Cyanide - Michael Marin

Stoveleg Media, Igniting Conversation

Welcome to Trick Time to Go. What can I get for you?

Yeah, I'd like to talk about a case where the most shocking behavior actually happens in the courtroom.

Pulled up to the second window and I'll see you next time.

Welcome to True Crime to Go. I am John here with Jamie. What's you doing, man? How are you doing, brother?

I'm doing all right. I'm doing better than the subject of today's story of Croft. Of course, there's a huge backstory here that we can cover in a full episode.

But I just kind of wanted to cover something that happened in a courtroom that you don't see every day and is definitely a topic worth discussing.

And I'm not familiar with this one. So why don't you get the ball rolling?

We're going to go back to 2012, June 28th in the Maricopa County Superior Court out in Phoenix, Arizona.

Michael Marin, who was 53 years old, said at the defendant's table, waiting for the jury to come back with a verdict.

Marin was a Yale Law School graduate, former Wall Street trader, mountain climber, pilot, self-published author, Mormon missionary, a man who seemed to have done everything and been successful throughout his life.

But when the jury foreman read the verdict, they said that Marin was guilty.

In the footage, you can see Marin, bury his hands in his face, cameras all over him, and then so quickly that you probably didn't notice it unless you were looking for it, he slips something into his mouth.

A few minutes later, he takes a sip of something from a sports bottle. He turns to reach for a tissue and then he collapses.

As attorney catches him, as he falls toward the floor, his face immediately starts turning blue and clear liquid starts coming out of his mouth.

Fifteen minutes after that guilty verdict, Michael Marin was dead.

What he put in his mouth that day was cyanide, and he had been planning this for at least a year.

This is Wildman. This guy is just a never-ending story. He is not a simple character at all.

This is the kind of guy he climbed mountains. He burned down his own house. He had four children who loved him.

In a courtroom of people, watched him die. So what in the world was going on with this guy?

Like, Michael Marin was born on December 2, 1958 in Oak Harbor, Washington.

He grew up a devout Mormon and in a household, and they served as a missionary for a church of Jesus Christ of Letterday Saints.

He attended BYU and then enrolled at Yale Law School.

After Yale, he went to Wall Street. Through the 80s and 90s, he worked for the Lehman Brothers, Meryl Lynch, the Solomon Brothers, primarily in Asia.

And he was based largely in Japan where he advised on complex international investments. He made some serious monies, and he spoke multiple languages.

He flew his own Cessna 310 Airplane. He drove a Rolls-Royce. This guy was something he owned 18 etchings from Pablo Picasso. You may have heard of him.

He was living his best life, but what did he do that was so wrong that he would want to kill himself?

He pretty much is Wall Street. If you want to think about the traditional, stereotypical, successful Wall Street person, but underneath all this success and adventure was something else.

For some people close to him described him as having a dark spot inside insecurity that people saw.

The same drive that pushed him to climb Mount Everest, sent him into some destructive behavior.

A former girlfriend would later say that after telling her about being detained in Malaysia in one of his trips that he made one thing clear, he would never find himself imprisoned again.

And by the actions we discussed at the opening, he meant it. She didn't know it, but he meant that literally.

In 2008, there was a huge financial crisis in our country during that time. Marin bought a 10,000 square foot mansion in the Biltmore States neighborhood in Phoenix for around $2.5 million.

His monthly mortgage payment was over 17 grand. That is insane.

Take a few zeros off of that for your boy, Jamie. His bank account quickly went from $900,000 to $50, not $50,000, 50 bucks.

He lost everything. He owed 34 grand in back taxes. He was paying for a second home that he couldn't afford.

He was six months away from a balloon payment of $2.3 million that he was going to have to make on this mansion. He needed a way out.

Well, he decided to raffle the house through a charity fundraiser. So the idea was that he would sell tickets at $1 a piece that there would be so much interest in this that he would sell a million of them and give some of the money to charity.

Keep the rest and then solve the mortgage problem. Prosecutors later would say that the raffle was designed to make him a million dollars while appearing philanthropic.

In April of 2009, the Arizona Attorney General ruled that the raffle was illegal. So the scheme was dead. The balloon payment was still coming and he was running out of options.

But in May of 2009, he decided to just throw off the cares of this world and hike to the literal top of the world where he would go to the very top of Mount Everest.

Two months later, after coming back down from Mount Everest, he would burn down his own house.

Yeah, I guess he made some decisions while he was up there on July 5, 2009, firing golf. Marin's built more states mansion.

Investigators later would say that the fire had been said intentionally from four separate points in the home.

28 phone books had been stacked and used as kindling along with packing boxes. There was also an accelerant that was easy to detect.

Fire Captain Jeff Peabody, who responded to the scene, documented all of this.

And then the part that made every firefighter on the scene stop and stare was when Michael Marin appeared at a second floor window.

He was wearing a full scuba suit, mask, tank and snorkel. He climbed down a rope ladder. He had deployed out the window.

Can we have on those little flip flippers? I don't think he could have done the rope with the flippers. So that was the one part that he didn't have on yet.

He walked out of the burning building and into the front yard.

Captain Peabody told the SPN every fireman on the scene was you're not going to believe this guy.

He came out of a ladder of his master bedroom wearing a scuba tank, a scuba mask and a snorkel.

I wish his name was Steve. So he went to the hospital from his hospital bed. He gave interviews.

He explained that he had been lucky enough to have scuba gear in his bedroom when the house caught on fire.

He said, I realized that I actually had some air left in that tank. So that's what enabled me to get back to the window and then deploy that ladder.

If I hadn't had those two things, we wouldn't be talking. Investigators, however, were not impressed.

Peabody's report noted the scuba equipment had been in what he called a ready state stored next to a portable ladder in the upstairs master bedroom closet.

And the equipment was not there by sheer luck or accident. This was planned and put there in advance.

Also missing from the home that burned down were those 18 Picasso paintings calls who wants those to catch on fire.

Yeah, so from everything that you can look at, this is obviously staged. He wanted the insurance money.

And he did that to try to get out of debt. So he was charged with arson a trial again in 2012.

He maintained his innocence and his attorneys tried to argue that he heroically escaped from an accidental fire in a scuba suit, which is a great headline.

However, the deputy district attorney Chris rap open with a state of the line that cut to the bone.

Michael Marin couldn't pay his mortgage. So he burned down his house and they went on to share all of his financial issues.

All of his history and obviously the jury believed it during the trial something else came out about a year before the trial began.

He had posted something on Facebook where he asked, what would you do if you only had a short time to live?

A friend noted that he was alarmed by this and asked Marin if he was in bad health or thinking about hurting himself.

But when he went back to the post, it was deleted.

A former girlfriend said she had heard him say he would never be in prison again.

So all signs point to this being a plan for him to get out of debt.

And if it worked, then he would be okay. But if it ended up where he got caught and was going to go back to jail.

Then he was going to take his own life and on June 28, 2012, that's exactly what he did.

You can find this video online and it was confirmed that he died of cyanide poisoning and he took that poison.

I don't know how he got it, but he took that poison right there at the defense table in the courtroom.

That is so wild. You can watch this on video. It's horrifying when you know what's happening.

He's not just feigning and falling ill. He's literally dying in front of a full courtroom.

Also, you have to wonder, like he had it in his hand.

If it was not guilty, is he just shoving it in his pocket? Like what do we, what's the end goal here?

If he's found not guilty, he's still not going to, he still has all that money he owes.

So what's his life going to be like? It's a tragic story.

One of the wildest things you'll ever see caught on camera in a courtroom.

So it caught my attention. I assumed it would be interesting to our listeners as well.

Absolutely. I think this is one of those that we could turn into a full length episode. So thank you, man.

Yep. This has been a crime story in 10 minutes or less.

Would you like crime with that?

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