Jurors in Widow’s Trial Hear 2 Views of Man’s Slaying

As prosecution and defense lawyers revealed to jurors Tuesday dueling theories of who beat a Sylmar man to death with a baseball bat, Jeanie Adair, widow and defendant, dabbed at her eyes and nose with a tissue.

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

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

Goldstein said there were inconsistencies between Jeanie Adair’s robbery account and the evidence recovered at the crime scene. He showed painstaking detective work by criminalists who reattached pieces of electrical tape to show that the defendant was neither tied up nor freed, as she claimed.

“The real facts,” retorted defense lawyer Richard Plotin in his statements to the jury, “show you that her transgression was an affair, but not murder.”

He fervently presented a tale of narrow-minded detectives, who he says 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 hours-long attack to get back at her rival by damaging her face and hurting her back to make her unattractive to her lover. Shapiro’s involvement is evident, he said, because she allegedly knew about the murder before it became public knowledge.

“This isn’t a created one-armed man. This was a real person that brutalized” Jeanie Adair, Plotin insisted as cameras from the television show “48 Hours” rolled. “Maybe the instruction was that if the back doesn’t function, then the lower part doesn’t work so well.”

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Plotin told jurors about a convicted felon whose appearance resembles a composite of the man Adair says attacked her, and the alleged killer’s friend, who resembles another man seen by workers at the Brooktree condominium complex the day of the murder.

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 some valuables, including the earrings and wedding ring she was wearing.

She said her husband, who always walked home for lunch from his job as a medical assistant, must have been killed by the robber on his way out.

Plotin said the fact that authorities could find none of her husband’s blood on Adair’s clothing, which would be expected if she had delivered the fatal blows, proves her innocence.

But as testimony began Tuesday afternoon, prosecutors presented evidence that explained how such bloody clothes could have disappeared.

LAPD Patrol Sgt. Alan Kreitzman, one of the first officers on the scene, said he checked the garage of the victim’s two-story townhome and put his hand on the hood of the family’s only car. It was warm, he said, telling him it had been driven recently.

His testimony is typical of the kind of circumstantial evidence the prosecution is offering to prove Adair’s guilt. She says she had been tied up for about four hours by the time police arrived.

Deputy Dist. Attys. Goldstein and Marlo Dickman intend to prove Adair’s guilt by showing she was making telephone calls when she claimed she was tied up, that her bindings were not stretched as expected if someone were trying to wiggle out of them, and that valuables were left behind.

Her motive, the prosecution says, was money.

The couple had filed for bankruptcy; if Robert Adair had taken his children and left his wife, as he planned, she would have had to split a several-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance settlement for a personal injury suit. Then there was his $400,000 life insurance policy.

“Robert Adair,” Goldstein said, “was worth a lot more dead to her than alive.”