In 2018, beloved brother and uncle Steve Clayton (64) was found dead in his South Carolina home. He had collapsed at the bottom of his staircase. It could have been natural causes, but his nephew suspected foul play because he felt Steve’s wife Lana was acting strangely.
Steve had never had kids, but he was always a father figure to his four siblings and was a great uncle to their kids. He started a company called Physical Therapy Resources, which grew to have locations nationwide. The company did very well, and we was able to retire comfortably with millions at age 41 after selling his interest.
After retiring, Steve devoted time to helping inspire young entrepreneurs, and by spending time with his family.
Steve eventually found love online with VA nurse Lana Walsh, who his sister Rosie Clayton-Leslie says gave him a “glow he’d been missing for a while.” Lana was a wallflower, while Steve was the life of the party, but their differences really complimented each other.
Steve and Lana married in November of 2013 at their house in Charlotte, NC. Soon after the wedding, they relocated to a lakeside mansion in South Carolina, at Lana’s request. The move brought them closer to Lana’s son and grandchildren and Steve’s extended family.
In June 2018, five years into their marriage, Steve started feeling unwell. His ears started hurting, and he was often nauseous. He got dizzy one time in his garden. He also had a headache.
His wife Lana was a nurse, and told him to get some rest. He woke up 36 hours later. Lana told his family she was monitoring his health and just thought he was exhausted.
In two weeks, Steve felt much better and threw a part for the fourth of July. A few weeks later, on July 21, a man called 911 after a woman ran out into the road and asked the stranger to call help for her husband, who had fallen down the steps.
It’s odd that Lana, a nurse, would not have used one of the couple’s phones to call for help. By the time help arrives, Steve is already dead.
Below is a shot from bodycam footage of Lana crying on the scene.
Lana told police that Steve had been dizzy since two days ago. Steve’s nephew Nick French was a police officer who came to Steve and Lana’s house the minute he heard of Steve’s death.
Lana kept saying that Steve had fallen down the stairs. The police think that Steve died a natural death, but the checked for signs of an attack or struggle. There was none. The coroner thought he had had a heart attack because of a blue color in his face, which can be an indicator of that.
Nick find a smell of human excrement and urine in the bedroom. He thinks that Steve must have been going to the bathroom in the bed for days. Nick and his family threw out the mattress.
Later, Steve’s sister Rosie asks Lana what happened. Rosie said he had been sick for a few days and she had not called his family because she thought he was feeling better. She says he had not called because he had been sleeping, and had misplaced his phone. This made Rosie feel a sense of dread because it didn’t make sense that Steve would go without his phone for so long.
Lana said that Steve did not have a will. She planned for Steve to be cremated instead of buried, which is what his sister thought he wanted.
After his funeral Lana had started getting rid of all of Steve’s things, donating most of his personal items to the VA (the Veteran’s Association.) Even his wedding ring was gone. The family was very suspicious about the fact that he didn’t have a will. They asked for an autopsy and a toxicology report.
The initial autopsy found heart disease, but it took weeks for the toxicology report to come back. When the results finally came back, they found sedatives in his blood like marijuana, tamazapam (a sleeping pill,) and benedryl, but the major red flag was an extremely high level tetrahydrozoline, the active ingredient in eyedrops. It was obvious this was the cause of death.
If taken orally, eyedrops can cause dizziness, nausea, headaches, and fatigue, which were the symptoms Steve had experienced off and on for the weeks leading up to his death. If given enough, it can cause death by shutting down the central nervous system, and restrict blood flow to organs. Eye drops are odorless and tasteless, which makes it hard for a person being poisoned with them to detect.
In bodycam footage there is a bottle of Visine on the dresser, far away from the bed Steve had laid in for days, unable to even get up to use the bathroom.
Five weeks after Steve’s death, Lana Clayton is brought in for questioning with Detective Mark Motz. She told detectives that she “walked on eggshells”around her husband, who she said had ever-changing moods. He took a lot of medications to manage those moods, she said, but she did not mention the eye drops. When the detectives confronted her about the eye drops, she claimed Steve put them in his morning coffee every day.
When asked what she knows about the eye drops, she answers that she knows it causes diarrhea.
She says Steve had a nasty side to him and was often verbally abusive to her. She says he called her names like “stupid” and “b!tch.” Lana said Steve’s behavior had been escalating so she tried to stay out of his way.
Police looked over the house again looking for anything that could help them figure out what happened. Lana called the detectives and said she had more to say. The call was recorded. She said Steve’s behavior was worse than she had said the day before.
Lana says that his behavior had gotten so bad that she complained to a friend at work, who told her to put Visine in his drink to get back at him. She said she thought it would only cause diarrhea.
She said when she saw Visine on the dresser she squeezed the entire bottle in Steve’s water. She said “What if I did kill him? What if I caused his death with the Visine?”
The police made plans to arrest her, but the next morning Lana had tried to kill herself with gas and pills. Lana was found unconscious, but she survived and was charged with murder and tampering with food items.
January 16, 2020 Lana admitted guilt of voluntary manslaughter and tampering with a food item. She took a plea deal and argued that she did not mean to kill Steve, and had no idea that Visine was strong enough to kill him. She claimed she was just trying to get mild revenge on Steve for his abuse of her.
Prosecutor Will Thompson believe that Steve suffered for three days before he died, and that Lana was slowly poisoning him over the course of those days before finally delivering the fatal dose on the day he died. She had gone out to mow the lawn that day, which Will Thompson believes was to escape having to watch Steve’s final suffering. Steve’s symptoms in the previous weeks suggest that maybe Lana had been trying out the poison on him long before she decided to kill him with it.
Lana was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
