Jury Debates Life or Death for Samuels

Imploring the jury “Please don’t kill my client,” a defense attorney Thursday portrayed Mary Ellen Samuels, who masterminded the murders of her husband and the hit man, as a cookie-baking jailhouse “den mother” whose life should be spared.

To the prosecutor, though, the 45-year-old grandmother is a remorseless, money-grubbing shrew who deserves to be executed.

Now, the decision whether the “Green Widow,” as prosecutors call her, lives or dies is in a jury’s hands. If the jury decides on death, Samuels would become just the fifth woman to join the 383 murderers on California’s Death Row.

Samuels, convicted July 1 of two counts of first-degree murder, faces the death penalty because the jury found two special circumstances--that she had orchestrated multiple murders, and that one of the killings was for financial gain.

According to testimony during her trial, Samuels would have received $30,000 if her husband divorced her. But, with insurance proceeds, his estate ballooned to $500,000 when he was slain.

She spent the insurance money in less than a year--on a Porsche, a condo in Cancun, parties, trips, and custom-made outfits from a store called Trashy Lingerie.

Robert Samuels, 40, a motion picture camera assistant who worked on the films “Lethal Weapon” and “Heaven Can Wait,” was killed Dec. 8, 1988, in his Northridge home by an intruder who shot him in the back of the head, firing a 16-gauge shotgun through a pillow.

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Seven months later, James Bernstein, the 27-year-old reputed drug dealer suspected in Samuels’ death, was beaten, strangled and left to die in remote Lockwood Canyon in Ventura County.

Portraying Samuels as a selfish, manipulative “predator” and “the mastermind of two evil plots,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi told the jury: “I ask you for a verdict of death for all the selfish and inhumane decisions she made in her life. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, how many bodies does it take? We’re talking about murder for the sake of the almighty dollar.”

But defense attorney Josh Groshan repeatedly pleaded with jurors, “Don’t kill my client. Don’t kill Mary Ellen.” Acknowledging that Samuels “did something despicable,” Groshan said, “Mary Ellen is a woman who lost her way in life. Call it a midlife crisis.”

He continued: “Can you say she is so without redeeming value that you can say to her, ‘You deserve to die and I can kill you?’ Is she that far gone?”

As he spoke, Samuels bowed her head, closed her eyes, and rubbed her forehead with her fingertips.

Maurizi turned the jury’s attention to the victims.

“As a representative of the people of the state of California, I will be satisfied if you show Mary Ellen Samuels the same sympathy and the same mercy she showed Bob Samuels and James Bernstein when she had them killed,” she said.

Maurizi contended that Samuels exploited her ailing parents, Alex and Ellen Gurnick, during the penalty phase of the trial by putting them on the witness stand “to beg for her life.”

Their appearance for the defense Wednesday led to an emotional courtroom reunion that moved courtroom observers to tears. Samuels wept openly during a break as she and her mother spoke about “God’s will,” and she greeted her father, “Hi, Daddy. I love you.”

But Maurizi told the jury Samuels had been transformed from the a precious little girl into an evil woman. After her husband died, Samuels never sent a dime to her parents, who live on a fixed income. She took a boyfriend’s father to Cancun but never visited her own father in the hospital when he underwent bypass surgery, the prosecutor said.

And while Bob Samuels’ brother and sister wept and shopped for a headstone after his murder, “she flew off to Las Vegas and bought a fur coat--a fake one, she would tell you,” Maurizi said. “She went to Trashy Lingerie for a $1,500 spending spree.”

Since Monday a stream of witnesses told of Samuels’ upbringing and background as the defense attempted to portray her in a sympathetic light.

Struggling to the witness stand Wednesday, Ellen Gurnick, who underwent cancer surgery while the lawyers argued Thursday, asked the jury to spare her daughter.

“What a choice for sentence,” she said, pondering the alternatives for her daughter--life or death. “I want her to live. I don’t want her to die.”

There were dozens of happy family photos on display--showing Samuels at childhood birthday parties and skating outings, as a radiant bride marrying on her 21st birthday, and as a young mother.

There was testimony this week about piano and voice lessons, back yard barbecues, and trips to Disneyland, how she won the lead in the senior class play, how she taught her step-daughter to bake cookies, how the other inmates at Sybil Brand Institute for Women now call her the “den mother.”

And then the rosy images would fade.

Her former husband, Ronnie Lee Jamison, told the jury he wanted Samuels to live, that she had been a loving, understanding, generous spouse during their 11 years of marriage--even though she divorced him when he lost his job and kicked him out of the house.

“There was some bitterness on my behalf, naturally,” he testified. “I think you should try to make it work no matter how tough it gets.”

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Later, under cross-examination, Jamison conceded that Samuels was “a compulsive liar” who gambled and used drugs during their marriage.

Gurnick recalled her daughter as a “wonderful entertainer and baby-sitter.” Then this exchange occurred under Maurizi’s cross-examination of Gurnick:

Q: “Did you continue to see Mary Ellen after Bob’s death?”

A: “I don’t know. We didn’t really. I called her on her birthday but we didn’t communicate too much because we both were busy.”

Q: Did Mary Ellen come to see you and take you for a ride in her new Porsche?

A: No.

Q: Would it surprise you if I told you that Mary Ellen went through over $500,000 in cash in less than a year after Bob’s death?

A: It would surprise me.

Q: You didn’t see any of that cash or receive any benefits from that?

A: No.