Alleged eye drop murder. A divorce attorney accused of murder. Plus, criminal investigations at sea.

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1:24Welcome to Dateline True Crime Weekly. I'm Andrea Canning. It's September 17th, and here's what's on our docket. In Cleveland, Ohio, courtroom battles upend the murder trial of a divorce attorney accused of fatally stabbing his own client, nurse and mom of four, Aliza Sherman. So, things have gotten a little bit heated. In Dateline Roundup, five months after the singer David was charged with the murder of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, her family is now accusing his mother and managers of failing to protect her. And we'll bring you the latest on the new controversy surrounding the Lindsay Clancy holdout juror.

2:02According to NBC Boston's reporting, last year, the juror's nephew filed a restraining order against him. Plus, crimes don't just happen on land. What happens when there's a murder at sea? A Coast Guard special agent gives us the lowdown. It's not like a crime that happens at your local bank or grocery store or local house. The boat is the scene and it moves. But before all that, there is a case out of North Carolina we want to tell you about involving a former paramedic who's facing one of the most bizarre set of charges I think I've ever seen. In September of 2018, the sudden death of 32-year-old North Carolina preschool teacher Stacy Hunsucker left her two daughters without a mother and her husband Joshua without a wife.

2:48On the first anniversary of her death, he posted a tribute to her on Facebook. NBC affiliate WCNC covered the story. He described Stacey as an awesome mother and how he and their two daughters choose to live happily because that's what she would want. Three months after that post, Joshua, a paramedic at the time, was arrested and charged with Stacey's murder. Prosecutors allege he poisoned her with tetrahydrosaline, a chemical found in eye drops. Joshua Hunsucker has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him. Jury selection was set to begin in his trial last week, but a judge ruled the trial should be postponed.

3:27Here to bring us up to speed on the reason for the delay and on some other unique charges Hunsucker is facing is Dateline producer Marissa Meyer. Marissa, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Marissa, start by giving us some background on the couple at the heart of this case. So Stacey was, as you said, a young mom. She had worked at a preschool in Charlotte, North Carolina. And according to her obituary, she was an active member of her church. And her husband, Joshua, or Josh, who's now 41, he was working as a flight paramedic, providing emergency medical care to patients transported by helicopter.

4:08The couple had been married for eight years, and they had two young daughters together. Take us back to September 23rd, 2018, the day Stacey died. Marissa, what happened? So what we know of that day really comes from the probable cause affidavit. And Hunsucker found his wife not breathing in their home, and she ended up dying from cardiac arrest. There was no autopsy, heard Joshua's request, and Stacey's remains were cremated. It's important to note, Stacey had been having a number of health problems in the years before her death, including problems with her heart. And according to a GoFundMe campaign started by one of her friends, Stacey had been having issues since the birth of the couple's first daughter in 2013.

4:56Marissa, when did police start to suspect that Stacey's death was not from natural causes and that something more sinister might have happened? So interestingly, the investigation actually began within the North Carolina Department of Insurance. And a spokesperson for that office told NBC News that after Stacey's death, Stacey's mother contacted them. And she said she was suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Stacey's death and of the fact that Hunsucker received over$200 ,000 from two life insurance policies belonging to Stacey. So that's when the North Carolina Department of Insurance decided to start investigating.

5:37So what did they uncover, the investigators? Well, remember, there was no autopsy. So investigators didn't have a body to examine or exhume. But what they did have was some of Stacey's blood. According to the probable cause affidavit, Stacey had been an organ donor. And prior to her cremation, a sample of her blood had been preserved, as is the normal process of possible organ donation. And the affidavit states that the blood sample was sent to a lab for testing and came back positive for a chemical called tetrahydrosalene, which is found in eye drops. And according to this document, Stacey had 30 to 40 times the therapeutic dose in her system.

6:20We've seen this chemical come up in Dateline stories before. What does it do to the body, Marissa, when it's ingested? It seems just it has a nasty host of symptoms. It can cause vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, seizing, and even cardiac arrest. After that chemical was found in Stacey's blood, insurance investigators sat down with Joshua Hunsucker to get his side of the story. What did he say? That's right. And this wasn't the first time he'd talked to investigators. But according to the affidavit, the stories he'd given the police and insurance companies had not been consistent. And an attorney for the North Carolina Office of Insurance said at a preliminary hearing that while Hunsucker didn't confess anything to insurance investigators during that interview, he allegedly gave them probable cause to arrest him.

7:11Hunsucker was arrested in late 2019. That was over a year after Stacey died. He was charged with first-degree murder, insurance fraud, and obtaining property by false pretenses. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges, as we mentioned. Has Hunsucker's legal team given any hints about how they plan to defend him? So that's the thing. We know that from the very beginning of this case, Hunsucker's defense team has argued that they would strenuously oppose the allegations. They pointed out Hunsucker had no criminal record, and in fact, he was released on bond a few days after his arrest. At a hearing in 2023, according to the local newspaper, the Gaston Gazette, Hunsucker's defense asked to do their own testing on that blood sample.

7:57But we don't know what happened with that or whether it was even tested. And what makes it hard to know much more about the defense and a lot of aspects of this case is that a judge has imposed a gag order. And so the attorneys really can't divulge anything about the case. Hunsucker was released on bond. But as we mentioned when we started this segment, that was not the end of his legal troubles. There are a whole bunch of strange twists that we're about to talk about. Let us know about the first one. So in 2021, he's out on bond and Hunsucker gets arrested again, this time on an arson charge.

8:38And prosecutors allege that back in 2019, he started a fire on a medical helicopter during a flight. We should say the prosecutor is not connecting that with Stacey's murder in any way, alleged murder. This is a separate case, right? Yeah. Yes, yes. It happened after the alleged murder, about a month before his arrest, and he has pleaded not guilty in that case. Hunsucker hit the headlines again in 2023 when prosecutors accused him of faking his own kidnapping? Yeah, that's right. Right. Prosecutors say Hunsucker called 911 with a disturbing story that he'd stopped to change a flat tire and was assaulted.

9:21And he'd had his hands zip tied and was then injected with an unknown substance. And the person who he suggested was behind it was none other than Stacey's father. And according to prosecutors, this just wasn't true. And the whole kidnapping was staged. Do prosecutors have a theory about why Joshua would want to frame Stacey's dad? Well, according to the state, Hunsucker has engaged in a pattern of harassment against Stacey's parents for some time. They say staging the kidnapping was part of that. According to local reporters, prosecutors argued in a motion to revoke Hunsucker's bond that he was attempting to intimidate his in-laws so that they wouldn't testify against him in connection to the murder case.

10:08and they've charged Hunsucker with four counts of witness intimidation and obstruction of justice. Hard to believe, Marissa, but there is more. Prosecutors say Hunsucker also attempted to poison his own daughter. That's right. So prosecutors are now alleging that Hunsucker gave one of his daughters that same chemical that was found in Stacey's blood and that the daughter got seriously ill. We should point out he hasn't been charged with an alleged poisoning, and he has pleaded not guilty to all the new charges. We haven't really heard much from the defense on these allegations. A lot has happened in the nearly eight years since Stacey's death.

10:50After many delays, Joshua Hunsucker's long-awaited trial in the murder part of this, all of this, was set to begin last week in Gaston County, North Carolina. But Marissa did not go as planned. Yeah, that's right. It looks like now his trial will likely be rescheduled for January 2027. And we don't know exactly why the trial was continued. And we may not know the reason for the delay until the trial starts. Fascinating case. We will be sure to follow up on this one. Marissa, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Andrea. Coming up, last-minute defense filings throw the trial of the man accused of fatally stabbing Cleveland nurse Aliza Sherman into chaos.

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13:49More than 13 years ago, Cleveland nurse and mother of four, Aliza Sherman, was stabbed to death outside her divorce attorney's office. For 12 years, no one was charged. Then, in May 2025, a bombshell arrest. NBC affiliate WKYC covered the story. 51-year-old attorney Gregory Moore has been indicted on murder charges for the 2013 death of Aliza Sherman. Prosecutors indicted Aliza's own divorce attorney, accusing him of murdering her. They allege he did it because he wasn't prepared to take Aliza's divorce case to trial. Moore has pleaded not guilty. His trial was finally supposed to begin this Monday.

14:32Instead, Moore's defense team has filed motion after motion. Dateline Field producer Simon Doolittle has been at the courthouse all week, keeping an eye on things. He's here now to bring us the latest. Hey, Simon. Hey, Andrea. Simon, so you were calling us from the courthouse corridor, if we hear some sounds in the background. You expected jury selection to start Monday, but it didn't. So what has been going on? Yeah, there has been a lot of anticipation for this trial. As you mentioned, 13 years since the murder, certainly for Aliza's family and loved ones, a seemingly endless wait. A lot of us really did think things were going to get started at long last on Monday.

15:11But instead, we've seen a flurry of motions by the defense trying to either delay the trial or dismiss the charges altogether. All right. So before we get into these motions, remind us who Aliza was and what her situation was before she died. Yeah. I mean, Elisa was a 53-year-old nurse, by all accounts, a really adored mother, colleague, and friend. She had been married to her husband, Sanford Sherman, a physician for more than 30 years. But at the time, in 2013, they were getting a divorce, and it was a doozy. Yeah. So the divorce really comes into this because on March 24th, 2013, the day she was killed, she was at Moore's office.

15:57She was right outside the door. And her divorce trial was supposed to get underway that week. Exactly. Exactly. And mostly what we know about Elisa's last day comes from the grand jury indictment. She gets there, the doors are locked, and according to the indictment, she sends a series of text messages. She writes, It's, will you be here soon? Kind of cold. Doors locked. If you're here, why don't you let me in? Right around those moments, prosecutors say someone with a knife comes up behind her, chases her down the street, and ends up stabbing her more than 10 times. Police later release a video of a hooded figure in dark clothing from a nearby surveillance camera.

16:40They say this was the attacker fleeing the scene. Were they able to make out a face of this figure in the dark clothes? It's hard to identify the person from the video that was publicly released. And it's not clear from the indictment whether they believe that Moore himself did the stabbing or whether he simply orchestrated it. But what is clear is that even though it took 12 years to arrest him and charge him with this murder, that they were looking at more from the earliest days of this investigation. Police say his story just didn't add up. He told them he had been in his office waiting for her.

17:20But according to the indictment, building records show that he reentered a back door of the building after the attack. So in 2017, a few years after the murder, he actually pleads guilty to making false statements about his wear of ice to police in the investigation. And he served several months in jail. And there was something else about Moore that made investigators take a closer look at him. Something very strange, Simon. Walk us through this other piece of all of this. Yeah. So in 2012, this is before Aliza is murdered. Someone called bomb threats into three different courthouses here in the Cleveland area.

18:03And before the murder, prosecutors had started to look at whether Gregory Moore had made these bomb threats as a way of delaying cases that he had in these courts. Moore eventually pleaded guilty to inciting panic for two of those bomb threats. Fast forward to today, and prosecutors do believe that that behavior sheds light on what may have motivated Moore to murder Aliza. They essentially are arguing that Moore was taking even more extreme measures to delay a trial, in this case, Aliza's divorce trial. Instead of calling him bomb threats, they think he initially planned to kidnap Aliza, but that somehow things escalated and she was killed.

18:46Exactly how we go from a kidnapping plot to murder is unclear. It's one of the things we're hoping to get clarity on in the trial. So we're talking about 12 years between Aliza's murder and Moore being arrested. And his defense is saying that that long time period has made it impossible for them to defend their client properly. Yeah. Moore's attorneys filed a motion asking the judge to dismiss the case because of those 12 years. They said witnesses had died. Evidence had been lost. At an evidentiary hearing in July, the defense laid out leads they say they would have pursued had so much time not passed.

19:26One key witness, Simon, they say they lost access to was Aliza's estranged husband, Sanford. Absolutely. Sanford died in 2024. Look, you can certainly understand why defense attorneys are very concerned about Sanford. They brought a friend of his to the stand, a retired police officer, who testified that Sanford once asked him how someone could commit the perfect crime. He said he told Sanford things like the importance of not using a gun or a car that can be traced back to you. Investigators must have looked into Sanford early on. He and Elisa were mid-divorce. Absolutely. And honestly, this was not just any divorce.

20:11It was a really, really messy divorce. In fact, there was a civil suit after Aliza's death brought by Aliza and Sanford's own daughter. And, you know, she alleges that he mismanaged millions of dollars, hid them from his wife, blew all that money on strippers and affairs on the side. And investigators did interview Sanford. He denied having anything to do with her murder. And police say cell phone records back him up. He was nowhere near downtown when the attack happened. There was another lead. The defense said that they wished they could have explored. And that came up during the testimony of one of Aliza's former co-workers.

20:53Yeah. This former co-worker testified that a threatening voicemail had been left at their office shortly before Aliza had been killed. Who was it, this threatening voicemail? This is something that Pence is raising as a sort of tantalizing alternate theory of the case that because so much time has passed, they're really not in a position to chase down. How did the prosecution handle this? So prosecutors pushed back, essentially saying that none of this proves Moore can't still get a fair trial. And in August, the judge agreed and denied the motion to dismiss. That brings us to this week, Simon.

21:30The trial was supposed to get underway Monday, and it didn't. What happened? Yeah, the defense filed motions requesting delays and again dismissing of the charges altogether. One of the things defense has raised is they say only recently have they received a really large volume of evidence, including 40 ,000 pages of an expert report. They claim they didn't have time to go over it all and give an adequate defense. And then there's this fight over the lead prosecutor. The defense says he had been communicating with an attorney who represented Moore years earlier. Why is that a concern? Yes, they were raising the possibility of whether confidential information about Moore's defense could have been shared with prosecutors.

22:17Now, prosecutors vigorously deny any wrongdoing and say such flimsy accusations. Never before in their career had they seen these sorts of accusations been passed around. So things have gotten a little bit heated on that regard. What was the judge's response to these motions? Well, on Tuesday, she denied all of them, which one would think opens the door for the trial to finally start. But the defense filed yet another motion, this time asking the judge to throw up the case. And they're alleging double jeopardy. Basically, they're saying the plea deal that Moore had back in 2017 to making false statements about his wear of ice to police should mean that he can't be charged with any crimes related to this incident.

23:04Prosecutors have responded to that allegation of double jeopardy, calling this motion a bad attempt to thwart justice for Lisa Sherman. So after all that, Simon, the judge denied the defense motion. So what's next? So we are in jury selection now and are, of course, eager to learn more as this trial gets started. Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Andrea. Up next, it's time for Dateline Roundup. We've got updates in the David and Lindsey Clancy cases. And news from the prosecutor about what's next for Nick Reiner, the man accused of murdering his film director dad, Rob Reiner, and photographer mom, Michelle Singer Reiner.

23:44Plus, if a crime happens at sea, who gets the call? A special agent with the Coast Guard explains.

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26:33Welcome back, everyone. Joining me for this week's Roundup is Dateline booking producer Caitlin Cutt. Hey, Caitlin. Hi, Andrea. So, Caitlin, for our first story, we have an update in the Lindsay Clancy case, the mother and former nurse who recently stood trial in Massachusetts for killing her three children. She says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Clancy's trial ended, of course, in a dramatic mistrial due to the 11 to 1 jury deadlock. But Clancy's defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, is not ready to accept that. He has filed something called a renewed motion asking the court to find her not guilty.