Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  Rusty’s brother, Steven, and Steven’s wife, Lisa, spent time with Andrea and other relatives, sharing memories of Rusty as they went through old photo albums showing pictures of Rusty and Andrea when they were dating, their honeymoon, and the arrival of their children. Lisa described Rusty to the Cleveland Jewish News as “Harvard-educated, brilliant, very caring and loving and super-ethical,” and said, “He’s not the kind of person who ever got in any trouble, even as a kid.”

  The day of the funeral, while everybody was at the cemetery, police searched the Sneiderman house again, still trying to find Rusty’s wallet. Andrea said he sometimes kept it tucked away in places she didn’t know about. Instead of obtaining another search warrant, Thompson reached an agreement with Andrea that the search would be conducted while everybody was away to avoid disruption. A neighbor was assigned to monitor police to ensure that nothing that Andrea deemed inappropriate was taken. “Andrea set the ground rules,” Thompson later said.

  The department was eager to keep relations with Andrea good and lines of communication open. But it wasn’t an ideal way to operate. With Thompson and Cortellino turned away from the house the first night, then given resistance the next night about taking the computer, “It did not arouse my suspicions,” Thompson later recalled. “It irritated me that they weren’t cooperating.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “There’s a man who was sleeping in my backyard,” Rusty Sneiderman was heard telling the emergency operator. “He’s running. I think he has a gun in his back pocket and now he’s running away. I don’t know who the hell he is and I don’t want him by my house.”

  This was a recording of the 911 call Rusty placed on November 10 after he stumbled on the man on the side of his house. As promised, police followed up on Andrea’s suspicions that this incident may have been linked to Rusty’s murder. Detective Thompson not only reviewed a police report but listened to what in all likelihood was the last time Rusty’s voice would be recorded. It was touched with fear.

  “This is a house, you said?” asked the operator.

  “The house,” Rusty replied.

  “What did he look like? Was he black? White? Hispanic?”

  “He looked Hispanic with a mustache. He was wearing a hat and earmuffs, black mustache. I walked around the side of my house this morning—”

  “What sort of shirt and pants did he have on?”

  “Jeans and it looked like a gray jacket. He’s running now. He ran past Manza Court down the hill towards—I don’t know what the name of the street behind us is. Hold on, I can tell ya. He looked like he was drunk and passed out. He’s running towards Valley View Court.”

  “You can still see him right now?”

  “No, he just ran off into the bushes. I’m in the car right with my son. He’s two—”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Twenty seconds ago.”

  “Okay, did you see a gun?”

  “No but he was holding the small of his back just above his pants and I don’t know if it’s a gun or what, but I think it’s unusual to be running away from something holding on to that. But it scared the hell out of me. I walk around the side of the house, there’s some guy laying there sleeping on the side.”

  In the background Ian can be heard crying.

  “I know, bud,” Rusty comforted him. “I didn’t get your water bottle. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” said the emergency operator, “we’ll get an officer out there as soon as possible. What’s your last name?”

  “Sneiderman.” Rusty then spelled it. “Should I stay here? I’m in my car.”

  “It’s up to you if you want to stay and make a report. If not, they’ll post an officer in that area to check on the subject.”

  “Well, I want to make a report because we had a problem.” This was a reference, Thompson knew from Andrea, to the October 20 call about his garage door being opened.

  “Just stay there and a Dunwoody officer will be out there with you,” the operator said. “Are you still at home now?”

  “I’m in front of my house right now in a silver car waiting.”

  “A silver what?”

  “A silver four-door Infiniti.”

  Impatience now crept into Rusty’s voice. “I’m in a cul-de-sac. I’m the only car on the street, ma’am.”

  After reviewing the police report and the recording, Thompson canvassed the neighborhood asking if anybody else had seen the man. Thompson walked the path through the woods that the man had apparently used. He spoke to people at the construction site. But nobody else had seen the man or anything else unusual around that time. The lead seemed to be a dead end, one of what would be many in the early days of the investigation.

  But the possibility that Rusty’s killer may have been somebody familiar with his house—and probably Rusty’s routine—still had credence. Lawrence Minogue, a Dunwoody resident, heard about the shooting on 680 The Fan, Atlanta’s sports radio station, on his car radio at about 1 p.m. on November 18. He called police to report he had seen the silver van mentioned in the news report at about 8:15 a.m. that morning in front of the school as he dropped off his son. Minogue didn’t believe the van belonged to a parent because it had no car seat. He thought it might have been a delivery van. The driver appeared to be in his mid- to late thirties of Middle Eastern descent with a bushy beard so jet black that it had to be fake and what appeared to be short hair sticking out of the hood of a sweater. The van pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Mount Vernon Road.

  A few minutes later, another witness, Jack Gay, who lived on Manget Court near Rusty’s house, was taking his recycling can to the curb when he saw the silver minivan. It was around 8:30 a.m., he guessed. The van barreled toward him well past the twenty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit, then slowed down as it neared, the driver turning and facing him for three to five seconds. From about twenty-five feet away, Gay saw what he described as a dark-complexioned man, either Latino or Middle Eastern but not black or Asian, clean-shaven and wearing a hooded sweatshirt. The van then left the neighborhood more slowly, going toward Chamblee Dunwoody Road in the direction of the preschool, where within minutes the security video would again pick it up following Rusty’s car into the parking lot.

  The day after the shooting, Minogue went to the Dunwoody Police Station and worked with artist Marla Lawson to draw a sketch of the man who may appeared to have been staking out Rusty’s house before the murder. Lawson—who got her professional start by drawing Atlanta subway commuters in early 1970s—would create police sketches in a number of high-profile cases for local agencies and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Of the hundreds of pictures of killers, rapists, and thieves in her portfolio, her most famous picture was a sketch of the Atlanta Olympic bomber in 1996. Working off Minogue’s descriptions, Lawson created a drawing that Thompson would distribute to the public after rejecting sketches from two other witnesses. To Lawson’s artistic eye, it was the wrong choice. “They didn’t circulate the one I thought was best,” she’d tell the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But on the evening news the night after the shooting, Atlanta residents were presented the black-and-white image of a swarthy man with a beard and no mustache, a cap, broad nose, and full lips. The effect was sinister. If anybody could put a name to the face in the sketch they did not come forward. None of Rusty’s friends, business associates, or family members recognized the man in the drawing.

  It was a rocky start to the investigation. The man and the van both seemed to vanish. Taking his cues from the interview with Andrea, Thompson focused most of his efforts in the first few days on Rusty’s business history. Aside from the man on the side of the house, Andrea spent the most time talking about Rusty’s various employers and financial deals, with one job ending in a layoff and the other in an acrimonious firing. The detective interviewed several people at Discovery Point as well as Rusty’s partners in Star Voicemail, looking for evidence of animosity, checking out alibis. It was a time-consuming effort
and in the end fruitless. Nobody provided any information helpful to the investigation, and one by one everybody Thompson talked to was eliminated as a possible person of interest. The exterminator was interviewed and also cleared.

  Follow-up interviews with Rusty’s family and in-laws generated no leads. The questions touched on everything from Rusty’s finances to his social activities, even his sexuality. His parents and father-in-law sat in horror as they were asked whether they thought Rusty could have been gay or bisexual. “The questions were just to figure out if Rusty had a secret lifestyle,” Thompson later explained. Everybody insisted that Rusty was a dedicated father and husband, as straight as they come.

  On Tuesday, November 23, five days after the murder with Thompson getting nowhere, the police department summoned reporters to headquarters for a press conference. It started just after 4 p.m. and local TV stations cut away live to carry it. Dunwoody police chief Billy Grogan, all authority in his crew cut and dark uniform, three gold stars on his epaulets, began by summarizing the stark facts about the murder of Rusty Sneiderman.

  “This does not appear to be random in nature,” he began in his smooth southern accent. “The victim was shot multiple times at what appears to be point-blank range. We do have several witnesses that actually saw the shooting and from those witnesses we were able to get a composite, or a sketch, of what the suspect may look like. And this is the sketch.”

  He pointed to the drawing tacked to the wall behind him.

  “We also, in talking to our witnesses, have been able to get a more accurate make and model of the vehicle,” he continued, pronouncing it “vee-hickle” in the local fashion. “The vehicle appears, according to one particular witness—who has some knowledge about automobiles—that vehicle was a Dodge Caravan, a newer-model Dodge Caravan.” He then gestured to a photo of that car on the wall.

  The chief then got to the point of the press conference. “The Dunwoody Police Department is asking for the community’s help in finding Rusty’s killer,” he said, calling out for anybody in the Dunwoody Village shopping center area between 7:30 and 9 a.m. that previous Thursday to contact the department “if they saw anyone matching this description, saw a silver Dodge Caravan.” He noted that at the time of the crime the van may not have had license plates but could have them now. “Any information would be greatly appreciated and needed.”

  He then announced that the Sneiderman family was offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction “of the person or persons responsible for this terrible crime,” before introducing the next person to address reporters: Rusty’s brother.

  Like all of the family members, Steven Sneiderman had spent much of the three days since the funeral sitting shiva, speaking only to police and refraining from any public comments. He appeared nervous as he gazed at the reporters through his glasses.

  He took a deep breath, exhaled with a sigh, and said, “Thank you for this opportunity. I’m here today to speak for my brother who can’t speak anymore, and I’m here today to speak for my family and to reach out to this great community to help us. My brother was murdered. No one should have to face that. Our family has been devastated. My niece and nephew will never know their father. My sister-in-law has had an entire lifetime of dreams ripped from her.”

  Overcome with emotion, he struggled to continue, his voice breaking, tears welling. He breathed rapidly. “Our whole family has lost its brightest light, and we don’t know why. Can you imagine that? Put yourself in our shoes for just one moment. It’s why I’m here. We need your help desperately. Any information, anything at all could help. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we need every shred of information that we could get to help us solve this crime.”

  He urged the public to look closely at the sketch and the photo of the Dodge and “search your memory and help us to find the killer. Our family will be forever grateful. Thank you.”

  As Steven stood red-eyed and sniffling, Grogan took questions.

  “Chief, what leads you to believe, what evidence do you have to lead you to believe this was a targeted crime, not a random crime?” asked one reporter.

  “We don’t want to get into any details of our investigation too much at this time, but there doesn’t appear to have been any exchange of words between the suspect and the victim. From our witnesses’ accounts the suspect just walked up to the victim and started shooting.”

  “Mr. Sneiderman,” the same reporter asked, “is there anything that would lead you to believe that somebody could have targeted your brother for any reason?”

  “That’s what’s so hard to understand,” said Steven in a soft voice. “To know my brother was to love my brother. He just had an energy about him that drew people in, and he would do anything for anybody, and I can’t fathom for a moment what could drive someone to do this. We’re just grasping and were devastated. You never think something like this could happen to your family. It’s something on a TV show. It’s not real. But this is real. We need help from the community.”

  Another reporter asked, “Could you talk about what makes your brother special, something that will stick out to friends and family that they will always remember?”

  A smile came to Steven. “It’s hard to say. It’s just—I mean, he’s Rusty,” Steven said. “If you talked to anybody who knew him, you’re hearing that. He was Rusty. And he just, he had such a giving heart, he would do anything for anybody. And it haunts me. But I see that smile and that light in his eye. He was always there for everybody. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Steven then addressed his comments directly to the public. “Imagine if it was your brother and come forward,” he said. “I would like to think that if I wasn’t in this spot, and I had that information, I would have that courage to come forward. We would be so forever grateful.”

  * * *

  The press conference and the sketch brought a torrent of leads. Police tracked them down, no matter how far-fetched. Tips came in that Rusty was targeted by al-Qaeda or the Taliban. One call came from as far away as California. A Beverly Hills detective wanted to compare notes with Thompson on an unsolved case with vaguely similar details. Ronni Chasen, a Hollywood publicist who as far as anybody knew didn’t have an enemy in the world, was gunned down on November 16, two days before Rusty’s murder, in her car on the way home from the premiere of the movie Burlesque. Both were Jewish, both had been killed for no apparent reason, both had Hollywood connections, though Rusty’s were tenuous. Thompson and the Beverly Hills investigator would find nothing tying the cases, and Chasen’s murderer would turn out to be an unemployed felon who opened fire from a bicycle in a robbery.

  The leads kept Thompson busy—and distracted—and brought him no closer to solving the case. He admitted as much the day after the press conference when he interviewed Andrea for the second time. Thompson wanted to get Andrea away from her relatives and the distractions in her house. He spoke to her in a designated interview room with a wall-mounted video camera that he activated with a switch outside the front door. Sitting across from Andrea, he had taken off his coat and wore his dress shirt and jacket. Andrea dressed in a long-sleeved sweatshirt and appeared tired.

  “This tragedy has never happened to me personally,” he began by telling her. “I would be ignorant to think that I know what you’re going through … however, I can sympathize knowing what it’s like losing a family member in general.”

  “I wish he could have died of a heart attack,” Andrea told him. “I wish it was just a heart attack. Then I would have the answer.”

  “It’s the not knowing that drives people crazy,” Thompson agreed. “It’s driving me crazy because I don’t know what exactly to focus on.”

  Thompson told her that six days into the investigation, police had made little progress. “This is not going to be a quick process,” he said when the interview was interrupted by Sergeant Cortellino, who poked his head through the interview room door to say that Andrea’s m
other had arrived at the station and was sitting outside.

  Thompson continued, “I can’t tell you how long because I don’t know. Somebody could walk through the front door tomorrow … Could be the person who did it who had a sudden crisis of conscience. That’s movie stuff. This is a real-life movie that you had no intention of being a character in. My feeling right now is that this is going to be a lot longer than anybody whose dealing with this wants to take. I am not at the point going to say this is a cold case and we have to close it until we get some information from some source. The department is far from that.”

  He told her about the Beverly Hills detective with the Ronni Chasen case, and Andrea noted, “This Star Voicemail is all about celebrities. We had just started sharing this publicly.”

  He told her about a Philadelphia detective “that has a case that has similarities to this” and how they were comparing files.

  “What we’re going to be talking about today, some of it is going to be hard questions,” he said. “They’re going to be hard for me to ask. I just don’t like to ask certain kinds of questions regardless of the situation. They’re going to be hard for you to hear. You may end up walking out of this interview hating my guts because of the questions I need to ask. The reason I’m asking a lot of these questions is because this is still a fishing expedition. There might be something you might not have thought of.”