Time passed, and the world moved on from the death of Steven Robards. But his daughter found herself slowly consumed by guilt and the urge to confess her crime to someone. Ten months after her father’s death, Marie Robards was studying Shakespeare with her friend, Stacey High (per Texas Monthly). The two were pouring over “Hamlet” when Stacey began to quote Claudius’ lines about whether or not he will ever be able to repent for the murder he committed. This discussion made Marie quite emotional, and she eventually confessed what she had done to her father. She made High promise to keep her secret. The guilt didn’t take long to work on High, though. A month after Marie’s confession to High, High told the police everything.
Even though police took High’s statement in February, it took court orders to exhume the body, and Marie wasn’t arrested until October. Compounding the problem was that the county didn’t have the equipment necessary to perform the tests for barium acetate. When officials had all their ducks in a row, the test was finally completed and showed that Steven Robards’ father had more than 250 times the normal amount of barium acetate in his body when he died.
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Marie was arrested and released on bond. She used the life insurance proceeds from her father’s death to pay for a defense team that tried to spin her deadly act as one that was unintentional. They maintained that she was only trying to make her father sick. It didn’t work.
