Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  Andrea wrote back, “I feel terrible that I have not supported you in your situation”—an apparent reference to his marital problems. “I want to do that but you know how conflicting the whole thing is. But I still want to do it. If you want to talk this week, and I’m available, please do call me. I will try to call you on my way home today, around 4 p.m. Andrea.”

  Hemy responded, “Please don’t be, dealing with it, as difficult as it may be. Just knowing you are there for me is enough. Thank you for being my friend. And as your friend, I won’t do that to you because it just pains you.” Hemy said he would be out of the office on a business trip that afternoon. “I’ll be on the flight when you are freed up. Go home, relax on the way. Think of me and smile.”

  Andrea told him that if his flight was delayed, “You will have no choice but to talk to me”—she added a smiley-face emoticon. “Not a lot of relaxing going on these days. I am trying to get there. I need a routine. Is that even ever possible?” She signed it “Me” with another smiley face.

  * * *

  A week later, on September 1, Andrea had lunch with her close friend Shayna Citron at a Fuddruckers hamburger restaurant near the GE complex. It was their first lengthy discussion in some time, their busy lives with children, husbands, and jobs leaving increasingly little time for some of the things they used to do. Close friends for eight years, they had met at book club, and over the years they went together to baby showers, playdates, birthday parties, and weekends at the Sneidermans’ lake house. That previous May, Citron and her husband attended Andrea’s dance recital—“She’s a very good dancer and always has been,” said Citron later—and afterward the two couples went out for dinner. Andrea gushed about her new job at GE but lamented it intruded on her dance practice. Watching Andrea interact with Rusty, Citron detected a change. “It was at that dinner that I saw for the first time that they were going through a rough time,” Citron said. “They seemed awkward and uncomfortable together, which I had never seen before.” Three months later, at a fifth-birthday party for Sophia, where the little girls got manicures and played in a jump house, Andrea “revealed for the very first time … that she and Rusty were having problems.” When they finally got together for the long lunch in September, Citron said, “I realized these issues were more serious than I once knew.” Halfway through the meal, she asked what was going on. “She said something like, ‘Rusty and I are having major problems,’” recalled Citron. “It all stemmed around work, travel, picking up the kids, who was doing what. She started to mention grumblings around the house about all this time she is spending at work, that she is not making the same amount of money as Rusty had been when he was working.” When Andrea came home at night, the children would run and cling to her, which troubled Rusty. It was clear the children missed her—and Andrea desperately missed them. Citron asked Andrea if she was happy with the job. “She said, ‘Yes, I am. This is the first time that what I’m doing, I’m important. I like the people I’m working with.’” Andrea felt she was making a difference and that her co-workers all told her she was doing an amazing job.

  “Then she also told me that [her boss] told her that he was in love with her,” said Citron. Momentarily stunned, Citron asked Andrea how she felt about her boss. “She said that if maybe she had not been married she’d be interested in him.” Citron asked if he was good looking. “She responded saying, yeah, he’s got dark features. He looks professional.” When Citron asked if Andrea was thinking of getting a divorce, “She said to me that she would never divorce Rusty.”

  Andrea then asked for advice on dealing with her boss, particularly when they traveled together. Citron, who also traveled for her work, said that she, too, had been hit on. “It’s sort of the nature of the beast,” Citron remembered telling her. “It does happen. You have to stay strong and stick to your guns, and the one thing I told her, for sure, without a doubt: Do not stay on the same floor in a hotel with someone that is hitting on you. Because I knew that if she were to get off an elevator and walk to her room and that person was there doing the same, it might become very uncomfortable if he would be walking her to her room. That might lend itself to an opportunity that married women shouldn’t be involved in.”

  Andrea didn’t want to tell anybody at GE about her boss. She feared she would lose the best job she’d ever had. “She told me some things that she had never told me before,” recalled Citron. “She started talking about how everything in their married lives had always been about Rusty, whatever job he had, whatever problems were going on in his job.” It went back to when Rusty went to business school—Andrea worked to help pay his tuition—and after graduation Andrea agreed to follow him to Atlanta for a job opportunity.

  It was supposed to be a one-hour lunch but turned into two hours. When it was over, a rattled Citron went to her parents’ house, lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling fan, and told her mother, who also knew the Sneidermans, that “Andrea has checked out of her marriage.” She later discussed it with her husband also.

  Citron saw Andrea next at lunch a couple of weeks later at another restaurant near GE—she thought it was a Hoolihan’s or a Houston’s—to celebrate Citron’s birthday. A third friend joined them. Andrea was getting ready to go to London for business and talked excitedly about the trip, the castle she planned to see. Andrea asked if it was appropriate to go to a dance club with a co-worker, and Citron told her, “It just depends on how you’re dancing.” Regular dancing should be fine. “If it was risqué,” said Citron, “that would not be okay.”

  The next month, after Andrea had returned from the UK trip, the families gathered at Citron’s parents’ house for an annual Halloween costume party. Andrea and Sophia dressed alike as sock-hop girls with poodle skirts and ponytails. “Andrea had a bright pink ribbon in her hair,” recalled Citron. “She looked amazing. She looked the happiest I had seen her in a long time, absolutely radiant and glowing.” Rusty came dressed as Fred from Scooby-Doo and Ian had on a Scooby-Doo costume. “Rusty was wiped out,” said Citron, “his eyes, everything.” She and her husband came as Fred and Wilma Flintsone and they tried to make silly small talk with Rusty about how both the husbands were dressed as Freds. Rusty wouldn’t have any of it. That’s when it occurred to Citron and her husband that this was the first year that Rusty and Andrea had not come dressed as a king and queen—instead of coordinating their costumes with each other they had coordinated with their children. “I remember my husband saying, ‘What happened to the king and queen?’ and Rusty said, ‘I had to dress this way to save my marriage.’”

  Andrea expressed the same problems with another friend, Tammi Parker, that she felt it was unfair that Rusty was angry. Andrea said she only went back to work full-time because Rusty had quit his job at Discovery Point to pursue his business dreams, and that this was not Andrea’s choice. She told Parker she had grown tired of discussing the issue with Rusty. Weekends left the only time for Andrea to see not only Rusty and the children but also her friends. So when Rusty insisted that the family spend a weekend at their lake house—his “retreat,” as Andrea called it—Andrea struggled to muster the strength. Rusty was also pressuring her to socialize more often.

  “I’m not sure I have much of a choice but to go to the lake, which is what he wants,” Andrea wrote to Tammi in September, shortly after returning from the UK trip. “I have been told I need to give him that for now and schmoozing with friends is not a top priority for the health of my marriage.” She then warned Tammi, “Please do not forward this one. I know you understand it is a rough patch right now for me. I guess I knew it was coming when I took the job but not this bad.” She told Tammi she’d try to get together with her later in the month, “but I cannot push it because it only ends in a fight and I am tired of fighting.”

  Around the same time, Hemy also confided in friends. Late in the summer of 2010, Hemy met with Melanie White, a Realtor for Coldwell Banker. Melanie had known the Neuman family since May 2006 when she sold them their h
ome in East Cobb. As with other clients, she kept in contact with them. About twice a year she spoke with Hemy by phone, usually small talk, asking him if he knew of anybody who needed a Realtor.

  In one such phone call, Hemy requested a meeting in person. He told her that he was in trouble financially and wanted to discuss a short sale of his house. Two years into the recession, the real estate market was declining in Atlanta along with the rest of the country. Meeting at the Sunflower Café in Sandy Springs, they began by talking about what they usually did—his children, his work, the house. She then explained the parameters of a short sale, how banks will consider it once the borrower misses three mortgage payments. Hemy told her that he may qualify. He said he and his wife had chronic money problems, and more. He said he had moved out the night before and was staying in a Marriott hotel in Marietta near his office.

  “What’s the problem?” asked White, who would recount the conversation for authorities.

  Hemy told her they’d always had problems but now he “just couldn’t take it anymore. He told her that his wife never really had a job and that now the family needed her to work to keep up with the bills, including college tuition for his twins.

  White asked him if there was somebody else in his life. He told her that there was one person, a woman at work who was married with two small children. He refused to give her name because she was Jewish and White likely knew her or knew somebody who did. When Hemy asked White for her advice, she told him, “Go back to your wife, go back to your kids, leave the other person alone. She’s married.”

  If Hemy said anything in return, White didn’t remember it. Mostly, she said, he met her advice with silence. They left their meeting by agreeing to get together again to follow up on the short sale. Hemy noted that his wife was close friends with another Realtor in their subdivision but that if he had to sell the house he’d do everything he could to give the listing to White.

  They met again that same month, September, in the food court of the Perimeter Mall, the Nordstrom-anchored shopping mall in Dunwoody. Telling her that he valued her opinion, Hemy said he and his wife had gone to marriage counseling—it was not going well—and talked about his continuing money troubles. Then he told her about an upcoming business trip to the United Kingdom in which he’d be traveling with the woman he’d mentioned before.

  When White heard the dates, she was dismayed. Yom Kippur fell that year on the same Saturday that Hemy was to board a plane for Scotland. “I felt that was odd given that we’re all Jewish and that’s like the holiest day of the year,” she later said. She felt that rather than going to Europe with a potential lover, Hemy should be spending a day of atonement in temple, fasting and repenting for the sins of the previous year.

  If Hemy had any pangs of religious guilt, he didn’t show it. He told her he was “excited” about the trip.

  Andrea, too, was looking forward to it. This was to be her biggest work trip yet—and she made no secret of her own excitement. She recruited Rusty to help her with the itinerary. Both meticulous planners, they created a spreadsheet and entered the places Andrea wanted to see: the castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a West End show or two. She found out Dirty Dancing, Chicago, Billy Elliot, and Grease were all playing. Andrea also wanted to see the campus of Cambridge University and fancy London restaurants.

  Andrea also went over the itinerary with Hemy. When Hemy suggested they go to a dance club, Andrea said that sounded like a “fantastic idea” but worried about fitting in. “I have always wanted to go to a club in London, although I am sure I am nowhere near cool enough,” she wrote. “My clothes are certainly not trendy enough.” She added a smiley face.

  Departing September 18, they took the same flights and stayed in the same hotels, first in Scotland and then in London, meeting with GE employees at the company’s operations there. Andrea never did go to a dance club—she later said that would “not be appropriate”—but did see many of the sights.

  But like the Greenville trip, drama accompanied them. It had begun before they left with Hemy asking if Andrea still felt comfortable traveling with him.

  “I will continue to be the best boss you ever have or ever will,” he wrote a few days before. “I don’t have to go to England. But if you think that it is good that I go for work reasons then I will.”

  Something then happened overseas, according to a cryptic email from Andrea to Hemy after they returned on September 25: “Honest is good and maybe I’m not being honest enough. Not sure, but I do not want it to ruin the trip overall and you know that. Desire versus reality as you know is a world I’m trying to ignore because I have to. So sorry, not fair to you, I know. I have other thoughts but not the time right now.”

  Hemy forwarded this and other emails to Melanie White, who saved them and later provided them to police. Hemy had a quick turnaround—he left on another business trip on September 27, this time to Houston, and emailed White from the road. In one early-morning message on September 28, he recounted for White that the UK trip ended with a good-bye scene at the airport in which Andrea gave him a kiss.

  “I guess I should put this in context for you,” Hemy told White. “We left the flight with a kiss knowing that I was traveling [to Houston] and I told her we really shouldn’t communicate over the next one to two weeks. She wholeheartedly agreed.”

  By now, White knew Andrea’s name, though she didn’t know Andrea personally or her family. Hemy recounted how Andrea told him “that I’m the only one she can talk to about us and Rusty, that everyone else will be so disappointed. She tells people snippets, controlling the whole story. She also says that it won’t change the outcome, that she is staying no matter what. So any advice is pointless.

  “Anyway,” Hemy continued, “on Sunday she sent me a text and then we went back and forth a few times regarding how the kids are great, etc. I did give the advice that she must concentrate on them. Today, as much as it killed me I did not contact her.”

  It was Andrea who reached out to him. “She pinged me that she wanted to talk to me about some work thing,” he said. “Again, some chat and text when she agreed she would call me at 1 p.m. while I was waiting for my flight. She called and we spent 15 to 20 minutes talking about the kids and the presents we got them. She paid but we chose them together. I told her briefly that we never talked about my situation and that it was quite messy. I told her that I couldn’t have sex with someone I didn’t love and that it was killing me to pretend I was somebody I wasn’t.” They chatted more about work. She had to cancel a meeting they were to attend because she had a training session. Hemy wrote back to Andrea with a sad face. She wrote back “ditto.” They continued to text each other through the night.

  Hemy told White, “I don’t want to lose her.”

  White was mortified.

  “Hemy,” she wrote him, “it continues to sound like she is lifting you up and knocking you down because she herself displays emotions that are up and down. Always in the end, she continues to tell you she is not leaving her marriage. I am not sure if she is trying to convince you or herself. In my opinion, a person does not have an affair, whether emotional or physical or both unless they have a portion of their heart and foot in/out the door.”

  White told him that Andrea sounded “remorseful and confused” and that her emotions are jumping between wanting to be with him and the getting “angry at herself for thinking that way” and pushing him away. “It is a see-saw of emotions and will continue to be that way,” warned White. “Hold on. You must be patient and take care of yourself and your family. You’re going to have a lot come down on you once you positively announce your marriage is over and there is no way to get it back.”

  Again, Hemy didn’t say whether he’d take her advice. He wrote nothing in response over email and remained impassive when they spoke about the same issues later by phone.

  While in Houston, Hemy met with a longtime colleague, Orna Hanison. A native of England, Hanison had worked with Hemy in Atlanta and became
what she’d later call a “fairly good friend” over the years, the two often talking about their children. She also would become friendly with Hemy’s wife, Riela, who in late summer or early fall of 2010, as their marriage was crumbling, asked Hanison to try to talk some sense into Hemy and persuade him to take counseling more seriously.

  Now a human resources manager in the oil and gas division in GE’s Houston operations, Hanison met Hemy for dinner the night of September 28, 2010, the same day he had emailed White. They talked business at first, with Hemy expressing frustration about being passed over for a promotion and saying he wanted to test the job market. Hanison offered advice on interviewing skills. The conversation then turned to Hemy’s marriage. Hanison later recalled, “They didn’t love [each other] anymore, and that she had spent a lot of money and got them into a lot of debt.”

  Hemy said he was pondering a divorce and that he was having an affair. “I told him I thought he was having a midlife crisis,” Hanison said, “and he should go home and go to counseling, and do what he could to save his marriage.”

  Hemy, she said, responded with a laugh.

  Hemy revealed little to her about the woman. He wouldn’t give her name but did say she was younger, had two small children, and was Jewish. When Hanison asked if she worked at GE, he said no. As an HR manager, Orna knew that sleeping with a direct subordinate violated company policy and an internal investigation could lead to a demotion or firing.