UT v. Meggan Sundwall

Meggan Sundwall, a 48-year-old registered nurse from Santaquin, Utah, was charged with aggravated murder and obstruction of justice in the death of her friend Kacee Lyn Terry. The State alleged that Sundwall spent years convincing Terry she was dying of a cancer she never had, urged her across thousands of text messages to end her suffering with insulin, and administered the fatal dose herself on August 12, 2024. Terry was not diabetic and had no medical reason for insulin to be near her. Prosecutors alleged the motive was a $1.5 million life insurance policy Sundwall believed she would inherit, a policy that turned out never to have existed. These were the State's allegations, and Sundwall stood before the court presumed innocent until the State proved otherwise.

The trial centered on one contested question: whose hand pushed the insulin? The forensic evidence showed exogenous insulin drove Terry's blood sugar down to a level of 14, far below the point where the body begins to shut down. Both sides agreed on the cause of death. They did not agree on who caused it. The State argued Sundwall, a trained nurse with the knowledge and the access, watched Terry's failing blood sugar drop across a ten-hour day and let seven hours pass without calling for help. The defense argued that Kacee Terry took her own life, and it asked jurors to weigh assisted suicide as a lesser path. Between "she encouraged it" and "she did it" sat the reasonable doubt the defense hoped to hold open. Twenty-eight thousand text messages, deleted phone data, false claims about a do-not-resuscitate order, and an insurance policy that was never real all pressed against that single gap.

The case went to trial, and a jury found Meggan Sundwall guilty. We watched it because that is the work: not to cheer a side, but to test whether the State carried its burden, whether the judge's evidence rulings held, and whether twelve people could sort four years of messages and clashing narratives into a verdict that met the standard. The full record of how the system did its job, day by day, is laid out in the coverage below.