At times it seems as if we in Nevada do not have politicians but thespians—officials elected not to represent our wishes and beliefs, but rather to strut upon the public stage and provide entertainment to the masses.
Not as they do in critical theatrical productions or even serious feature films, but instead as they do in the basest arena for drama: soap operas.
That’s right, soap operas. The saturnine affair of Kathy Augustine was one of them. Not the first—not the last—but one of them.
Her saga presented several lurid elements to a public who, by and large, would not have otherwise paid her, a veteran of public office in Nevada since 1993, any attention. It started with her warningless marriage to critical-care nurse Chaz Higgs, just three weeks after her then-husband Charles Augustine died of stroke-related complications while under Higgs’ watch. One year later, Kathy Augustine, then the State Controller, suffered the shame of an unprecedented impeachment and censure by the State Assembly for ethics violations and was repudiated by her own party, the Republicans. And then she became the talk of the town when she was found unconscious and non-responsive in her Reno home on July 8, 2006. It was a sudden and unforeseen death that would become official three days later, and no sooner than Kathy Augustine’s family took her off life support did the public begin to suspect Higgs of killing his wife, who at the time of her death had no medical conditions but increasing turbulence in her relationship with Higgs.
The trial was, it seemed, made for TV. Even with the witness testimony that Higgs had oftentimes talked of killing his wife in the months and days leading up to her death, and that Higgs had sought love affairs with at least three other women immediately before and after his wife’s passing, the state did not by any means have an impregnable case. There was much room for doubt. Above all because the alleged murder weapon—a potent muscle relaxant called succinylcholine—is so modern that the forensic science used to study it is still unbrazened.
But then Higgs himself took the stand, and after the first day of telling his side of the story, which in essence was that he loved Augustine and that politics and the state’s Republican party were culpable for her death, the critical-care nurse (and former military medic) went home and tried, for the second time since being accused of murdering Augustine last summer, to kill himself. By slitting his wrists, with horizontal slices.
Once again he was unsuccessful, and his abortive efforts appeared to be nothing more than an inexorable conscience acting out. The stuff of daytime television.
Augustine’s murder trial attracted the buzz of the masses, right from the start. The courtroom in Reno last week could not contain all those who showed up—citizens who for the most part were neither kin nor kith to anyone involved with the case but rather, idle followers of the real-life thriller approaching its climax. (Which, of course, came to resolution this past June 29, when 12 jurors who needed less than seven hours to deliberate decided in unanimity that Chaz Higgs was guilty of murder in the first degree, by poisoning his wife with succinylcholine.) Selecting jurors on the first day of trial, June 18, proved to be a difficult task, for most of the jury pool was already familiar with the high-profile case and had formed an opinion on the matter. There were multiple daily dispatches from every source of media. One week into the trial, Kathy Augustine’s daughter Dallas held a public auction for her deceased mother’s personal belongings, and hundreds of citizens came, spending in excess of $30,000 for vestiges of the life of the former politician.
All of which goes to show that Kathy Augustine had a place reserved for her in the public consciousness of Nevada.
Not on account of her politics, of course. The state at large, and we in the southern end especially, tend to be less concerned with the fundamental objective of politics—issues, stances, ideologies and their avatars—and more attentive to the other side of politics. The buzz surrounding Augustine’s saga epitomized this. And, moreover, it illuminated the manner in which we attend the political arena these days: like a swarm of fans to a professional wrestling show.
Yet now that Augustine’s storyline has concluded, it, like most political soap operas and their actors, will in all likelihood vanish from the occupied minds and transient memories of this town by the time articles such as this one have been discarded with yesterday’s waste.
And then it will be heard of no more.