Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  “I would like to announce that we have made an arrest in this case,” he continued. “We have arrested forty-eight-year-old Hemy Neuman. He has been charged with murder and he is now being held at the DeKalb County Jail without bond. The investigation of this case is still ongoing. Additional information will be given at a later time. We are asking if you have any information about Mr. Neuman that you contact Detective Andrew Thompson.”

  Anyone expecting a hardened professional hit man out of The Sopranos would be disappointed. The face from the booking photo was a middle-aged man with neatly cut gray hair, bearing little resemblance to the swarthy bearded suspect from the police sketch. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution would describe him as “physically unassuming.”

  The suspect had no criminal record. “He is out of Buckhead,” Carlson said, the address a surprise. If Rusty Sneiderman was an unlikely victim, then Hemy Neuman, from one of the best neighborhoods in Atlanta, seemed the most far-fetched of killers.

  “We still have detectives that are actively working this case as we speak,” Carlson concluded. “So for the integrity of the case, I’m not going to be able to answer any questions. We will be gathering information and when we do have information we will be releasing it.”

  * * *

  While Carlson gave Neuman’s residence as Buckhead, for reporters building biographies, the property records showed that he had a house in East Cobb, about five miles southeast of Dunwoody. East Cobb is essentially Dunwoody’s demographic twin, another leafy, upscale neighborhood north of Atlanta where houses start at half a million dollars and soar upward. Reporters descended upon the thirty-two-hundred-square-foot home on Lasalle Drive with two stories, nine rooms, and three and a half baths. Taped to the front door was a handwritten note: “We will not be taking interviews at the moment. Please remain off of the property. Respectfully, thank you.”

  Neighbors said that Neuman lived there with his wife, listed on records as Ariela Neuman, and three children, two of them adults, one a teenager. “It’s very shocking, totally not the kind you can imagine would do something like that at all,” neighbor Dinesh Chaudhry told Channel 2 news. The last time anybody saw him, Hemy was barbecuing with his family. He had long and strong ties to the community. He helped with the Robotics Club at Cobb County’s Walton High School and was active in the Jewish community. His Facebook page revealed he grew up in Israel, where he attended a school north of Tel Aviv. The school’s website said the students came from abroad and Israel from disadvantaged families. His LinkedIn page showed that he had graduated from Georgia Tech. On Facebook, he wrote that he had spent the holidays traveling “with the girls in Florida,” an apparent reference to his children. He last updated the page that previous Friday, wishing his friends a happy New Year.

  His Facebook and LinkedIn pages also showed that he worked as an operations and quality manager at GE Energy in Marietta, just a few miles from his house. A spokesperson for General Electric told the media the company was fully cooperating with police and confirmed what many reporters had already started to figure out. Among the dozen or so people who directly reported to Hemy in the quality division within the Energy Group was Andrea Sneiderman, wife of the murdered Rusty Sneiderman.

  Once again, the how-could-it-be shock rippled across the Atlanta suburbs. “A lingering question remains: How does a learned, accomplished man with a successful career, one who contributes to his community and has no prior record, find himself facing a murder charge?” asked 11Alive news. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote, “Despite the arrest, questions still linger regarding why Sneiderman was killed and who was involved.” It simply seemed impossible that somebody like Hemy Neuman could kill somebody like Russell Sneiderman.

  But the revelation that Andrea worked for Hemy gave the local media something to chew on. Everyone now forgot the notion of a hit man targeting Rusty in a business dispute; the new theory centered on Andrea’s job. The Journal-Constitution wondered “whether there had been any falling out between Sneiderman and her supervisor.” But most people were just confused. Rusty’s friend Paul Sims took one look at the picture of unassuming Hemy Neuman and drew a blank. “I’ve never heard of him before at all,” Sims told Channel 2 news.

  As for Rusty’s family, there was a collective reluctance to say too much. “We talked to the police,” his father Donald Sneiderman told the Journal-Constitution. “We just don’t know enough, so we aren’t going to comment right now.” Rusty’s brother, Steven, added: “There’s still a lot of questions that we need answered. But we’re grateful for the hard work of the Dunwoody Police Department and we look forward to seeing this case through to a conclusion.” Unlike many others, they knew all about Hemy Neuman. Rusty had spoken of him. He had attended the funeral and shiva, giving a prayer and speaking both to Rusty’s father and brother. And Andrea had said he had hit on her. None of this was known publicly yet; nor would people yet catch on to the simmering animosity between Rusty’s family and Andrea.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, January 5, the day after his arrest, Hemy made his first court appearance. A patrol car drove him to the parking lot of the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur. Hemy wore an orange jail jumpsuit with DEKALB COUNTY JAIL stenciled on the back. With a beefy cop behind him and Detective Thompson in front of him, Hemy made a perp walk from the patrol car to the front door of the courthouse, surrounded by reporters and TV camera crews. He slumped over as he walked, not looking up, his posture no doubt bent by the shackles that wrapped around his waist and cuffed his hands in front of him.

  “What do you have to say?” one reporter shouted at him. “Why did police arrest you? How do you know Mr. Sneiderman?”

  “Do you have anything to say? Nothing at all?” asked another reporter.

  Hemy took a seat at the far end of a wooden bench to listen to the judge confront him with his alleged misdeeds. He appeared forlorn in his jail wear and plastic jail sandals worn over white sweat socks. There were no family members, no friends, no co-workers to support him. Next to him sat another prisoner in the same orange jumpsuit.

  The judge informed Hemy that he had been “charged with the offense of murder. What the defendant did with malice forethought … caused the death of Russell Sneiderman, a human being, by shooting the victim.”

  Hemy showed no emotion. He looked only at the judge, ignoring the crowd of journalists in the courtroom behind him, the media pool video camera to his right. He could have been in a management meeting hearing the findings of a quality-control report. He asked the judge a couple of questions in a calm, quiet voice. Among them was a request for a lawyer.

  “Mr. Neuman, I’m appointing a public defender to represent you at your next hearing,” said the judge. “That preliminary hearing,” the judge continued, “will take place on February the eighth at nine o’clock in Courtroom A, which is across the hall. The detective will bring you to that that area and the public defender will be around to talk to you about your case.”

  The judge explained that if Hemy hired private counsel, those lawyers would need to notify the court and the public defender would back out. Hemy nodded and said yes quietly. A court staff person gave him a clipboard with forms on it. Hemy asked what he was signing. The judge told him it was a continuance form.

  The brief hearing ended with Hemy being denied bail. He was led back into the parking lot as the cameramen swarmed. It was a cold, gray morning, the wind blowing in the microphones.

  “Did you kill Rusty Sneiderman?” shouted a reporter.

  Hemy kept his head down and kept walking. A cop placed him in the backseat of a black-and-white patrol car, which headed back to the jail.

  At 1:30 p.m. that same day, Andrea Sneiderman was squeezed into the same cramped police interview room where Hemy was grilled, this time sitting across the table from the number two man at the Dunwoody Police Department. Deputy Chief David Sides, a veteran cop who had worked everything from patrol to sex crimes, spoke with an ominous drawl and exuded t
he cheerless demeanor of Dick Cheney, whom he resembled.

  It was not their first meeting, but it would be the most intense.

  “You and I have spent, I think, close to four hours together, and I’ve always been very forthright with you about what my goal is,” he began. “My goal has always been to identify the suspect and prosecute him to the full extent of the law. And the only question I have is: Are you willing to help me do that?”

  “Absolutely,” answered Andrea in a small voice.

  “We’ve made an arrest in the case, and I need you to help me,” he said. “You have to tell me, what I have to have, I have to have the truth, nothing but the truth, all of it, unabridged, undiluted, pleasant or unpleasant.”

  “Right,” said Andrea in a near-whisper, breathy and soft.

  “If you’re ready to do that, now is the time to talk. If you can’t do that now, you need to tell me,” he said. “Do you understand what I’m asking you?”

  “I think—”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  After Lieutenant Barnes entered the room and sat to Andrea’s left, putting her in the corner area previously occupied by Hemy, Sides told her: “Let’s establish a new foundation. The new foundation is that he sat in this room for about four hours yesterday and talked.”

  “Okay,” said Andrea.

  “The secondary foundation is I’ve had an investigator sitting at GE most of the day.”

  This seemed to throw Andrea. “Today?” she asked.

  “Uh-hmmm,” he said. “Based upon the foundation of what he told us yesterday and what the co-workers told us today, what is it you think they told us?”

  “That my co-workers told you?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” she said.

  “What do you think he told us?” asked Sides.

  “Oh, I’m sure he told you that he thought I was in love with him, or something along those lines,” she said, her hands placed on the table palms down. “He’s crazy! I don’t know. I don’t know what he told you. That he was in love with me? That he was infatuated? That he stalked me? I don’t know. You tell me. I don’t know what he said. That he wanted to be my husband? That he went crazy? I’m hoping he said he went crazy—because he’s crazy! I don’t know what he would say.”

  “Why do you say that he’s crazy?” asked Sides.

  “Because you told me that he shot my husband. Why would someone shoot anybody else? Why would someone, no matter how they might feel about someone else, why would they kill them? Why? Why? Everyone at work loves him, they think he’s the greatest thing ever, great boss, good mentor—how would we know that he’s crazy?”

  Andrea revealed that a week earlier, on December 28—a little over a month after the murder—Hemy sent her an iTunes gift song. It was Bruno Mars’s love ballad “Just the Way You Are.” Andrea said it made her “nauseated.”

  “Who sends a song?” she asked. “What was he hoping, that I would recover and fall in love with him? I don’t have an answer to that. I really don’t. I told Detective Andy—I told you right away that he had feelings for me. I told you. I mean, I didn’t think it was anything worth telling anyone over. Yeah, he had feelings for me, he made that clear. Did that make him crazy? I don’t know. I don’t understand crazy people.”

  She stopped rambling and looked at the stone-faced cops. “Please, ask me a question. I don’t know what you want.”

  After another lecture from Sides about the need for her to tell the truth, they asked her about the gift song and other emails she had received and sent. She told them that Hemy had brought her work laptop to her at the shiva and that she recently used it to submit an overdue expense reimbursement so her corporate American Express wouldn’t get canceled. She saw the gift song on her BlackBerry while in Florida. Barnes asked to see the device, and she handed it to him.

  “I like Hemy as a person,” Andrea told him as he pressed the buttons on her BlackBerry. “There’s no doubt about that, I thought he was my friend, I thought he—” She buried her head in hands. “We had dinners together, we traveled.”

  “We’ll get into that in just a second,” said Barnes. “Mind giving me your password?”

  “My password is ‘Rusty,’” she said.

  “I’m going to ask you not to delete anything, okay,” said Barnes, before asking Andrea once again about her business trips with Hemy. Barnes now asked most of the questions, assuming the role that Sergeant Gary Cortellino had with Hemy, with Sides sitting across the table watching Andrea and saying nothing.

  Sometimes speaking in a whisper, Andrea went over her trips to Florida, Nevada, South Carolina, and the United Kingdom. She spoke of how he first expressed his feelings for her by Lake Tahoe. She told her friends about it but never reported Hemy to the company’s human resources manager because she didn’t think it was serious enough to jeopardize her job.

  “And did you make any trips this year by yourself without him?” asked Barnes.

  “I had training in Denver, auditor training.”

  “What month was that?”

  “July also. It was like the week after Minden. I remember because my husband had to do two weeks by himself with the kids. I came home for the weekend. I then sort of had to leave again for this training class.”

  “Hemy was not in Denver?”

  “No, not that I know of, but—”

  Sides asked, “Did he ever express interest in a relationship after Lake Tahoe?”

  “I mean, I guess, nothing that I directly point to,” she said. “I guess he would say: I wish you would change your mind. That kind of comment.”

  Barnes asked about the day of the murder. “The first second you heard what happened, your women’s intuition has got to be going off the radar?”

  “That wasn’t it at all,” she said.

  “What were you thinking?” Barnes asked.

  “I didn’t know Rusty was dead until I went to the hospital,” she said. She explained that after Donna Formata at the school called her, “I asked her what was going on, I screamed into the phone, ‘What was going on?’ She said she just needed me to come. So I ran down the stairs, and I drove all the way. I called my mom, my dad, my brother and told them to meet me at Dunwoody Prep, that something happened to Rusty and I had no idea what was going on.

  “I got to Dunwoody Prep, I pulled up and fell out of the car. All I see is yellow tape and a car. Rusty’s car. I fell to the ground, somebody picked me up, some police person, and they walk me into Dunwoody Prep. I still didn’t know what had happened, no one was telling me, no one was telling me what was going on. So they bring me into the office and Cortellino comes in and sits in front of me. I asked him what was going on? He says, ‘Your husband’s been hurt, we don’t know what hospital he’s at,’ some bullshit lie. He then he says, he said, ‘Is there anyone who would want to hurt your husband?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea.’”

  “As the day goes on,” asked Barnes, “and you’re going through your mind, at any point did you suspect Hemy?”

  “Never, never.”

  “You never thought Hemy would have done anything until yesterday?”

  “No, it wasn’t up until that email”—the iTunes gift song.

  “And you got that email—it was on December the twenty-eighth?”

  “Right. I didn’t even read it until recently.”

  In the email Hemy also asked if she would be coming to the office holiday party. For the first time Andrea now revealed that she had communicated with Hemy in the days before his arrest. “I told him I didn’t want to hear from him,” she said. Hemy responded that she “must be going through so much.” Andrea told him she didn’t want to go to the party. His email, she said, “just made me nauseated.”

  “Why wouldn’t you have called us on the twenty-eighth and told us that he had sent had that? That’s pretty bizarre.”

  “I don’t know,” said Andrea. “And you know what? I sat at my d
ining room on Friday after this happened, with Detective Andy, he asked me if anyone had feelings toward me. I gave him Hemy’s name immediately.”

  Andrea became upset again, seemed on the verge of crying. “My in-laws are sitting right there at that same table. I wanted you to find something, because this—this is not my life.”

  There was a knock on the door and Barnes left the interview room. Sides went over previous questions for a couple of minutes before Barnes returned.

  “Your mom thinks we’re holding you hostage back here,” he told Andrea. “Can you put her at ease? And then we can ask you a few more questions? We’d like to get done today, so I know this is not easy for you, but it is what it is, and you’re the person who has the answers that we need. At least we have some more questions for you, try to understand why this happened. We need to talk to you.”

  Andrea left the room to speak with her mother, but she didn’t return. She would never sit for another police interview again.

  CHAPTER 9

  Along Wildwood Parkway, amid the pricey neighborhoods where visitors have to check in at a guard shack, a driveway marked by a discreet sign cuts through the trees to a complex of sleek office buildings. These are the Marietta offices of GE Energy, and as Deputy Chief Sides had informed Andrea, detectives had arrived. With search warrants, detectives cleaned out Hemy’s office drawers and seized his computer. They obtained the travel records of Hemy and Andrea, including their American Express card charges, plane reservations, and hotel and restaurant bills.

  They also spoke to employees.

  Alice Waters, an engineering manager, had worked in the Atlanta office since 2004, after transferring from the Schenectady, New York, office. She handled fifteen computer programs that automated various processes in her engineering group. On the same level as Andrea in a corporate ladder—Waters called her a “peer”—Waters served as a manager in another engineering group, also reporting to Hemy.