He assured her that the interview room was soundproof and that nobody in the station could hear or see them. When Andrea asked if it was being recorded—“I’ve seen a couple of crime shows,” she said—he acknowledged that it was. “My memory is not that good,” he said.
“Any kind of sensitive information that you tell me is going to remain in the inner circle of this investigation,” Thompson continued. “I’m not going go talk to your parents about it, I’m not going to talk to Rusty’s family about it. They have no need to know. The reason I’m saying that is I need to know things that you may consider embarrassing to the family, things that may be disgusting to some people … I’m sure every couple have little secrets that they do that they don’t want their parents to know about.”
Once again acknowledging her standing in the community, “I know that you’re a very educated woman, you’re very intelligent. You’re not the normal person that we get back here. That is the whole thing. If I come across like—”
“If you’re attacking me?” interjected Andrea.
“It’s not personal,” he said.
“I understand,” she said.
After covering some of the same ground from the previous interview, he began by asking about her relationship with Rusty.
“If you don’t tell me something voluntarily or in response to specific question and I end up finding out later down the road from somebody else, it could be an issue. So I have to come back and ask you why didn’t you tell me this.”
“I get that,” she said.
For the next half hour, he brought her through the entire story of her marriage, from meeting Rusty at the weekend retreat at the Hillel at the University of Indiana, through their moves to Chicago, San Mateo, Boston, and Atlanta, their wedding in the synagogue founded by their grandparents, having children, and settling in Dunwoody for the good public schools. Andrea was effusive and seemed to enjoy sharing her memories—until she suddenly stopped.
“I still feel unsafe,” she said.
The fear after the murder had her considering hiring private security.
“This is akin to a terrorist act,” Thompson said, urging her to continue with her life. “One way to let the terrorists win is to stop doing your routine. That makes me angry.”
She then continued with her life story, talking about her difficult pregnancy with Sophia, how her daughter was born with health problems and had to be on a heart monitor for six months. “Rusty was a mess, I was a mess,” she said. “I was exhausted, I was probably a raving lunatic.” But Rusty, she said, “has been a great parent, a great husband.”
She talked about her easier pregnancy with son Ian and how she worked at home while taking care of her son until Rusty’s job at Discovery Point was ending and she started working at GE Energy. It gave the family a steady income and health benefits, even if her travel put a strain on Rusty.
“There was a period this summer, I was gone one or two weeks in a row, and he was responsible for taking them and picking them up everywhere,” she said. “When I got back from that trip, he was an ass. He couldn’t get any work done.” They spoke about it and sometimes he raised his voice, though she added, “He didn’t raise his voice at me, he raised his voice out of frustration. We did argue and then we made an agreement and said we need more help in the house.” They hired a part-time nanny and “the past couple of weeks it’s been great.”
They talked about the Sneidermans’ lake house, the weekend trips boating, the parties with friends. Andrea broke down. Her voice shaking, she said, “I want to have the memories that we’re talking about and not the four times that we’ve fought.”
Thompson changed the subject, taking her through the family’s daily routine. He asked about the cruise the couple took shortly before the murder and took down the names of the people they met on the ship. He asked her about work on the house and got the name of her “rain-gutter guy” and the contractor. He got more names of business associates. He took down her passwords for the social networking site Facebook and her email.
An hour into the interview, he finally got to the questions he’d warned her about.
He asked if Rusty ever dated women before meeting Andrea. She assured him he was monogamous—“just the kind of guy who wanted a girlfriend around.”
Thompson then asked, “People do things to experiment: Has he ever talked to you about experimenting about being with another man? Has he ever talked to you about a desire to do that?”
She shook her head no.
“Has he ever shown to you as possibly being bisexual or having some sort of unexplored homosexuality?”
“No, never.”
“Since he has been with you, has he ever expressed to you a desire to experiment with having another person with you, a threesome, sex parties? Have you ever expressed an interest in trying that with him?”
“No.”
“Same thing for you: Have your ever experimented with another woman?”
“No.”
“You told me about your boss: Has there ever been another woman that approached you?”
“Woman? No.”
“Let’s talk about your boss,” Thompson said. “This is your current boss?”
“Yes.”
“How did he approach you in expressing an interest?”
“We traveled for business together and we were at dinner.”
“On one of your trips?”
“Uh-huh. And he said—what I think I said to you—which is that he thinks I’m fantastic and that was kind of it. [He] would love to have a relationship with me but knows that that’s probably unlikely. That was sort of—”
“So it was a sort of polite come-on?”
“Very,” she said. “That’s right. He really respected me as a person.”
“Was it out of respect for you as a person or out of fear for keeping his job?”
“I don’t have an answer to that.”
“That’s a fair answer. That’s reasonable. Is he married?”
“Oh, yes.”
“He has children?”
“Yes.”
“Did he go into any other further detail about how he would want to work [a relationship]?”
“Not really,” said Andrea. Her tone now changed. She became business-like. “Let me describe this to you. I feel like you’re asking me a question—I want to tell you. We’re close friends, he and I. Even once he said that, and I said no, and we worked together a lot, traveled together a lot, I enjoy his—I admire him as a professional. I enjoy learning from him. I learned a ton. We talked a lot, talked a lot of business. He talked about his family, I know. We’re friends. I want it to be clear, it wasn’t just that ‘You’re great and I’m interested,’ and it’s that or nothing. Am I saying that the right way? We continued our relationship.”
“It sounds to me like you had a strong enough friendship beforehand that this didn’t disrupt anything, was a blip on the radar and got past it?”
“Exactly.”
“How often do you do business trips?”
“I went on them once a month. Maybe July I went twice. I went to a training class one week. I went to a site, a software location where we build software. Minden. And the next week I had auditor training—I trained to be an auditor as part of my job. Longmont, Colorado. Those just happened to be back-to-back because of poor timing. That was the July where Rusty was like: Are you kidding? Two weeks of kids?”
“Didn’t have time to work?”
“Exactly. But you asked how often I traveled? That was a long trip. In September I went to England.”
“How was the trip?”
“England was great. I hadn’t been there since with Rusty.”
That trip lasted a week. She had also traveled to Melbourne, Florida, where software was built, and to Greenville, South Carolina, where GE made turbines.
“How many of your business trips does your boss go with you?”
“All of them.”
“
All of them?”
“Besides Longmont, Colorado, for some training,” she said, “he went to all of them and I’ll tell you why. He hadn’t been to the sites, either. And it was part of his goals and objectives, and he’ll tell you that from his boss, and he needed to get out there more, and he wanted to introduce me to people also. And so he went with me. I could have shown up to those places by myself, but I’m not sure I would have gotten the respect or the attention. Does that answer your question?”
“Yes, it does.”
“And, of course we travel together, so we became friends, right?” she said. “A million hours, you’re in the car or you’re on the plane.”
“You can’t help it,” said Thompson. “If you don’t get along it’s going to be a very long trip.”
“And we saw eye-to-eye from a business perspective on a lot of things,” said Andrea.
“Did the company pay for hotels, or it came out of your own pocket and got reimbursed?”
“Corporate cards.”
“What hotels did you guys normally stay at?”
“I like Hilton points so I would stay at Hiltons. Maybe all of them were Hiltons.”
“To be convenient, did you have rooms on the same floor?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “We didn’t control it, you know what I’m saying? We didn’t always control where the hotel put us. I have no problem being next door to each other. It’s neither here nor there. Again, we were friends. It didn’t bother me, I guess.”
Moving on to another topic, Thompson returned to a question he had asked her at her house.
“Anybody you can think of that would be interested in pursuing your husband? Your reaction was a little odd. You laughed, you smiled, and you said no one would be interested.”
“I’m laughing now,” Andrea said. “He doesn’t have time to go to the bathroom, let alone have an affair. It’s one of those things. Of course, through this whole thing people bring that up—vengeance or revenge, I have no idea. Honestly, he didn’t have time to pee. I can’t imagine him fitting that in. He loved me so much, and made that clear a million times a day, so I laughed because—”
“It’s so absurd?”
“It’s absurdly ridiculous,” she said. “There’s actually more words I can use.”
Thompson chuckled and said, “Understood.”
Without prompting Andrea then said, “My mom knew about this Hemy thing. I mentioned it to her—he expressed an interest. I needed to tell someone.”
“She’s the only one that didn’t jump up,” Thompson said, a reference to the family’s reaction when he asked the question during the interview at Andrea’s house.
“There you go,” said Andrea. “There’s no point in telling the rest of the family.”
“There is no point,” the detective agreed.
“No one needed to know.”
“I was sort of surprised you said it with everybody around.”
Speaking in a whisper, so softly the interview room microphones barely picked it up, Andrea said, “I’m not hiding—”
Thompson assured her, “I don’t get the impression that you’re hiding anything.”
“And I don’t think that this Hemy thing is anything. I really don’t,” she said, her voice louder. “If I did, I’d sit here and give you fifty other reasons why. I don’t know, that’s up to you to figure out, I guess. Or decide if that’s on your list. I don’t know how you guys figure out what your priorities are.”
“It’s one of those things that we have to look into and prove it one way or the other,” Thompson said, “so that when it comes to a trial, if a defense attorney brings it up, if they happen to get their hands on the information, we can say we investigated it, this is what we found, this is why we didn’t do anything with it.”
Andrea said, “Okay.”
Thompson and Cortellino would agree on priorities; looking into Hemy Neuman could wait, favoring other avenues of investigation. Thompson changed the subject “You guys met in 1994, you got married in 2000…”
And on it went. The interview lasted a few more minutes before Thompson ran out of questions and sent Andrea on her way.
CHAPTER 5
At Dunwoody Prep, forty-seven security cameras peered into almost every corner of the grounds. The day after the shooting, CDs of the footage from the two cameras with the best view of the scene—those trained on the parking lot—were submitted for analysis to Walter Pineda, a former Pinkerton detective who went on to start his own company, Video Enhancements, that specialized in analyzing security videos. He could adjust the contrast, color, and darkness of the moving images in the hope of getting a better view of the shooter. He could also lift the best images from multiple cameras and edit them together like a movie to provide a better sense of movement and time.
In this case he created an eerie sequence that began about an hour before the crime, when the van pulled into the parking lot at 8 a.m., left, then returned about an hour later. The effect implied that the shooter either was casing out the school, looking for the best location to kill, or had shown up at the wrong time, since the van went back to Rusty’s neighborhood then reappeared on the security footage at 9:10 a.m. Rusty’s Infiniti could be seen approaching the school, with Ian in the backseat and the van on his tail.
Nowhere in all the footage could any part of the actual murder be seen; it all occurred in a security camera blind spot. Nor could Pineda generate a better image of the shooter; in all the frames the assailant remained a bearded blur. But what did come through clearly—better than any of the descriptions provided by eyewitnesses—was the van. Witnesses had variously characterized it as a Chrysler, Kia, and Hyundai. Chief Grogan went public calling it a Dodge. It was silver or gray and probably new. The security cameras captured the van from different angles, the enhanced images providing police a strong hope of narrowing down the getaway vehicle.
Detective Thompson brought the photos to Chrysler, Honda, and Ford dealerships, but none said the van looked like one of theirs. A colleague, Officer Brian Tate, the policeman who had gotten the first call to the crime scene, suggested the van looked like a Kia. Looking at photos on the company’s website, Thompson compared the body shape, hubcaps, side-view mirrors, and lights. It all added up to a Kia Sedona, a family minivan. The general manager of a local Kia dealership examined the enhanced photos and confirmed that the murder van was in fact a 2011 Sedona, on the market for only weeks. A call to Kia headquarters found that sixteen hundred of those vans had been sold in the United States in black, burgundy, white, dark blue, light green, and silver. But only thirteen were sold in Georgia and South Carolina.
So began the time-consuming process of hunting down the van. Working off Kia’s list, police visited every buyer, then took pictures of the vans and checked alibis. All the Sedona owners were cleared.
But before police had to expand the search to other private buyers outside Georgia and South Carolina, Thompson got an idea. The enhanced photos from the security cameras revealed what looked like white stickers on the van’s windshield and driver’s-door window. A friend told Thompson that rental car agencies use window stickers with bar codes to keep track of their vehicles. Could the killer have rented the van?
Police refocused the search for 2011 Kia Sedonas sold as fleet vehicles to rental agencies in Georgia and North and South Carolina. This meant tracking down fewer vehicles than the more than nine hundred sold to private buyers outside Georgia. As investigators logged miles and hours tracking down vans, Thompson continued to chase leads to the tip line and from other law enforcement agencies and interviewing Rusty’s business associates and family members.
Adding to the workload was the fact that this was not the only murder investigation under way. Although the Sneiderman case attracted all the media attention, Dunwoody police actually had two other recent homicides. In July, an elderly couple’s bodies were found in the rubble of their home, apparently set on fire to conceal evidence of the murders.
/> “Certainly, there is pressure to bring some closure,” Chief Billy Grogan acknowledged to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in December 2010. “But these incidents are not related, so there’s no need to believe that Dunwoody is not safe.” He urged residents to have reasonable expectations. “Just because we have the Dunwoody Police Department doesn’t mean crime is going to disappear,” he said. Sergeant Gary Cortellino attributed part of the problem to new apartment complexes going up—the newspaper noted that the slain-and-burned couple lived near a “cluster of apartments.”
In the past, a small department like Dunwoody’s could have reached out for help to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but the state police force had its own staffing issues. Two years into the recession, budget cuts, hiring freezes, and furloughs had trimmed the GBI’s head count to its lowest level in a decade. The GBI would be able to provide police lab support, but for more investigators on the ground, the Dunwoody Police Department would have to look elsewhere.
By mid-December, a month into the investigation, it was all hands on deck for the Sneiderman case, with supervisors like Lieutenant David Barnes, who headed the detectives, pitching in. The department finally got outside help from the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, which provided investigators to track down the van leads and perform other tasks. Sergeant Cortellino obtained a list of fleet Kia Sedonas sold in the Southeast, then sent word to all the rental agencies in the region to hold on to their rentals until police could go out and inspect them. For each Sedona that Cortellino found, DA investigator William Presnell would head to the lot and take a photograph for comparison.
When a Kia Sedona was returned to one Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Presnell headed out to take a look. The lot was located on Riverstone Parkway in Canton, twenty-five miles northwest of Dunwoody in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the heart of Cherokee country. By the time Presnell got there, on December 14, the van had been rented out again. Presnell left his business card asking for a call when the van was returned. His phone rang a week later.
On December 21, he returned to the agency and saw the Sedona—silver with a sticker on the window—with South Carolina plates. The van looked like the one in the security video stills and was impounded. Forensic technicians conducted a thorough search, recovering small dark synthetic hairs. Working off Enterprise records obtained by subpoena, Thompson tracked down the people who rented the van over Halloween and asked if anybody had worn costume wigs or beards. They said they had not. The records showed that the van had been rented from another Enterprise Rent-A-Car agency in Marietta on November 17 and returned on November 18. The contact number was a cell phone.
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