Wife Acquitted in Husband’s Beating Death

Delivering a crushing defeat to police and prosecutors, jurors Monday acquitted a 39-year-old woman of the baseball bat murder of her husband, a killing she for years has maintained was the work of a home-invasion robber.

Jeanie Adair let out a shriek of joy and hugged her lawyer as the clerk read the not-guilty 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, adultery and deceit, Adair has said that she was the victim of her lover’s ex-wife whose hired thugs killed Robert Adair, 40, when he innocently walked in on an attack on Jeanie Adair.

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” and 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.

Adair also may be judged by a civil jury. Oddly mirroring the court battle surrounding the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, the victim’s family vowed to file a wrongful-death lawsuit.

“My mother is going to start that this week,” said Dan Meyers, Robert Adair’s brother. “It’s not over.”

The jurors, who deliberated for just over two days, declined to comment, but speaking through an alternate juror said the prosecution simply did not prove 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 that the verdict was the result of the judge gutting the case, unfairly excluding evidence that proved Jeanie and Robert Adair’s marriage was falling apart, the alleged motive.

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

Goldstein accused San Fernando Superior Court 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 comment, saying he was ethically barred from making public statements on a case over which he had presided.

That aside, Goldstein said he was 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 she’d been attacked by a home invasion robber dressed as a gas company worker. She said the robber bound and beat her, stole her jewelry and other valuables, then crushed her husband’s skull with a baseball bat when he inadvertently happened upon the crime.

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

Two years after Robert Adair was killed, his wife was arrested and charged with his murder and the special circumstances that she ambushed him and killed him to collect on his life insurance policy. 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 would have faced life in prison without the possibility of parole.

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

Plotin claimed Mindy Shapiro, who had threatened Jeanie Adair after learning she’d had an affair with her husband, had her allegedly mob-connected boyfriend hire a couple of thugs to rough up Jeanie Adair as a surprise “gift” for Michael Shapiro’s birthday.

Among his best evidence was the testimony of a cable company worker who on the day of the crime saw a man dressed in an outdated gas company uniform at the Sylmar condominium complex where the Adairs lived. No gas company workers were scheduled to work there that day, according to authorities.

Plotin identified as possible killers two friends, one of whom was a violent ex-convict said to favor baseball bats and knives.

Adair tentatively picked out the ex-convict from a line-up.

The cable company worker said the ex-convict’s friend looked like the man he had seen near the Adair property that day.

Standing at a bouquet of microphones and facing a line of television and still cameras, Adair said she was the victim of a witch hunt by prosecutors who, fueled by her former in-laws, pursued her as the sole suspect.

“They focused their attention solely on putting me behind bars,” she said, “when they could have been tracking the people who really killed my husband.”