Revisiting a Case of Murder

On the night he was murdered, barrel-chested millionaire Stanley Cohen went to bed as usual--nude and alone.

His glamorous young wife, Joyce, stayed up late. After 11 years of marriage, the couple’s relationship had hit the shoals. Both were having affairs. They had not slept together for two years.

In a downstairs bedroom of their bluff-top Coconut Grove home, Joyce said, she was sorting through clothing for a garage sale when she heard a loud banging noise.

Following her startled Doberman pinscher, Mischief, Joyce said, she ran into the hallway just in time to see two shadowy figures bolt from the house.

Upstairs, 52-year-old Stanley was dead, four bullet holes in the back of his head. As blood spread onto the designer sheets, Joyce grabbed a towel and pressed it to the gaping wounds. And then, she said, she summoned police.

In Miami, the slaying caused an immediate sensation. Stanley was a well-known and prosperous builder. When not playing host to local powerbrokers at Buccione’s, a chic restaurant they owned, the Cohens might be jetting off in their private Sabreliner 60 to their mountain ranch in Steamboat Springs, Colo.

Joyce, 16 years younger than her husband, was an immediate suspect. Friends told police she wanted a divorce but feared losing her moneyed lifestyle. And police found it strange that the alarm system had been turned off, that Stanley had been shot with his own gun and that no neighbors reported hearing Mischief bark.

Despite their suspicions, police did not charge Joyce with the March 1986 killing until 2 1/2 years later, after Frank Zuccarello, 25, a jailed member of a home-invasion robbery gang, came forward to tell police that he and two accomplices had been hired by Joyce to kill her husband.

“She’s a killer,” prosecutor John Kastrenakes told jurors at the close of a 3 1/2-week trial. “Do not feel sorry for her because she’s a woman. She’s a cold, calculating murderess who put on a good show for everyone.”

The jury agreed. Found guilty of first-degree murder, Joyce was sentenced in November 1989 to life behind bars.

And the state’s maximum security prison for women is where she has remained--with scant hope of early release until five months ago, when a local television reporter stepped forward to reveal a secret that she had kept for five years. In a sworn statement, Gail Bright said that the lead detective in the case told her--off the record--that Zuccarello was coached to lie about his involvement in the slaying.

In her statement, Bright recalled her 1993 conversation with Miami police Det. Jon Spear: “And he said, ‘We believed all along that Joyce killed her husband . . . but we didn’t have the evidence to back that up.’

“And I said, ‘Well, are you telling me that those three guys were not there? Is that what you’re telling me?’

“And he said, ‘That’s right. They weren’t there.’ ”

For five years, Bright said, she has been tormented by the knowledge that police may have framed Joyce. But she kept quiet out of fear that she would lose her police sources--and possibly her job.

Joyce’s attorney, Alan S. Ross, immediately filed a motion to have her 1989 conviction overturned, citing evidence he says was “invented and fabricated” by the Miami police.

Now Miami ponders two questions: Will Joyce Cohen get a new trial? And how could a newswoman have stifled such explosive information?

Two First Met at Construction Site

Stanley Cohen was a burly, hard-driving kid from Miami who went to the University of Florida in Gainesville, earned a civil engineering degree and the nickname Crusher, married his college sweetheart and came home to make a fortune building schools, shopping centers and a courthouse.

After his third divorce, Stanley was enjoying the single scene. And then one day he spotted dark-eyed Joyce Lemay McDillon, working as a secretary on a construction project.

At 24, Joyce had come to Miami with her son to escape a failed marriage. Despite her hardscrabble background, she had a stylish vivacity that complemented her exotic good looks. And Stanley was smitten.

The Cohens were married in Las Vegas in December 1974. Over the next few years, Joyce took up the life of wealthy society wife with ease and, according to friends, Stan delighted in financing it. After buying a landmark coral rock home for his new family, Stan adopted Joyce’s 5-year-old son, paid for her to study interior decorating and seemed only too happy as his wife prowled Miami in her white Jaguar for expensive furnishings, jewelry and gourmet foods.

As the 1980s dawned, the Cohens’ circle had expanded to include not only the trendy clubs sprouting up in Coconut Grove but also spots in Steamboat Springs, where Stan bought a 600-acre retreat he called Wolf Run Ranch. The Cohens visited there frequently--to ski in the winter, just relax in the summer or entertain friends.

The ‘80s also ushered in the age of cocaine. In the social swirl that kept the Cohens running between Miami and Colorado, their drug use was increasing, friends reported, and so too was discontent.

Weeks before her husband was killed, Joyce met Tanya Tucker at a party, and the country music star ended up spending the night at Wolf Run. According to a 46-page sworn statement by Tucker, the two women drank champagne, tooted a little coke and Joyce bared her soul.

Tucker said Joyce complained that she was “miserable” in her marriage and expressed her belief that her husband had gotten a girlfriend pregnant. “Bottom line,” Tucker told police, “she was extremely unhappy. Not just sad--it didn’t seem like it was something that was going to go away.”

Children Suspected Wife Was Killer

When Stanley turned up dead, police were not the only ones who immediately suspected his wife. His two children from a previous marriage--Gary Cohen, a Miami lawyer, and Gerri Cohen Helfman, a well-known local television anchor--also believed their stepmother was guilty.

After five months went by without police making an arrest, the children filed a civil suit that accused Joyce of either killing or conspiring to kill their father. They asked for $5 million in damages.

Joyce called a press conference to announce the results of a polygraph test that she said proved her innocence. Then she counter-sued the children for slander. She asked for $11 million.

Both suits were dismissed.

In the meantime, after seeing a TV report on the murder, Zuccarello summoned detectives to his jail cell in neighboring Broward County, where he was being held on burglary charges.

Over several months, and in scores of meetings, Zuccarello outlined for detectives a shadowy scenario in which he and two confederates--Anthony Caracciolo, the alleged triggerman, and Tommy Lamberti, the son of reputed Gambino crime family mobster Louis “Donald Duck” Lamberti--were hired by Joyce to kill her husband in exchange for $100,000 of her inheritance.

During his conversations with police, Zuccarello was rewarded for his cooperation by being checked out of jail about 60 times for police-escorted trips to see the Miami Dolphins, to see his girlfriend and to get his hair cut at his favorite salon.

In November 1988, 2 1/2 years after someone put a gun to the back of Stanley’s head as he slept, his widow was charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and possession of a firearm during commission of a felony. When arrested, Joyce was living in a Chesapeake, Va., trailer park run by her new boyfriend. Before Stanley’s insurance company got around to paying his heirs, Joyce had already been charged. She never got a dime.

Prosecution Plan Starts Unraveling

Even before jury selection began in the fall of 1989, the state’s plan to use the three alleged killers as prosecution witness showed signs of unraveling.

Lamberti’s lawyer, Edward O’Donnell, asked to withdraw from the case, telling the judge that his client admitted to him that he planned to lie about being involved in the murder in exchange for a 10-year reduction of the 22-year robbery sentence he was serving. Like Caracciolo, O’Donnell said, Lamberti was prepared to plead guilty to second-degree murder while insisting he had never met Joyce or been to her house.

Marsha Lyons, a former federal prosecutor, was named to replace O’Donnell as Lamberti’s counsel. But she too had problems with her client’s plans to commit perjury, and she eventually withdrew as well. “It was a very troubling case,” Lyons said. “Knowing that two lawyers had come to the same conclusion should have been troubling to the prosecution too.”

Prosecutors feared Lamberti and Caracciolo would not back Zuccarello’s story. They never took the stand. But Zuccarello did.

From the witness stand, Zuccarello said that on the morning of the murder, Joyce let the trio into the house, quieted the dog, handed them a gun and said, “Hurry up, get it over with.” Zuccarello said that he stood by the door while Caracciolo went upstairs and executed Stanley.

Ross cross-examined the star witness vigorously, pointing out inconsistencies in his statements and descriptions of the alleged meeting in which Joyce supposedly gave the men a map to the house and a down payment on their fee.

But Zuccarello was not the prosecution’s whole case. They had the murder weapon, Stanley’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, found in the bushes near the house. It was clean of fingerprints, but stuck to the revolver were tiny pieces of tissue consistent with a tissue containing gun powder residue recovered from Joyce’s bathroom.

Ross implored jurors not to find his client guilty simply because she used cocaine and cheated on her husband. “Brand her with a scarlet A,” said Ross, “but don’t convict her of murder because she had a moment of infidelity.”

The jury was out for just eight hours. As the clerk read out the verdict--guilty on all three counts--Ross sighed and slumped in his chair. Joyce remained dry-eyed. She was fingerprinted and led from the courtroom.

Outside, Ross faced reporters. “As a criminal defense lawyer, you always know if your client did it. I’ve always known. All these years, through all these cases, I’ve always known. I’m in the best position to know. But even I, this time, still don’t know if she did it.”

Key Case Figures Are Interviewed

Joyce was four years into her life sentence in 1993 when Bright, after reading a book about the murder, decided to revisit the case. In the Broward Correctional Institution, Bright taped an interview in which Joyce, through tears, insisted on her innocence.

In another prison, Bright interviewed Lamberti, who repeated what he had told the court in 1990 when he and Caracciolo pleaded no contest to second-degree murder charges and were each sentenced to 40 years. “I assure you that I am the wrong man in this courtroom,” Lamberti said. “I am just taking this plea because it is in my best interests. I don’t care what they think, I am innocent.”

And then Bright interviewed Spear, the dapper, 20-year detective who, after Joyce’s conviction, was praised in a Miami Herald editorial for “piec[ing] the case together, detail by painstaking detail, tracking down each hit man in turn, and the woman who hired them.”

After an on-camera chat in his office, Spear walked the reporter outside the Miami police headquarters, where Bright said the detective let slip his belief that Joyce had really pulled the trigger and that Zuccarello and his two pals were not there.

Asked how Zuccarello could have testified to something about which he had no knowledge, Bright said, the police officer reportedly replied: “It’s simple. You walk into a jail cell . . . , the file’s on the table, you go to the bathroom for 30 minutes, they familiarize. They know the routine.”

Bright’s cameraman, Mario Hernandez, swore that he also heard the detective suggest the three alleged hitmen were not involved in the slaying. But he could not corroborate the remark about leaving the case file on the table.

In the same conversation, Bright said, Spear went on to caution her about reporting his admission. “He said, ‘But if you ever tell anybody that, I’ll deny it.’ ”

Spear called later in the day, Bright said, and pleaded with her: “We’ve been friends for a long time. Don’t put that on the air.”

Bright said she was stunned by what she had heard, and she and Hernandez debated for months about what to do. She said that she considered Spear, a longtime police source, a friend whom she was reluctant to put in a jam. Eventually, Bright said, she and Hernandez decided that “as journalists, it was not our obligation to come forward with information like that, and to just leave it be.”

Bright, 44, said her decision to keep quiet was torture. “I went back and forth . . . and every time I would start to think I was going to come forward, I chickened out.”

Finally, Bright testified, she was swayed by a series of events that began earlier this year with a pleading letter from Joyce, saying “something to the effect that, ‘I’m locked up in this prison. I didn’t kill my husband. These three people weren’t there. There has to be something that jogs your memory about the investigation that you did. If there’s anything at all, please help me.’

“And, of course, that just made the agony that I was already going through worse.”

Bright, who has not responded to several interview requests, said in her July statement that she was conflicted by what she viewed as her ethical imperative as a journalist and her duty to disclose information that could mean an innocent person was wrongly convicted. “As a journalist I shouldn’t do it, but as a human being, I mean, if I get killed in a car wreck tomorrow, and maybe this is true . . . then I felt that somebody should know about it.”

Bright said she talked to WPLG-TV Station Manager John Garwood and then to one of the prosecutors in the case, David Waksman, who was also a personal friend. Garwood, she said, cautioned her to think about the consequences disclosure could have on her job as a police reporter and in making her potentially liable for criminal prosecution on withholding evidence charges. But Waksman urged her to tell he truth, she said.

The ability to grant off-the-record status to sources is occasionally necessary to gather information, most journalists agree. And the reporter’s promise of confidentiality is a bond recognized in Florida, as in many states, as a privilege protected by law.

Retired Detective Denies Scheme

Ross, Joyce’s attorney, has asked the Miami-Dade state attorney to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations that the police suborned perjury and/or obstructed justice in mounting their case against his client. But, he said, “I would be shocked if steps were taken to prosecute someone for wrongdoing.”

Assistant state Atty. Paul Mendelson said that Spear, now retired, “denies what Gail Bright says he said.” He added, “It could have been a misunderstanding.”

Spear has not responded to a request for an interview. But after he talked to Spear, Lt. John Campbell, supervisor of the Miami homicide division, said the retired detective admitted to “intermittent doubts” about Zuccarello’s truthfulness. “Everybody agrees [Zuccarello] could have been lying,” Campbell said, adding that Spear “flatly denies” leaving the case file on the table for Zuccarello to review.

Stanley’s 39-year-old daughter dismissed Bright’s statement as false. “I don’t know what her motivations are,” Helfman said.

In the state’s response to the defendant’s motion to vacate her conviction, Mendelson said he would argue that even without Zuccarello’s testimony, the jury was presented with enough physical evidence to find Joyce guilty.

Zuccarello was never charged in connection with Stanley’s murder. In exchange for his testimony, he was sentenced to seven years for robbery, served 25 months and was out on parole before he testified in 1989.

Lamberti and Caracciolo remain behind bars.

And Joyce, now 48, is still in Florida’s toughest women’s prison. Ross declined to make his client available for an interview. But he described Joyce as “anxious, very hopeful” over the prospects of having her conviction set aside.

A hearing on the motion is expected to be held in circuit court before the end of the year.

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.