Jury Begins Weighing Woman’s Murder Case

The lawyer defending a San Fernando Valley woman who is charged with crushing her husband’s skull with a baseball bat told jurors Thursday that police arrested the wrong person.

Authorities mistakenly zeroed in on Jeanie Adair and ignored more likely suspects--a violent ex-convict and a jealous ex-wife--defense lawyer Richard Plotin told jurors.

“It’s not my job to prove who killed Robert Adair,” Plotin said in court. “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.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein said the problem with the defense theory is “there isn’t a bit of evidence to support it.”

After two days of listening to lawyers argue their opposing theories, the jury retired to deliberate the case Thursday. If Adair is convicted of first-degree murder with the special circumstances of lying in wait for her victim and killing for financial gain, she faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Adair says that a robber dressed as a gas company worker forced his way into the couple’s Sylmar condominium, then bound, gagged, terrorized and beat her for hours as he gathered loot. Adair told authorities the invader killed her husband when he came home for lunch.

But Goldstein told jurors that Adair killed her husband Nov. 5, 1996, as a way to end her crumbling marriage and collect $400,000 in life insurance. Her husband was planning to take the couple’s two children to Las Vegas and leave his adulterous wife behind.

On the morning of the murder, Goldstein said, Adair called her husband at work twice, asking what time he planned to come home for lunch. Goldstein said she also called her lover, Encino physician Michael Shapiro.

Goldstein said that shortly after noon, as Robert Adair read the mail in his living room, Adair hit him in the head with a baseball bat. Two more crushing blows killed him.

About two hours later, Adair ran to a neighbor’s home and said she and her husband were victims of a deadly home invasion robbery.

Goldstein said the evidence--including Adair’s injuries, the state of her home and the location of her bindings--did not fit her account. An expert witness for the prosecution said her injuries could have been self-inflicted.

Two people testified earlier in the trial that they took phone calls from Adair during the time she told police she had been gagged and hogtied by her attacker.

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

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