Jury Retires to Consider Adair Case

Borrowing a line from the prosecution, the lawyer defending a woman accused of crushing her husband’s skull with a baseball bat said repeatedly Thursday that the charge “doesn’t make common sense.”

Police and prosecutors zeroed in on Jeanie Adair and ignored any evidence that did not prove her guilt, defense lawyer Richard Plotin told jurors Thursday. Investigators cast aside the more likely suspects and ignored the motives of Adair’s romantic rival, he said.

As a result, Plotin said, they arrested the wrong person.

“It’s not my job to prove who killed Robert Adair,” Plotin reminded jurors in his 2 1/2-hour summation. “What I’m showing . . . is that they don’t have a case. They don’t have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that she killed her husband. They have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that she didn’t kill Robert Adair.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein replied that the defense theory “doesn’t fly.”

“The problem with the defense theory is that it is a theory,” Goldstein told jurors, “and there isn’t a bit of evidence to support it.”

After two days of listening to lawyers argue their opposing theories, the six-man, six-woman jury retired to deliberate the case Thursday. If Adair is convicted of first degree murder with the special circumstances of lying in wait and murder for financial gain, she faces life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Goldstein told jurors that Adair decided to end her crumbling marriage on Nov. 5, 1996, by killing her husband. That way, he said, she could cash in $400,000 in life insurance and pocket a personal injury settlement that she might otherwise have had to share with her husband, who was planning to leave his adulterous wife and take the couple’s two children to Las Vegas.

The morning of the slaying, Goldstein said, the defendant twice called her husband at work, asking about when he would be coming home for lunch, as he always did. Goldstein said she also called her lover, Michael Shapiro, with a tale of a threatening phone call.

Shortly after noon, as Robert Adair read the mail in the living room, Goldstein said Adair cracked him in the head with a baseball bat so hard that he fell, unconscious. Two more crushing blows killed him.

About two hours later, Goldstein said, Adair ran to a neighbor’s home with a tale of an attack by a home invasion robber who gagged and hogtied her and then on his way out killed her husband. The neighbor called police.

Police were able to unravel Adair’s tale, Goldstein said, because her injuries, the physical state of the home, and where her blood was found did not fit her account. Her injuries could all have been self-inflicted, an expert witness for the prosecution testified.

One of the surest clues that the defendant is lying, Goldstein said, is that she has been unable to keep her story straight, changing key details such as where and to what she was tied, and where her attacker was when her husband arrived at the home.

Then there were witnesses who testified they took phone calls from Adair that morning, at a time when she alleges she was being held prisoner by her attacker. Those calls, Goldstein said, incontrovertibly show that Adair made up the home invasion story to try to get away with killing her husband.

Plotin said the attack was arranged by the wife of Adair’s lover, Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro. Shapiro instructed a violent felon to attack Adair, he said, and hurt her so that she would no longer be attractive to Michael Shapiro.

“Mindy Shapiro had a motive, a method and an opportunity to do things to Jeanie Adair,” Plotin said.

Goldstein called that alternate theory ludicrous.

But Plotin assured jurors that the words of “common folk,” a paramedic, hospital workers, the defendant’s mother, prove that the woman’s injuries--including a facial cut, bruises and an injured back--were really caused by another.

Plotin said the phone calls simply weren’t made by Adair. He said two were made up by a secretary to help the prosecution and the third was someone, likely Mindy Shapiro, impersonating the defendant.

The fact that she had none of the victim’s blood on her person, when the prosecution’s own expert witness said the killer would, is proof that Adair didn’t kill him, Plotin said.

Plotin also accused the Los Angeles police detectives and officers of lying, fabricating reports after the fact, coaching witnesses and generally bungling the investigation.

“The police in this case closed their eyes and closed their minds to any evidence inconsistent with their belief that Jeanie Adair killed her husband,” Plotin told jurors. “It is you that have the opportunity to tell the truth about what happened.”