Widow Held in 1996 Slaying

Two years after Jean Adair told police an intruder beat her husband to death with a baseball bat, the mother of two was arrested early Wednesday as investigators said they had enough evidence to prove that Adair herself administered the fatal blows.

LAPD detectives arrested Adair, 38, at her home in Frazier Park in Kern County on suspicion of homicide. 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 November 1996 slaying at the couple’s condominium in Sylmar.

“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. They were looking for jewelry Adair said was stolen during the alleged home-invasion robbery in which her husband was killed. Investigators theorized there was no robbery and that Adair may still have been in possession of the jewelry, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jane Winston. Winston said no such jewelry was recovered in the searches.

She said the case against Adair is circumstantial.

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

She 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 her 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 injuries on 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 family members said.

The case first 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 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 new 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 entire family was grateful to Ferguson and her fellow detectives for not giving up on the case.

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

Added Adair’s brother, Dan: “It’s a great way to start the year, just knowing that she’s not out there enjoying her life anymore.”

Adair’s family members told police early on they thought his wife may have been responsible for his slaying. His mother, Margarita Sutcliffe, said the marriage had been in trouble for years and that shortly before he was killed, he had told his wife he wanted a divorce. When police publicly named Jean Adair as a suspect more than a year ago, family members went public too, appearing on television and being quoted in the press 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 taken care of by her mother, authorities said.

Adair, one of four children, was born into a wealthy family and raised in Beverly Hills. But Sutcliffe said her son wasn’t impressed by glitz and glamour. He was more interested in helping people, she said.

To that end, he had been working as a medical assistant at the Sylmar Medical Center for about a decade before his death, earning $24,000 a year.

Ferguson said that over the course of the two-year investigation, she learned not only about Jean Adair but also about Robert.

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