Wife Faces Charges of Hiring Assassins--Twice : Courts: Mary Ellen Samuels is accused of paying a hit man to kill her husband, then hiring two more to kill the gunman. Defense attorneys say she is innocent and a victim of spousal abuse.

To look at Mary Ellen Samuels, nothing would make you expect to find her where she will be this week--in a courtroom, on trial in the murders of both her husband and the man she allegedly hired to shoot him.

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

But the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi, uses other choice words: greedy and manipulative and callous.

Samuels goes on trial this week 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 then her hit man--for financial gain, she could become the fifth woman among the 381 killers on California’s Death Row.

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” feature films 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. 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.”

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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 R. Bernstein, which had been dumped in remote Lockwood Canyon in Ventura County. Maurizi alleges that Samuels had to hire more hit men to do away with Bernstein when he asked for more money and threatened to go to the police if she did not pay.

Defense attorneys Philip Nameth and Justin M. (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 smitten with the Samuelses’ daughter. He acted on his own when he killed Robert Samuels, they say, after Nicole told him that Robert Samuels, her adoptive father, had molested her and raped her when she was 12.

Mary Ellen Samuels is likely to testify, and her story of family abuse will play a key role in the defense case, Nameth said. As for who was involved in Bernstein’s death 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.

Maurizi said she does not believe that Samuels or her daughter were abused, adding that she has not found any medical or police reports to substantiate the claims.

The abuse defense angers Susan Conroy, Robert Samuels’ sister. “It’s the ultimate betrayal. He isn’t here to defend himself. Bob was a hard-working guy and he loved them very much. He never would have done anything to them,” she said.

Paul Edwin Gaul and Darell Ray Edwards, the men who admitted killing Bernstein, will testify under plea bargains that spared their lives but sent them to prison for 15 years to life.

Several other people Mary Ellen 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 knowledge of the alleged plots.

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The defense maintains that Samuels is being sold out by a flock of “fair-weather friends” who implicated her to save themselves.

The Samuelses’ marriage broke up in 1987 when Mary Ellen moved out, taking the refrigerator and leaving a five-page “Dear John” letter. She moved to a condominium in Reseda. For a while, according to court records, Robert Samuels expected them to reconcile. But reconciliation apparently was far from her mind.

She said “that she hated him and that he abused her and her daughter and she wanted him done,” longtime friend Heidi Dougall testified at a preliminary hearing.

According to prosecutors, Mary Ellen Samuels did not want to give up their investment--a Subway sandwich franchise she managed on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks--or the $1,600 she received in monthly support.

During the second half of 1988, Samuels spoke openly about having her husband killed, prosecutors say. She allegedly had to look no further than her friends and their lovers for her hit men. Even Nicole’s high school friends were approached, 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. She said her mother had found someone to kill her father.

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.”

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

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.

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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.”

Later, Samuels allegedly became so frustrated that she took matters into her own hands, beating him with a broomstick, according to court records.

Other plots involved getting Robert Samuels drunk and driving him off a cliff along Mulholland Drive, Dougall said.

If the whole tale seems incredible, many of Mary Ellen Samuels’ friends did not want to believe it, either. Hatched in some of the San Fernando Valley’s better-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 Mary Ellen 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.

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,” Hutchison said.

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

Mary Ellen Samuels seemed to police to be very much the distraught spouse, and was not an immediate suspect. Her status in the investigation changed as Samuels collected about $500,000 worth of insurance and went on a shopping spree, according to court records.

She paid $50,000 in cash for a new white Porsche, bought a $130,000 condo in Cancun, Mexico, and was photographed lying on a bed--wearing only a smile and about $20,000 in strategically placed stacks of $50 and $100 bills.

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Dean Groover, a concert promoter who took the picture while vacationing with the recently widowed Mary Ellen Samuels in 1989, described it in court last week: “U.S. currency. Mary Ellen. A hotel bed, I believe in Cancun.”

Judge Michael Hoff has ruled that the prosecution can show the photograph to the jury, finding it relevant to the financial gain allegation. However, the judge ruled that the jury will not hear testimony about the personal license plate on her convertible: NAST VXN.

Hoff consulted his desktop dictionary for that ruling. Nasty, he noted, means “very dirty or filthy, offensive, morally offensive, indecent, mean, malicious, ill-humored,” while “vixen” is defined as “a female fox” or an “ill-tempered, shrewish woman.”