Connecticut mom charged after police say she tried to poison husband with spiked bottle of wine in bitter custody battle
A Connecticut mom has been charged with two counts of murder for allegedly poisoning her estranged husband’s wine bottle in the midst of a bitter custody battle with a chemical commonly found in antifreeze.
Kristen Hogan, 33, was arrested Friday, after police say she admitted to putting ethylene glycol in her former partner’s wine and a bottle of iced tea. She told officers she sought to make the man sick as “payback for being mentally abusive,” according to documents released by the Connecticut State Police. She denied trying to kill him.
A state crime lab found notable levels of ethylene glycol in a sample of the wine, police said.
State police began investigating the case last month, after the man, unnamed in the heavily redacted police documents, was sent to the ICU in early August.
Throughout the night of August 10, the Ridgefield man, who separated from Hogan in May, became “increasingly ill.” His mother found him the following morning “slurring his words, staggering, and vomiting,” according to the state police.
The man later told police he believed Hogan might want to poison him to become the full owner of a property they both used and to “gain full time custody of their child.”
Following the alleged incident, the man was “in fear for his life,” police say, and installed security cameras at his home. He said this step made Hogan “irate,” and that she put tape over the cameras, some of which eventually went missing.
He also told officials that Hogan, who had full access to the property where the alleged poisoning took place, was the last one inside other than him before he drank the wine. He based the claim on a notification he received on August 7 that her phone had accessed a wifi router there. The date was the same morning she failed to appear in court for a hearing on the custody matters.
Police investigations later revealed that Hogan had searched online for information about various chemicals and how much “would kill you” if the compounds were ingested. She also sought details on the penalties for not appearing in court, police said.
Hogan is currently detained in York Correctional Institution on a $1 million bond, according to state records.
In September, the documents reveal, Hogan alleged her husband might be poisoning their child, after the child was taken to the hospital that month for a “serious illness.”
The husband told police the allegations were “very alarming” because they came at the same time Hogan had appeared to be attempting to “become more cordial with him” and offered to cook him dinner, a gesture he found “highly odd.”
He also became “concerned” after their child returned from a visit to Hogan’s residence showing signs of fatigue and declining to eat. The husband told police another of his children, this one with a different mother, had gone to the hospital in October of 2024 for similar symptoms.
Hogan, meanwhile, claimed that this woman believed the former husband could be poisoning the second child by tampering with their medication.
