Naive or Deadly--2 Images of Wife to Dominate Trial

Petite and perky, with a turned-up nose, large sparkling brown eyes and a sassy short hairstyle, Mary Ellen Samuels seems to radiate suburban wholesomeness.

Yet she is about to go on trial for hiring a hit man.

Twice.

“Hi, Muffin,” remarked a friend recently, waving at Samuels, 45, from the front row of a Van Nuys courtroom. “She’s so darling,” she added to another court watcher.

To defense attorney Philip Nameth, Samuels is “naive and gullible and nice.” But the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi, uses other choice words: greedy and manipulative and callous.

As Samuels’ trial starts this month in Van Nuys Superior Court, the charges include murder, attempted murder and soliciting murder. If the seven men and five women on her jury find Samuels guilty of deliberately killing her husband and her hit man for financial gain, she could become the fifth woman among the 381 convicted killers on California’s Death Row.

Prosecutor Maurizi is alleging that greed and a pending divorce motivated Samuels to hire a gunman to kill her husband of nine years, 40-year-old motion picture cameraman Robert B. Samuels, who had worked on the television series “China Beach,” as well as the “Lethal Weapon” features and “Heaven Can Wait.”

On Dec. 8, 1988, he was ambushed inside the Sepulveda house the couple once shared, and shot in the head with a 16-gauge shotgun. There was no sign of a struggle.

The following day, Mary Ellen and her 18-year-old daughter Nicole called the police, saying they had found his body in the hallway.

“The picture that I have of her is she was really pretty pampered by her husband,” Maurizi said. “She was well taken care of. Her child was in private school. I think she already had what the average American would consider the good life. But half of it wasn’t going to be good enough for her.”

About six months after Samuels’ slaying, a botany professor on a nature hike found the body of the suspected hit man, a 27-year-old reputed cocaine dealer named James Bernstein, who had been dumped in remote Lockwood Canyon in Ventura County. Maurizi alleges that Samuels had to hire two other hit men to do away with Bernstein when he asked for more money to buy a car, and threatened to go to the police if she didn’t pay him.

Defense attorneys Nameth and Josh Groshan will tell the jury a different story. They contend that Bernstein, who carried a business card calling himself “James R. Bernstein, specialist,” was utterly smitten with the Samuels’ daughter. He acted on his own when he killed Robert Samuels, motivated by anger and revenge. Nicole, the defense says, had told Bernstein and others that Robert Samuels, her adoptive father, had raped her.

Mary Ellen Samuels is likely to testify, and her story of family abuse will play a key role in the defense case, Nameth said. “Bob Samuels closed more bars than most bartenders,” Nameth said. “When he drank, he would become abusive.”

As for who had Bernstein killed and why, the defense attorneys say their list of people with strong motives is a long one that includes drug customers and suppliers--but not Mary Ellen Samuels.

Two men who admitted killing Bernstein will testify against Samuels under plea bargains that spared their lives, but sent them to prison for 15 years to life.

That killing was botched and messy. The admitted hit men--Paul Edwin Gaul and Darrell Ray Edwards--had been drinking beer all day. First they tried to strangle Bernstein, but it generally takes three to five minutes of constant pressure to accomplish that, and he managed to squirm out of the car. So, they tackled him on the side of the road and broke his larynx, according to court records.

Several other people Samuels once considered her closest friends also will testify for the prosecution under grants of immunity to protect them from being charged after admitting their involvement in the alleged murder plots.

The defense contends that Samuels was not only physically and psychologically abused by her husband, she was sold down the river by a flock of “fair-weather friends” who implicated her to save their own skins.

“These people are doing what many people would do,” Nameth said. “When the finger is pointed at them and the pressure comes, they roll over. It is an easy way to solve a crime.”

Each one of the former friends testifying against Samuels owes her money, Nameth said.

Maurizi said she doesn’t believe that Samuels or her daughter were ever abused, adding that she has been unable to find any doctor’s or police reports to substantiate the claims.

The Samuels’ marriage broke up in 1987 when Mary Ellen moved out on him, taking the refrigerator and leaving a five-page “Dear John” letter. She set up housekeeping in a condominium in Reseda. For a while, according to court records, Robert Samuels expected them to reconcile. But reconciliation was far from Mary Ellen’s mind. She wanted him out of her life--permanently, she told friends who testified at her preliminary hearing.

She told people “that she hated him and that he abused her and her daughter and she wanted him done,” longtime friend Heidi Dougall recalled during a court hearing.

But according to prosecutors, she didn’t want to give up their investment--a Subway sandwich franchise she managed on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks--or the $1,600 that Robert Samuels paid in support each month.

He stopped making those payments two months before he died.

During the second half of 1988, Samuels spoke openly about her plans to rid herself of her husband, and offered the job to several people--even approaching Nicole’s high school friends, according to court records.

Nicole, then a senior, turned to a friend in the cafeteria at Alemany High School, and asked for help in finding a gun, Maurizi said.

The friend, Celina Krall, recalled at an earlier hearing that Nicole “asked if I could get a gun so someone could take care of her father. She was tired of him beating her mother and raping them. She said she wanted to get rid of him.”

Nameth called that scenario nonsensical. “Oh, come on. Be serious,” he said. “What hit man doesn’t carry his own gun?”

But Maurizi says Samuels did not seek out “the typical, Hollywood-style hit man.”

She allegedly had to look no farther than the friends and lovers of her daughter and best friend.

According to court records, Mary Ellen Samuels asked Celina’s brother, John, and her fiance, David Navarro, if they would be interested in carrying out the hit. She then continued to shop for a hit man and, prosecutors allege, finally found one.

About a month before Robert Samuels died, his wife arranged a dinner for him and several friends at a restaurant in Northridge. According to court records, the plan was to get him drunk and take his car, leaving him confused and vulnerable to the hit man who would stalk him in the parking lot.

But the hit man never showed. Robert Samuels took a taxi home and Samuels complained bitterly to a friend that she and her hired hit men had “tried to do him” three or four times, Dougall testified at the preliminary hearing. “She said she’d spent almost $15,000 and nothing happened.”

And later, Samuels allegedly became so frustrated that she took matters into her own hands, beating him with a pink broomstick, according to court records. The incident led to the charge of attempted murder.

The defense contends that the pink broomstick, the alleged lethal weapon, was a dog toy.

Other plots involved getting Robert Samuels drunk and driving him off a cliff along Mulholland Drive, Dougall said, but they never progressed beyond the planning stage.

If the whole tale seems incredible, many of Samuels’ friends didn’t want to believe it, either. Hatched in some of the San Fernando Valley’s best-known bars and restaurants, the murder plot seemed to be an open secret in some circles of the Valley’s newly divorced.

Wednesday night always was rock ‘n’ roll night at the Tickets lounge at the Woodland Hills Marriott, where Marsha Hutchison met Samuels in 1988.

“Everyone would talk about their divorces,” complaining about being broke, she said. Hutchison was taken aback, however, when Samuels asked her for a loan to pay for a hit man.

“I thought she just flipped out, had cracked up,” Hutchison testified in court. She told Samuels that “she should quit saying stuff like that in public.”

Just before Christmas, 1988, Hutchison testified, she received a call from Samuels. “She said something terrible had happened. Bob was dead. She said he had been shot in the head. I threw up in my bathroom sink,” Hutchison said.

Afterward, nobody wanted to talk about what had happened to Robert Samuels. And, no one went to the police.

Ann Marie Hambly, once a friend of Samuels and now a key prosecution witness, explained why: “Things don’t happen like this. I didn’t know of anybody who had ever concocted or dealt with something like this before. It’s not something I’m used to.”

Mary Ellen Samuels seemed very much the distraught spouse after she found her husband’s body and initially, police didn’t suspect her. But as the leads she gave officers fizzled, Samuels collected about $500,000 worth of insurance and went on a shopping spree, according to court records.

She paid $50,000 cash for a new white Porsche, bought a $130,000 condo in Cancun, Mexico, and was photographed lying, come-hither style, on a bed--wearing only strategically placed stacks of $50 and $100 bills. The defense and prosecution are expected to argue before Judge Michael Hoff over whether the photograph is too prejudicial to show the jury.

Eventually, Bernstein began feeling the heat of the police investigation. He was crazy about Nicole, but Nicole told friends that while she once had been involved with the older man, she was just stringing him along, according to court records.

Nicole has not been charged in the case and her status as a witness is likely to be the topic of a hearing Wednesday, according to attorneys involved in the case.

The defense would like her to testify on behalf of her mother, but the prosecution is fighting the use of a witness who will probably invoke her Fifth Amendment right not to testify against herself during cross-examination. The trial is scheduled to begin March 21.

The facts of the Samuels case are such an odd brew of the banal and the bizarre, that jurors may have difficulty suspending their disbelief, prosecutor Maurizi acknowledges. “It’s hard to imagine another fellow human being being that callous,” she said. “I think her appearance adds to that sense of disbelief. That’s part of what boggles the mind--that these people actually exist in our world, our Valley, and not just up on the movie screen.”