Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  Two days before the murder, Waters saw Hemy at a ninety-minute status meeting. “Same as usual. Serious, getting into the work. I didn’t notice anything unusual,” she later said of the November 16 meeting. Ditto at a thirty-minute meeting on November 17. “He acted like he always had,” she said. “He was serious, levelheaded, logical, just walked us through that we needed to go through. I didn’t notice anything unusual.”

  Asked how Hemy interacted with Andrea, Waters said she noticed that they seemed to be closer to each other than with any other employees. At an Atlanta Braves game outing for work, for instance, they hung out with each other as the group waited to get into the ballpark. “The rest of us were milling around, having social conversations,” Waters would later recall in court, repeating what she had told investigators. At meetings Hemy and Andrea usually sat next to each other. “The only thing I noticed is that they were very familiar with each other and I just assumed they had known each other before,” she said.

  Carmen Harting, a twenty-one-year GE veteran, was Hemy’s secretary the last two years. She had observed her boss and Andrea driving together to work functions. Harting, who managed Hemy’s calendar, noted, “They had a lot of lunches together.” But neither woman said that they ever saw Hemy act affectionately—or inappropriately—toward Andrea. And Andrea never seemed uncomfortable around Hemy, and never expressed any complaints that reached them. The only hint of something brewing between them came that previous August, about three months before Rusty’s murder, when at one meeting they suddenly and uncharacteristically didn’t sit next to each other—they sat across from each other at the table. But that could have been due to any number of factors, the women said. The employees were constantly under deadline stress and even Hemy, despite his usual cool, had been known to occasionally snap at somebody.

  Otherwise, Hemy was described as a model boss: organized, analytical, calm, logical. He rarely talked about his personal life. His staff heard him say at some point he had spent time as a child in Mexico and Israel, and he could speak Spanish.

  One of the few people with whom Hemy was close was Al Harris, an audit program manager who worked for him and had an office next door. They talked at holiday parties, restaurant outings with the staff, the occasional office trip to an Atlanta Braves game. Hemy told Al his childhood was a “hard life,” much of it spent in boarding schools. The previous fall Hemy revealed he was going through a divorce. In December, after the murder, Hemy spoke about having stomach problems that sent him to the hospital. Beyond that, Harris knew very little about the private Hemy Neuman.

  But as employees thought hard, one thing about Hemy did stand out. On November 17, Hemy followed the thirty-minute meeting with Waters with a four-hour marathon meeting attended by, among others, Andrea. Starting at 10 a.m., the meeting’s agenda called for Hemy to describe a new technical process and ways to audit that process. As usual, he went to a dry-erase board to draw diagrams, flowcharts, and process maps.

  Jerry Morton, a quality program manager, noticed something strange. Hemy was diagramming a process that the employees already were doing. It was a mental lapse uncharacteristic of Hemy. Morton, who handled quality assurance for the engineering services division, pointed out the redundancy. Rather than responding, Hemy remained silent and looked over Morton’s head, appearing lost in thought. Morton had never seen Hemy behave this way. Later on during the meeting, Hemy answered one of Morton’s questions with another blank look. Morton assumed that something was on his mind.

  The next day, Rusty was murdered.

  Police retraced Hemy’s steps in the hours before the shooting. Using his statement to Barnes and Cortellino as a road map, investigators went to Ed Voyles Honda on Windy Hill Road in Marietta, about two miles from the GE office. Greg Gibbons, the service director, confirmed that Hemy arrived on the afternoon of the seventeenth. Service records showed that Hemy’s 2009 Odyssey van needed work on the computer software relating to the brakes. A recall notice had gone out and the warranty would cover the work. As Gibbons reviewed the service records for police, he saw a notation indicating that Hemy didn’t want to stay at the shop while the van was worked on but would come back the next day. That Hemy didn’t want to be a “waiter” struck Gibbons as unusual since the recall work would take only forty-five minutes. There was no provision for a free rental car.

  Across the street, Christina Testa, branch manager of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car, told detectives that at 2:30 p.m. on November 17 she opened the door for Hemy. After introducing herself, she passed him off to another agent. Testa sees about twenty customers a day, but Hemy would stand out. He had reserved the car the day before, on November 16, but arrived half an hour early for his appointment. The compact car he had requested was still in transit from another branch. Hemy sat in one of the chairs to the side while the employee tracked down his car.

  “He was very fidgety,” Testa said, according to her written statement to a DeKalb County DA investigator. “You could just tell he was very uneasy like he was uneasy to go somewhere. So after a few minutes, and I’m like, oh crap. This guy’s waiting in here and I don’t want him to make a scene because he’s been waiting. So he just sat there. He didn’t really say anything. He was looking down a lot.”

  Testa told another employee, “We just need to get this guy out of here.” They decided to offer him a free upgrade to a larger vehicle to get him on his way. Hemy accepted. He presented his driver’s license and credit card and was handed the keys to a 2011 Kia Sedona minivan. The van was silver and had bar-code stickers on the front windshield and driver’s-side window to identify the car.

  The investigators found that the following day, November 18, 2010, Hemy did arrive early at GE as he had stated. This was confirmed by GE’s security operations. Every GE employee gets a photo ID badge with an assigned number. The plastic badges give them access to the doors and elevators in the four buildings that make up what the company calls its campus: the main building with the number 4200 and three other buildings, the 3200 and 1300 buildings, and a building half a mile away at 2018 Powers Ferry Road. Every time the ID badge is used, a record is made with the time and location. In addition, cameras are focused on hallways and waiting rooms, entrances and the parking garage, and twenty-two security officers patrol the grounds. Guards monitor the front doors to the 4200 and 2018 buildings twenty-four hours a day, and patrols roam the rest of the campus. It is almost impossible to get in or out of any building, elevator, or parking garage at GE’s Marietta offices without security knowing about it.

  Footage from one of the eleven security cameras scattered throughout the four-level parking structure showed a silver Kia Sedona minivan entering shortly after 5:30 a.m. on November 18. Under subpoena, GE produced the records of all key-card activity, formatted as a computer-generated log stored on a server in a secure room and accessible only by security and authorized GE employees. A printout showed that Hemy Neuman swiped his security ID badge at the entrance to the main building at 5:37 a.m. Police went back through the records and found that Hemy’s arrival time was uncharacteristically early—he normally got to work at between 7:45 a.m. and 8:15 a.m.

  Thirty seconds after scanning into the front door, Hemy used his key card to activate the lobby-level elevator to the floor where his office was located. At 5:45 a.m. his computer was up and running. GE keeps records of when the password-accessible work computers are turned on and can keep track of the activity, from websites visited to emails sent and received. GE’s in-house high-tech forensic examiner, Kathleen Gough, uses this data for a range of IT investigations, from sexual harassment to theft of company secrets.

  Gough told investigators that while Hemy had turned on his computer shortly before 6 a.m., he didn’t type on it. There were no records of emails, websites, or Word documents being opened. With his computer still on, Hemy left his office. A security camera trained on the basement hallway showed him leaving at 5:51 a.m., according to the time stamp on the video, apparently taki
ng the stairs instead of the elevator. He had only been at work for twenty minutes.

  Later that morning, an employee named Michael Farnam arrived at 7:30 a.m. and turned on his computer. A quality manager in the thermal engineering division, Farnam had been scheduled to attend a 9 a.m. meeting with Hemy. But his computer now showed an Outlook email from Hemy saying the meeting had been changed to 2:30 p.m. Farnam couldn’t tell exactly when the email was sent, only that it came between 6 p.m. the night before when he left work and when he got to his desk that morning at 7:30 a.m.

  That same morning another employee, Alan Schachtely, a software engineer and process engineer, was attending a training class. Schachtely had about the same rank at the company as Hemy—the two shared a boss—and he had known Hemy for about two years. Schachtely and Andrea supported the same organization that built the software for energy services. Their offices shared a wall and were located in a different building from where Hemy worked.

  At 10:34 a.m. on November 18, Schachtely received a text on his BlackBerry from Andrea: “Call me asap pleas [sic].”

  Not wanting to leave in the middle of the class, he wrote back, “5 min.…”

  Andrea responded, “My husban [sic] was shot.”

  A stunned Schachtely wrote back, “Calling.”

  He walked out of the course and called her from the hallway. She asked him to call her manager to tell him her husband had been shot.

  At 10:45 a.m., Schachtely sent Hemy a text:

  “Hemy.… It’s Alan Schachtely,” he wrote, giving his full name because he didn’t know Hemy well, having attended occasional meetings with him but never texting him before. “I need to make contact with you. Andrea has a family emergency that I need to make you aware of.”

  Hemy replied, “Call my cell.”

  Schachtely couldn’t be certain, but believed he did talk to Hemy on the phone. Either way, Hemy got back to Schachtely, sending a text that said, “I just talked to her.”

  “Ok … Good,” Schachtely replied. “You are in the know. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.”

  Later that morning, Schachtely told police, he spoke again with Andrea on the phone. She told him her husband had died.

  Schachtely didn’t know where Hemy was when he talked to him on the phone and texted him. They worked in different buildings. But Hemy’s whereabouts twenty minutes later, at 11:06 a.m., when his debit card swiped a reader at a RaceTrac gas station on Delk Road in Marietta, was about two and a half miles from the office. Hemy purchased 2.43 gallons of gas for $6.41. He then turned up at the Enterprise agency, south of the gas station, and returned the van. The odometer showed that 123 miles had been placed on it since it was rented the afternoon before.

  At 11:48 a.m., Hemy was back at GE. This time he didn’t scan himself into his building using his key card but obtained a visitor pass to enter the nearby 2018 building—where Andrea worked. It’s not uncommon for employees to get visitor badges if they lose or forget their regular ID badges; GE rules require the guard check a driver’s license or passport to confirm the employee’s identity. Visitor badge holders also have to sign a computer screen at a kiosk that is monitored by a security camera.

  Security camera footage showed Hemy going through this process. The computer badge log showed that the visitor pass was swiped at 11:51 a.m. to access the second floor where Andrea’s office was located. No cameras showed the private office space, so his activities weren’t known. Whatever he did, it took about twenty minutes, for at 12:12 p.m. he obtained from the security guard a second visitor pass, this one at the front desk of the main building—his building. He scanned the card to get through the lobby and again access the elevator at 12:14 p.m. He would have had to produce an ID to the guard to get the badge. A video camera recorded him in the lobby.

  At some unknown time he left the building—no cameras caught him—but twenty minutes later, at 12:36 p.m., he swiped his regular employee badge to reenter. At 1 p.m., Hemy was in his office on the phone when Alice Waters entered and overheard him say something to the effect of: “Let me know when you find out anything.” He hung up and said nothing to her of the phone call.

  She was there for their regular biweekly meeting in which Hemy catches up on her work. Ten minutes in, somebody came into his office—Waters didn’t remember who—and Hemy excused himself to speak to this person outside her hearing range, returning about two minutes later appearing “a little disturbed.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked him.

  Nothing, he told her.

  “Something is bothering you,” she said. “What is it?”

  He looked at her and said, “Andrea’s husband was shot and killed.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

  Hemy excused himself again, telling Waters to wait in his office while he contacted the human resources department to tell them what had happened. Reinier Van Ede, GE’s human resources manager, welcomed Hemy into his office and started to make a joke. They worked on the same floor, their offices about fifty yards away. They saw each other frequently and got along.

  Hemy stopped him.

  “He came to me as HR manager,” Van Ede later said, “letting me know that Andrea had to leave the office because her husband was shot.” He described Hemy’s demeanor as “appropriately concerned.”

  About ninety minutes later, Hemy appeared at his 2:30 p.m. meeting with Michael Farnam, the meeting that had been rescheduled overnight per the Outlook message. Nothing was said about Rusty or Andrea. “It was a normal meeting as far as I recall,” Michael later said.

  Taken as a whole, the security evidence and witness statements bolstered the police case against Hemy, contradicting his claim that he was in the office during the time of the shooting. His alibi was shattered.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Good morning,” DeKalb County district attorney Robert James greeted reporters at his office. “During the course of the last four weeks, my office began to work with the Dunwoody Police Department to investigate the death of Mr. Russell Sneiderman.”

  Robert James was young, handsome, and ambitious. Raised in Tennessee, James is the son of NFL star Robert James Sr., a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end for the Buffalo Bills in the late 1960s and early 1970s who after football became a minister and assistant high school principal. His mother Barbara James also was an educator. After graduating from Middle Tennessee State, where he played basketball and was president of the African-American Student Association, Robert Jr. moved to Atlanta to study law at Georgia State. Stints as Rockdale County assistant district attorney and DeKalb County solicitor-general, the office that prosecutes misdemeanors, earned him a spot on Georgia Trend Magazine’s “40 Under 40” list. In 2010, he ran for DA in a special election to complete the remaining three and a half years of the term of Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, who resigned when President Obama appointed her to a top post in the Environmental Protection Agency. The thirty-nine-year-old James trounced attorney Constance Heard with 64 percent of the vote.

  Three days after James took office, Rusty Sneiderman was murdered. The new DA seized the moment. James not only provided investigators, but also controlled the flow of public information. After the police department announced Hemy’s arrest, Chief Grogan wanted to hold a second news conference on January 6, two days later, but James nixed it. “At that point we were deep into an active investigation,” James later told the Dunwoody Crier. “You want to control the integrity of whatever information comes out and goes in. If certain things get out, it makes it difficult for us to conduct our investigation. We really wanted to make sure that no one would talk to the media and the only way to do that was to close ranks and take it over at an earlier-than-normal phase.”

  If Grogan felt slighted, he kept it to himself. Others in Dunwoody weren’t so quiet. “Information Blackout in Sneiderman Murder,” complained the Crier in a headline, which reported on a tense Dunwoody Homeowners’ Association meeting following Hemy’s arres
t. About two hundred people packed Dunwoody United Methodist Church, anxious to hear from Grogan what was going on with the murder case. “I’m going to talk about our community outreach programs,” the chief told them. “I know what you all want to know, but I can’t comment on that issue.” The pressure reached City Hall. Councilman Denny Shortal sent an email to constituents: “Many of you have asked why there isn’t more information released to the public concerning our progress in these investigations. Folks, investigating a crime, especially a capital crime, is not a public-affair event. In fact, it is just not good practice to release information to the public on the progress of investigations.”

  It was shades of the bad old days of DeKalb County rule for many residents. For the next month, Dunwoody remained subjected to what the Crier called the “party line of no comment,” all part of James’s strategy to keep the case from buckling under the weight of growing media interest and public pressure for answers. James later admitted in the Crier interview that his tactics were “challenging, given that it was so early in the administration.” But he insisted he had no choice.

  Now, on Tuesday, February 8, James was front and center before the TV cameras with the first official statement in weeks.

  “Since Mr. Sneiderman’s death in November of last year, the Dunwoody Police and my investigators have worked tirelessly to bring justice to the loved ones of Mr. Russell Sneiderman and the citizens of DeKalb County,” he said. “Today, at 9 a.m., the DeKalb County Grand Jury returned a two-count indictment of Hemy Neuman. The indictment is currently being filed with the DeKalb County Clerk of Superior Court. Neuman was indicted by the Grand Jury for one count of malice murder and one count of possession of a firearm during a commission of a felony.

  “Our collective goal,” he continued, “is to continue to seek justice and preserve the public safety of our community, not only for the Sneiderman family but for anyone who has lost a loved one because of violent crime.”