospital worker described Craig as ‘doting’. He sought counsel from nurse and doctor friends about his wife’s mysterious illness. He dutifully updated Angela’s nine siblings through their continuous big-clan text chain.
On March 11, while Angela was in the hospital, he texted her: ‘I just woke up dreaming about making love to you.
‘I love you and want you.’
But as his wife lay suffering, he was secretly plotting to kill her.
Craig’s nefarious multi-tasking came to light in detail this year during his more than two-week murder trial. A jury to found him guilty of first-degree murder and additional counts related to crimes he then plotted from jail. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Craig had been cheating on Angela, and jurors heard excerpts from Angela’s 2009 and 2018 journals in which she agonized over her marriage and her husband’s continued affairs. In 2019, the couple had met with two of their best friends and admitted they were struggling.
‘He told us that he had been dealing with sexual addiction for a long time and that it had gotten to a point where he was going to, or had thought about, killing himself,’ family friend Nikki Harmon told the trial.
‘And he told us that, one night, he was planning to inject himself with something to kill himself and drugged Angie to make sure that she didn’t wake up and stop him.’
Angela, Harmon said, ‘told us that she was going to stay in the marriage and … she was going to help him work through it.
‘And so he was attending group counseling and therapy.’
By 2022, however, Craig seemed to be up to his old tricks. Three women testified they’d begun sexual and financial ‘arrangements’ with the dentist after meeting him on ‘sugar dating’ site Seeking.com in the months before Angela’s death.
Angela, Harmon said, ‘told us that she was going to stay in the marriage and … she was going to help him work through it’
Craig’s profile on sugar dating site Seeking.com listed him as rich and ‘married but looking’
Three women testified they’d begun sexual and financial ‘arrangements’ with the dentist after meeting him on ‘sugar dating’ site Seeking.com in the months before Angela’s death
He bought a $9,000 car for one ‘sugar baby’s’ daughter. He took two others on vacations to Montana – though one trip was cut short in December 2022 when Angela called her husband to confront him about infidelity the morning after he landed in Bozeman.
One woman named Elizabeth Gore testified that Craig turned the car around, booked new flights and went home, telling her that he was going through a divorce.
What he told Angela, however, was that the relationship with Gore wasn’t physical, which wasn’t true, Gore told the court.
Angela threatened to leave but accepted her husband’s story, and she believed the two were working on their marriage after the holidays. By March, her sister and best friend testified, she believed they were ‘on the mend.’
But Craig told another mistress that he was married but ‘not happy and that he was trying to figure out how to get divorced.’
He also told a woman named Carrie Hageseth that ‘financial separation from [Angela] was near impossible … it’d make him completely broke and destitute.’
The dentist even asked her if she knew ‘anyone who can help me with my problem’ – which she took to mean his wife – adding that he could ‘pay handsomely.’ Hageseth had suggested he ‘hit up a homeless person,’ which she described as ‘somebody that doesn’t have much to lose.’
She told the court how he referenced his wife while discussing the movie The Purge – featuring a plot where you can kill anyone within 24 hours and not face any consequences.
‘He didn’t say specifically her but said that he knew how he would be able to get away with … injecting somebody in the neck with a substance,’ Hageseth testified.
Craig ‘mentioned he could use potassium chloride, or potassium something, because it was untraceable,’ she told the court. ‘It would be one injection.’
Three women testified they’d begun sexual and financial ‘arrangements’ with the dentist after meeting him on ‘sugar dating’ site Seeking.com in the months before Angela’s death
![Craig told Hageseth (pictured) that 'financial separation from [Angela] was near impossible … it'd make him completely broke and destitute'](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/09/06/21/100581337-14960481-Before_Craig_met_Cain_he_juggled_multiple_relationships_with_sug-a-100_1757189145380.jpg)
Craig told Hageseth (pictured) that ‘financial separation from [Angela] was near impossible … it’d make him completely broke and destitute’
Craig hadn’t communicated with Hageseth for a few days – but was persistently still texting Gore – when he traveled to a dental conference in Las Vegas in late February 2023.
There, he met Texas orthodontist Karin Cain – who was in the end stages of a long divorce and out of the dating game for years.
A conservative mother of two from a small town, Cain was nervous about going alone to a conference dinner event being held at the Vegas NFL stadium and debated staying in her room.
But she forced herself to attend, and Craig was standing in front of her in the line for the bus to the dinner. He struck up a conversation, drawing her in with his ‘incredible gift of making people feel so understood,’ she testified at trial while crying.
Craig told her he was in the ‘same situation … also at the end of a hard divorce’ and living apart from his wife.
‘The conversations were very deep and honest and vulnerable,’ Cain said during trial.
Her marriage, Cain told the court, had ‘been a really not safe place, and so when I felt all this safety … I felt seen and heard, and it was extremely comforting and drew me in.’
The pair ‘made out’, and Cain said Craig was ‘receptive’ and ‘understood’ when she told him she wanted to avoid full physical intimacy ‘until I know this is my forever person.’
‘That’s pretty hard, being this age, so it’s a difficult thing to bring up to people.’
They went to the airport together in Vegas, kissed each other goodbye and boarded separately. They would exchange 4,000 texts and 80 declarations of love in under four weeks.
Cain even booked a flight to Denver for a trip in March that year, but Craig kept pushing the visit back. Soon, he began texting her about his wife’s sickness.
Her marriage, Cain (pictured) told the court, had ‘been a really not safe place, and so when I felt all this safety … I felt seen and heard, and it was extremely comforting and drew me in’
Cain bought flights to Denver for early March but Craig kept pushing the visit back. Soon he began texting her about his wife getting sick
Mark Pray, second from left, testified emotionally at his sister’s murder trial about the suspicious behavior and lies of his brother-in-law
The dentist, upon returning from Las Vegas, began researching fatal substances and the quantities needed to kill a human, the trial heard.
On March 4, 2023, Craig had arsenic delivered to the house. Two days later, his office manager, Caitlin Romero, spotted him working in the dark after hours at an exam room computer – something so unusual that she took note.
As she was driving home, Romero testified, ‘I got a text from him saying that he was having a personal package delivered to the office, and when it got there, put it on his desk, don’t open it.’
Angela first got sick on March 6, 2023. Between March 7 and 8, receipts showed Craig bought at least 19 bottles of Visine – eye drops containing poisonous chemical tetrahydrozoline.
She was hospitalized on March 9, the same day a customer service worker at Midland Scientific began dealing with Craig about an order of potassium cyanide the dentist had placed.
The dentist claimed he was using it for a presentation and seemed desperate to get his hands on it. He repeatedly called and emailed the Texas-based Midland Scientific worker – and even turned up at a loading dock for the company near his office seeing if he could pick it up on March 13, a witness testified.
On March 13, the cyanide was delivered to his dental office – though a staffer mistakenly opened it, and Romero noticed ‘potassium cyanide’ on the label.
She researched it, saw that it was poison and discovered it caused symptoms matching Angela’s – a realization that would set off a change of events leading to Craig’s undoing.
He repeatedly checked with staff about poison he’d ordered to his office – telling them to expect an important package, put it on his desk and not open it
A customer service worker at Midland Scientific began dealing with the dentist about an order of potassium cyanide the dentist had placed
Home surveillance images from trial exhibitions showed Craig making Angela protein shakes that prosecutors say were tainted; he’d ordered arsenic, cyanide and oleander, as well as purchasing multiple packets of Visine, eyedrops containing a chemical lethal if ingested
After administering a dose of ‘Clindamycin’ at Craig’s insistence, Angela’s visiting brother and sister-in-law brought her to the hospital for the final time on March 15. She had become much sicker after taking the antibiotic and could barely get out of the car
Angela was released from Parker Adventist hospital on March 14, by which point her brother, Mark, and his wife had driven from Utah to help.
They were at home with Angela when Craig left the house on March 15, allegedly for work. He reminded them to give his wife a dose of antibiotic Clindamycin, a prescription he said the hospital had approved.
About 20 minutes later, Angela began frantically calling for her brother.
She was ‘sitting up in her bed, bent over and couldn’t hold herself up,’ he said.
They decided to take her immediately back to the hospital, and Angela ‘was still able to provide a little bit of support, but I basically carried her out to the car, put her in and we went to the emergency department.’
Angela was admitted to the hospital and Craig turned up later that day, urging his brother-in-law to go home and get some rest. Then, Craig went into Angela’s room with a syringe and emerged 60 seconds later to tell staff alarms were going off.
Angela crashed and never regained consciousness.
Doctors told her family that night that Angela was essentially brain dead.
By that afternoon, however, Romero had alerted her bosses to the cyanide – and Craig’s longtime friend and business partner, who’d been at the hospital for support, alerted staff.
They told police, and an investigation began – as doctors frantically started administering the cyanide antidote, though it would ultimately prove futile.
Craig’s aghast friend and partner Dr Ryan Redfearn, meanwhile, confronted him that day in a phone call about the cyanide delivered to the practice.
The package hadn’t been opened, Craig first insisted – before claiming it was a ring for Angela. When Redfearn kept pressing, Craig said Angela was suicidal and had asked him to buy the poison.
By the time Craig returned home on the night of March 15, he was denied access to his home by police; within hours, he was writing an iPhone note manifesto. It was a timeline aiming to offer explanations for the poisoning blamed squarely on his wife.
Hospital footage showed Craig emerging from a bathroom with what appears to be a syringe in his hand before entering his wife’s room briefly
Jurors saw evidence from their home of shake bottles in the sink; tests on items from the house showed evidence of tetrahydrozoline, a fatal chemical found in eyedrops
As family came to town to bid goodbye to Angela, who was on life support, Craig was romancing his ‘love’ Cain, who was completely unaware of his still-intact marriage and his murderous plot and came to visit Craig on March 16.
Craig took her to dinner in Boulder and on a hike, and spent time in her hotel room, too. He’d only been gone a few hours on March 19 when police knocked on her door to tell her he’d been arrested – and the horrifying truth began to emerge.
He was booked into jail the day after Angela was taken off life support – and soon tried to rope one of his children into fabricating evidence to exonerate him.
The Craigs’ third-oldest child, Annabelle – who turned 18 days before her mother’s death – told the court that her father had asked her to bail another inmate out of jail. The inmate – who Craig had falsely claimed was Annabelle’s cousin – gave her a letter that had been taped together.
It was from her father. In it, Craig wrote that ‘we need a deep-fake video of Mom saying she asked [Craig] to order cyanide, arsenic and oleander, and she was going to take it herself,’ the 20-year-old testified.
Craig also tried to convince a fellow inmate, Kacy Bohannon, to plant fake journals of Angela’s in his truck or home to make it seem like she’d been suicidal. He even drew a map for Bohannon – who flushed it, said no, and told authorities after he got out of custody.
He also tried to get his felon cellmate, Nathanial Harris – a man who once featured on Denver’s 50 Most Wanted list – to recruit Harris’ ex for a scheme in which women would lie to exonerate the dentist.
He wrote letters to Harris’ ex, Kasiani Konstantinidis – one of which reached her while the other stayed hidden in Harris’s mail in his cell.
Harris, wanting no part, told his new wife to tell the prison. She called the guards, who staged a search. Harris surreptitiously identified the letter and, just like the one which reached Kasi’s house, it offered money in exchange for manufacturing witnesses and lies.
Harris also told the court that Craig asked him to kill the lead detective on his case and other inmates. Harris said he lied and told Craig he’d carry out the hits in order to shut him up and stop him from approaching others.
The couple had six children, one boy and five girls – and he tried to rope at least two of them into his post-arrest schemes. He was found guilty of trying to order hits from behind bars and trying to manufacture witnesses to lie for him
![In a letter, Craig wrote that 'we need a deep-fake video of Mom saying she asked [Craig] to order cyanide, arsenic and oleander, and she was going to take it herself'](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/09/06/21/101898339-14960481-Craig_called_his_teenage_daughter_and_asked_her_to_bond_out_a_fe-a-108_1757189145717.jpg)
In a letter, Craig wrote that ‘we need a deep-fake video of Mom saying she asked [Craig] to order cyanide, arsenic and oleander, and she was going to take it herself’
Craig sobbed occasionally during the closing arguments of the trial – before the jury found him guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to mandatory life in prison
The courtroom was filled daily with reporters, members of both Craig and Pray families, and even former patients of the dentist – all still trying to come to terms with Craig’s plot.
Meanwhile, Angela’s loved ones fought to present the real picture of her, highlighting her wit and intelligence. Relatives briefly lit up through their tears as they watched snippets of her family life from home surveillance footage shown during trial.
During victim impact statements – before the judge sentenced Craig to life without parole – Angela’s siblings and children tearfully spoke of the woman they love and miss.
Angela’s sister Kathryn said that Craig ‘knew what kind of pain and trauma he was inflicting.
‘He was torturing her. It has been shocking,’ she said. ‘We were fooled … We were unable to save her.
‘We were unable to rescue her from the person that was supposed to honor her, protect her and love her.
‘He killed her, and then, in an attempt to save himself from the consequences of his despicable crime, he … disparaged her by attacking her mental health, her trust, her strength, her faith, her commitment to family and her ability to keep a confidence.’
The Craigs’ oldest child and only son, Toliver, struggled to contain his emotion in his victim impact statement.
‘It’s hard to lose your mom and, three days later, lose your dad,’ he said. ‘And have to spend the next two and a half years trying to untangle whatever he tells you.’
