DEATH BY ANTIFREEZE

Crime_stry_rot

FACTORY worker Matt Po­dolak always polished off the lunch his fiancée Holly McFeeture packed for him with raspberry tea – little realizing that she’d started lacing it with deadly antifreeze!

And in the summer of 2006, the 31-year-old Navy vet and devoted father died in agony.

“He was in so much pain,” re­called his grief-stricken dad Len. “He couldn’t talk except to ask for his children.”

Matt lived in Cleveland, Ohio, with Holly, their two children, Saman­tha, 2, and Joshua, 6 months, and Holly’s 8-year-old daughter, Michaela, from a previous relationship.

“Matt loved being a dad,” said his brother Mark.

But after three years to­gether, Holly decided she wanted out of the relation­ship. There was just one problem. Matt didn’t want to break up because he was afraid he’d lose custody of the kids.

“She decided to kill him be­cause she figured this was the only way to get rid of him,” prosecutor Brian McDonough told The ENQUIRER. “She’s a cold, calculating, devious woman.”

Holly also stood to gain $15,000 from Matt’s life insur­ance policy and 401K plan.

“That doesn’t sound like much, but $15,000 to some people might seem like $150,000 to others,” said McDonough.

An autopsy showed that Matt had been poisoned over a period of weeks with ethylene glycol, the toxic ingre­dient in antifreeze. McDonough said that Matt wouldn’t have tasted the antifreeze in the flavored tea, adding: “You can’t see it in the tea, either. So he had no way of knowing it was in his drink.”

Immediately, authorities suspected Holly and started to build their case. They learned that not long after Matt’s death, she went out to a karaoke bar and belted out a rendition of the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” – a song about a woman who kills her abusive hus­band by poisoning him.

“I thought that was coldblooded,” said Cleveland homicide detective Sgt. Mike Quinn.

Still, Holly escaped justice for six years. The big break in the case finally came when Jamison Kenne­dy, an ex-con who dated Holly after Matt’s death, told authorities that the 35-year-old vixen had confessed to him that she’d “put something” in Matt’s drink and that he’d gotten sick and died.

“That was compelling evidence,” noted McDonough.

Cops were finally able to charge Holly with murder. Incredibly, at her trial, Holly’s attorneys claimed that Matt took the antifreeze to kill himself because he’d run up big gam­bling debts. But “suicide didn’t make sense,” said McDonough. “No one would down antifreeze on purpose, let alone bit by bit.”

And on July 24, 2013, jurors agreed. They found Holly guilty of murdering Matt, and in August she was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after serving 30 years.