On Sunday night, a bizarre medical mystery unfolds on HLN’s returning hit series, Something’s Killing Me with BD Wong. We meet a successful doctor who ends up dead after collapsing in her home after work, but how?
Host BD Wong introduces us to Pennsylvania native Dr. Autumn Klein, a 41-year-old neurologist seemingly happily married with a daughter and who appeared to have an enviable life.
But after returning home from work one night, Autumn fell to the floor and was clinging to life when her husband, Robert Ferrante, called 911 saying his wife Autumn appeared to be having a stroke.
Autumn was rushed to the ER and met by her peers in the trauma team, many completely confused as to what was going on with her. They were desperate to save her and worked frantically to revive her.
She was young. She was healthy. Then, the stories her husband started telling law enforcement and to their family and friends were not adding up, leading everyone to believe he might have something to do with her death. But how?
After a grueling revival effort, which failed, a barely alive Autumn lasted three days in the ICU before passing away. After an autopsy was scheduled, her body cremated, blood tests from Quest returned to the hospital and revealed that traces of Cyanide poison were in her blood.
Something’s Killing Me is a six-part documentary series created by CNN Development team which investigates established medical oddities and criminal cases “where life literally hangs in the balance.”
Weekly, the series enlists physicians and scientists working against time to try to save a life or explain the death.
With Autumn’s case, the details soon get murkier. So much so that a book was written about her death by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Paula Reed Ward. Her book Death by Cyanide: The Murder of Dr. Autumn Klein, was published in 2016.
At first, Dr. Autumn Klein’s death was not viewed as suspicious. Despite her husband’s attempts to say she may have had underlying health issues, none were found.
In Ward’s measured reporting of what transpired after Klein’s death, she wrote that Klein’s body was cremated when a doctor who had treated her when initially admitted to emergency saw the results of a returned Quest blood test that could have easily been overlooked or filed away.
Ward wrote: “The cyanide in Autumn’s blood measured at 3.4 milligrams per liter. A fatal level.”
Make sure to tune in to see what happened to Dr. Klein’s 6-year-old daughter Cianna and her husband – now a person of interest who ultimately was convicted of her murder by a jury trial.
Something’s Killing Me airs Sundays, beginning July 29 at 8/7c on HLN.