Shortly before authorities say state Controller Kathy Augustine was fatally poisoned by her husband, she confided to a close friend that she regretted the marriage and was divorcing Chaz Higgs.

"You know, I made a big mistake," Sherry Dilley quoted Augustine as saying.

Augustine made the remark earlier this year while comforting Dilley of Minden on the loss of her husband to cancer.

During the conversations, Augustine demonstrated she knew the pain that Dilley was suffering. Augustine's husband of 15 years, Charles, had died in August 2003.

After his death, Augustine rushed into marriage with Higgs, who had been her husband's nurse in the hospital. Augustine warned Dilley not to make the same mistake.

"She said, 'I know you are going to be lonely,'" Dilley recalled. "'It's going to hit you all of the sudden that you are alone. But don't make the same mistake I did. Don't listen to someone say they can take care of you.'"

Not long after Augustine made those comments, she was dead.

Authorities allege that Higgs, a critical care nurse, injected the 50-year-old in July with a lethal dose of the powerful paralyzing agent succinylcholine at the couple's home. Authorities have not disclosed a motive for the slaying, but friends say she died as she was preparing to divorce Higgs.

Augustine, born Kathy Alfano, was raised in Southern California. She endured two failed marriages as a young woman, and as a single mother raised her daughter, Dallas.

She graduated from college and eventually went to work in the airline industry as a flight scheduler. It was then that she met her third husband, Charles Augustine, a pilot 16 years her senior. They married in 1988. Her brother, Phil Alfano, said Charles truly loved Kathy.

"A good guy and just very supportive of what she was doing in her life," Alfano recalled.

Alfano said Charles knew how to deal with his sister, who at times could be demanding and relentless in her pursuits.

"My sister was very driven, and he was a little bit more laid back," Alfano said. "He took some of her stuff in stride and laughed it off."

Kathy Augustine pursued her Nevada political career full force in 1992, when she was elected to the Nevada Assembly. She at times was criticized for cutthroat methods and questionable tactics to win her political races.

In one campaign ad during her successful Assembly race, she ran a poor quality photo of her political opponent, who was black, with the caption, "There is a real difference."

In a 1994 state Senate race against incumbent Lori Lipman Brown, she accused her opponent in a campaign ad of being against prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in the Legislature. Brown, who is Jewish, had simply declined to participate in a prayer during a session.

Augustine won the race, and in 1998, she was elected the state's first female controller.

She was impeached by the Assembly for three counts of campaign ethics violations in 2004. The state Senate convicted her on just one of three impeachment counts, finding that she violated a state law by using equipment in her state office to advance her re-election campaign in 2002. The state Senate reprimanded her, allowing her to remain in office. A term-limits law prevented her from running for another term as controller, so in May she filed as a Republican candidate for state treasurer.

Alfano said when his sister was in the Assembly and state Senate, it was a part-time position. Her marriage with Charles survived, even though he stayed in Las Vegas when she was in Northern Nevada for the session.

But when she was elected controller, she had to live in Northern Nevada full time. Neighbors of the couple in Las Vegas said that by 2003, the marriage was in trouble.

Neighbor John Tsitouras, a longtime friend of Charles, said the couple had been having marital problems for an extended period of time.

When the weather was nice, Tsitouras and his wife, Dotty, would sit on their front porch and drink coffee. Charles would join them and discuss his turbulent relationship with Kathy.

"They didn't get along at all," Tsitouras said. "Divorce papers were drawn up."

Charles had refused to sign the divorce papers, Tsitouras said.

"Knowing the two of them, it was probably just sheer stubbornness," he said.

Alfano said he believes the troubles with the marriage were largely attributable to his sister's demanding political career.

"She was elected controller about the time he was retiring, and they were at very different points in their lives," Alfano said. "I think if the job hadn't interfered, I think they would have stayed together."

In 2003, Charles suffered a stroke and was hospitalized at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, where Higgs, 42, was a nurse. Family and friends of Kathy said despite the troubles with the marriage, she was overwhelmed by sadness when her husband took ill.

"They were still very cordial to one another," Alfano said. "In my personal conversations with my sister, it was clear that when he (Charles) went into the hospital, she was broken up. She was crying. It was very tough for her."

After suffering the stroke, Charles appeared to be improving in the hospital but then suddenly died. The death was attributed to natural causes stemming from the stroke, and no autopsy was performed.

But since Higgs' arrest Sept. 29 on a murder charge in the death of his wife, the possibility that he might have killed Charles by poisoning him has been raised. Clark County authorities now are preparing to exhume Charles' body from an east Las Vegas grave to try to determine if this is possible.

The criminal case also has prompted questions about the origins of Kathy's relationship with Higgs. Alfano and Kathy's friends from Northern Nevada are confident she first met Higgs while he was caring for her ailing husband at the hospital. But last week, Clark County District Attorney David Roger said he saw Higgs and Kathy together at a political function in 2002.

"This guy (Higgs) was just different looking," Roger said. "He was real standoffish, and he stuck out."

Roger said he can't remember at which function he met Higgs and that he'd "make a bad witness" on the matter, but still is confident of the timing of the meeting.

He was running for the district attorney's job that year, and by the next year, after Higgs and Kathy were married, he was in his new job, meaning he had little time to attend political functions.

Others said last week they believe Roger is mistaken.

"I've never heard anyone say they met before they met in the hospital," Alfano said.

Alfano also said his family members remember seeing Higgs at a reception for Charles after his funeral.

"I've heard stories that Chaz was at the reception afterward," Alfano said. "I didn't know. I was talking to relatives, but that's my understanding, and I believe that to be true."

That same year, the Augustus Society named Kathy their Italian American of the Year, and Alfano and his entire family attended a banquet for the honor.

Kathy showed up at the function with Higgs, and her family figured he was her date. To their shock, Kathy introduced Higgs as her new husband.

She'd married him in Hawaii, just three weeks after Charles' death.

"She said he (Higgs) was like an angel," Alfano said. "She kept using that word, and she talked about how compassionate he was. She had been swept off her feet.

"It sounded very immature," Alfano said. "Of course we didn't say anything at the time. I wished her well, but I also told her I thought it was silly for her to rush into it that quickly, and I hoped it worked out.

"I remember my mom talking to Chaz, standing there, saying, 'I want you to make sure to take good care of her,'" Alfano recalled.

Kathy's friends wondered what she was doing with Higgs. Higgs, who had obtained his associate's degree in nursing just a year earlier, occasionally showed up at Republican functions in T-shirts.

Some who met Higgs at one of the functions described him as quiet, almost anti-social.

"Very shy, very uninterested," Kathy's friend Jerry Bing said of her first impression of Higgs.

Bing wondered why a successful and outgoing politician had chosen to marry a younger man who seemed to care little about his wife's politics.

"The first time I met him, I walked away shaking my head," Bing said. "I remember thinking, 'What a very strange relationship.''' Kathy's friend Heidi Smith had a similar reaction to Higgs. She met him at a Republican women's function in Northern Nevada in 2003 and thought he was "weird."

During one political function, she sat with Kathy and Higgs during dinner. "We went through a whole dinner without him saying more than two words," Smith said. "He was the exact opposite of Kathy. Kathy was vivacious, and this man never talked."

Alfano said, "You could be in a room with several people, talking about this or that, and he seemed like he was in his own world.

"And, when you shake his hand ... I never met a guy who had a handshake like this guy," Alfano said. "It was like shaking the hand of a corpse."

Higgs had an extended career in the Navy. He enlisted in 1983 in his home of record, Jacksonville, N.C.

He was in hospital corpsman school in 1984, then the Fleet Medical Service School at Camp LeJeune the same year. He was at the Naval Hospital at Camp LeJeune from 1984 to 1986, then the Naval Hospital at Jacksonville from 1986 to 1990.

He had SEAL training from 1990 to 1991. He was at the Naval School of Health Science from 1991 to 1993, and then spent four years in Bahrain. He finished his naval career at the Naval Medical Clinic in Quantico. He received several awards and decorations in the military, including a Kuwait Liberation Medal.

In trying to figure out the relationship, Kathy's friends figured she'd simply fallen for a shy, younger man who was into physical fitness and his appearance.

"We just figured he was a ladies man -- that's all we thought he was good for," Smith said.

"I thought, 'Well, I guess she's got some young stud,'" Bing recalled.

Higgs' attorney has said his client did not stand to gain financially from Kathy's death.

"It's as big a mystery to him as it is (to) everyone else," defense attorney Alan Baum previously said. "He was quite surprised when Kathy suffered her heart attack and subsequently died. Although he has medical training, he has no better explanation for her demise than anyone else."

Higgs also has denied having anything to do with the death of Charles, Baum said.

Smith said the reason for Higgs marrying Kathy "eluded all of us with the exception of money. He wasn't helping her any (financially)."

Last year, Alfano and his wife went to Italy with Kathy and Higgs. Overall, they gave the appearance of being happy, but Alfano said there were two incidents on the trip that "caused him concern."

He declined to discuss those incidents with the Review-Journal, saying they are relevant to the law enforcement investigation into his sister's death.

Alfano and Kathy's friends said, in retrospect, they believe Kathy Augustine married Higgs out of loneliness and grief over the death of Charles.

"I think when Chaz came in, she was at a vulnerable point, she needed companionship, and she went head-first into something that wasn't prudent," Alfano said.

"I love my sister, but this image that was concocted of the hard-driving politician, a lady of steel, was not entirely accurate," Alfano said. "She could be very vulnerable, too trusting of people."

Dilley recalled the counsel that Kathy gave her when her own husband died of cancer, the advice not to rush into a relationship. Augustine hinted that Higgs' interest in her was primarily financial.

"He wanted a Rolex, he wanted a BMW," Dilley recalled. "Kathy told me -- 'Don't. People are going to want things ... and once they start asking you, they don't stop.'"

Review-Journal writers Lynnette Curtis and Ed Vogel contributed to this report.