Using Eye Drops to Prank, Torture, or Kill

The common household item is great for treating dryness and redness of the eyes, but it’s also poisonous if swallowed.

By Jessie Schiewe

Art: Zoot Ghost

When police found him, Steven Clayton’s body was sprawled on the floor of the foyer in his lakeside South Carolina home — a historic, mint green structure modeled after George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. 

The 64-year-old retiree from Florida had died, it seemed, after taking a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs. It wasn’t until two weeks later, on the day of his funeral, when the toxicology reports came back, revealing the truth. 

It had been no fall that killed Clayton on that fateful day in July of 2018. 

He had been poisoned. 

With eye drops. 

By his wife. 

Tetrahydrozoline is an active ingredient found in both eye drops and nasal sprays that works by narrowing blood vessels, in turn reducing eye redness and stuffy noses. 

But when it’s swallowed in large enough doses, the chemical can be toxic — even deadly. Milder symptoms include blurred vision, difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, temperature drops, seizures, and even comas. Death usually comes as a result of heart failure. 

It can be hard to believe that such a common household item, sitting innocently in the bathroom cabinets and bedside drawers of so many people, can also double as a murder weapon.

Yet for those seeking out simple and fail-proof ways to make others suffer, it’s one of the more popular poisons to be used, with eye drops to blame for a handful of crimes in the last decade.

The clear coloring of most eye drops makes mixing it in foods, and even water, a cinch. Bottles of the stuff, especially the more popular brands like Visine and Opti-Clear, are also cheap and easy to acquire at most pharmacies, markets, and convenience stores.  

Exactly how much tetrahydrozoline needs to be ingested before it kills differs from person to person, with every case unique unto itself.

It took three days of eye drop poisonings by Clayton’s wife, Lana Sue Clayton, before he succumbed to his final, fatal dose. 

For others, like 49-year-old Marceline "Marcie" Jones, it can take even less. The New York woman died after a friend spiked her soft drink at an office Halloween party in 2008.   

Usually, if caught in time, death by eye drop poisoning can be avoided. The individual’s age and overall health also play a role in helping them survive the pain and other symptoms. 

• Though he was often sick, a Pennsylvania man survived being unknowingly poisoned with eye drops by his girlfriend over a period of three years. She later admitted to spiking his water around 10 to 12 times during that period because she wanted him to “pay more attention to her.” 

• Frank Shull, an 84-year-old man in Cleveland, Ohio, was poisoned by his homeless, jobless son in 2012, but didn’t die despite drinking a glass of milk containing two bottles of eye drops. 

• In 2017, when a Wisconsin woman failed to succumb to the eye drops her husband had squeezed into her can of Diet Coke, he tried to kill her using other tactics, such as strangulation and suffocation. He was not successful. She survived and he ended up behind bars. 

• In Wyoming, an unnamed woman survived a prolonged case of eye drop poisoning carried out by her 19-year-old stepdaughter in 2018. Over the course of four months, Alexis Jennings mixed about 20 bottles of Visine into the woman’s teas and coffees, leading her to be hospitalized twice. The teenager had begun administering the eye drops as a punishment to her stepmother after she revealed a dark secret about the girl to her then-boyfriend. The secret, according to the Caspar-Star Tribune, was that Jennings was a pedophile who had previously molested a young girl. 

• In 2009, Cecil Peterson survived after drinking sweet tea that had a half bottle of Visine mixed in with it. The Missouri man, whose wife had been trying to kill him, just experienced strong stomach pains. He got a temporary restraining order against her and she divorced him a year later. 

The reasons why people resort to eye drop poisonings aren’t always clear.

Clayton’s wife Lana Sue, who received a 25-year prison sentence for her crime, was forthcoming about admitting she poisoned her husband, yet she never revealed a motive.

But it’s likely money had something to do with it.

Lana Sue would have inherited Clayton’s more than $1 million in assets, in addition to his expansive Greek Revival estate valued at $822,000. According to the Washington Post, she also destroyed her husband’s will after killing him, which further suggests her motives had something to do with his finances.

In fact, money usually is at the root of many eye drop poisoning cases. A few months after Clayton’s death, another married person killed their spouse in the same way. 

Over the course of a few weeks in 2019, Joshua Lee Hunsucker, a paramedic in North Carolina, is believed to have murdered his wife and the mother of his two children by secretly administering eye drops into her drinks. 

According to Stacy Robinson Hunsucker’s toxicology report, the amount of tetrahydrozoline found in her system was “between 30 and 40 times the therapeutic level,” the Charlotte Observer reports. 

Hunsucker’s goal, his wife’s family believes, was to get Stacy’s $250,000 life insurance payout. He reportedly purchased a boat worth $80,000 to $100,000 with the money shortly after death, and used the rest to fund “multiple expensive vacations” with his new girlfriend, whom he also let move into the couple’s home, reports WSOC-TV. 

Eye drop poisonings have also appeared in popular culture, with financial incentives usually to blame. 

In Crooked House, an Agatha Christie mystery novel from 1949, a young girl kills her grandfather by tricking him into drinking his own eye drops because she was mad he wouldn’t pay for her ballet lessons. In a CSI episode from the early 2000s, a hooker is caught drugging customers with eye drops so that she can rob them and then flee. 

But not all who commit eye drop poisonings do so with the intent to kill or for the hunger of money. In fact, thanks to a lot of misinformation out there, not everyone seems to know that ingesting eye drops can be lethal. They think it just causes really bad diarrhea.

Because of this, it’s not uncommon for people to pull pranks or exact revenge by mickeying another’s drink with a few squirts of Visine to give them the runs. Unsuspecting high schoolers have done it to both their classmates and teachers as jokes.

In 2019, a San Diego man, thinking he was committing a “harmless prank,” spiked two of his coworkers’ water bottles with the stuff. One of them was his supervisor who reported experiencing nausea and pain so bad it was “almost like hot pokers, almost like labor pain.” 

The urban myth that eye drops cause diarrhea has been made all the more believable in recent years thanks to movies like Wedding Crashers and shows like Orange Is The New Black where characters dose others with eye drops because of their presumed laxative-like affects. 

In fact, it’s through the media that many eye drop poisoners learn about the under-the-radar torture tactic. The woman who spiked her friend’s drink at the office Halloween party got the idea after watching Wedding Crashers. She said she thought it would be funny just like it was in the film when Owen Wilson’s character makes Bradley Cooper’s character spend all night in the bathroom. 

Alexis Jennings, the teenager who tried to kill her stepmother by poisoning the woman’s teas and coffees, also devised the scheme thanks to the media. She said she had read a news story about a person who did something similar. 

Less common are accidental eye drop poisonings, but they do happen — and most of the time they involve children.

Usually, the child will find a bottle lying around the house in easy reach and will play with, suck, or chew on it, ingesting the liquid in the process. Children between the ages of 1 month to 5 years are the most likely to knock back a Visine, with the Food and Drug Administration citing roughly 100 cases involving infants overdosing on the product between 1985 and 2012.  

When a 1-year-old boy in Pennsylvania ingested eye drops on at least two occasions last year, it was also by accident — just in a different way. The toddler had sipped from juice boxes and water bottles intended for his older brother, who was being slowly poisoned by his mother, Samantha Elizabeth Unger. The 23-year-old — who likely suffers from a mental health disorder called Munchausen syndrome by proxy — didn’t keep track of how much Visine she put into her son’s sippy cups and Capri Suns, but knew she used at least one bottle. 

Eventually, the 3-year-old became so sick that he was flown by helicopter to the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center for treatment. Doctors there said the boy arrived at the hospital with “life-threatening clinical signs,” including a heart rate around 40, PennLive reports. 

He survived, and now the brothers live with their grandparents. Unger, meanwhile, is serving a three-and-a-half to 12 year prison sentence. Had the boy died, her prison stint would have been longer, but luckily for him, her dosage was not enough to kill.

JESSIE SCHIEWE IS THE EDITOR OF OK WHATEVER. SHE BELIEVES IN MERMAIDS AND THRIFT SHOPS FOR EXERCISE.

Zootghost’s work revolves around social commentary, dark humor, and skateboarding. 

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