Woman Held in Fatal 1996 Beating of Husband

Two years after Jean Adair told police that an intruder beat her husband to death with a baseball bat, she was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of committing the crime.

LAPD detectives--saying that they had enough evidence to prove that Adair administered the fatal blows, took the 38-year-old mother of two into custody at her home in the Kern County community of Frazier Park. She is expected to be charged with murder today.

A prosecutor said Adair, who is being held without bail, would be charged with the special circumstances of lying in wait and committing murder for financial gain, a first step in seeking the death penalty.

Adair’s lawyer, Richard Plotin, maintained his client’s innocence and questioned what led police to make an arrest now.

“As far as I know, there is no new evidence,” Plotin said.

Det. Patty Ferguson, the lead investigator on the case, said detectives have chased down every possible lead since Robert Adair’s slaying in November 1996.

“But we keep coming back to the same place--Jean Adair,” Ferguson said.

Detectives served two search warrants early Wednesday--one at Adair’s house, the other at the nearby home of her mother. The officers were looking for jewelry that Adair said was stolen in a home-invasion robbery during which her husband was killed.

Investigators theorized that there was no robbery and that Adair might still have the jewelry, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jane Winston. Winston said no such jewelry was recovered in the searches.

Winston said the case against Adair is circumstantial.

“There are no fingerprints. There are no fibers. There are no witnesses,” the prosecutor said. “But we have thoroughly investigated her story and have come to the conclusion that it does not make sense.”

Winston said investigators believe Robert Adair came home for lunch and his wife lunged at him with a wooden baseball bat, striking him repeatedly in the head.

“He was taken by surprise,” Winston said.

Minutes after the attack, Jean Adair was ringing a neighbor’s doorbell, screaming for help. She had red marks on her face and tape hanging from wrists. She said she was bound and beaten by the same man who killed her husband.

Jean Adair’s former lover, Dr. Michael R. Shapiro, said he examined her after the alleged attack and found that the injuries to her back were real.

“I think she was a victim that day, and if she was not, then I do not know how she incurred her injuries,” Shapiro said in an interview Wednesday. “I don’t believe the woman I knew could have, or would have, done something like this.”

Despite being identified as a suspect in her husband’s killing, Jean Adair collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in life insurance, police and Robert Adair’s relatives said.

The case made headlines for the apparent randomness of the crime--Adair said a man disguised as a gas company worker talked his way into the couple’s gated condominium complex before viciously beating them both during a robbery.

The case made the television tabloid circuit a year later when Adair--an attractive blond who was having an affair with Shapiro, a San Fernando Valley physician, at the time of her husband’s killing--was identified as a suspect. By that time, she had hired a lawyer and was refusing to talk to police.

Sources said Adair’s current boyfriend is a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, who was at her home when she was arrested.

“I don’t know what he did or did not know about her background,” one police source said.

Robert Adair’s sister, Simone Adair, said her family was grateful to Ferguson and her fellow detectives for not giving up on the case.

“They pretty much sustained our hope,” said Simone Adair, 35, a graphic artist in San Francisco. “Even though Robert’s not here, he had all these people fighting for him.”

Robert Adair’s relatives told police early on that they thought his wife might have been responsible for the slaying. His mother, Margarita Sutcliffe, said the marriage had been in trouble for years and that Robert told Jean he wanted a divorce shortly before he was killed.

When police publicly named Jean Adair as a suspect more than a year ago, the family went public too, appearing on television shows and being quoted in newspapers about their theories on the case.

Jean Adair cut off all contact with her husband’s family and moved with the couple’s two children to Frazier Park. The children are being cared for by her mother, authorities said.

“I never had a chance to meet Robert Adair,” Ferguson said. “But everything I’ve heard about him is that he is a caring, loving man who loved his children. He did not deserve this. He did not deserve to die.”