Sylmar Widow Acquitted

Delivering a crushing defeat to police and prosecutors, jurors Monday acquitted a 39-year-old Sylmar woman of charges that she beat her husband to death with a baseball bat, a killing she has maintained was the work of a home-invasion robber.

Jeanie Adair let out a shriek and hugged her lawyer as the San Fernando Superior Court clerk read the verdict. Investigators, some prosecutors and the family of the victim, Robert Adair, streamed out of the packed courtroom in the middle of the proceedings.

“I don’t feel I can really celebrate,” Adair said at an impromptu news conference at the courthouse entrance. “I was very happy, but I am still very angry because the people that killed my husband are still out there.”

In a twisted tale of murder, tinged with jealousy and adultery, Adair has maintained that her lover’s ex-wife hired thugs who killed Robert Adair, 40, when he innocently walked in on an attack on Jeanie Adair in their Sylmar condominium.

Simone Adair, the victim’s sister, shook and sobbed as she left the courthouse, surrounded by other relatives.

“What I feel is a miscarriage of justice,” she said. “I know in my heart that she killed Robert, and that will never change.”

Margarita Ruffino, the victim’s mother, agreed, calling the trial a “mockery of justice,” adding that her former daughter-in-law still must be judged by God.

“I know the Lord knows,” said Ruffino, who had been barred from the courtroom two weeks ago after she allegedly threatened Adair in a restroom.

The jurors, who deliberated for just over two days, declined to comment. But an alternate juror said they simply didn’t think the prosecution proved its case.

“We don’t know if she’s guilty or not, but it wasn’t proven to us that she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” said the 35-year-old woman, who declined to give her name. “There were too many holes.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein complained the judge had gutted the case, unfairly excluding evidence that proved Jeanie and Robert Adair’s marriage was falling apart.

“The jury was deprived of a complete picture of the facts of the case,” Goldstein said.

He accused Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt of consistently ruling against prosecutors because they successfully appealed one of his early rulings.

Wiatt, who worked as both a prosecutor and a defense attorney before becoming a judge, declined to comment, saying he was ethically barred from making public statements on a case over which he presided.

That aside, Goldstein said he was still surprised that “the defense could find 12 people that would have found there was reasonable doubt.”

He said the defense was “ludicrous” and has no doubt a killer has been set free.

Richard Plotin, Adair’s lawyer, said he knew all along she would be acquitted. “They did not have a case,” he said.

Nearly three years ago, Adair appeared on a neighbor’s doorstep one November afternoon and told him that a robber dressed as a gas company worker had bound and beaten her, stolen her jewelry and other valuables, then crushed her husband’s skull with a baseball bat when he happened upon the crime.

Police doubted her story, saying that Adair gave differing accounts and that the crime scene contradicted her version of events.

Two years after Robert Adair was killed, his widow was arrested and charged with his murder and the special circumstances that she ambushed him and killed him to collect $800,000 in life insurance.

The prosecution based its case on telephone calls police said she made at a time when she had told authorities she was bound and gagged.

If she had been convicted, she faced life in prison.

In a vigorous defense, Plotin blamed the crime on Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro, the oft-mentioned but never seen former wife of Encino surgeon Michael Shapiro.

Plotin claimed that Mindy Shapiro had threatened Adair after learning of the woman’s affair with her husband and had her allegedly mob-connected boyfriend hire men to rough her up as a “gift” for Michael Shapiro’s birthday.

His best evidence included the testimony of a cable company worker who saw a man dressed in an outdated gas company uniform at Adair’s condominium complex that day. No gas company workers were scheduled to work there that day, according to authorities.