Alabama chiropractor convicted of slowly poisoning wife with lead-laced capsules

Hannah Pettey was twenty-two years old when she nearly died. In January 2022, after six months of escalating pain, she lay in a hospital bed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, her body shutting down. She had lost more than forty-five pounds. Doctors found her colon packed almost entirely with lead—an astronomical amount, they said, the likes of which they had never encountered in a patient. Within days, they told her mother Nicole that this was no accident. Someone had poisoned Hannah deliberately, methodically, over months. It was attempted murder.

Hannah had married Brian Mann, a chiropractor, when she was eighteen years old. They met in June 2017, just after she graduated high school and moved into her own apartment away from her mother. Brian was twenty-nine, charming, and certain. Within weeks of their first date, he told friends Hannah was the one. They married in May 2018, and Hannah became pregnant almost immediately. By the time she fell ill in late 2021, they had two children—Lincoln, three, and Gracie, two. Hannah was too weak to leave her bed, too sick to attend her daughter's birthday party. She could barely walk. Brian, she would later say, was sweet to her during those months. He placed vitamin capsules on her nightstand each night, insisting she take them even when she was too nauseated to swallow.

When Nicole heard her daughter gasping on the phone on January 18, 2022, she drove to the hospital immediately. Hannah was admitted in critical condition. Doctors said she had hours to live. She was starving to death. That night, she seized so violently she lost consciousness and remained unconscious for nearly forty-eight hours. When she finally woke, it was to her mother's voice. Nicole had bent over her daughter's bed, kissed her head, and whispered that she loved her. Hannah's eyes opened. She was alive.

But the poisoning had ravaged her. Doctors placed her in a medical coma and paralyzed her to prevent movement that might kill her—her brain was so swollen with fluid that any motion could be fatal. When she finally recovered enough to leave the hospital in early March, she learned something else: the lead had destroyed her ability to have children. She was twenty-two years old. The hospital had reported the case to state authorities as an attempted murder. Investigators and police had to determine who had done this. Both Nicole and Brian were considered suspects at first. Both were kept from seeing Hannah. But as detectives interviewed them, a pattern emerged. Nicole had rushed to the hospital, stayed by her daughter's side, and showed the kind of panic and devotion that matched what investigators expected from a concerned mother. Brian, by contrast, had stood outside the hospital room arguing with Nicole about visiting rights. He had not responded to Nicole's text about Hannah's seizure. He had shown little of the urgency the moment demanded. Within days, investigators cleared Nicole. They focused on Brian.

The problem was evidence. Police searched Brian's home and found nothing—no lead capsules, no tainted supplements, no scraped lead. They found no physical proof of the murder weapon. Brian denied everything. He blamed Nicole, calling her cruel and controlling, suggesting she had poisoned Hannah herself out of jealousy over Hannah's marriage. He claimed Hannah had been sickly her whole life, that she had visited the school nurse constantly in second grade. He said Nicole was making waves, stirring up trouble as she always did. Without concrete evidence, the case stalled. Then, in mid-February, a contractor named Danny Hill saw a newspaper article about Brian's arrest and called police. Hill had installed lead lining in the walls of Brian's X-ray room at his chiropractic office—soft, malleable lead that could be easily scraped into shavings, the consistency of pencil shavings. When the job was done, Hill had asked Brian what to do with the leftover lead. Brian said he would take care of it. Now, with this information, police had probable cause. They obtained a search warrant and recovered a section of that lead from Brian's office. It was thin enough to be shaved. It was thin enough to fit into a capsule.

Hannah, meanwhile, had been discharged from the hospital on medication and in emotional turmoil. Just one week later, she met Brian at their former home. She wanted him to deny the accusations outright, to tell her it was impossible, to defend himself publicly. He did not. Instead, she found herself changing her mind about the divorce she had filed. She called her attorney and said she wanted to stop the proceedings. She told police she did not think Brian had done it, that there must be something else. Her family doctor wanted her involuntarily committed, fearing Brian would kill her. But then, when Lieutenant Alan McDearmond asked her to sign a form releasing the investigation, Hannah refused. She said she wanted him to keep going. She decided to proceed with the divorce and cooperate with prosecutors.

That decision proved crucial. Hannah told McDearmond something she had not mentioned before: Brian had taken out life insurance policies on her while they were dating. When she was in the hospital fighting for her life, he had tried to take out more policies. If they had been approved, he would have collected more than five million dollars upon her death. Motive. Money was motive. In September 2022, a grand jury indicted Brian Mann for attempted murder. He pleaded not guilty and was released on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bond, required to report to jail every weekend and wear an ankle monitor.

The trial began in June 2025. Prosecutor Garrick Vickery laid out the theory: Brian had made a decision to slowly poison Hannah to gain her life insurance and rid himself of her. He had months to execute the plan and months to dispose of the evidence. Hannah took the stand and told the jury how Brian had insisted she take the capsules even when she was too sick to swallow. She described the pain, the weight loss, the seizures. She revealed that doctors had told her she could no longer have children. Vickery showed the jury how easy it was to scrape lead into capsules—anyone who had sharpened a pencil could do it. Brian's defense attorney, Chad Morgan, argued that police had found no lead capsules anywhere, that they had no witness to any actual poisoning, that the case was built on assumptions. He suggested Nicole could have poisoned Hannah with milkshakes. Hannah testified she did not even like milkshakes. The defense called no witnesses. After a day and a half, the jury deliberated for one day and returned a guilty verdict. Brian Mann was sentenced to life in prison in August 2025.

Hannah, who doctors had feared would never recover her cognitive function, graduated from college with a teaching degree. She became a teacher. She and her children moved back into the home she had shared with Brian, repainted it, redecorated it, filled it with pictures of the three of them. She built a new life in the space where she had nearly died. The divorce proceedings remain ongoing. As of late 2026, Hannah and Brian are still married.