They moved back to Israel, where Hemy worked for a few years before returning to the United States for his job at GE. The steady, high-paying employment didn’t seem to make matters better at home. When his sister visited in 2008, she could feel the tension. Money problems had been mounting. The family could barely afford a housekeeper and yet when Monique arrived she saw her brother installing a garden with a waterfall. Ariela had a new diamond ring. Hemy seemed manic. They threw an elaborate birthday bash for the twins. Hemy was the life of the party, something he never had been before. He paid for his sister to visit, another thing he hadn’t done in the past.
At work, Hemy described himself as a “terror.” The company asked him to erase a sixty-five-million-dollar budget deficit and he did it. Yet at home the spending spun out of control. Between March and August 2008 the Neumans burned through seventy-one thousand dollars. They paid college tuition and bought an air-conditioning system for the home. He cashed out a hundred-thousand-dollar pension with the idea of paying off seventy-seven thousand in credit card debt. Instead, by year’s end, the credit balance hovered at seventy-four thousand dollars.
Hemy’s moods would swing wildly, up for one stretch, down the next. His sister had flashbacks of her father. During a visit for the twins’ college graduation, a party for which he spent twenty-five hundred dollars, Hemy exploded at his mother for no reason while they were taking pictures of the children. His mother reeled. Everybody felt uncomfortable and embarrassed.
By 2010, his marriage was in trouble. He claimed that he had tried to work on it, coming home and greeting his wife with a hug. But she would only cross her arms, he said. He felt alone again, like when he was sent off to boarding school. He felt as if he was slipping at work. A big project he had developed ended up going to another employee. He felt his energy ebb; all he wanted to do was sleep.
The only thing that kept him going were his children—and a new woman entering his life.
Asked by Dr. Rand-Dorney how he felt about Andrea, Hemy recounted a biblical story. He had been reading the Bible and the Torah more frequently of late and said the first and second books of Samuel spoke to him. In the passages, David, the first king of the Jews, saw a beautiful and beguiling woman named Bathsheba bathing in the open on a nearby rooftop. Hemy said this reminded him of his August trip to Greenville, South Carolina, when he fantasized about Andrea and, according to the therapist’s notes, “thinks he saw her naked” coming “out of the shower toweling herself.”
“She was a beautiful person,” he told Dr. Rand-Dorney. “I thought of her as Bathsheba.”
Hemy took it a step farther. He became fixated not just on Andrea, but on her children. He told Rand-Dorney that he “went back and forth” on whether he believed Sophia and Ian actually belonged to him and not Rusty. Becoming confused at times, he started to think the children were in danger. He told the psychiatrist, “I feel like I need to protect them.”
After speaking with Hemy for several hours at the jail, Dr. Rand-Dorney found symptoms of a psychotic disorder and the possibility that he was driven by obsessive thoughts. He developed toward Andrea what mental health professionals call “erotomanic delusions” but wavered on whether he actually had sex with her or just thought he did. “As that relationship evolved, he became more and more consumed by it but depressed at the same time,” Rand-Dorney later said. “At points he said he had sex with this woman, and then I’d ask, and he’d say, ‘I don’t know if it’s true.’”
Rand-Dorney’s screening found signs of paranoia, psychosis, and delusions, but more testing would be needed for a solid diagnosis. Another expert, Dr. Peter Thomas, a licensed psychologist and former president of the Georgia Psychological Association, was recruited. Although he had decades of experience, he had never been involved in a criminal case before. His work had mainly focused on child and family counseling. When his colleague Julie Rand-Dorney asked for his assistance, he agreed to advise the defense as long he did not have to testify.
On May 11, 2011, he met with Hemy at the jail for a clinical interview and psychological testing. As with Rand-Dorney, the work was preliminary, the tests intended to find potential issues, not to come up with a diagnosis. Thomas’s first impression was that Hemy spoke in a way that was “very naïve yet sophisticated,” with statements that came off as both “confusing” and “bizarre.” Hemy seemed to be driven by a mission that other people didn’t understand. In the ink blot test—the famous Rorschach test—Hemy kept seeing in the blotches a “demon” trying to engulf him with its evil. When discussing his relationship with Andrea, he couldn’t say for certain whether they had been sexually intimate. Thomas thought Hemy might have “psychotic behaviors” and recommended more evaluation. “I wasn’t sure if he knew what was real and what wasn’t,” Thomas said.
After this limited assessment, the defense moved on to another expert for a detailed examination. Two months later, in August 2011, when the pretrial hearings were not going well for Hemy, his lawyers placed a call to Dr. Adriana Flores, one of the top forensic psychologists in Georgia. She had conducted a dozen evaluations previously; her opinion was so valued that DA Robert James also had contacted her in September but he was too late. She visited Hemy in jail on September 8, 2011, for the first of three sessions. Her work would consume one hundred hours, requiring her to read through binders of reports and conduct additional interviews with people close to Hemy, including his parents and sister. Flores wanted to talk to Andrea, but she refused.
Hemy once again recalled his difficult childhood, his abrupt relocation to a boarding school, and the horrible time in the cold shack, only this time he added details.
“One day in the shack he experienced a demon,” Flores later said. “He was feeling really, really horrible, asking God what he did to deserve this, why have I been forsaken.” He described the demon as over six feet tall in a heavy cloak. “He said he felt anguish, deep pain,” said Flores. “At that moment he did not want to live and he prayed to God to take him.” The demon was there to take Hemy away, but he didn’t go.
Hemy said the demon would periodically return, the next time in 1981 when Hemy was a sophomore at Georgia Tech and suffering the depression that left him unable to do schoolwork and constantly craving sleep. Hemy did not see the vision again for years, absent during his manic years when he moved to Florida, then back to Israel, then to Atlanta, where he was a fiend at work and ran up bills at home.
Then in February 2010, it reappeared. At the time, the financial and marital strains had sent Hemy into another depression. “He was feeling like a failure, a wreck, very low energy, oversleeping, wanted to sleep life away,” Dr. Flores would later say. During a day trip for business to Greenville, the demon emerged in Hemy’s car. It seemed to wrap itself around him in an evil embrace and spoke to Hemy: “Come to me, I won’t ever abandon you.”
The feelings of pain and abandonment overwhelmed Hemy. Up ahead on the road was a concrete barrier. Hemy considered slamming the car into it, then changed his mind. He couldn’t do that to his children. He continued on to Greenville and the work of GE Energy.
It was shortly thereafter, in March 2010, that he received the résumé from Andrea Sneiderman. He hired her and they began traveling together, Hemy feeling an immediate connection. They chatted easily and commiserated and drew ever closer, bonding over their shared personal problems at home. She was, Hemy told Dr. Flores, the first person he could ever really talk to, and he held back nothing, his childhood stories about his abusive father and the boarding school flooding out of him for the first time. During the trip to Minden, Nevada, they had what he called an intimate dinner in Lake Tahoe, where he read her a poem and told her she was beautiful. He said they kissed, a chaste kiss but one he’d never forget.
A few weeks later, when Andrea went to the training session in Longmont, Colorado, Hemy initially stayed behind, he said. But then a spectral vision appeared. This time it took a female form, sort of an angel. Materializing while Hemy was
attending a dinner party with his wife, the angel told him that Ian and Sophia Sneiderman were his children and that he needed to let Andrea know.
It was on this night that Hemy frantically called the hotel in Longmont and tried to get the staff to buy flowers and chocolates for Andrea. He then spent his own money to fly there. Andrea met him at the airport, he told Flores, and joined him for dinner. Hemy told Andrea, “If you search the world over there is no better father for Sophia and Ian than me.” He related Andrea as replying, “That may be, but I made a commitment to Rusty and I’m not breaking up.”
For Hemy, what he saw as a growing relationship with Andrea brought both joy and sorrow. While in Longmont, he said, he could feel her putting up an emotional wall. They returned to the hotel and shared a bed, but Andrea did not want to have sex, he claimed. He tried to cuddle but she resisted. The next day she was angry and he bought her flowers. But over dinner her mood changed. They shared a bottle of wine and spent the night in the same bed, the morning spent cuddling. She stroked his chest. He would describe it as the most incredible moment of his life. Then she would change again. She sent him the email expressing confusion and regret.
The next time a vision came was after Hemy saw Rusty during a visit to the Sneiderman house in August 2010. While driving home, a female angel appeared in the car. According to Hemy, she told him that Andrea’s children were at risk from Rusty. “He’s going to hurt them,” the angel warned. “And you have to protect them. You can’t let this happen again.”
A tremendous pain overcame Hemy.
“As he’s driving he thought: I have to kill him,” said Flores. “And he said that from that point on he said: ‘I got my marching orders. I was a faithful soldier doing what I had to do.’” He never second-guessed the orders or analyzed them. His only thought was: How do I do it?
He considered poison. He thought about running Rusty over. Then he decided on a gun. It would be a “fire and forget mission,” homing in on the target and then proceeding without looking back, according to Hemy, all to protect the children. It was around this time that Andrea had sent Hemy the photos from Sophia’s birthday party. The fact that Rusty wasn’t in any of them reinforced Hemy’s belief that Rusty posed a threat to the children.
Entering another manic phase, Hemy made the Greenville trip with Andrea on August 26. In his retelling to the psychologist, they had adjoining rooms and fed each other during a dinner of tapas and wine. Returning to the hotel with another bottle of wine, they cozied up in bed and watched The Goodbye Girl on the computer, both in their pajamas, kissing and cuddling. His memory now faded. They may have had sex, but he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that afterward she was upset, the feelings she later expressed in her emails when she told him she felt horrible and would have to live with this the rest of her life.
For weeks there was emotional push and pull, and Hemy wavered on whether to go to the UK with her, eventually deciding to, only to face more mixed emotions from Andrea. When they made their second trip to Greenville, the pattern continued, one minute Andrea expressing regret, the next dancing with him at the Pulse nightclub. Their communications would become more frequent and intense, emails and texts and phone calls, Hemy’s obsessions building, his plans to commit murder coming into focus.
The first attempt came on the morning of November 10, 2010. The homeless man lurking around the gas meter at the Sneiderman house was in fact Hemy wearing a disguise, lying in wait to shoot Rusty. But then Rusty called 911 and Hemy had to flee into the woods, which he knew about because he’d visited their home previously.
Eight days later, Hemy set out again to kill Rusty. He bought a different disguise, rented the Kia Sedona minivan, followed Rusty into the preschool parking lot, and this time shot him dead. Hemy took full and complete responsibility; Andrea knew nothing about it, he told Dr. Flores. If anything, he worried what Andrea would say if she found out the killer was Hemy. The fake beard was not intended to fool Rusty, he told Dr. Flores, but so Andrea wouldn’t know who killed Rusty. Hemy didn’t want her angry at him.
Dr. Flores diagnosed Hemy as suffering a bipolar 1 disorder with psychosis manifested by delusions. The mania and depression spoke to the bipolar disorder, as did Hemy’s “hypersexuality” at the time. The angel telling him to protect Andrea’s children indicated delusions. How much of his relationship with Andrea also was a delusion was harder to determine, Flores said. She found enough independent evidence to suggest they had at least an emotional affair, but how far it went physically couldn’t be determined.
Dr. Flores believed that Andrea played a strong part in Hemy’s emotional problems, giving him “cues” that reinforced his delusions and created his perceived attachment to her. Andrea, according to Dr. Flores, was “manipulating him into believing what she believed and thinking what she thought.” Andrea’s inconsistent rewards and punishments perversely created a strong emotional bond. No matter how much she distanced herself from him, Hemy could count on Andrea coming back, Dr. Flores said. Whether Andrea did this wittingly or unwittingly was unclear, though Dr. Flores would insist, “The only person who could’ve known he was delusional … was Andrea Sneiderman, because the delusions were about her.”
His mental illness was so severe, she concluded, that he was not criminally responsible for Rusty’s murder and that at the time he pulled the trigger he did not know the difference between right and wrong. “Everything,” she said, “points to him being criminally insane.”
There was always the possibility that Hemy was faking all this, inventing the demon and angel only so that he would appear insane and wiggle out of a murder rap. So much of Dr. Flores’s findings hinged on what Hemy told her—if he was lying, her conclusions would be wrong. Dr. Flores conducted a battery of tests to determine if Hemy was faking mental illness—“malingering” in psychological parlance. She concluded that Hemy was telling the truth. His mental illness, she said, was so severe that typically somebody in his condition would be committed to a mental health facility.
A second defense expert, Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, would also meet with Hemy, in September 2011, and come to the same conclusion. “Mr. Neuman, at the time of the alleged offense, was unable to distinguish right and wrong” due to his bipolar disorder, she’d later say. In fact, months after the murder, Hemy was still delusional about Rusty’s murder. “He really believes this stuff … and has such little insight into the gravity of this stuff,” Marks would say. “People who have no insight don’t get it, and he doesn’t get it.”
The prosecution predictably cast a skeptical eye. For one thing, the timing seemed suspicious. For the better part of a year, he had been a model prisoner—no fights or complaints, no reported problems with other inmates. That suddenly changed in October 2011. Just days after his attorneys’ press conference announcing the defense strategy and shortly after Hemy met with Dr. Marks, Hemy sent a request to speak with Dr. Brickhouse. Unavailable at the time, Brickhouse had the on-call clinician follow up. Hemy reported that he had grown concerned for his safety. A new group of inmates had moved into his pod, among them two men who “were contemplating throwing him down the stairs,” said Brickhouse. “They took exception to the fact he was Jewish and made reference to the fact that Jewish people did not accept Christ.”
The jail moved Hemy to protective custody, an area with a smaller pod—twelve inmates—and single-inmate cells. A day later, on October 12, Hemy sent a “sick slip” with another plea to talk to Brickhouse, this one marked “urgent.” After conferring with the clinician, Brickhouse met with Hemy, who related the threats. He said he now felt physically safe but had come to feel suicidal. Asked if he had made any plans to act on this, he said that he had five razors he had been keeping for some time in case. “At that time,” Brickhouse later said, “he shared that he had committed the murder he was charged with, something he did not mention in January. He also shared that he changed the nature of his legal defense,” an apparent reference to his plans to plea
d not guilty by reason of insanity although Brickhouse didn’t know the details at the time.
Brickhouse wasn’t entirely convinced Hemy wanted to kill himself, but he told Hemy that ethically he would have to take action. As a precaution a guard searched his cell, finding and seizing the razors, and the jail transferred him to a section called 3A, the mental health ward, with twenty-seven beds staffed twenty-four hours a day by nurses and security. Under observation by nurses making rounds every fifteen minutes, Hemy spent his time reading and praying. He showered and shaved and seemed to have no trouble sleeping. He suffered what would be labeled “situational depression,” not unusual for someone suddenly stripped of their liberties and locked up, but Brickhouse saw no signs of a more serious psychosis. After about two and a half months, Brickhouse spoke to Hemy. They discussed the timing of his transfer—whether it should happen before or after the Jewish holidays and Christmas. The decision was made to do it after the new year, in January 2012. “His mental state was completely unremarkable during that period of time,” Brickhouse later said. “There was never any documented evidence of any delusions, there was never any documented mental health requests. His behavior was exemplary.”
* * *
To see if there was any evidence that Hemy was faking his problems—and to build ammunition to rebut a defense insanity case—prosecutors hired their own expert. Dr. Pamela Crawford was a former US Air Force psychologist who retired as a major. Licensed as a psychologist in South Carolina, Dr. Crawford did not have a license in Georgia where the trial would be held. She also was not currently board-certified, having allowed her certification to lapse three years earlier. This, along with the fact that she would charge the state about sixty thousand dollars for her work, would make her vulnerable at trial. But her review was extensive, including two interviews with Hemy.
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