Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  The former deputy chief in Marietta, Grogan was a perfect fit for Dunwoody. Even-tempered and politically astute, he worked well with the new city council and business community. He had his pick of officers and his selections won praise from the locals—among them many officer-of-the-year recipients and veteran cops who had avoided any taint of the scandals that seemed to plague Atlanta-area departments. The Dunwoody jobs paid better, the department had the best and latest equipment, the cops could take their official cars home. The department was housed in a nondescript office building with dark-tinted windows in an office park hidden among the pines, not far from the Perimeter Mall. Even after the department’s performance in the Sneiderman case would raise questions, the town’s newspaper publisher, Dick Williams, says support remained high at home. “I think people in Dunwoody were pretty certain of this: They loved their cops.”

  * * *

  The next day, Thompson and Cortellino again rang the doorbell at the Sneiderman house in the late afternoon or early evening on November 19, 2010, a copy of the search warrant in hand. The detectives were welcomed into the dining room, where they took their seats at a long table. The house was spacious and modern. It had five bedrooms, four bathrooms, walk-in closets, a sitting room, fireplace, gourmet kitchen, deck off the back porch, and three-car garage with a remote-operated door. Andrea was at the table, along with her parents, Bonita and Herbert Greenberg, Rusty’s mother and father and, in time, Rusty’s brother, Steven. A tape recording of the interview picks up more voices in the background. Andrea and Rusty’s children would be heard on the tape; at one point, the interview would be interrupted by Ian crying and Sophia saying she was going to take him for a walk.

  The detectives later said they wanted to build rapport with the family, gather information about the case, and search Rusty’s computer and other belongings. Throughout, the detectives would treat them with deference. “Part of my job for this interview is I need to get to know you and your family, like a relative,” Thompson said at one point. “Your family,” he went on, “is a very prominent family.” He called them “very well known” and assured them he had no doubts that he’d find evidence that Rusty was, as Andrea and the rest of the family insisted, “very well liked.”

  The problem, Thompson was trying to impress upon the Greenbergs and Sneidermans—people unaccustomed to dealing with police or crime—was that not everybody might be inclined to view Rusty and his family so positively. “When it comes time to make an arrest, a defense attorney is going to want to paint a very bad picture about his life,” Thompson said, “and we want to be able to counter anything he has to say.”

  For the next two hours, the detectives got to know the Sneiderman family—and its secrets.

  * * *

  She was born Andrea Greenberg and grew up with her brother, Todd, in the northern Ohio city of Sylvania. A bright student with an aptitude for math and science, she went to the University of Indiana in Bloomington, majoring in computer information systems and technology. In September 1994, she visited the campus’s Hillel chapter, the “Jewish home away from home” as the Helene G. Simon Hillel Center calls itself, with a big-screen TV, pool table, gym, and, according to its website, “lots of comfortable couches to relax on,” plus an “open refrigerator policy for students to grab a snack or a to-go box.” The Hillel offered a weekend retreat twice a year. “It’s just a time for the Jewish kids to get away,” Andrea would later say. There were activities, religious services, and socializing with other students. She started talking to a junior named Rusty Sneiderman whom she’d seen before on campus but hadn’t spoken to until now. Rusty asked her about her sweater—it had the logo of the summer camp she had gone to with her brother, Todd, for years. Rusty had a friend who also went.

  Later that evening, with the retreat over, Rusty called Andrea. They went out together for the first time that same night.

  The son of an accountant, Russell Sneiderman was, like Andrea, from a close-knit Jewish family in northern Ohio, just 125 miles to the east of Sylvania, in Cleveland. An overachiever still well remembered at Beachwood High School, Rusty served as the editor of the school newspaper and played on the golf team. His good-bye column his senior year, reprinted in full after his murder more than fifteen years later, revealed the traits that would later serve him well in business: He was self-deprecating, charming, funny, optimistic. He reminisced about his hapless freshman year in which his locker was “already assigned to a very popular senior girl who was not interested in a ‘four-eyed’ freshman,” his golf team won only a single match, and he got the three hardest teachers three periods in a row. He joked about speaking before a thousand people at the North American Invitational Model United Nations only to have a stink bomb go off (“My partner, from the class of ’91, said, ‘Maybe it was just your breath’”) and how he finally got his groove by his junior year. “I had figured out how to get good grades without working too hard and could devote my remaining time to after-school activities,” he wrote.

  Both bright and ambitious, the young couple explored the quaint towns surrounding the university, Rusty’s obituary would say, and soon found they shared a family history—their grandparents on both sides had founded the same synagogue in Florida.

  Rusty graduated in 1996 and returned home to Cleveland to work at an accounting firm; Andrea followed him there for the summer after her junior year, living in an apartment and visiting Rusty and his parents frequently. Donald and Marilyn Sneiderman were fond of their son’s girlfriend, and Donald later remarked that they seemed very much in love. For the next two years, they had a long-distance relationship. When they weren’t putting thousands of miles on their cars going back and forth between Cleveland and Bloomington, the technologically savvy couple used early incarnations of social networking sites and experimented with a videoconferencing precursor to Skype—“not an inexpensive thing at the time,” Andrea would recall.

  After Andrea graduated in 1998, they found a small apartment in Chicago, both working at Deloitte Consulting, which helps businesses improve management practices and technology. Andrea’s parents frowned on them living together before marriage but Andrea was certain it was only a matter of time before they were husband and wife. “I wasn’t going to move in with him unless I knew we were getting married,” she later said. At Deloitte they worked in different divisions of the company, Andrea in technology, Rusty in finance. “The stock market was doing well then,” she said and Rusty set aside money regularly in what they called their “ring fund,” watching it grow until it reached the right amount. Andrea picked out a design for an engagement ring and Rusty ordered it. The only surprise for her was when it would happen and how the ring would turn out. She found out when Rusty proposed in 2000 while they vacationed at a resort in Laguna Niguel in Orange County, California.

  Over the next hectic months they planned a wedding while Rusty applied to business schools. In rapid succession, Harvard Business School accepted him, and on December 30, 2000, they tied the knot in a ceremony in that same Florida synagogue co-founded by their grandparents. The newlyweds settled into an even smaller apartment in Boston—the closet was so tiny they couldn’t use hangers—while Rusty attended business school and Andrea worked at a struggling start-up company. When the company went under, Rusty found a posting for a job at the business school in the information technology department. Andrea was hired as a liaison between the technical people who wrote the software and the Harvard professors and faculty who used it. She saw Rusty every day, and they socialized with his classmates.

  Andrea was in the midst of a major project when Rusty, after graduation, got offered a business development position for Siebel Systems’ offices in Atlanta. He had worked previously in wealth management and insurance in Boston but, wanting a less expensive place to live and more house for their money for when they had children, the couple agreed he should take the position. After three months in a comfortable company apartment at the San Mateo, California, headquarters
while Rusty trained, they moved to Smyrna, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, into a neighborhood with other young couples who would become their longtime friends. Andrea telecommuted from her home for her job with the Harvard Business School, traveling to Boston about once a month for meetings. She later became an independent contractor for the business school’s publishing unit, billing hourly.

  After their first child, daughter Sophia, was born in August 2005, the Sneidermans sought a new neighborhood with better public schools. They found it in Dunwoody. Rusty would move to another company, this time doing wealth management at J. P. Morgan in Atlanta. Their two incomes and savings got them a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar house on a quiet cul-de-sac. As members of the Congregation Or Hadash synagogue, they were active in Atlanta’s Jewish community. Dunwoody was home to the new site of the Marcus Jewish Community Center—named after its major donor, Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. Sophia would be enrolled in Dunwoody Prep preschool, and when son Ian was born in October 2007 he stayed home with Andrea while she worked out of the home. The Sneidermans made extra payments on their home to build equity and earned enough to buy a second house on Lake Oconee, in Eatonton, Georgia, an hour-and-a-half drive away, where they spent weekends boating and waterskiing with family and friends.

  Their lives as busy young professionals with small children were not always easy. As the country sank into a recession, Harvard had less work for contractors like Andrea. Soon her remaining duties—developing online courses—dwindled. Then in late 2007, Rusty was laid off from J. P. Morgan, a victim of the hit on financial institutions. Property values throughout the Atlanta region plunged, including the mini-mansions of Dunwoody, where some residents found themselves owing more than their houses were worth. Unemployment inched up, and so did crime. This was when Dunwoody’s drive to break away from DeKalb County built steam. The Sneidermans now had two mortgages and two children and neither Andrea nor Rusty had a full-time job. But they had time and resources.

  “We’re savers, always have been,” Andrea later explained. “Whenever everyone else was going out to fancy dinners we were eating peanut butter and jelly at home so we saved our money. We had a lot of money saved up in the bank. I worked many successful jobs myself, Rusty has made a lot of money over the years. We saved it. Our financial situation was just fine. We work and live based on what we earn. That’s our style of living. We don’t live beyond our means. So the times Rusty was unemployed, I was always making consulting income at that time or he himself was making consulting income.”

  Even during the worst of the recession they had nearly a million dollars in the bank in cash and retirement accounts. Characteristically self-confident, Rusty set out to find another job without having to settle for the first opportunity that came along. He explored several ventures—businesses he could purchase or start up—but none panned out. He eventually took another salaried position, this time as chief financial officer for Discovery Point Child Development Centers, a daycare chain based in Duluth, Georgia—fifteen miles from Dunwoody—with schools in Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida (Dunwoody Prep was not part of the chain).

  Almost immediately, Rusty clashed with the owner. His days at Discovery Point seemed numbered. By late 2009, with Rusty on the brink of unemployment and Andrea’s contract work with Harvard petering out, she ventured into the job market. She commiserated with a friend, the wife of one of Rusty’s college roommates who was trying to return to the work world after having children. She led Andrea to a woman in her book club named Ariela Neuman who was married to a top-level manager at GE Energy in the same technical/computer field as Andrea. Andrea didn’t know Ariela or her husband, Hemy Neuman, but they had mutual acquaintances. Andrea’s friend got Hemy’s contact information, and Andrea sent him a résumé.

  After an interview Hemy hired Andrea in March 2010 as a quality systems manager in the product creation department. The engineering teams developed complex integrated systems in the aerospace, healthcare, and energy industries. Job descriptions were so technical that a person unschooled in technology and engineering would struggle to understand what anybody even did at GE Energy. But for Andrea it meant a solid job in a rough economy, full benefits, and a salary of $125,000 a year.

  She was to report to work in April. That same week, Rusty was fired from Discovery Point. “I asked him to quit Discovery Point,” Andrea would later say. “We realized that it was really just making him unhappy to work for other people and he really was an entrepreneur in spirit and needed to do it on his own.” Rusty seized the moment with characteristic enthusiasm, putting his schmoozing skills to work to strike out on his own as an entrepreneur. “He was probably the best networker that this city has ever seen,” Andrea would say.

  Rusty finally had the freedom to fulfill his dream of building a company that he could pass on to his children. Meetings were held and funding was sought. He explored buying a company that installed radios in police cars, but his group’s offer came in too low for the sellers. Then at a party he met a man with an idea for a voice-mail service with a celebrity twist. In a filing with the Georgia Secretary of State, Rusty named the business Star Voicemail and described it as a service providing “custom voicemail greetings featuring notable sports, movie, music and TV personalities. He registered a domain name and began building a website. Andrea helped with the technical side and became one of its most enthusiastic supporters.

  “Imagine if you were to call someone else’s phone who didn’t answer,” she would later say. “Instead of saying, ‘Hi, this is Susie’—and if Susie was fifteen, you heard, ‘Hi, this is Justin Bieber. Susie is out with me shopping. She can’t get to you right now, but, hey, have a great day.’ So it’s Justin Bieber’s voice for example, saying Susie’s name.” Software programs made it possible for a celeb’s voice to utter any number of names, and the service would be sold as an app with a celebrity menu. “So you could purchase the George Clooney or the Justin Bieber or whomever your favorite star was and that person was giving a quippy message,” Andrea would say. “It’s their voice instead of yours. That’s the business.”

  The start-up showed promise. Meetings were held with investors. They got interest from Bieber’s manager. But with Andrea now holding down a full-time office job, Rusty had taken over the bulk of the childcare duties. “It was a difficult transition,” Andrea would acknowledge. At times Rusty “would be annoyed with the situation,” she said, particularly when home life cut into the time he wanted to spend on the voice-mail start-up. Complicating things were Andrea’s unexpected travel demands for GE. “That was an issue of mine when I took the job,” Andrea later said. “I didn’t want to be away from home very often so we came to an agreement that it would only be about 20 percent of my job. It turned out to be more than that. But it was pointed out to me that I should visit all of the sites that I manage and that it was important for me to meet the people in those locations and for some reason it was important for me to do it soon.” Within days she was on the road, and her travel schedule would call for one trip a month on average.

  When she wasn’t on the road or staying late at the office, she had to take work home with her. Rusty saw the demands on Andrea and began to feel guilty. “He was supportive of me working,” she would later say, “but he didn’t want me to feel the pressure to work.” Out of the tension came a solution. They hired a part-time nanny to give Rusty more time for work. Andrea became the “science parent” at Sophia’s elementary school. They played softball in a cystic fibrosis fund-raiser. They traveled with the children to Washington, DC, for the ninety-fifth birthday party for Rusty’s grandmother; then Rusty and Andrea left the kids with relatives and the two of them took a five-day cruise, returning on November 15. Rusty’s parents planned to spend Thanksgiving with them in Dunwoody, and the six of them were to travel to Disney World in March. “They had a happy, hectic life,” a lawyer for Andrea would later claim. “They were enjoying each other. They were enjoying their kids. It all came crashing do
wn on November 18, 2010.”

  * * *

  Most of these details came out in Andrea’s interviews with police, some later, but the story represents the substance and tone that emerged in the days after the murder. The Sneidermans looked like just about any other two-salary couple in Dunwoody, their challenges shared by thousands of families in every subdivision Outside the Perimeter. As the media had reported, nothing on the surface suggested why Rusty would be targeted for murder.

  Thompson asked Andrea if anything unusual had happened recently. Minutes into the interview, she pointed to two events that had left her and Rusty shaken. The first occurred a month earlier on October 20 when she was upstairs at home with Rusty and heard the garage door open.

  “I panicked,” she said. “I screamed that the garage door opened, somebody opened the door.”

  They called 911 and a Dunwoody police officer took a report. Nothing had been stolen, and it didn’t appear that anybody had entered the garage or house. Police suggested that it may have been a technical glitch—somebody with the same garage remote code activating the Sneidermans’ opener by mistake.

  Three weeks later they got a second scare. Around 8:30 a.m., on Wednesday, November 10, Rusty was getting ready to take Ian to Dunwoody Prep when he thought he smelled gas. Walking around to the side of the house to check the meter, Rusty saw a man lying facedown on the ground near the air-conditioning unit.