Trial to Begin of Wife Accused in Fatal Beating

The sensational case of a woman accused of beating her husband to death with a baseball bat will finally reach trial this week, promising a classic whodunit spiced with all the drama, deceit, philandering and intrigue of a daytime soap opera.

To determine who killed Robert Adair, jurors will be urged to examine the words, actions and motives of a cast of characters including the victim’s adulterous spouse, her lover the surgeon, the physician’s jealous wife and an ex-con said to favor baseball bats.

And if the climate of previous hearings is any indication, the testimony will be punctuated by a bitter feud between the lawyers, who have openly declared their mistrust and who have battled intensely over even small matters.

“Hollywood,” said the lead Los Angeles Police Department detective on the case after one hearing, “could not have come up with a better script.”

Prosecutors and police unwaveringly assert that Jeanie Adair ambushed her 40-year-old husband nearly three years ago in their Sylmar home because she was greedy. They say she wanted to keep a large unrelated insurance settlement for herself and cash in on hundreds of thousands of dollars in life insurance on her dead husband. If convicted, Adair, 39, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

No physical evidence proves Adair killed her husband. The case against her is circumstantial, based, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein at one hearing, “on some common sense considerations.”

The prosecution will strive to reveal the defendant’s alleged motive and expose her story of a home invasion robbery-turned-murder as a badly executed cover-up. Crucial to the case is a phone call to her former lover that the defendant could not have made if she were bound and gagged by her husband’s killer, as she claimed.

“This is almost like something out of Sherlock Holmes or ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ ” Goldstein said.

The defense will offer jurors an equally scandalous theory: that the wife of the man with whom Jeanie Adair was having an affair hired a couple of thugs to rough her up and rob her. The scene turned deadly when Robert Adair accidentally stumbled on the crime, defense lawyer Richard Plotin asserts.

Lover’s Jealous Wife Is Key, Defense Says

Working from police investigative files and later interviews, the defense relies on the physical similarities between a violent ex-convict and his friend to Jeanie Adair’s description of her attacker and to another man seen by workers in their condominium complex the day of the murder.

More importantly, it hinges on the personality of Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro, whom the defense has portrayed as an unstable woman bent on revenge against the rival she claims broke up her marriage to Encino orthopedic surgeon Michael R. Shapiro.

Plotin asserts that Mindy Shapiro has impersonated the defendant and others, stolen Jeanie Adair’s medical records and constantly harassed and threatened her. It is she, he claims, who called Michael Shapiro the day of the murder, impersonating the defendant with such aplomb that she fooled her former husband.

And Plotin offers another damning phone call, through the testimony of a neighbor who says she overheard Mindy Shapiro talking about the Adair slaying before it was public knowledge.

“They were just lame,” Plotin said of the detectives investigating the Adair murder. “They focused on Jeanie and they were looking at evidence to try to confirm she was guilty.”

Police insist they thoroughly investigated the two men named by the defense as more likely killers and eliminated them as possible suspects, in part because no fingerprints or other physical evidence tied them to the scene.

Prosecutors also point out that the man the defense is calling a hit man was pawning a television less than an hour after the crime for a paltry sum, when the real killer would have had hundreds of dollars in cash and diamond and gold jewelry in his possession.

Goldstein has complained unsuccessfully that allowing the defense to present the alternate killer theory to the jury will “shift the focus of the case from the murder of Robert Adair to the marital problems of the Shapiros.”

Plotin responded in court papers, “There is more evidence of Mindy Shapiro’s culpability in this case than there is of Jeanie Adair’s.”

Victim’s Wife Was Suspect From Start

It’s no secret that Jeanie Adair was the primary suspect for some time before her arrest.

Suspicion fell on the blond, blue-eyed mother of two not long after she appeared on a neighbor’s doorstep with a horrifying tale of being attacked in her home by a robber posing as a gas company worker.

She said she was punched, kicked, bound and gagged by the assailant, who rummaged through her condominium for hours on Nov. 5, 1996, taking money and jewelry and apparently killing her husband on his way out. It took her over an hour to free herself from the tape bindings after the killer fled, she said, and to finally summon help.

Paramedics first thought Jeanie Adair suffered a concussion, but soon began to think she was faking, according to court testimony.

Police responding to the Brooktree condominium unit where Robert Adair lay dead, surrounded by the day’s mail, said the scene was staged. Drawers were more messed up than searched, and easily stolen valuables such as Robert Adair’s wristwatch and the cash in his wallet were left behind while a coin collection was purportedly stolen, detectives said.

Jeanie Adair’s injuries were superficial, detectives said, and they did not find the mess that would naturally occur when a bound person drags herself into the bathroom. The scissors she said she used to cut the tape on her wrists had no adhesive residue but did show traces of blood, authorities said, suggesting she instead used them to cut her chin.

Then the victim’s family members, also suspecting the widow, told authorities about the couple’s marital woes. Just before his death, the victim and the defendant had a blowout, relatives said. Robert Adair was planning to take the children to Las Vegas and leave his wife behind, his mother said.

Prosecution Calls Story ‘Insult to Intelligence’

“The defendant is not telling the truth in her statement,” Goldstein said. “To believe her story requires the court to believe that such a brutal intruder would kill a person with a baseball bat . . . but then leave the only person who can identify him alive.

“That makes no sense at all,” he added. “It is, in fact, an insult to the intelligence.”

Yet it took authorities more than two years to piece together enough evidence to arrest Jeanie Adair, despite their suspicions.

If they have uncovered incontrovertible proof of her guilt since then, they have kept it quiet.

As the case neared trial, Plotin argued that his client, who had been jailed since her arrest in January, should be granted bail on the grounds that “guilt is not evident.”

Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt granted the motion in May.

When jury selection begins in earnest today, Adair will be walking in the same door as the prospective jurors.

In the next six weeks, they will decide whether she also walks out of it.