Meling Wouldn't Come Near As His Wife Lay Near Death, His Mother- In-Law Testifies -- Doctors Also Found His Comments Puzzling

The mother of Sudafed-tampering victim Jennifer Meling said she was surprised that Joseph Meling showed no interest in approaching his desperately ill wife after she emerged from a six-hour coma.

"It seemed strange that he didn't want to touch her. . . . I never saw him touch her," Lilly Lindbo testified in Meling's product-tampering trial.

Fighting back tears, Lindbo said Jennifer's awakening, which doctors called miraculous, came as Lindbo and her husband were psychologically preparing to accept their daughter's death in the early hours of Feb. 3, 1991.

Jennifer Meling had become seriously ill about 9:30 the previous evening, after taking a capsule from a Sudafed container in her Tumwater apartment.

Although doctors did not know what was wrong with Jennifer Meling, they told her family that the 28-year-old woman was "just hanging by a hair," Lindbo recalled.

Through the night, Lindbo and her husband agreed that if their daughter didn't emerge from the coma by 4 a.m., they would pray for God to let her die because they feared she would have suffered irreversible brain injury.

A few minutes after 4 a.m., the couple approached the hospital bed where their daughter lay motionless. "Her dad said, `Jennifer, if you can hear me, open your eyes.' And she opened her eyes," Lilly

Lindbo testified.

But she said her son-in-law showed no interest in approaching his wife or staying at her bedside. Even though Jennifer Meling was still critically ill, he left the hospital by 8 a.m. and had not returned when Lindbo herself left the hospital at 6 p.m. that day.

Joseph Meling, on trial in U.S. District Court in Seattle, is charged with poisoning his wife and with causing the deaths of two strangers who took cyanide-filled capsules in Sudafed packs purchased in Olympia and Tacoma.

Prosecutors say Meling hoped to collect $700,000 from a life-insurance policy on his wife and that he tried to confuse authorities by putting other poisoned capsules on store shelves.

Lindbo's observations about Meling's reluctance to approach his wife came during questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Joanne Maida, planting the suggestion that Meling was the cause of his wife's plight.

But Carol Koller, one of Meling's attorneys, suggested that relatives sometimes have difficulty viewing loved ones hooked up to life-support equipment and in obvious distress.

In response to questions from Koller, Lindbo said she herself felt a fear and a reluctance to repeatedly enter the room where her daughter lay dying. "I thought, `I can't look at her again . . . but I have to.' "

Under questioning by the defense lawyer, Lindbo acknowledged the marriage of Joseph and Jennifer was difficult for the Lindbo family to accept at first.

In testimony today, a detective who investigated events surrounding Jennifer Meling's cyanide poisoning said that even though Joseph Meling increased his wife's accidental-death insurance less than two weeks before she was poisoned in 1991, Meling at first denied there had been any recent changes in the policy.

Charles Burnett, a former Tumwater police officer who is now with the Snohomish County sheriff's office, said he specifically asked Meling about insurance coverage, to probe for a possible motive to the poisoning.

Burnett said Meling told him the couple purchased insurance in the fall of 1990, but failed to mention that in January 1991 Meling bought an additional accidental death provision, boosting his wife's coverage to $700,000.

Although denying recent changes in the policy, Meling told Burnett that he had a large amount of insurance, which he said was necessary because Meling sold insurance and prospective clients sometimes asked him how much he carried.

In testimony yesterday, two doctors who treated Jennifer Meling the night she collapsed testified they were surprised Meling told them he would be the primary suspect if his wife died.

"I thought that was most inappropriate . . . at that time I did not suspect there was any foul play," said Dr. Lewis Almaraz.

Dr. T. Hian Pouw, Jennifer Meling's primary physician, said Meling told him he was concerned that if news accounts portrayed him as under suspicion for insurance fraud, it would ruin Meling's career as an insurance salesman.

Pouw said he thought it odd that Meling, as his wife lay dying, considered it as a potential business setback.

Another witness yesterday said she was uncomfortable when, a few days after the poisoning, Meling began telling her his marital problems.

Nancy Harwick, a family friend, said Meling told her he had initially been taken by his wife's intelligence but had since decided that was a mistake. "Next time he was going to marry a woman with no brains - with nice legs and big breasts," she said.

Meling's trial, which opened Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle, is expected to last up to six weeks.