Jury Hears Rival Theories in Trial of Victim’s Wife

As widow and defendant Jeanie Adair dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, prosecution and defense lawyers Tuesday outlined dueling theories of who beat her husband to death--and why--in the couple’s Sylmar home three years ago.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a case about sex, about lies and about money,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein said in opening remarks in a San Fernando courtroom.

With the cadence, tenor and expressions of someone reading a fable about moral decay, Goldstein said Jeanie Adair crushed her husband Robert’s skull nearly three years ago to end a crumbling marriage to her financial advantage. Then, the prosecutor said, she claimed that she and her husband had been attacked by a home invasion robber.

For 45 minutes, Goldstein detailed inconsistencies in the defendant’s story and evidence recovered at the crime scene. The evidence included the work of criminalists who reattached pieces of electrical tape to show that the defendant was neither tied up nor freed as she had claimed.

But defense attorney Richard Plotin disputed that theory. “The real facts,” he told the jury, “show you that her transgression was an affair, but not murder.”

Plotin presented his own tale, this one of detectives who he claims rushed to judgment and discounted the real killer: Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro, the wife of the Encino orthopedic surgeon with whom Jeanie Adair was having an affair.

It was Shapiro, Plotin said, who set up the attack to get back at her rival by damaging her face and back to make her unattractive to her lover. Shapiro’s involvement is evident, he said, because she allegedly knew about the slaying before it was public knowledge.

“This isn’t a created one-armed man. This was a real person that brutalized” Jeanie Adair, Plotin said.

Adair had told police that her attacker posed as a gas company employee, using the ruse of a gas leak to enter her home about 9:30 or 10 a.m. She said he beat and kicked her, threatened her with a knife, bound her with electrical tape and stole a number of valuables including the earrings she was wearing and her wedding ring.