Murder Trial to Open in a Case Fit for the Movies

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

To determine who killed Robert Adair, the jury selected Monday will be urged to examine the words, actions and motives of a cast of characters that include the victim’s adulterous spouse, her surgeon lover and the physician’s jealous ex-wife.

And, if the climate of previous hearings is any indication, the testimony will be punctuated by a bitter feud between the defense and prosecuting attorneys, who have battled intensely over even small matters.

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

Prosecutors and police assert that Jeanie Adair ambushed her 40-year-old husband at their Sylmar condominium because she was greedy. They say she wanted to keep a large insurance settlement from a previous unrelated injury all to 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.

There is no physical evidence that proves she killed her husband, prosecutors say. Rather, the case against her is circumstantial, based “on some common-sense considerations,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein at one hearing.

The prosecution will strive to reveal the defendant’s motive and cast doubt on her story of a home invasion robbery-turned-murder as a badly executed cover-up. Crucial to the case is an alleged 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 ex-wife of the surgeon 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.

Pieced together 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 that of another man seen by workers in the Sylmar condominium complex the day of the murder.

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

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

Plotin also offers a damning phone call of his own, 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 his own black-and-white television less than an hour after the crime for a paltry sum, when the real killer would have had hundreds of dollars in cash, diamonds and gold jewelry in his pocket.

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 and 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 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 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 her way into the bathroom. The scissors she said she used to cut the tape on her wrists did not contain adhesive, but did contain 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. Robert Adair was planning to move with his children to Las Vegas and leave his wife behind, his mother said.

Goldstein said the defendant’s 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 two years to piece together enough evidence to arrest Jeanie Adair, despite their suspicions.

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

Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt granted the motion.

For opening statements today, Adair will walk in the same door as the jurors.

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