Ex-Lover Testifies in Murder Case

The former lover of a woman who reported that an intruder beat her and killed her husband testified Thursday that she called him at the time of the alleged attacks.

Robert Shapiro, an orthopedic surgeon who was Jean Adair’s doctor as well as her lover, testified in Van Nuys Municipal Court that she called him at his Encino practice “probably sometime before noon,” but after a surgery that ended between 10:30 and 11 a.m. on Nov. 5, 1996.

Adair told police that an intruder posing as a gas company employee attacked her in her Sylmar condominium between 9:30 and 10 a.m. that day. 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 fled.

Adair was arrested last month on suspicion of her husband’s murder. Authorities say that she smashed Robert Adair’s head with a baseball bat to collect his life insurance policy and because he was leaving her. She allegedly ransacked her home and staged her own injuries.

Shapiro testified at Adair’s preliminary hearing Thursday that a woman who did not identify herself but whose voice he recognized as Adair’s called him that day to tell him 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.”

Shapiro said he had assumed the threat came from his ex-wife, who he said had threatened Jean Adair several times before.

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