Michelle Herndon’s Kindness Isn’t Rewarded
(‘Needle in a Haystack,’ Forensic Files)
In the land of Forensic Files, Michelle Herndon’s death falls into the drawer marked “No good deed goes unpunished.” Like Diane Tilly and Jack Lynch, Michelle wanted to connect with people who were struggling.
Michelle, out of the goodness of her heart, befriended the socially awkward roommate of one of her close pals.
Oliver O’Quinn refused to accept the platonic status of his relationship with Michelle. It ended in a horrible tragedy and an international manhunt.
Full of energy. For this week, I looked for information about the time Oliver spent abroad after fleeing U.S. authorities. Also, because no one in Michelle’s family appeared on Forensic Files, I checked to see whether any of them talked to other media.
So let’s get going on the recap of “Needle in a Haystack” along with extra information from internet research:
Michelle Ann Herndon was born on July 15, 1981 and grew up in Live Oak, Florida, where she belonged to Friendship Baptist Church. “She had the bluest eyes,” her mother, Belinda Herndon, told NBC News. “She just reminded me of a butterfly the way she would just kind of float around.”
Liked all beings. By age 24, Michelle was entering her senior year at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She worked her way through school via a full-time job as a personal trainer, and she wanted to join the Peace Corp.
It would have been a good career choice, according to her mother. Michelle, she said, was a custodian of the planet and its occupants. She volunteered at a facility for homeless people. She confronted litterers wherever she saw them.
A fan of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Michelle worked at an ape sanctuary and gave money to animal charities.
One November day in 2005, Michelle didn’t show up for her classes or her job at Gainesville Health & Fitness.
Bad sign. Michelle didn’t answer phone calls from her fiancé, whom Forensic Files calls Jason Doyle but other sources identify as Jason Dearing. On November 10, 2005, he drove from his home in Miami to Gainesville to look for her.
Jason, who had been dating Michelle for four years, heard her dog, Duke, barking inside her house at 115 SE 10th Street, but Michelle didn’t answer the the bell or her cell phone. The doors and all the windows were locked.
Alerted to the situation, Belinda hightailed it over to Michelle’s house. She arrived to the sight of yellow police tape. Jason was crying as was Michelle’s friend Jessica Seipel.
Police had found Michelle face down in her bed. She had been dead for several days.
Wee mark. Although her friends and family said that Michelle loved life, investigators considered the possibility that she committed suicide, somehow. Or perhaps an aneurism had taken her life during sleep.
The medical examiner couldn’t find a cause of death. An autopsy revealed that Michelle was in great physical shape and had no disease or other health problems.
Eventually, a tiny needle mark on Michelle’s left arm was spotted. Belinda told investigators that Michelle was afraid of needles, so it didn’t come from donating blood or selling plasma.
Roomie of a friend. The needle mark hadn’t caused bruising or bleeding, leading investigators to believe it came from a medical professional.
The police found a Publix shopping bag next to a garbage can outside Michelle’s home. It held two empty bottles of propofol, syringes, and a pediatric butterfly IV. It also had vials of midazolam and etomidate, according to Oxygen. Medical professionals use propofol as a strong anesthetic and sometimes mix it with other medications.
The lab found a lethal dose of propofol in Michelle’s system.
Peddling falsehoods. Michelle suffered from migraines and police wondered whether she went outside normal channels for medication. She knew Oliver O’Quinn, an intensive care nurse at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida, because he was Jessica Seipel’s roommate. Oliver specialized in anesthesia.
Little about Oliver O’Quinn’s early life turned up on the internet. He was born on August 18, 1978, to Beecher O’Quinn and the former Phyllis Donnells and spent at least some of his early life in Tennessee.
By November 2005, he was 27, divorced, and not much of charmer socially. Oliver tried to impress others with tall tales about being a firefighter and a first responder during the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, according to Jessica. (False self-aggrandizing stories, another Forensic Files staple, Jack Boyle and David Davis).
Not living in reality. Oliver sometimes joined Michelle and her friends for dinners at home. She let him tag along for activities like attending concerts with her and her other friends. Jessica thought Oliver had a crush on Michelle. “He was shy. A bit awkward around women,” Jessica told NBC News. “But Michelle always did all she could to make him feel at home.”
Michelle had reportedly said that she felt sorry for Oliver. Her friends began referring to Oliver as “stalker boy.”
“He had no relationship with Michelle other than a friend but in his own mind he thought he had a relationship,” Michelle’s cousin Wayne Edwards told the Gainesville Sun.
Machine yields evidence. Oliver once borrowed someone’s dog so he could have a play date with Michelle and Duke. Oliver began dropping by Michelle’s place and calling her frequently.
Phone records showed he had barraged Michelle with phone calls in the days before her death, dialing her 43 times in less than a month. But he stopped calling on the day that she died — before it was public information that she was deceased.
Via the FDA’s National Drug Control number as well as a lot number, police traced the propofol bottles from Michelle’s garbage to Shands Hospital. They came from an Omnicell automated dispensing machine in the intensive care unit, and the employee number used to obtain the propofol belonged to Oliver O’Quinn. On a needle cap from the discarded drug bag at Michelle’s place, investigators found male DNA.
O’boy O’boy. Meanwhile, Oliver abruptly left his job at Shands Hospital. Sources vary as to whether he was fired or quit.
But a detective located O’Quinn at his part-time gig at Nature Coast Regional Hospital in Williston. Oliver told him he would give a police interview at a later time.
Instead of following through, he fled to Dublin, Ireland, on November 29, 2005. It’s not clear whether he had any friends or relatives there, but he told his U.S. family that he was taking a vacation in the land of his ancestors, according to IrishCentral.com. He had previously visited the country.
Finds a haunt. If Oliver was heartbroken over Michelle’s death or consumed with worry about a police investigation, it didn’t stop him from trying to live it up on the Emerald Isle.
“We noticed him first at the New Year’s Eve party, but afterward also, because he was always asking girls out for the whole time he was here,” an employee of the hostel where Oliver stayed told the British newspaper the Sunday Times. “It was funny because he wasn’t all that good-looking, but he kept trying.”
At some point during his four-month stay, Oliver became a regular at a Dublin cafe, where he sent emails to his family in Tennessee as well as his ex-wife, according to the Irish Times.
Out of reach. As police were starting the lengthy process of having him extradited, Michelle’s family worried that he would slip through authorities’ fingers. “What scares me is, if he did this to her, what’s stopping him from doing this to someone else?” Belinda Herndon said.
Other attempts at bringing suspects back to the U.S. from Ireland were burdensome and ineffective. According to the Sunday Times, between 1999 and April 2005, all 12 of the extradition requests the U.S. made to Ireland failed.
The Irish state police, however, truly wanted to arrest Oliver — they just had to wait for the extradition paperwork to go through.
African tour. Oliver applied for a job in Ireland, but when he attempted to register with the Irish Nurses Organisation, its chief executive saw that U.S. authorities had flagged his name as an alleged criminal.
In April 2006, when Oliver discovered that the Irish Times had run a story about his extradition case, he packed up. Although Forensic Files said he flew directly from Ireland to Senegal, other sources say he went to Mauritania first — and one says that he stopped in Morocco before that.
He attempted to receive a money order at the American embassy in Mauritania, but officials there noted that his passport number had been designated as belonging to someone under investigation.
Again, Oliver slipped away, crossing the border into Senegal, but authorities there quickly turned him over to the U.S. He was taken away from Dakar in handcuffs.
Toxic words. A lab confirmed that the male DNA on the syringe cap in Michelle’s garbage came from Oliver.
Investigators finally uncovered a motive: Oliver had recently overheard a telephone call during which Michelle referred to him as an annoying little man. Another theory said that Oliver was upset when Michelle told him she was going to marry someone else, according to the Sunday Times.
It came out that, while in custody, Oliver told another inmate that Michelle deserved a long sleep. And Oliver said that Michelle had put him down so he was going to”put her down.”
Rx for murder. On a visit to his hometown in Tennessee after the murder, Oliver had told his father, Beecher O’Quinn, that he was depressed because a girlfriend had died of a drug overdose — incriminating words because police had not released to the public the fact that Michelle died that way. (Beecher would later recant his statement about that incident and tell Oliver’s half-sister to clam up about it too.)
Assistant State Attorney Tim Browning made a case that, under the pretense of giving Michelle hard-to-obtain medication for one of her migraines, Oliver went to her apartment and injected her with an overdose of propofol. He left his DNA on the cap after pulling it off with his teeth, as medical professionals sometimes do.
Michelle had four times the lethal dose of propofol in her system; it would have killed her in just seconds. The injection might have also included midazolam and estomidate.
Can’t ‘stand’ it. At the trial in May 2008, Jessica Seipel testified that Oliver told her that he had never met anyone like Michelle.
But when he found out that Jason Dearing was planning to move to the Gainesville area to make their relationship closer, Oliver snapped and decided to kill, the prosecution alleged.
Oliver didn’t testify on his own behalf.
The public defender, who called no witnesses, denied that his client was obsessed with Michelle Herndon. Drew McGill told the court that if Oliver clung to Michelle a bit too tightly, it was only the normal behavior of a shy person.
Father can’t stomach it. Oliver’s story was that his intentions toward Michelle were good, that he injected her to relieve her headache pain, but accidentally used too big a dose of propofol.
After three hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Oliver of first-degree murder.
After the verdict, Belinda called Oliver a “small, small man” and said she hoped he never felt as devastated as she and her husband were. Donald Herndon didn’t attend the trial because he didn’t want to be in the same room with Oliver, according to the Gainesville Sun.
“It is beyond my comprehension how an intelligent mind could conceive of what we’ve heard about this week,” Judge Peter Seig said, addressing Oliver directly. “You executed Michelle Herndon.” The judge also said he would sleep well knowing that Oliver would be in prison for life without the possibility of parole, the Gainesville Sun reported.
Today, Oliver is housed in Florida’s Zephyrhills Correctional Institution.
Once a hero. It’s still a mystery why Oliver, who was high-functioning enough to have a successful career and get married (and stay on good terms with his wife after their divorce) committed murder because of overhearing a small insult and being friend-zoned.
I found an Atlanta Journal story from 1994, when Oliver was a 16-year-old Civil Air Patrol Cadet Captain, that noted he came to the aid of a citizen suffering from heat exhaustion. He also presumably saved some lives during his career as a nurse.
Not that those deeds make up for causing the death of Michelle Herndon. But they give Oliver something positive to think about while he spends the rest of his life behind razor wire for punishing someone who was trying to be good to him.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube.
You raise a fascinating point when you mention him thinking behind the razor wire. What do people in that situation think about? Would make a great book. Thanks for posting.