Jury Urges Execution of Samuels : Courts: Woman who arranged slayings of her husband and his killer will be sentenced in September.
A jury recommended the death penalty Thursday for a woman who arranged her husband’s murder to collect a $500,000 estate and then arranged the slaying of his killer.
In asking the jury for the death penalty last week, prosecutor Jan Maurizi called Mary Ellen Samuels a greedy, manipulative “mastermind of two evil plots” in the slaying of “Lethal Weapon” cameraman Robert Samuels and the man paid to kill him, James Bernstein.
Samuels, 45, was convicted July 1 on two counts of murder, two counts of conspiracy and two counts of solicitation for murder. She is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 16.
Samuels was convicted of hiring Bernstein to kill her husband, and then hiring two men to strangle Bernstein, a drug dealer.
Her 40-year-old husband, a camera assistant for the motion pictures “Lethal Weapon” and “Heaven Can Wait,” was killed Dec. 8, 1988, in Northridge.
Bernstein died in 1989.
Samuels inherited $500,000, but prosecutors said she spent it in less than a year.
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