Melody Johnson admitted to poisoning her husband’s coffee with bleach and was given three years of probation. (Law&Crime Network)
An Arizona A woman confessed to poisoning her husband’s coffee with bleach and will not be imprisoned.
Melody Felicano Johnson, 40, pleaded guilty in April to two counts of adding poison or a harmful substance to food or drink. She was originally charged with attempted murder. Prosecutors were asking for as much as four years in prison. As part of the probation, Johnson must undergo mental health treatment and have no contact with her husband, Tucson NBC affiliate KVOA reported. Johnson had already served about a year in jail.
As Law&Crime previously reported, police in Tucson said Johnson had been poisoning her spouse’s coffee since he was stationed in Germany in March 2023. He is an airman with the U.S. Air Force and the couple had been going through a divorce at the time.
After two to three weeks of his coffee tasting bad, Johnson’s husband purchased pool chemical testing strips and the coffee pot water returned positive for high levels of chlorine even though the faucet water was normal.
Hidden camera footage showed her trying to poison her husband by pouring bleach into his coffee maker — and the video was taken by the would-be victim himself.
“Boom,” he is heard saying in one self-recorded video after getting a positive result for chlorinated water.
According to officers, he set up a hidden camera in his home and it captured defendant Johnson pouring something into his coffee pot.
“He stated she knew that he would prep his coffee pot to be ready at night so that in the morning he just needed to turn it on to make his coffee,” documents show. “At that time he stopped drinking the coffee but continued to pretend to drink it as he did not want to make a report of this while in Germany.”
This pattern allegedly continued after the Air Force moved him to the David Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. He brought video evidence to police, and when the initial footage was not clear enough, he purchased even more cameras. He secretly recorded his wife making her way with bleach from the laundry room to the coffee maker and pouring the substance inside, police said.
Here is one such video dated July 16, 2023, from when the couple lived in permanent housing. A woman, identified as defendant Johnson, is in a small room pouring what seems to be a bleach bottle into a small bottle. The footage, which features time timestamps and is edited to depict different points of view, shows that in a matter of seconds, she made her way to the kitchen and poured the contents of the smaller bottle into the coffee maker.
Footage from July 5, 2023, when the couple lived in temporary housing, shows her pouring something into the machine while wearing just a towel.
Multiple videos show the husband testing the coffee pot water, even comparing it with water straight from the tap. In the footage, he often remarked on the smell and that the water in the machine was soapy.
He says in a video that you can detect the smell from this location.
“Look at that,” he said, displaying the outcomes of the test. “Completely different. Amazing. Wow, wow, wow.”
In this and other videos, he displayed a close-up of the bubbly interior of the coffee maker’s water container.