Saturday, August 17, 2002
By KATIE N. JOHANNES
Tribune Staff Writer
In a search of Tashala Lynett Hayman's home, Cascade County Sheriff's investigators also found a poisoned pop packaged and addressed to William Prince of Wales.
A note in the package read: "Have a Coke and a smile," federal court documents say.
Hayman, 22, is charged with federal counts of mailing poison with intent to kill or injure another and production of false Social Security cards.
She is the same woman who was arrested last week on charges she stole a credit card number while working for N.E.W., a Great Falls company that takes calls from customers seeking warranty information.
Police allege that Hayman used the number to purchase a 9-mm pistol and clothes.
Authorities have been unable to find a motive for Hayman's alleged actions. She moved into her sparsely furnished mobile home in Vaughn about six months ago, Sheriff John Strandell said. Before that, she lived in Spokane. She's believed to be a California native.
U.S. Attorney Bill Mercer credits an alert Vaughn postmaster for helping investigators track down the poisoned soda addressed to Kennedy.
The postmaster remembered Hayman sending a package to Kennedy on about Aug. 1, documents said. She tried to send the package with no return address. When the postmaster required one, Hayman allegedly wrote her Vaughn address on the package.
Washington D.C. Capitol Police and the U.S. Postal Service tracked down a package addressed to Kennedy in the Capitol mail system that contained two soda bottles that tested positive for cyanide.
In addition to the poisoned soda addressed to Prince William, Sheriff's officers and FBI agents found several suspicious items in Hayman's home, including two open bottles labeled "Sodium Cyanide"; a wine bottle that had apparently been tampered with in an unaddressed package; Internet printouts with addresses of Sen. Edward Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady who's now a U.S. senator from New York; and printouts with information about the British Royal Family.
Also found were lists of names, Social Security numbers and credit card transactions; a note reading: "Order crossbow and gun and Cyanide fox;" several notes addressed to the British Royal Family; and shipping and packaging labels for sodium cyanide.
In Hayman's purse, investigators found a calendar with a note written on it that said: "Prepare the Cyanide Trucks and Cyanide;" a business card for Postal Annex in Spokane, Wash.; and notes about sodium cyanide, sulfuric acid and nitric acid.
The Spokane (Wash.) Regional Drug Task Force called the Cascade County Sheriff's Office to report that a woman using the name Carolyn Smith bought two pounds of sodium cyanide from a chemical company in Texas, according to the federal affidavit.
The woman had the chemical shipped to a mailbox at a commercial mailing service in Spokane. She allegedly had mail forwarded from the mailbox to her Vaughn address.
Officers believe Hayman used Smith as an alias. They found that the forwarding fee paid to the mailing service came from an account in Hayman's name. In her purse, they also found an identification badge with Hayman's photo and the name Carolyn Smith, documents said.
The chemical company denied a request from the same woman to ship 20 more pounds of cyanide after suspecting that the business she claimed to work for did not exist, documents said.
Hayman told investigators she bought two pounds of cyanide for experimentation, and said she had ingested some of the chemical to see what how it would affect her, documents said.
She will appear at a detention hearing in Helena on Wednesday. If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.