FARMINGTON, NY — They met in a Veterans Affairs hospital, a former airman with bipolar disorder who drank too much and a clerical assistant struggling to cope with her teenage son’s drug-overdose death.
Cynthia Galens and Thomas Stack soon moved in together in this upstate town near Rochester. Galens says Stack was abusive, and she decided one night to exact revenge by lacing a jug of margaritas with antifreeze.
“If I didn’t want him around, I would’ve put a lot more in. I just wanted to get him sick,” State Police said Galens told them in early January, three months after Stack’s death from complications of ethylene glycol poisoning.
“It’s a horrible thing I did,” she added. “I miss him so much I can’t stand it.”
Galens, 51, has pleaded not guilty, and is awaiting trial on a second-degree murder charge.