For Steven Robards, life had really just begun after he’d married the love of his life, and his teenage daughter, Marie, had just moved in with them. But in the winter of 1993, this family’s lives would be changed forever.
The family had settled in for an early dinner of tacos — Steven’s favorite. He ate every bite, thanked his family for making them, then headed off to church services.
But within just two hours, Steven would collapse — he was unable to breathe. His autopsy revealed he passed away from a simple heart attack, and that was that. No warning, no history, nothing suspicious.
But what no one knew was that Steven’s final meal… may have been the very thing that killed him.
[Intro]
Marie Robards was born into a life that, at first, felt pretty normal. Her parents, Steven and Beth, had been high school sweethearts — married young, just 18 — and two years later, Marie came along. But that kind of start doesn’t always last.
As Marie grew up, her parents’ marriage began to fall apart. Steven struggled with depression, bouncing from job to job, and eventually, the strain became too much. They divorced. Marie stayed with her mother, Beth, and only saw her dad every so often.
Still, Steven never fully disappeared from her life. He had served in the Navy, and despite his struggles, he kept trying to rebuild. Eventually, he found some stability — working as a mail carrier for the United States Postal Service, a job he genuinely enjoyed. He was outdoors, moving, starting to feel like himself again.
He also met someone new — Sandra — and for the first time in a while, things seemed steady.
Meanwhile, Marie was growing into a strong young woman who was hard not to notice. By the time she was 16, she was a straight-A student — driven, involved, and well-liked. She did well in school, stayed active in extracurriculars, and naturally drew attention.
On the surface, she had everything going for her. But at home, things were shifting again. Beth had now remarried, and Marie didn’t get along with her new stepfather. The tension built quietly but steadily — until it became clear something had to change.
So Marie moved in with her dad. And for her, this wasn’t a setback — it was something she was genuinely excited about. She wanted that time with him, and Steven did too. The two of them were two peas in a pod, and they loved hanging out together, so this move was actually great for them both.
By then, Steven’s life looked different. He had a stable job, a bigger apartment in Fort Worth, and a sense that he was finally getting things back on track. And now, for the first time in years, he had the chance to really be a father to Marie. And he took it.
The two of them settled into a rhythm. Marie got along well with Sandra, helped around the house, cooked for the family — especially Mexican food, one of Steven’s favorites — and for a while, everything felt right.
Like maybe this was how things were always supposed to be.
But it wouldn’t last. Because soon, tragedy would come creeping in — and everything in Marie’s life would change.
A TRAGEDY
It was February 17th, 1993, and it was a regular evening in the Robards family household. Steven had just had dinner — tacos made by his daughter, Marie — and he enjoyed every morsel of it and thanked Marie for a delicious dinner before heading out the door.
See, he was due to attend a church service that particular evening, but as soon as he got to the church, he started feeling unwell. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he just felt that something was wrong. He was out of breath. He was in distress, and he didn’t feel so good.
Nonetheless, he managed to make it to the end of the church service and got home, but after that, things only went downhill. Steven was getting worse. Sandra and Marie were both worried because, as time went on, his condition wasn’t getting better. Ultimately, Sandra decided to call 911, and an ambulance was dispatched.
According to Sandra, Steven was feeling very nauseous, and he fell unconscious after a while. The ambulance was racing against the clock to reach the Robards’ house, but tragically, it was too late. Before the ambulance even got there, Steven had sadly passed away. He was only 38.
Sandra and Marie were right beside him during his last moments, but nothing could have prepared them for the grief and pain that was about to hit them head-on.
Because he was relatively young, his family did request an autopsy because, up until this point, they had no idea what happened to him and how his health had declined to the point of crashing completely.
Well, according to the autopsy results, Steven’s cause of death was a heart attack. This came as a surprise for everyone because he never had any heart complications before, but heart attacks can be pretty unexpected, and they can affect anyone regardless of age or lifestyle.
There was nothing malicious or nefarious in the autopsy. The medical examiner didn’t find anything suspicious in his system, and everyone was even more bereaved. Steven was young, yes, but death can also be uncertain and unexpected. It hardly ever comes with a warning.
Naturally, Marie, Sandra, and even Steven’s ex-wife, Beth, were devastated. Sandra had lost the love of her life. Marie had lost her dad. Beth had lost the father of her first child.
The last thing Marie remembered about her dad was how happy he was when they were having dinner before he walked out that door and came back sick. She was only 16 when she lost her dad. No child should ever have to go through this.
Steven’s death came as a devastating shock to everyone… or did it?
NEW SCHOOL, NEW LIFE
Since Marie didn’t have her dad to live with anymore, living in Fort Worth was kind of difficult at this point, so she was sent to live with her grandparents. She had just lost her dad, and now her life as she knew it was never going to be the same again.
She had to pack everything up and leave for Mansfield, Texas, to live with her grandparents. She enrolled in Mansfield High School, and the transition was really easy for her.
She was very smart, and even though she was going through a rough and unexpected patch in her life, she threw herself into studies to keep herself busy. She ultimately graduated from high school, and she went on to attend the University of Texas to study pre-med. She wanted to become a pathologist, and in order to aid her studies, she used the money she got from her dad’s life insurance policy payout — which was $60,000, to be exact.
It is heartbreaking that Steven wasn’t there to witness his daughter graduate from high school and get into a good university and pursue her major, but even after his passing, Steven was a major stepping stone in Marie’s life. His insurance payout helped Marie achieve her dreams.
But you might be wondering: If Steven’s passing was accidental and purely medical, what are we doing here? This is a true crime story.
Well, things were not what they seemed — and detectives were about to figure this out firsthand — because Steven Robards’ passing was not accidental.
His autopsy stated that he died of a heart attack that came out of the blue. But was that really the truth?
Just a second ago, I mentioned that death doesn’t come with a warning. But what if it did in Steven’s case and he just didn’t see it? What if someone close to Steven was sporting that warning label?
The police thought the same too, and unbeknownst to everyone who knew Steven, the police were busy looking into his untimely passing. They were certain there was something fishy about Steven’s death. They knew it was not accidental. They just had to prove it.
NATURAL CAUSE OR SOMETHING ELSE?
About a year after Steven lost his life, the police were approached by someone. It was a woman by the name of Stacey High. She had come to the police because of a very peculiar incident that occurred.
It had to do with a scene in Hamlet — a classic William Shakespeare play.
You might be thinking, “Where does Hamlet come into all of this? And who is Stacey?”
Well, according to Stacey, she was reading a particular line in Hamlet when she looked up at the person next to her and saw that person in tears and hysteria.
Here Stacey was, just admiring the lines written by this literature magician, and suddenly, she saw someone bawling their eyes out.
So, who was this person in tears?
It was Stacey’s best friend from Mansfield High School — Marie Robards. Steven Robards’ daughter.
But why was she crying?
See, after Steven’s passing, Marie went on to live with her grandparents in Mansfield, and she enrolled in a new high school. She immediately clicked with another girl by the name of Stacey High, and the two were really good friends. They had a lot in common, they worked really well with each other, and it was never a dull moment between the two.
Well, during their senior year, they were required to read William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet for an English class project. So the two got together and started reading the play.
As Stacey got to a scene in Act III, when King Claudius was agonizing over how to repent after murdering his brother, Stacey was seriously in awe of the writing, and she looked up at Marie to comment on this part of the story when she saw Marie acting very emotional.
But then the weirdest thing happened. Totally unprovoked, Marie asked Stacey:
“Do you believe it’s possible for a person to not have a conscience?”
This question was seriously out of the blue for Stacey. She didn’t know how to answer that, but something in Marie’s eyes told her that she had been hiding something for a really long time.
Within minutes, Marie broke down and confessed to her best friend — who was also a high schooler, mind you — that she had done something really bad.
Up to this point, Stacey’s definition of “bad” meant maybe a fling with a boy or sneaking out or something. She was literally a high school student, so you can kind of understand where these thoughts were coming from.
But Stacey never expected the words that came out of Marie’s mouth when she asked what she had done.
Surely not murder. Anything but murder.
But that is exactly what Marie told Stacey. She confessed to her unsuspecting best friend that she had murdered her own father a year ago. Steven’s death was not accidental. He was poisoned by someone — that someone being his own daughter, 16-year-old Marie.
Stacey was completely floored. She did not expect her to say something like this. Marie, a straight-A, model student who had never done anything wrong in her life, had confessed to doing the unthinkable.
Seems like her perfect image was only a facade, and this just proves that straight A’s can be a trauma response too. Because the perfect, model student, Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes, was responsible for her father’s untimely death.
Well, little did Marie know, Stacey would be the one to implicate her to the authorities — because why wouldn’t she? This was something serious. The whole town knew of Steven’s untimely passing, and everyone was shocked and in disbelief that it was a heart attack.
Well, it turns out that it wasn’t. Steven’s own daughter was the cause of his passing.
GOT WHAT FROM WHERE?
Stacey got to the police station, and she told the officers everything.
Now, Steven’s case was still under investigation. The police were very suspicious of the circumstances under which Steven passed away. They were looking for that smoking gun, which they were unable to find a year into Steven’s passing, but now they finally had it in the form of Stacey’s statement.
When the police heard that it was Marie who was responsible for his passing, they were just as shocked as everyone else. The last person anyone would’ve suspected was Marie. The police were looking into people closest to Steven, but his 16-year-old daughter was not on their radar at all.
So, to say that this revelation was a surprise to them would be an understatement.
Anyway, the police still wanted to know how Marie had planned all of this, and luckily, she had told Stacey everything like she was her human diary.
According to Stacey, Marie was in chemistry class once, and the students were in a lab when their teacher pulled out a white powder-like substance that is extremely dangerous if ingested. This chemical can cause a decline in the body’s natural potassium levels, which is essential for the heart, and it can also cause a variety of symptoms like nausea, stomach aches, and heart issues — exactly the same things that Steven experienced before he couldn’t be saved.
Marie was extremely fascinated by this substance ever since her teacher warned the students that it was highly toxic and should never be ingested. But Marie was already hatching a plan.
She stole some of the poison from the chemistry lab when no one was looking and stuffed it in her bag.
You hear of people going to great lengths to get their hands on shady and toxic substances, and here you have Marie conveniently stealing a literal toxin from her high school chemistry class.
To give you an idea of the timeline, she stole this compound from her chemistry lab about a week before Steven’s passing. So this already reeks of premeditation. She had seven days — hundreds of hours — to pull back from her plan, but she didn’t. She had murder on her mind.
If you remember, on the fateful day of Steven’s passing, it was Marie who had fixed dinner for everyone, and she had decided to make tacos for her dad.
Turns out, Marie laced her dad’s tacos with the powder.
It was later found out that the amount of poison in the tacos was almost 28 times the lethal dose, tragically cementing Steven’s horrible fate.
Marie was right by her dad’s side, emotionless and cold, as he ate the tacos happily. The tacos he knew his daughter made special for him — one of his favorite meals.
Marie knew it was just a matter of time before Steven’s condition would deteriorate, and she was unfortunately right. Steven lost his life a couple of hours later, and Marie — the person who gave her dad laced food — was right there seeing everything go down.
Sandra was horrified when Steven started to act weirdly and wasn’t getting any better, and Marie just sat there, waiting for everything to reach a tragic end. Not once did she try to help or come clean about what she had done.
Stacey was forced to promise to keep her lips zipped by Marie. But her conscience won in the end because, best friend or not, she couldn’t just sit there and pretend like she didn’t know the greatest detail in her best friend’s dad’s passing.
So she told the police everything from start to finish.
But the police were now left with a serious question. Why did Marie want her father gone? What had happened between the two that led to such escalation?
Well, the police were busy digging up several pieces of evidence, and the one very crucial thing they needed to confirm was whether Marie had stolen the compound from the lab.
When the school checked the lab and the manual of chemicals, a page was missing in the manual that usually had everything about a certain compound written on it.
Can you take a wild guess which compound’s page was missing?
Now that the police knew Marie had stolen the substance from the chemistry lab, they needed to figure out one final thing: its levels in Steven’s body at the time of his passing.
If you remember, Steven’s autopsy didn’t show any suspicious information. Well, that is because for a compound like this, there are specialized tests that are conducted. They can’t be traced in a normal medical examination or autopsy. There is specialized equipment and testing that has to be requested, and since at the time of Steven’s autopsy there was nothing that led the examiner to test for poison, it ended up never showing up in the report.
But now the police needed those specialized tests.
So they managed to get their hands on Steven’s body tissue, and then it was sent for testing. A mass chromatograph gas spectrometer was used to analyze Steven’s tissue, and there it was — the poison.
This proved that he had this toxic compound in his system, and this was the reason for his sudden passing.
This equipment also managed to find the exact amount of poison given to Steven by his daughter. It was way too much.
But now, the police had everything they needed. It was time to arrest Marie Robards.
THE SENTENCING & AFTERMATH
While all of this investigation was going on, Marie was in Austin, Texas, attending university. So the police went there to arrest her.
When the police told her why they were there and what they were there for, she was expressionless — which is scary to think about.
Even the police did not suspect her, and had it not been for Stacey coming clean to the police after several months of keeping this secret locked away inside her, Marie would have gotten away with the perfect crime.
This case is interesting in the sense that no one suspected the pretty, poised, and polished straight-A student. She was literally right there in the background, but she was the main villain in this whole incident too.
Luckily, the police had finally caught up to her, and they brought her back to Fort Worth to be questioned.
In that interrogation room, in front of investigators, Marie confessed to everything. There was no point in hiding anything now. She knew she was done for.
But she told the police that it was never her intention to fatally harm her dad. She didn’t want to kill Steven. She just wanted to make him sick.
When the police asked why, Marie’s answer literally confused everyone.
The reason Marie went through all that trouble of taking her dad’s life was because she didn’t want to live with him anymore. That was pretty much the only reason.
Steven was not doing anything malicious to Marie. He was not rude, aggressive, or abusive with her. He was quite literally the best dad he could be in his situation. But for Marie, it wasn’t enough. Steven’s efforts all went in vain because all Marie wanted was to live with her mom.
Marie didn’t want to live with her dad, and that was why she did the unthinkable.
That was it. The reason for Marie’s actions is literally as petty as it is minuscule.
From the outside, everyone thought that Marie and Steven were the best of friends — or at least as much as a father and daughter could be. But the truth was far darker.
But the thing is, it was Marie who had problems with her mom and her mom’s new husband first. She didn’t want to live with her mom anymore, and now, once she came to live with her dad, she wanted to go back.
She was 16 and just two years away from becoming an adult and making her own decisions and facing the consequences herself. She literally couldn’t wait a couple more years and move out on good terms without harming anyone, and she really thought that getting rid of her dad — or at the very least getting him dangerously ill — was the best option available.
It is just so bizarre.
But speaking of getting something back, you might be wondering: Was Marie successful in reuniting with her mom?
Well, not exactly.
See, after Steven’s funeral, Marie was probably very excited that she would get to live with her mom following her morbidly well-executed plan.
Well, that was too bad for Marie because her mom and her new husband decided to move to Florida and not tell Marie until after Steven’s funeral was over.
So there’s that.
She literally didn’t think twice before pushing her dad to the brink of death, and in the end, she didn’t even get what she wanted. Marie’s mom wanted nothing to do with her. She wanted to start a new life with her new husband in Florida.
This was why Marie was forced to stay behind with her grandparents, finish high school in Mansfield, and then get into university. It is devastating that Steven’s passing was all for nothing.
Well, her trial was held in 1995, and she stood by her innocence. She maintained that she didn’t want to kill her dad. She only wanted to make him sick so that she could go back and live with her mom.
Marie ended up pleading not guilty, and she was tried as an adult. This trial, and this whole case in particular, was heavily publicized. It was sensational.
You had a 16-year-old girl who murdered her father for personal gain. That was a headline you didn’t see every day in the 1990s.
In the end, Marie was found guilty and sentenced to 27 years in prison in 1996. And even this sentence seemed harsh to a lot of people. There was a huge divide following the sentencing.
Some people sympathized with Marie — a young girl who was left to deal with life on her own after seeing her parents get divorced — while others thought Marie was a cold, calculated, heartless murderer.
You can decide for yourself.
But fast-forward to 2003, Marie was released on parole after serving only about nine years behind bars.
As of today, not much is publicly known other than the fact that she is living under a new identity. She might be married. She might have children. Who knows?
But one thing is certain. She is now out in society living a normal life after taking an irreversible step simply because she didn’t want to live with her dad anymore.
