Cynthia Talks to New8 about her Life and her Religionwww.cbs8.com/features/special....php?id=11069312-04-07 at 7:57AM
News 8 Exclusive -- We've heard about the sex, the wild parties and the breast implants in the murder trial of Marine widow Cynthia Sommer. Now she's getting a new trial, and for the first time, we're seeing a more personal side of Cynthia Sommer.
Cynthia Sommer, a 34-year-old mother of four, has something to look forward to for the first time since her arrest on murder charges two years ago.
"I'm amazed. I am shocked," she said.
After a jury found her guilty of poisoning her husband, the judge has now thrown out her conviction and ordered a new trial. It was a one in a million shot.
"It's like we went through a mouse hole with a Mack truck, so I'm totally excited," Sommer said.
Sommer grew up in Michigan. She got pregnant at age 17, gave birth to a daughter, and promptly married the baby's father.
"We had a baby and it was the right thing to do. So after that we had another baby, and three babies later…" she said.
She had a girl and two boys with her first husband Dan Peace, but it was a rocky relationship - more of an escape than anything else, Sommer says.
Cindy filed for divorce in 1999 after seven years of marriage.
"I left Dan and I bought a Jeep and it had four seats, and it was me and the kids. It was like it's just me and the kids and I don't want anything else," Sommer said.
It took just six months for Cindy to meet and marry her next husband Todd Sommer, a Marine stationed in North Carolina.
"He was such an awesome person, and everything we talked about, we agreed upon, and we just had a great chemistry, and we had so much fun together," she said.
Cindy got pregnant with her fourth child on their wedding night.
"We got married in Key West, and we got married on the beach at the Westin, and we spent our wedding night there," she said.
She also said she wasn't planning on getting pregnant that night.
Much of the murder case against Sommer focused on her sexual lifestyle after her husband Todd collapsed and died inside their home on the Miramar base in 2002. The Marines Sommer had sex with were her dead husband's best friends.
"That was part of me looking to them for… I'm sad and I'm hurting, and you're the closest thing I can get to him right now," Sommer said.
Prosecutors revealed that Cindy had posted pornographic photos of herself and Todd on an adult website weeks before Todd died. They tried to show Sommer killed her husband because she wanted to be free.
"I don't think that that means I killed my husband, because we looked at pornography or looked at pictures, and I certainly don’t think it means that I wanted to leave my husband, or party," she said.
Sommer also used a portion of her husband's life insurance money to pay for breast implants shortly after Todd's death.
"I was really depressed," she said. "I was really sad. I was really hurting. I felt that was something I could do to maybe pick myself up a little bit."
Sommer started drinking heavily. She moved to Florida with another Marine named Ross Ritter, started using cocaine and neglecting her children.
"I lost my kids and I went to jail overnight, and I quit," she said. "It was a wake-up call for me, and I quit and got my life together."
In Florida, Sommer completed two years of probation and court ordered counseling.
"I think that was when I finally realized that, wow, I need to stop and I need to pick my life up and I can't do this anymore like this," Sommer said.
Then, in late 2005, deputies in Florida arrested Sommer for the murder of her husband three years earlier and brought her back to San Diego. Sommer has spent the past two years in Las Colinas Jail in Santee.
"I've used this time to get close to God, to lean on him for my strength," she said.
"I mean, I'm not going to go and be a bible thumper and tell you what you have to do, but I definitely tell people when they ask me 'how do you do this?' And I tell them I couldn't do it if I didn't have God."
Sommer talks to her mother, her attorneys and her supporters who donate to her defense on a website, freecynthia.com.
As our interview ended, Cindy Sommer admitted she is scared of the possibility of going to prison. We asked her how often she thought of Todd.
"Every day. I have a picture of him up on my bed," she said.