Witness Calls Adair’s Story Into Question

Jean Adair’s former lover testified Thursday that he spoke to her on the telephone at the time she told authorities she was being attacked by a robber who killed her husband.

The key testimony against Adair, charged with her husband’s murder, emerged from a reluctant witness at a Van Nuys Municipal Court hearing on her request to have all charges against her dismissed.

Robert Shapiro, an orthopedic surgeon who was both Adair’s doctor and her lover, testified that she called him at his Encino practice “probably sometime before noon” but after a morning surgery that ended between 10:30 and 11 a.m. the day of the killing.

Adair told police that an intruder posing as a gas company employee entered her Sylmar condominium and attacked her sometime between 9:30 and 10 a.m. on Nov. 5, 1996. She said she was punched, kicked, beaten, tied and gagged. While she was tied up, she said her husband arrived home for lunch and was killed by the intruder, who then fled.

Adair was arrested last month and charged with the slaying. Authorities allege the petite woman killed Robert Adair, smashing his head with a baseball bat, to collect on his life insurance policy and because he was leaving her. She allegedly then ransacked her home and staged her own injuries to support the home invasion story.

She is being held in jail without bond on the capital charges.

Shapiro testified Thursday that a woman who did not identify herself but whose voice he recognized as Adair’s, called him sometime between 11 and noon and complained about an anonymous threat.

“The substance of the call is that she received a threatening telephone call from a male that said: ‘Now is the time or the time is now.’ Something like that,” he said at the preliminary hearing. “I told her to call the police.”

In a sometimes tense exchange with Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein, Shapiro would not identify the caller as Adair but as someone who he “at the time felt” was Adair.

He was also tentative in his description of what was said during a telephone call with the defendant the following day. Even though he said he read a transcript and listened to a tape of what he told police two days after the crime, he told the prosecutor that he did not remember the details of what she told him happened to her and her husband.

“I can’t tell you the substance of a conversation I had two days ago,” the silver-haired, balding physician said through pursed lips. “I was more interested in the injuries than I was in the mechanism of the crime.”

Adair tensed when Shapiro was called to testify. She did not turn to look at him as he walked into the courtroom and displayed no emotion when he testified.

Several of the victim’s family and friends filled a row of seats in the audience during the hearing.

Adair’s attorney, Richard Plotin, is scheduled to cross-examine Shapiro on Tuesday morning, when the hearing continues.

Plotin has argued vigorously at previous hearings that detectives overlooked more viable suspects. Police say that the descriptions of height and weight Adair gave for her attacker are worlds apart from the man Plotin claims is the more likely killer.

Thursday’s hearing was particularly contentious, with the prosecution and defense sparring so often and over some matters so minor that Municipal Judge Paul Metzler admonished them.

“Let’s be professional, gentlemen,” he said.

The issue of DNA testing led to the most intense disagreement among the lawyers. Plotin asked for blood tests to be conducted on Adair’s clothing before the end of the preliminary hearing. He said the results will help him prove that she did not kill her husband.

But Goldstein protested that the tests will destroy the evidence at a point when police need it for other investigative efforts, namely crime scene reconstruction.

Metzler, who sided with Plotin on a number of issues, ordered the tests done unless police can appear to show good cause why they should be delayed.