DaSilva thought this was the end of it, but one evening about two weeks later Hemy Neuman appeared at the Buckhead Diner while DaSilva was parking cars. DaSilva didn’t know how Hemy got there, seeing no car. Hemy apparently walked up to him. Speaking English this time, Hemy asked if DaSilva remembered him. DaSilva said yes, of course. Hemy reminded him anyway that he was the man who had bought the gun and asked if he could talk to him. DaSilva reluctantly agreed, wondering how Hemy had found him at his other job. Without being asked, Hemy said the other valets at the Atlanta Fish Market had directed him to the Buckhead Diner.
Hemy went on to tell DaSilva that “something bad happened with the gun,” DaSilva later said. DaSilva asked if the gun had malfunctioned and worried that Hemy wanted his money back. Hemy wouldn’t say what went wrong, only that he had to get rid of the gun. DaSilva asked if he had sold it, and Hemy replied that he had disposed of it where nobody would find it.
Then out of the blue Hemy said, “Don’t ever have a mistress.”
DaSilva didn’t know what to say, so he just said, “Yes.”
Hemy told a convoluted story about a mistress causing trouble with a family and that this family knew Hemy had the gun—somebody had seen him flash it—and members of the family got scared. So Hemy tossed the gun into Lake Lanier, a resort with boating, sandy beaches, banquet halls, a boardwalk, and a water park fifty miles northeast of Atlanta.
DaSilva listened, unsure how to react. Hemy explained that some people might try to contact DaSilva asking if he’d sold Hemy the gun or if he’d ever met him. If that happened, Hemy advised, DaSilva should just say that the pair knew each other through mutual friends at Georgia Tech and that DaSilva was trying to get them jobs at GE where Hemy worked. DaSilva agreed to lie for him but felt uneasy. Hemy offered him a bunch of twenty-dollar bills from his pocket, but DaSilva said he declined. Hemy asked if he was sure he didn’t want the money; DaSilva told him yes and added that he really needed to get back to work. Hemy walked away.
Rattled by the conversation, DaSilva that day approached an Atlanta police officer. He asked the officer if a person could get in trouble for selling a gun that was later used in a crime. According to DaSilva, the officer told him that if the gun had been sold legally, the seller need not be worried. Feeling assured the sale was legal, DaSilva said nothing more about it until he was contacted by Potter.
Hoping to obtain a shell casing for comparison, the investigator asked DaSilva if he had ever fired the weapon in the six months he owned it and kept any of the shells. DaSilva said he shot it about five hundred times at a range but had not kept the casings.
But he did know where he might be able to find one. When DaSilva purchased the gun, it came with a shell from a test fire. Excited about his first gun purchase, he gave that shell to his girlfriend, Aurora Juarez—also a gun enthusiast. It was “like a gift,” he later said, “nothing special.”
At Potter’s request, DaSilva called Aurora, who was at home and said she’d talk to him. The detective went to her house, flashed his badge, and asked her if she had kept the shell.
“I keep everything,” she said.
It had been in her room. Potter took the shell casing to Fite’s laboratory in an envelope. Through the stereomicroscope he compared the casing with one found at the crime scene, looking at their respective ejection marks.
Fite, who had testified twenty-seven hundred times in cases for both the defense and prosecution, was prepared to go to court to give his expert opinion that Rusty Sneiderman was gunned down with the $375 Bersa Thunder 40 that Hemy Neuman bought from Jan DaSilva.
CHAPTER 12
In late July 2010, Hemy Neuman left for a business trip to Colorado, telling his wife, Ariela, he was meeting an HR representative. She would later find that the trip went on the family credit card and not Hemy’s corporate American Express. She was aghast that Hemy, who had put the cash-strapped family on a budget, found the money to dash off to Colorado for a few days. Pressed on his expenses, he admitted to Ariela that he had in fact purchased two bottles of wine during the meetings. Only later did Ariela discover what she called the true identity of the “HR representative.” So, too, did detectives.
Tracing Hemy’s travels for GE proved easy. Everything was meticulously documented in GE’s travel files, from dates and locations to the names of restaurants, hotels, and items purchased. GE Energy had a liberal travel and expense policy, leaving the details to the discretion of the boss. Hemy could decide how frequently and how extravagantly employees could travel on the company dime, and with whom he would travel. In the seven months before Rusty’s murder, his companion was usually Andrea.
Going through her expense records as well, investigators found the trips that she had spoken of in her police interviews. Her May 24, 2010, excursion to Florida shortly after she was hired was there. So was her July 13–14 trip to Minden, Nevada, where she said Hemy revealed he had feelings for her—the fleeting moment she said the two had quickly put behind them.
Investigators also found the June 21 overnight trip to Norfolk, Virginia, that Andrea and Hemy took. The receipts showed they dined at the Sirena Cuchina Italian restaurant downtown, with Hemy’s expense form showing a bill of $154.34, including a $50 bottle of wine. They also found the July 18 trip that Andrea took to Longmont, Colorado, north of Denver, where she stayed at the Hampton Inn, a Hilton property that gave her travel points.
Andrea told police that she traveled there solo for auditor training. But interviews with hotel staff revealed a different story.
Before Andrea arrived, the phone rang at the front desk. Hampton Inn day shift clerk Ruth Ingraham answered. It was 11:30 a.m. and a man was calling to say that his wife, whom he identified as Andrea Sneiderman, would be checking in that night after arriving on a 7 p.m. flight. He said they were newlyweds and that she had come to the hotel on business. He said they had never been apart since getting married and he worried that she would be very lonely.
“And he wanted me to purchase flowers, chocolates, and a nice card to write a note in to be put into her room,” Ingraham later said in court, repeating what she had told local police recruited to assist Dunwoody detectives. “And he said he would be flying out during the week as a surprise and that he would repay me.”
A new employee at the hotel, Ingraham didn’t know what to do. “I said it’s very romantic, but I just don’t know what the rules are,” she later recalled.
The man wouldn’t take no for an answer. Becoming “very insistent,” she said, he tried to talk her into buying the flowers and chocolates, but she refused. He finally gave up, but did ask if she would leave a message for Andrea when she arrived. Ingraham agreed. As he dictated, Ruth scribbled into the front desk logbook: “Andrea, for the sweetest and most beautiful woman in the world. Peaceful sleep knowing that you are always in my dreams. Love, Hemy.” For the clerk, he left his full name, Hemy Neuman, and a phone number with Atlanta’s 404 area code. When night clerk Brady Blackburn took over the front desk and read the log, he added his own notation: “WTF am I supposed to do with this?”
The insistent Hemy had become the talk of the Hampton Inn staff. At a company picnic the next day, Ingraham asked her boss, the hotel owner, what to do about the request to buy flowers and chocolates. He told her she didn’t have to buy the items. That night after the picnic, Hemy called again, this time telling Blackburn that his new wife Andrea would be lonely traveling without him. “He impressed upon me what a great travesty, what a problem that she was going to be apart from him,” Blackburn later recalled.
When Hemy asked Blackburn to buy the flowers and chocolates, the clerk suggested that he contact a florist himself to arrange a delivery to the room. But the man said the florists were closed and asked if the clerk could somewhere find flowers and leave them in the woman’s room, and then be reimbursed with a personal check when the man arrived a few days later.
Blackburn laughed. He told the man that would be impossible, that he couldn’t aff
ord anything like that. The man asked why. The clerk told him it was none of his business and the request was outside of hotel policy. Through the conversation, the man struck a strangely familiar tone, telling the clerk, “You’re my friend.” When Blackburn repeated that he wouldn’t do it, the man was “disappointed, dejected, but he didn’t fight me on it,” he later said.
When Andrea Sneiderman checked in later that night, Blackburn told her she had a message. He didn’t read it verbatim, instead paraphrasing it: “Andrea, Hemy says he loves you.”
Andrea blushed and looked down, according to Blackburn.
Andrea got a room with two queen beds. But contrary to what she told police, she would not be alone in Longmont. Three days later, on Wednesday, July 21, 2010, Hemy took Frontier Airlines Flight 305 from Atlanta to Denver, arriving at 8:20 p.m., charging the airfare on his own credit card and not the corporate American Express, records showed. That morning, Andrea asked a clerk named Lindsay Clayton to move her to a room with a single bed. Andrea also said the room would have two guests instead of one.
And she requested a late checkout for Thursday, her last day at the hotel.
According to flight records, Andrea and Hemy returned to Atlanta on July 23 on the same Frontier Airlines flight, leaving at 11:48 p.m. from Denver. Andrea had arranged for a seat next to his, with GE covering Andrea’s expenses and Hemy paying his own way.
* * *
The day before the Longmont trip, Hemy had sent Andrea an email about a natural wonder called Ruby Falls in the Lookout Mountains near Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“It’s a waterfall in a cave and wishing I shared that tranquility with you,” he wrote on July 17. “Wishing you were here.”
Andrea responded, “Ditto.”
This was the first of hundreds of emails and text messages between them, obtained via subpoena, covering the months leading up to the murder and adding another layer of information about their travels and relationship. Two days later, on July 19, after Hemy had pestered the Hampton Inn staff to leave flowers and chocolates for Andrea, he sent a photo of roses.
“Those are gorgeous, seriously,” Andrea replied. “I have an appreciation for perfectly open roses, not sure what else to say but thank you. Unbelievably thoughtful of you.” She told him it was “so thoughtful and sweet. I knew you might try something like this.” In a message, Hemy alluded to his calls to the hotel staff, telling Andrea that a clerk called him “the last great romantic.”
“Romantic for sure,” Andrea replied. “Talk to you in a few.”
When they had both returned to Atlanta two days later, Hemy messaged her that he was “exhausted” after the trip but that, “You’re in my every thought.”
Andrea replied, “Try to get some rest. Please enjoy the day.”
Like Andrea, Hemy had not told police about going to Longmont, and when investigators later spoke with Hemy’s wife, she recounted how he had claimed it was a business excursion but ended up paying for it himself. Then, just two weeks later, on August 12, Hemy met Rusty. This was the lunch meeting that both Hemy and Andrea had told police about in which Hemy sought help getting a new job. If Hemy and Andrea were secretly having an affair, Hemy clearly hid it well. An email from Rusty (copying Andrea) showed that the men got along famously.
Hemy,
Thank you for making time to get together for lunch today. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I can see why Andrea is enjoying working with you.
During our conversation, you mentioned something about GE that reminded me of my favorite case in business school. It’s about a GE executive who leaves GE, buys a business and sells it a few years later for a significant profit. When you have a minute, you may want to check out his story.
Please let me know when you have time to continue our conversation. I am looking forward to it.
Talk to you soon,
Rusty.
Rusty then emailed business associates:
My friend, Hemy Neuman, is currently an executive with GE Energy and he is interested in learning more about future career options with growing private equity backed companies. Would you or someone on your team be willing to advise him on what additional skills, experiences, etc. he should try to obtain at GE to make himself more marketable to growing PE backed companies in the future? For reference, a copy of his resume is attached.
Meeting Andrea’s husband did nothing to dampen Hemy’s interest in Andrea. Four days later, on August 16, Hemy sent her a highly personal message. Under the subject line “Balance,” he offered advice on juggling work and home responsibilities. Mentioning nothing about GE Energy, Hemy’s message reflected an intimate knowledge of Andrea’s apparent struggles.
“There is no panacea for balance. You are overwhelmed because you are trying to find answers and get it all together,” he told her. “It will come. The small things you do to try to achieve that balance. So it starts today. You will reach your balance by doing these two things and you must do them.” He went on to recommend that she “leave at 3:30 p.m., pick up Sophia, go buy stuff with her, let her settle in at home and then start working at 5-ish,” then advised that she “let Rusty pick up Ian at 5:30 p.m. During the 3:30 to 5:45 p.m. [period] think of nothing else but Sophia. Nothing else matters at that time.”
Andrea followed up by text-messaging Hemy a picture of herself and her daughter, Sophia. This prompted Hemy to write her: “I just saw your text messages. I am so happy for you and Sophia. You can’t imagine. Thank you for sharing with me. I feel like I was there, standing by the doorway, looking adoringly with a huge proud smile on my face. It made my week.” It was signed “Hemy” with a happy face.
Andrea then sent him more pictures: an album of ninety-eight photographs taken at Sophia’s birthday party.
“You and the kids are amazing,” Hemy wrote back. “Thanks for sharing that with me.” The photos showed Sophia helping make her elaborate four-foot-tall cake. “Looks like you had fun,” Hemy wrote, “though a twinge of stress there for a minute.” A couple days later he emailed her coupons for a Sesame Street show and the play Peter Pan.
* * *
On Thursday, August 26, Andrea departed for her fifth business trip in four months. She would later say that she bid good-bye to Rusty, dropped off the children at school, and met Hemy, who drove them 135 miles to Greenville, South Carolina, where GE operates a sprawling plant. Hemy made the two-hour Greenville run frequently, though he usually treated this as a day trip. Travel records showed that Hemy and Andrea stopped for lunch at the Macaroni Grill in the Mall of Georgia in Buford, then went to a Publix Super Market to purchase a bottle of wine. The receipt identified it as a Shiraz from FishEye vineyards. Arriving in Greenville late in the afternoon, they checked into adjoining rooms, the records showed, before having dinner together at Cazbah, a tapas restaurant and wine bar. The bill came to $84.56—including a $31 bottle of wine. The name on the wine label said, “Bitch.” The next morning, they had a meeting, lunched for $29.65 at a P. F. Chang’s in Greenville, then hit the road for Atlanta.
Unlike the Longmont trip, the hotel clerks had nothing to offer police. The email traffic between Andrea and Hemy was a different matter. Whatever happened in Greenville, it left them both reeling.
“I caused you so much pain when all I wanted was to give you so much,” Hemy wrote on August 27, 2010, the day they returned. “I know it doesn’t help, but I am sorry. I shouldn’t have come over. You are so beautiful and such a great person. I discovered the mature, responsible Mama Andrea. Don’t respond.”
The emails didn’t disclose the reason for his apology. Whatever it was, it triggered days of soul searching for Andrea. “I really don’t know what to say at this point. I am angry. Your apology is heartfelt but it does not make the ongoing pain go away that I now have to repent and live with the rest of my life. Not sure what I was thinking. I’m also feeling that we may have ruined it. Not sure. I’m not trying to be hurtful. I’m just trying to be honest. I’m not sure how to live with this.”
“This is the last one from me,” Hemy wrote back. “I know it won’t help, but please never forget how much I love you.”
“I know,” replied Andrea, “but so do other people. I betrayed them all. I’m not sure how to deal with that for now—but my burden, not yours.”
Another day passed before Hemy—despite telling her he was done talking about the matter—sent her a late-night email: “One last thought: besides the birth of Tom and Lee, that was the most beautiful experience of my life.”
The next morning, at 7:46 a.m., Andrea wrote back, her tone sharp.
“I appreciate that, but please understand what I am feeling. I am having constant feelings of anger towards you, me, everything,” she said. “Yes, mixed with other feelings as well. But selfish feelings I am trying to suppress at every moment. Thursday night was one of best I had in a long time. It was such a great evening as a whole and now I feel sad I will never have that again. So many other things to say but not appropriate for email, most result in me getting angry.”
In his response, Hemy implored her to forget her anger and focus on something else.
“Marry me,” he wrote. “You’re thinking I’m crazy and you’ve made your intentions clear. But before you respond, spend a night thinking about it. It won’t solve anything but you know I will give you, Sophia and Ian the world. Together we can make it all work. Marry me.”
In a long email, Hemy told Andrea that her feelings of betrayal and anger are “not about you” and that feeling that was “a copout.” He then recalled their trip to Minden, Nevada, when they had dinner at Lake Tahoe, and the time they spent together in Colorado.
“It’s about how you felt when we looked at the stars in Tahoe, when we woke up Friday morning in Denver and we walked out of the restaurant on Thursday when you took my hand and nestled your head on my shoulder. Blaming it all on Friday morning doesn’t cut it. I keep trying to suppress thinking what it would be like to make Friday dinner together, to share a mah jong [sic] night with friends, or watch a movie in bed, that I know how to make you and Sophia happy even though I have never met her. You can’t stop thinking about it but you’re so locked in that it would not fail that it tears you apart. It’s a betrayal not to those that love you but to yourself and it happened way before Friday morning … I know now more than any other time, that it is you I want to share everything with and you are pained because it is also what you want but can’t have. Think about it. Be with me forever.”
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