My Dentist Was Arrested for Murder. Then Things Got Weird

Inside the trial of Dr. Gilberto Nunez
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 27, 2017 11:49 AM CDT
Updated Jul 1, 2017 3:35 PM CDT
My Dentist Was Arrested for Murder. Then Things Got Weird
Strange.   (Getty Images/trevorb687)

When James Lasdun needed immediate care for a broken tooth in April 2016, he found himself in the office of his dentist, a man he had assumed he'd have to give up seeing—due to the doctor's arrest for murder six months earlier. After the tooth was tended to, Lasdun asked Dr. Gilberto Nunez if he'd be willing to talk about the case, and Nunez said yes. "When he went on trial, a few weeks later, almost every detail of his account was corroborated," writes Lasdun in the New Yorker. And the details are pretty weird. At the root is a love triangle: In 2011, Nunez was seeing Linda Kolman, whose husband, Thomas Kolman, was found dead in a Planet Fitness parking lot in Ulster, NY, in the early hours of November 29 of that year. The prosecution asserted Nunez had met him there and gotten Kolman to ingest midazolam, a sedative Nunez stored in his office, leading to his death.

But the midazolam itself seemed problematic: The two vials located in Nunez's office hadn't been opened, and the amount detected in Kolman's blood would have only sedated him, leading the prosecution to assert that Nunez had risked giving Kolman a non-fatal dose based on the belief Kolman's sleep apnea would finish him off. That's one of the less peculiar elements of the whole ordeal, which also included the "Samantha texts" (nearly 1,000 texts he sent Kolman over two days in July 2011 from "Samantha" that indicated Linda was having an affair with Nunez) and the "bromance" that emerged between Nunez and Kolman after Kolman learned of the affair (Kolman sometimes babysat the kids when Nunez and Kolman's wife went out). Nunez was found not guilty of murder, but he's behind bars anyway. Read the wild full story to learn why. (More Longform stories.)

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