Lynn Turner trial moves to Houston County

ATLANTA - Court officials are moving the trial of a woman charged with poisoning her police officer husband with antifreeze 110 miles from Cobb County in metro Atlanta.

Lynn Turner's murder trial will resume April 26 in Houston County, south of Macon, Leanne Dolin, law clerk to Judge James Bodiford, said Thursday. Bodiford will remain on the case, Dolin said.

On Wednesday, Bodiford suspended the trial on its third day and ordered the change of venue because of difficulty selecting an impartial jury due to pretrial publicity. Turner, a former 911 operator, is charged in the 1995 death of Cobb County police officer Glenn Turner.

Defense lawyer Vic Reynolds had argued that intense media attention made a fair trial impossible in Cobb County, just north of Atlanta. During two days of jury selection this week, only eight of 125 jurors questioned said they had never heard of the case, and one female prospective juror said she believed Turner was ``guilty as homemade sin.''

In addition to her husband's death, Turner, 35, is the prime suspect in the 2001 antifreeze poisoning death of her boyfriend, Forsyth County firefighter Randy Thompson, but faces no charges in that case.

Prosecutors plan to draw on similarities between both deaths at the trial over Glenn Turner's death, which is expected to last a month.

If convicted, Turner faces life in prison.

Authorities say Glenn Turner, 31, and Thompson, 32, ingested lethal doses of ethylene glycol, a sweet, odorless chemical found in antifreeze.

At the time of Turner's death, his wife was heavily in debt and her husband had changed his $100,000 life insurance policy to list her as his beneficiary after earlier listing a sibling, prosecutors have said. Little has been said about a possible motive for Thompson's death.

Defense lawyers have argued that there is no direct evidence linking Turner to the deaths and that there is no conclusive scientific proof that either man was murdered. They point out that authorities initially determined each died of natural causes.

It wasn't until after Thompson died that police launched a criminal investigation into both deaths.