Acquittal Has Not Brought Widow Peace

A Frazier Park woman acquitted of the baseball bat murder of her husband said she is angry and sickened that a prosecutor and her in-laws continue to publicly call her a murderess.

“I thought all of this was supposed to stop when you get a not guilty verdict,” Jeanie Adair, 39, said in an interview with The Times on Thursday. “I didn’t do this crime everybody accused me of.”

During a hearing Thursday, she asked a judge to declare her factually innocent: “No. 1, because I’m innocent and hopefully it will stop people from saying what they’ve been saying in newspapers and on TV shows.”

Prosecutors say the motion, an unusual petition, is “an outrage.”

“She is the one who keeps the case alive by filing motions without merit,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein. “There is no one, including the jury, who has said she is factually innocent except for the defendant.”

A decision on the matter is expected next month.

Adair, who says she is slowly getting over her ordeal, tearfully described how she and her two children kiss and release helium-filled balloons in tribute to her dead husband, Robert Adair, in lieu of visits to his “cold” grave site.

She compares the experience of being wrongfully accused of his murder to that of war-scarred Vietnam veterans. She said she jumps at the doorbell and flinches when she drives near Sylmar, the scene of the crime.

This week, she adopted a dog from a shelter to protect her against the attackers who she said she fears will return to “finish what they set out to do.”

In November 1996, Adair told police an intruder forced his way into her Sylmar condominium, tied her up, beat her and robbed her. The incident had gone on for hours, she said, when her husband walked in on the attack and was killed.

During the trial, defense attorney Richard Plotin said an ex-convict who used baseball bats as his favorite weapon committed the crime on the order of a jealous woman whose husband was having an affair with Adair.

Plotin would not allow a reporter to inquire about the events that day, saying he did not want Adair to “relive” the attack, nor did he permit her to say who she thought killed her husband.

Adair did say that she was surprised that detectives ever suspected her at all.

“It was so hard to believe, with my injuries, that somebody could look at me as a suspect,” Adair said.

She accuses her mother-in-law, Margarita Ruffino-Sutcliffe, of trying to break up her marriage, then pushing detectives into investigating her after Robert Adair, 40, was killed.

“She has absolutely no moral fiber and I’m not interested in what she says,” said Ruffino-Sutcliffe, who said she is contemplating suing her daughter-in-law in civil court. “I don’t care how upset she is. She murdered my son and nothing will change that.”

Prosecutors deny that the victim’s family had anything to do with a decision to file murder charges against Adair.

They said those charges were based in part on telephone calls they allege Adair made to her husband and her lover at a time when she says she was bound and gagged by an intruder.

Suspicion also fell on her because of her affair with her Encino orthopedic surgeon. Goldstein said Robert Adair was leaving her and taking their children to Las Vegas, with her blessing.

Sitting in a conference room off the San Fernando courtroom where she was acquitted, Adair said she never called her husband or Dr. Michael Shapiro the day of the slaying.

As for the state of her marriage, she said it had weathered her “indiscretion” and that she and her husband were moving away together to make a fresh start and raise their children far from Los Angeles’ mean streets.

She said she never doubted she would be acquitted.

When about a dozen Los Angeles Police Department officers in bulletproof vests descended on her Frazier Park home at 7 a.m. nearly a year ago to arrest her on suspicion of murder, she said she turned to her frightened children and told them: “This will be over soon. I’ll be back.”

She waited in jail without bail for four months, seeing her children and relatives and boyfriend, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, twice a week.

When her trial date neared, prosecutors asked for a continuance and got it--albeit after heated arguments with the trial judge and an appeal to a higher court.

But Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt granted a defense motion, too: Adair was allowed bail.

“That was one of the happiest days of my life,” Adair said. She was out the next day, eating pizza and watching videos with her children, Erin, 13, and Christopher, 11.

After a monthlong trial, jurors on Oct. 13 acquitted Adair of murdering her husband. The defense cost her more than $250,000.

Some jurors later said they believed she may have been involved in the crime, but that the prosecution had no solid evidence that proved her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Goldstein, the prosecutor, complains that he lost the case because the judge was a “second defense lawyer” whose consistent rulings against the prosecution allowed a guilty woman to go free.

“He’s a poor loser,” Adair said of Goldstein. “Just suck it up and go on with it.”