California bomber's wife dies in 'suspicious' circumstances: Dateline reveals new details before deadly blast
Stephen Beal, who was sentenced to life for the 2018 blast, has never been accused of a crime in the death a decade earlier, but officials say he failed to cooperate with the investigation.
Stephen Beal was sentenced to life in prison last month over what authorities described as a “horrific act of violence” — a bombing at his ex-girlfriend’s Southern California spa that killed her and seriously injured two customers.
The 2018 death of Ildiko Krajnyak, 48, in the package bombing came roughly a decade after Beal’s wife died in what an official with the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office said at the time was a “mysterious case.” Now, federal prosecutors have weighed in with a filing that calls the circumstances surrounding the death “highly suspicious.”
Ildiko Krajnyak.via DatelineBeal, 64, has never been accused of a crime in Christine Beal’s March 8, 2008, death, which the medical examiner’s office concluded was “probably natural.” Beal won a half-million dollar lawsuit against an insurance company that initially denied an accidental death claim he filed in the months after she died.
But in the Jan. 5 filing, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for California’s Central District pointed to several factors in Christine’s death, including elevated lead levels in her body during a toxicology analysis and her husband’s “failure” to cooperate with medical staff. They made the allegation in a filing that urged the judge in the bombing case to consider the death as she determined Stephen’s prison sentence.
During the Jan. 19 sentencing hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Josephine Staton said she would not take Christine’s death into account in her decision. She called Stephen’s crimes targeting Krajnyak “calculated” and “chilling” and sentenced him to life in prison plus 30 years for four felony charges, including the use of a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death.
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