Turner, who killed her husband and later her boyfriend by poisoning them with antifreeze, committed suicide in prison by overdosing on prescription blood pressure medication, according a Georgia Bureau of Investigation autopsy released Wednesday.
The autopsy concluded Lynn Turner took a lethal amount of propranol, said Dr. Kris Sperry, the state's chief medical examiner. She was found Aug. 30 on a bed in her cell at Metro State Prison.
Turner, a former 911 operator, was convicted in 2004 of killing her husband, police officer Glenn Turner, in 1995. Authorities first thought he died of natural causes, but reopened the investigation in 2001 after her boyfriend, firefighter Randy Thompson, was found to have been poisoned.
Her family reacted with disbelief to the suicide. Her mother, Helen Gregory, said she and Turner's two children, ages 12 and 14, had visited her at the prison days before she was found dead. And she said that her daughter was hopeful that a new round of legal appeals would exonerate her.
``It's totally untrue. She had too much to live for,'' Gregory said. ``She had a Georgia Supreme Court case filed. She had another case to be filed. She has two children, a mother and a father she loves dearly. There's no way she committed suicide. There's no way.''
Prosecutors said both of Turner's victims were poisoned with ethylene glycol, a sweet but odorless chemical in antifreeze. During Turner's 2004 trial, prosecutors suggested the substance could have been placed in foods such as Jell-O. Turner killed the men to profit from their life insurance policies, they said.
Forsyth County prosecutors sought the death penalty during her 2007 trial, but jurors instead sentenced her to life in prison.
``I wanted her to live her whole life behind bars. I wanted her to wake up every morning and think about what she did,'' Glenn Turner's brother, James, said Wednesday. ``And she took the easy way out.''
Lynn Turner
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