Prosecutors Say a N.C. Woman Poisoned Her Daughter at Thanksgiving. Even Before That, Her Life Was Hardly Ordinary. 

As Thanksgiving approached last fall, there was little question where Leela Livis would spend it. While she’d lived in Cullowhee most of her adult life, the 32-year-old often returned to her hometown of Hendersonville to see her mother, Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel, and help look after her two youngest siblings.

In Cullowhee, Livis’ life was simple and structured. She lived alone in a small cabin surrounded by books, plants, and art, and she worked full-time as a payroll specialist.

In Hendersonville, junked cars and free-range chickens dominated the yard at Casper-Leinenkugel’s property at 15 Schmidt Terrace, and the house was filled with clutter. Her life had been just as chaotic: Since moving here in the early 2000s, Casper-Leinenkugel had appeared in court more than 20 times, received 10 traffic tickets, been accused of mismanaging three businesses, and had the bank foreclose on a property. Her four children, of which Livis was the oldest, have at least three different fathers. 

Livis’ friends said she was as much of a caretaker for her then-52-year-old mother as she was for her 8-year-old brother, Everett, and her 2-year-old sister, Beatrice. Still, Livis and Casper-Leinenkugel had a great relationship, friends maintained; one said they “were closer than any two people on Earth.”

The long Thanksgiving weekend culminated with a dinner on Sunday, November 30, that her 27-year-old sister, Maija Lacey, Lacey’s boyfriend Evan Pegg, Casper-Leinenkugel’s former business associates and current boyfriends, Jeff Bosch and Landon Phillips, and several other people attended. They were celebrating the holiday on Sunday because it was the only day both Lacey and Livis didn’t have to work.

By all accounts, the gathering was a congenial affair, with plenty of food and alcohol. Casper-Leinenkugel cooked not one but two turkeys, and everyone was laughing and telling stories. Then a screw-top bottle of MD 20/20 fortified wine found its way to the table.

Recollections diverge at this point. Lacey told investigators that her mother had retrieved the bottle of Mad Dog from a storage closet and placed it in the refrigerator the night before, but she wasn’t sure who served it. Months later, she slightly amended her statement: “Mom didn’t touch the wine. It was Leela that poured it.” 

Another guest, who asked not to be named, told The Assembly that Livis had retrieved the bottle and poured Lacey, Pegg, and herself a glass, while Casper-Leinenkugel was on the back porch, de-escalating a fight that had broken out between her two youngest kids.

According to the police report, Lacey consumed only “about a shot glass full” because, she later said, a fly landed in her glass. Casper-Leinenkugel remembered the moment a little differently, telling investigators that Lacey tasted the wine, spit it out, and said it was “off.” 

Lacey and Casper-Leinenkugel also had different recollections about the amount of wine Livis and Pegg drank; Lacey told police they each drank a full glass, and Casper-Leinenkugel said they finished the bottle. 

Lacey and Pegg left the house around 8:30 p.m. That night, the 26-year-old Pegg started feeling “flu-like symptoms.” The police report said Lacey called 911 around 8 a.m. the following day; she later said publicly that her mother had advised her to do it. An ambulance took Pegg to Hendersonville’s AdventHealth Hospital, where doctors said he appeared to have cyanide or methanol poisoning. Pegg remained in the hospital for nearly a week but eventually recovered.

Livis wasn’t as fortunate.

‘Does Wine Turn Into Cyanide?’

Livis graduated from Western Carolina University in 2015 and returned to get an MBA before taking a job in the school’s payroll department. Her friends say she loved the surrounding forest and the variety of plants and animals it contained. A talented artist, she enjoyed making intricate sketches and paintings of the natural world.

Livis had always been a model student. At West Henderson High School she’d been named a North Carolina Academic Scholar as a senior, and at Western Carolina she was a member of the Honors College. Brian Railsback, an English professor and the Honors College’s founder, praised her maturity: “She was the kind of student who already has a professional sense about her.”

It carried over into her career. She always told her boss if she was going to be absent. But co-workers say that the day after the fateful dinner she didn’t come to work and she didn’t call in sick.

Livis had returned to Cullowhee after dinner on November 30. Casper-Leinenkugel told police she tried to contact her first thing the following morning. When she was unable to reach Livis, she asked the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office to do a wellness check before she and Phillips drove to Livis’ 450-square-foot cabin in the hills south of Cullowhee, where they met with sheriff’s deputies. 

Livis was dead.

Police said it was Casper-Leinenkugel who suggested a possible connection between Pegg’s illness and Livis’ death: the wine they’d consumed at the Thanksgiving dinner. Phillips told the deputies the empty bottle was still at the house, and he brought it to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office the next day. 

On December 19, the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner informed Jackson County detectives that Livis’ blood contained acetonitrile, an industrial solvent that slowly turns into cyanide after ingestion. That was relayed to authorities in Henderson County, where Sheriff’s detective Joseph Tulloch was tasked with determining how the acetonitrile got into the bottle of wine and whether it had been done intentionally.

Acetonitrile is mostly used in laboratories and factories to manufacture pharmaceuticals, photographic film, and lithium-ion batteries, but it’s widely available online and deceptively dangerous. “It’s a colorless, clear liquid, and it can easily be added to any other liquid,” said David Burrows, a forensic toxicologist from Holly Springs. “With wine, you probably wouldn’t be able to taste anything different.” Inhaling its fumes can also be lethal. 

At a January hearing, Assistant District Attorney Robert Reeves told the judge that after dinner on November 30 Casper-Leinenkugel had Googled, “What to do if I accidentally ingest acetonitrile?” and “Does wine turn into cyanide?” While visiting Pegg at the hospital after Thanksgiving, Casper-Leinenkugel told a doctor that the bottle of wine had been “stored in a closet next to chemicals used in the barn” and that “the kids play back there as well and may have got to it.”

During a search of her house on January 13, Henderson County sheriff’s deputies found a brown bottle with red tape labeled “acetonitrile.” The next day, Casper-Leinenkugel drove to the sheriff’s office and showed detectives the text messages she’d exchanged with Livis and Lacey on November 30. She also explained that a friend had bought the acetonitrile for her on eBay because she couldn’t remember her passwords to log into Amazon or eBay. Two people close to her said she used it for orchard management and pest control. 

Sheriff’s deputies arrested Casper-Leinenkugel two days later and charged her with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of attempted murder, and three counts of distributing a poisonous chemical “which might cause death, serious physical injury or serious physical pain and discomfort.” She’s been held without bond in the Henderson County Detention Center ever since. 

When Henderson County Sheriff Lowell Griffin spoke to the media a week later, he said that detectives believed that Pegg was the intended victim; Livis was collateral damage. Despite the case’s more dramatic aspects, Griffin said he believed that the motive was pedestrian: financial gain. “I believe this was all motivated, if you want to sum it up in one word, by greed,” he said. The sheriff’s office declined to discuss the case.

One of Casper-Leinenkugel’s attorneys, Dustin Dow, said at a hearing in May that investigators had used business records to insinuate that Casper-Leinenkugel may have had a motive to target Bosch. “They believe the motive was somehow to get rid of him,” Dow said. “He thinks it’s patently absurd.” Bosch declined to be interviewed.

The Assembly asked the N.C. Department of Insurance if Casper-Leinenkugel stood to gain from the deaths of anyone involved. The department declined to answer, citing an open investigation.

Another attorney for Casper-Leinenkugel, Paul Bidwell, in a statement to The Assembly on June 2 noted that both Lacey and Pegg have appeared at Casper-Leinenkugel’s hearings in support of her, and Bidwell criticized what he said was a “rush to judgment” against his client.

“At present, there is more evidence that this death was due to a horrible accident than by unlawful conduct of this Defendant,” he said in the statement. “The entire family fights for the release of our client whom they believe, whole-heartedly, is unjustly accused.”

See You in Court

After Casper-Leinenkugel’s arrest, people came out of the woodwork to describe their strange and often contentious interactions with her. They said she’d told them she’s related to the queen of England and to Wisconsin’s famed beer-brewing Leinenkugel family. Others pointed to the curious assortment of jobs she said she had, including software engineer, emergency medical technician, pilot, and firefighter. 

In 2009, Phillips, co-owner of the bar Tolliver’s Crossing in Asheville and her future boyfriend, hired her as a bookkeeper. Tolliver’s co-owner Chuck Brown said he didn’t know what to make of her at first: “She was like the awkward kid in class. You felt kind of bad for her. She just couldn’t fit in.”

Brown initially gave Casper-Leinenkugel’s quirkiness a pass but said she “raised red flags” when she started “hiding shit and lying about stuff.” 

“I’d catch her lying about little things,” he said. “I’m like, ‘That don’t make no sense. You shouldn’t have to lie to me about that.’” He also said he discovered that she wasn’t paying certain bills and told Phillips she shouldn’t be handling their books. 

Casper-Leinenkugel responded by going on the offensive. “She went to Landon and said something totally different,” Brown said. “She was quick to get ahead of the stories.” 

After taking an out-of-town trip, Brown said he returned to find the pub’s locks had been changed. She’d turned his business partner and investors against him, he said, but a lawyer advised him that if he fought it he would likely end up wasting a ton of money. He chose to walk away from the business instead.

“And guess what? The bar closed a year later,” he said. “Whatever she touches goes rotten.” Phillips didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Casper-Leinenkugel started Patton Public House, a European-style pub in West Asheville, with two business partners in June 2016. When paychecks started bouncing a month later and employees complained, Casper-Leinenkugel blamed the payroll processing company. That November, the other partners filed a lawsuit accusing Casper-Leinenkugel of fraud and breach of fiduciary duties. The plaintiffs dropped the lawsuit in 2019.

Casper-Leinenkugel’s first attempt at owning a business was in 2010, when she and James Wilson, her business and romantic partner at the time, attempted to buy Hendersonville’s Bounceville USA for $40,000. After making a $10,000 down payment and agreeing to make monthly payments on the rest, the owner, Gail Tustin, handed them the keys to the business.

Their recollections about what transpired next differ widely. Wilson told The Assembly that he and Casper-Leinenkugel made monthly payments for the first few months until Tustin started showing up at the business and demanding the final payment early. Tustin contends that Casper-Leinenkugel and Wilson never delivered a single payment and that she was only asking them for the money they owed.

In August 2010, Casper-Leinenkugel and Wilson called the police and asked them to charge Tustin with trespassing and making harassing phone calls. When Tustin offered to forgive their debt, she said, they dropped the charges.

Tustin hadn’t heard about Casper-Leinenkugel’s arrest or any other details until The Assembly contacted her. “Does she have a life insurance policy on these girls?” she responded, referring to Casper-Leinenkugel’s daughters.

Tustin said Casper-Leinenkugel had told her during their business negotiations that she and Wilson were waiting to receive money from a life insurance payout. Tustin also said that an employee had reported seeing a letter Wilson had left in the office that said that if he were to die, the police should investigate Casper-Leinenkugel.

“I don’t remember writing a letter,” Wilson told The Assembly. “I do remember saying things like that to people, that if something were to ever happen to me, everybody knows where to look.”

In the statement he made on June 2, Bidwell, Casper-Leinenkugel’s attorney, didn’t address any specific allegations regarding past business dealings. “People from our past inevitably have opinions which are likely to reflect in some way on our character, whether favorable or not,” he said. “Our focus is solely on whether the ‘evidence’ would lead a jury to reach a conclusion that Ms. Leinenkugel committed a heinous crime against a loved one. All other speculation reflecting our client’s character is irrelevant.”

Before N.C.

One of the first things sheriff’s detective Tulloch did after he was assigned Leela Livis’ case was search the history of 911 calls made from 15 Schmidt Terrace. There had been many over the past 20 years, but one stood out. In 2007, Casper-Leinenkugel had called 911 to report that Mischa Schmidt had died on the property. 

To understand how Schmidt’s life became intertwined with Casper-Leinenkugel’s, you need to know who Stacey Shelton is. That also requires you to know about Travis Peterson.

Peterson told The Assembly that he was “utterly naïve” when he met Casper-Leinenkugel—then known by her birth name Linda Casper—on the first day of class at Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College in Rice Lake in 1990. Captivated by Casper’s bright red hair, skimpy tank top, and short shorts, Peterson didn’t stand a chance. They became a couple almost instantly.

Peterson, now 55, described the woman he knew back then as “very caring, very supportive” and credited her with getting him through school, where they both studied commercial architectural design. “If an issue came up, she would have a way around it,” he said. “If that didn’t work, she had two to three alternate routes of fixing whatever was going on.”  

Casper’s relationship with Peterson offers a glimpse of some of her unorthodox beliefs. Even though they had a child together—Leela, born in 1993—he said Casper wasn’t interested in marrying him and insisted their daughter be given a different last name. Using “Li” from “Linda” and “vis” from “Travis,” they agreed on “Livis.”

After getting their associate degrees, Casper and Peterson lived with Casper’s parents for two years in rural Exeland, Wisconsin. During their extended stay they designed an addition to the house and helped build it. 

After spending four years with Casper, Peterson said, he believed their relationship was on steady ground. But when he was offered a job in Ashland, Wisconsin, she told him she wanted to stay close to her parents and to her friend Stacey Shelton. Peterson assumed Stacey was a woman. He said he learned otherwise when Casper kicked him out of the house. 

Casper and Shelton were married on May 6, 1995. Two years later, they had Maija. Casper again insisted on giving her daughter her own last name, using “L” from “Linda” and “acey” from “Stacey” to form “Lacey.”

Casper and Shelton may have looked like the epitome of domesticity, but their marriage was unconventional–especially for rural Wisconsin. They were featured in a 1999 Salon article about polyamorous couples, sharing that they would drive to Minneapolis-St. Paul once or twice a month so that Casper could have sex with someone named Steve Adams, while Shelton hung out with Adams’ wife. According to Salon, Casper also enjoyed sleeping with her friend Mary Anne, but her relationship with Adams consumed most of her interest. At one point, she and Shelton asked if the couple wanted to move in with them. Shelton eventually had second thoughts and nixed the idea.

Casper then reached out to another polyamorous couple in Hendersonville, according to Salon. Shelton had gone to Hendersonville High School, and they decided to move there. They bought a house north of Hendersonville in August 2000. Several friends said they had a brief affair with another married couple, Michael Schmidt and his wife.

Neither marriage lasted very long. Casper and Shelton suffered financial strain. During an 18-month stretch starting in November 2001, a local dentist and Wells Fargo took them to court seeking money they were owed, and Countrywide began foreclosure proceedings.

In April, one of their former neighbors recalled the couple’s volatility in an interview with The Assembly. “They were weird,” he said before requesting anonymity. “One day they’d be outside playing with the kids. The next, they’d be fighting and cussing at each other.”

The couple experienced one final traumatic event together. “When [Linda] and my son broke up, he was moving out of the house,” Shelton’s mother, Sandra Riddle, told the Hendersonville Lightning in January. “We went back up to get the rest of the stuff, and the house had burnt down mysteriously in the middle of the night.” Shelton declined to comment for this article.

Casper filed for custody of their kids and changed her name to Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel. She and Schmidt remained close. He was part of a group that met on Wednesday nights in the early 2000s for half-price wings at McGuffey’s Grill & Bar in the Blue Ridge Mall and for drinks in downtown Hendersonville at Hannah Flanagan’s Irish Pub afterward. Occasionally, he brought Casper-Leinenkugel with him.

“They were close friends,” said Tina Richards, a friend of Schmidt’s, “but we all found her to be extremely weird.”

In November 2005, Schmidt also changed his name, from Michael to Mischa. At that point, he was on the verge of losing his house at 15 Schmidt Terrace, friends told The Assembly. Casper-Leinenkugel bought the property from him for $105,000 on March 2, 2006. 

Schmidt used the proceeds to travel in Australia for three months, according to several friends. The trip exhausted him physically and financially. When he got home, he had a bad cough and very little money. As part of the arrangement they’d made, Casper-Leinenkugel bought him a camper, and he lived on the property rent-free. That agreement lasted until October 31, 2007, when Casper-Leinenkugel called 911 to report that she’d found the 42-year-old Schmidt dead in his camper. 

She told police that she and Schmidt had seen each other two days earlier, and that he was an alcoholic and a heavy drug user. His death certificate listed acute acetonitrile toxicity, likely by huffing, as the cause.  

Some people who knew Schmidt acknowledged his drug use; others were shocked to hear this claim. “I never once witnessed Mischa using any kind of drug (even weed),” his friend Don Hardin told The Assembly in a message, “and I can’t imagine him huffing anything. He wasn’t even that heavy of a drinker.” 

At a recent hearing, Assistant District Attorney Michael Van Buren emphasized that acetonitrile deaths are rare in North Carolina, yet two appear linked to 15 Schmidt Terrace. 

When Casper-Leinenkugel was arrested in January, she was charged with two counts of first-degree murder—not just her daughter’s, but Schmidt’s as well.  

Echoes from the Past

In late January, Sheriff Griffin had also said that there might be other victims “outside of this jurisdiction.” He wasn’t the only one thinking that. Anne Hause, a high school classmate of Casper-Leinenkugel’s in Wisconsin, messaged The Assembly online on February 17: “We are all wondering if she killed her husband up here.”

Casper-Leinenkugel frequently returned to Wisconsin over the years. During one of these trips in the early 2010s, people close to her said she rekindled a romantic relationship with Elroy Lund, a retired farmer and chemical salesman 28 years her senior. Lund owned a house and several outbuildings on 40 acres outside Exeland. He’d turned the property into a successful dairy farm in the early 1970s, but when industrialization started pricing out small farmers, he took a sales job with Olympic Chemical Corporation. After that, he started drinking too much, said his brother, John Lund. The Rock Castle Bar just down the road became Elroy’s “second home.” He liked nothing more than drinking cans of Old Milwaukee, which he affectionately called “Old Milsop,” but that devotion led to health problems, bankruptcy, and divorce.

Lund and his oldest daughter, Sonja Rogers, remained close; they were “two peas in a pod,” as his brother put it. Hoping to help her father, she and her husband purchased the farm from him, with the plan of fixing it up and putting it back on the market. “They were able to sell it,” said John Lund, “but he fought them all the way. Part of that was because he had met Linda. She helped turn him against his daughters.”

Lund was supposed to pay $600 rent each month and $355 in quarterly insurance payments, his brother said. When he neglected to make even a single payment, Rogers and her husband took Lund to court in 2013. The following year, Lund and Casper-Leinenkugel each filed countersuits and claimed they’d left valuable items at the farm before they were evicted. Lund’s case was dismissed in May 2015, but Casper-Leinenkugel’s dragged on for three years, with Casper-Leinenkugel eventually representing herself. A transcript of the final hearing in her case showed she was hardly intimidated by the opposing counsel, judge, or legal jargon, and the judge reprimanded her several times for failing to address others properly and for interrupting him.

Casper-Leinenkugel and Lund got married on March 10, 2017. Two months later, she left the trailer they’d been living in and went to get food. She returned to find her second husband dead, according to local news outlet Ladysmith News. 

When Sawyer County sheriff’s deputy Nate Frey arrived, Casper-Leinenkugel told him that it was 80 degrees inside the trailer because Lund had poor circulation, local media reported. The coroner wrote that he found it “odd that Elroy was found wearing only a pair of boxer shorts and athletic socks despite it being reported that he was always cold.” But neither he nor Frey felt strongly enough about it to label his death suspicious. The autopsy listed Lund’s cause of death as a heart attack.

When Sawyer County detectives heard about Casper-Leinenkugel’s arrest in North Carolina earlier this year, they reopened an investigation into Lund’s death. Their efforts hit a snag, though. The medical examiner had failed to put in a request to test Lund’s blood sample in time, so it had been discarded.

Sonja Rogers, who didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article, had expressed her own suspicions about Lund’s death to law enforcement back in 2017. Local media reported that she told investigators she “would not put it past Casper-Leinenkugel to ‘poison’ her father.”

Casper-Leinenkugel continued to exert control over Lund even after his death. A veteran of the U.S. Army Reserve, he’d often told his friends that he wanted to be buried at the Northern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery; Casper-Leinenkugel had his body cremated instead.

She also wrote his obituary, which mentioned his younger daughter, Sarah, but not Sonja.

What Comes Next 

On December 2, 2025, Travis Peterson said, Casper-Leinenkugel called to tell him their daughter had died but glossed over the details of how it happened. He said he didn’t hear the whole story until he spoke with other members of Livis’ extended family at her funeral in Brevard on December 8.

Among the people who attended was Heather Clayton, a co-worker in Western Carolina’s Human Resources Department whom Livis had grown close to over the previous year. During their initial meeting soon after Clayton was hired, Livis took a particular interest in Clayton’s many tattoos. “She wanted to drink up every one,” Clayton said. “‘Tell me about this one. Tell me about that one. What’s this one mean?’”

Livis was known for peppering new acquaintances with questions—favorite color? favorite animal? favorite hobby?—and would later use that information to create handmade greeting cards for them. “They were all incredible and super thoughtful,” Clayton said.

Such recollections moved many attendees to tears. Both Peterson and Clayton said Casper-Leinenkugel was an exception; she didn’t display any outward signs of sadness at the funeral. They didn’t judge her, though. Everyone grieves differently, they thought.

Peterson said Casper-Leinenkugel texted him a few days after the funeral about a life insurance policy his mother had taken out on her granddaughter when Livis was born. Peterson reminded her that they had cashed it in years before and didn’t give the request much thought—until Casper-Leinenkugel was indicted. 

After that, Peterson started advocating for the death penalty if Casper-Leinenkugel were to be found guilty. “She deserves to die because she murdered our daughter,” he told The Assembly. But at a hearing on February 26, Assistant District Attorney John Douglas Mundy said the state would not seek a death sentence.

As angry as Peterson was, he was also dumbfounded. “Those two had a very good relationship,” he said. “Leela never said anything that would cause concern. Those two were tight.” 

On April 27, Casper-Leinenkugel’s defense team, led by Bidwell and Dow, filed a motion requesting that Casper-Leinenkugel be allowed to stay at home during her trial. Peterson strongly opposed the idea. “Hopefully they keep her in jail because if she ever gets out, she’ll disappear,” he said. “She’s that smart. She’s that calculating. She will disappear.”

Superior Court Judge Athena Brooks heard the motion for bond modification on May 20. Casper-Leinenkugel was in the courtroom that day wearing glasses, prison stripes, and a sardonic smile. The sight of Lacey, Pegg, and Bosch, who were there to support her, seemed to lift her spirits, until the judge denied the motion.

“There’s no way that she did it,” Lacey told reporters afterward. “I don’t know how they came up with that, but I don’t believe it at all.”

Standing by his girlfriend Lacey’s side, Pegg praised the woman who had been charged with trying to kill him. “The reason why I’m alive is because of her mom telling her to call the ambulance,” he said.

In addition to a handful of journalists from local newspapers, producers from Dateline NBC and ABC’s 20/20 were on hand. Because of the nature of the crimes she’s been accused of committing and the more lurid details of her life, Casper-Leinenkugel’s trial could bring a media circus to Henderson County.  

Peterson was already feeling overwhelmed by the information that had been unearthed about the mother of his child. “The more I’m finding out, the worse it gets,” he said. “A methed-out writer in Hollywood couldn’t come up with this.”