Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  Andrea leaned forward and stared at Geary. “I never picked the wine that we drank.”

  “Question for you,” he asked. “Why would you share a bottle of wine at dinner far away from home, without your family there, with a man that just expressed those feelings to you?”

  “I worked in consulting and have had many jobs since then at which drinking a bottle of wine while you’re out of town is very commonplace,” she shot back. “And drinking a bottle of wine did not enter my mind, my psyche that that was relevant to. Sorry, when I told him I wasn’t interested, he seemed like everything was fine. So at the time … he understood and respected my decision and I felt very comfortable that he could continue a normal friendship regardless how he expressed his feelings to me.”

  Shown more receipts and then emails, she gave variations on the same answer. She either didn’t remember things or downplayed the significance of them. Geary played a video of Andrea talking to Deputy Chief David Sides the day after Hemy’s arrest in which she was asked if Hemy had been with her in Colorado with her and she stammered, “No, I do not—I know that—I’m trying to think.”

  “Do you remember now?” Geary asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If that’s what I said, then that’s what I said.”

  It was, Geary suggested, not the kind of trip she’d forget, with the email from Hemy with a picture of roses, and her reply about that being “thoughtful” and a “sweet gesture.”

  Asked if that was her email, she answered, “Yep.” It was a word she’d use increasingly often, her answers becoming more terse. Then with strain in her voice she said, “I don’t remember every email that I’ve written.”

  Geary showed her additional emails, from Hemy to her, from her to Hemy: more trips, more hotels, more wine. Andrea replied to Geary as if he were a child, condescension in her voice. She shrugged her shoulders and she glared. She didn’t remember everything Hemy told her and she didn’t remember what she told him back. How could she? It was so long ago. Then she’d say, If the emails say it, then it must have happened—but not the way it looks. The change in rooms in Longmont? She didn’t like the room she was in. It had nothing to do with wanting a single bed.

  She was shown receipts from their first trip to Greenville, an eighty-four-dollar dinner with a thirty-one-dollar wine called “Bitch.” There was an overnight, followed by emails filled with guilt and remorse and anger—emails Andrea read aloud in court as they were projected on a screen for the jurors and audience to see.

  “What happened in Greenville, ma’am?”

  “We were holding each other’s hands,” she said, “and that’s it. It may sound worse than it is, but to me that was a betrayal.”

  “So you’re repenting in the email, at least, from holding his hand?”

  “Yup.”

  She took a deep breath, and the questioning continued.

  She didn’t remember him telling her he loved her. She considered his email about wanting to marry her “ridiculous.” Most of things he said or wrote she never kept track of or paid much attention to, they were just a handful out of thousands of emails that were otherwise benign. He was being “silly,” she said, “mannish.” Then he’d go back to being her friend and she wouldn’t worry about it. She never told GE, she never told Rusty. She felt comfortable enough with Hemy that she went to the UK with him.

  “I do want to just note that we did not go to the dance club,” she said in reference to the email about her saying she had taken dancing lessons for years. “In fact, we did not do any of the things that are insinuated that we did on that itinerary because there were definitely points during this manipulation that I was under, which is exactly what it was, that I realized that every activity we were doing, every situation that he put me in, was a convenient situation to get what he wanted, to get me in a position that he wanted, to get me to spend time with him. And when we were in England, I realized that none of that was appropriate and so we did not do any of that.”

  Repeatedly she insisted the emails weren’t an accurate picture of what was happening. Shown messages to her friend Tammi about apparent strains in her marriage, she suggested she misquoted herself in her own email.

  “Yep, I told her it only ends in a fight, I’m tired of fighting,” Andrea testified. “I used the word fighting. I think that word is being misused in the email.”

  For the rest of the afternoon in court, she responded with sarcastic relies of “yep” and “yup” and “nope.” She treated each email as a revelation, a dim memory to her that meant nothing at the time and even less now.

  Geary turned to Andrea’s second trip to Greenville with Hemy and asked her if she went to a restaurant called Pulse.

  “It’s a dance club not a restaurant,” she corrected.

  “Do you remember going there?” he asked.

  “We went to dinner at a restaurant, an actual restaurant, and then afterwards, we were walking along. He said, ‘Let’s check out this place. I found this place online.’ It was a place just to have [a] drink. That was my impression at the time.”

  “Did you go there?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “We had some drinks at the bar. Maybe one, two.”

  “Did you dance?

  “I went onto the dance floor myself,” she said. “As I explained, I’ve been a trained dancer for some time, being able to dance to me is like a release, I’m very much in my own space when I do that. I got up and I was dancing alone on the dance floor.”

  “Did you dance with the defendant?”

  “He came to join the dance floor. Did not join me on the dance floor initially, and he was also dancing, and then there was a time where he reached out his hand and as the defense has said twirled me around, and that’s it.”

  “Were there other contacts?”

  “There was not.”

  “Besides dancing, like partner dancing?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you kiss him or did he kiss you?”

  “No. I—I—no,” she said. Then added, “I guess you have people that have said that that did occur.”

  “Do you have any idea why someone would believe you were kissing him?”

  She shrugged. “No, I don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  Without prompting, she added, “In this case when you are talking about alleged affairs and someone else’s husband being murdered I think people tend to think they saw a lot of things.”

  “Well, let me ask you that,” said Geary. “This is a gentleman up to that point in time who asked you to marry him at least twice that we’re aware of, correct?”

  She began to sniffle. “Correct.”

  “And has expressed his love for you in just emails numerous times, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you’re going to a dance club drinking with him, correct?”

  “I didn’t go to the dance club as a drinking activity, and nor did I know at the time that it was a dance club until we got in there. But yes I was there.”

  “And you stayed?”

  “Yep, I stayed.”

  “Did you have adjoining rooms in that trip in Greenville?”

  “Uh, yep.”

  “Did you and he spend time in each other’s room or in one of the rooms, together?”

  “When we got to the hotel, I remember sitting briefly on the balcony of my room, but that was that, there was no other additional time, if that’s what you are asking.”

  Geary asked, “Did the defendant ever tell you he was going to a gun show in Dalton?”

  “No.”

  “On October 31 of 2010, did the defendant text you while he was at the gun show in Dalton telling you that he was there?”

  “No,” Andrea said, exasperation and disbelief in her voice. “Telling me that he was at a gun show?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I do not remember him texting me that.”

  “Now
is this like the other emails, that it could have happened, you just don’t remember?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure I would remember a gun show.”

  “You didn’t remember ‘I love you’ but you’d remember a gun show?”

  “I didn’t say that I didn’t remember, I just didn’t remember all these emails from two years ago. Similarly I don’t think I could remember the content of texts from two years ago.”

  Geary then asked her about the morning Rusty called 911 to report a man on the side of the house. She recounted how Rusty had called her at work to tell her what happened.

  “And as soon as Rusty ended that call or you ended that call, who did you call?”

  “I have no idea. I was at work, so I was presumably doing work things.”

  “Any idea why you would immediately call the defendant after talking to Rusty?”

  “I’m sure it was—no—I’m sure it was work-related,” she said. “It does seem coincidental. But I’m sure that there was something else going on that I had to call him about. I talk to him frequently about work matters. And I had a meeting with Hemy that day and I told Hemy exactly what happened on the side of my house.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I told the person that worked for me, I told Hemy and told like six other people also what happened on the side of the house because it was bizarre and scary. And he stared at me and looked at me and it was him the whole time.”

  “Did you know that then?

  “No, how could I know that? He was sitting there like an absolute normal individual. He came to work. He was at work. For all I know he was at work the entire time. We don’t work in the same building, I don’t know where he was at that time. Rusty didn’t recognize him. How would Rusty recognize him? He was wearing a disguise. He described him as a Mexican worker.”

  Her testy answers turned to anger as Geary asked how Hemy would know how to approach their house through a sidewalk hidden in the woods.

  “Someone had to tell him about that,” he said.

  “Someone had to tell him?” she answered angrily.

  “How else would he find out?”

  She snapped at him, “He had been stalking my house for months.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “I think we all know that by now.”

  “So that’s a guess on your part?”

  She leaned back. “It is speculation on my part, yes.”

  Andrea continued to simmer, lashing out again when he questioned her about Hemy coming to her house two days before the murder while Rusty was there and the children were upstairs asleep.

  “I keep going back to this, but I just want to clarify: You had a man over to your house with your children—”

  She interrupted him sharply, “I had no choice but to continue my career and my job and—”

  The judge now jumped in with a warning. “Miss Sneiderman, the lawyer has a right to ask the question. You can give a response. But let him finish the question. He’s going to allow you to finish your answer.”

  “Thank you, Judge,” Geary said. “This is the same man who repeatedly said he loved you, he repeatedly asked you to marry him, who came to your house with your children in their beds to work on a project?”

  Andrea said, “Yep.”

  “At your house?”

  “Yep.”

  “And at this time did Rusty know about the advances of the defendant?”

  “Nope.”

  By now she’d been on the stand most of the day, her nerves appearing frayed, when Geary asked her how she found out about the shooting.

  “That morning, did you get a phone call from the daycare?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “Really didn’t tell me anything,” she said, her voice now dropping. “They said there has been an accident.”

  “I’m sorry, speak up a little please.”

  In a whisper, she said, “They said there had been an accident, that Ian is fine. But there had been an accident.”

  “And the accident specifically was directed to Rusty, or did they tell you?”

  “They didn’t really tell me,” she said, speaking louder, “and then I screamed into the phone asking what was going on, and they just said you need to come here and so I dropped the phone and ran out of my office.”

  “Did you, prior to dropping the phone, did they clarify it was Rusty or they didn’t tell you?”

  “I don’t remember. I presumed it was Rusty. I don’t know whether they actually said. Maybe they said it had something to do with Rusty. I don’t remember.”

  He asked again, “Did they at any time tell you what had happened to Rusty?”

  She responded with an emphatic “Nope.”

  After receiving the call from Donna at the preschool, Andrea recalled running to the parking lot and driving to the preschool, making several calls along the way.

  “Do you remember who you called?”

  She sighed. “My parents, my brother, Rusty’s parents,” she said.

  “Rusty’s parents—do you remember who you talked to?”

  “Yep, I talked to Rusty’s dad.” She pointed him out in the audience section.

  “Don Sneiderman?”

  “Yep. I said something’s happened to Rusty. I have no idea what, and that’s all I said, and I was belligerent on the phone.”

  “At that time did you know what had happened to Rusty.”

  Andrea leaned forward again. “No,” she said, her voice full of restrained rage. “I didn’t know what had happened to Rusty until I got to the emergency room. No one told me what happened to Rusty.”

  “Who else did you call when you were on your way to the daycare?”

  “I don’t remember, but evidently I tried to call Hemy,” she said, pointing to him, “probably to tell him that I had left the office, that something had happened, which was a very normal thing for me to have done, to tell my boss that I had left my office and something had happened to my husband.”

  “Do you remember what his cell number was at the time?”

  She cracked a smile. “No I don’t.”

  She couldn’t remember how many times she called Hemy or whether she left him a voice-mail message. “I barely could have my foot on the gas pedal and go fast enough,” she said.

  “How many times did you call Rusty?”

  “Call Rusty?” Andrea seemed taken aback by the question.

  “Rusty,” Geary said.

  “Zero times.”

  “Why didn’t you call Rusty?”

  “Because they just told me something had happened to Rusty,” she replied. “What are the chances that he’s going to be answering his cell phone?”

  Geary offered, “They didn’t tell you what happened to Rusty.”

  “Is there a question?” she asked.

  “Yeah, just curious why didn’t you call Rusty?”

  “Is that the question?”

  The judge had tired of the sparring and told the prosecutor to ask another question.

  “You arrived at the daycare, how long did you stay there?”

  Andrea couldn’t remember, saying it was a chaotic experience, her emotions running wild, everybody around her refusing to tell her what was going on.

  “I pulled up in my vehicle to caution tape and police cars and Rusty’s car, but no Rusty. I fell out of the vehicle, I was picked up by I don’t know who, and taken inside.”

  “Was it a police officer, do you remember?”

  “Have no idea.”

  “When you were taken inside, did you talk to anybody, or did someone talk to you or do you remember?”

  “I remember, they sat me down in this office that they have, this little office room, I remember one of Sophia’s [former] teachers, Katrina is her name, she came in, she was hugging me, couldn’t let me go. No one was talking, no one was staying a word. No one would tell me what happened. And then eventually, Gary Cortellino from the Du
nwoody Police Department sat down in front of me and started asking me questions.”

  “Do you remember how long that lasted, ma’am?”

  “It felt like three seconds, but I have no idea.”

  “At that time did you leave the daycare?”

  “Eventually my parents came from Roswell because I was on the phone with them almost the entire way to the daycare,” she said. Then she put her mouth up to the microphone so her words were loud and clear. “I was on the phone with them on the entire way to the daycare.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “They were keeping me company in the car,” she said, adopting her lecturing tone, “because I was beside myself.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “No time to call Rusty in there,” she said.

  Eventually, with the help of her brother and father, they tracked down the hospital where Rusty was taken.

  “When you went to the Atlanta Medical Center, ma’am, did you find out what happened to Rusty?”

  “They took me into what I call the Death Room. And sat in a chair and someone—I have no idea who—they came over and said that he came in with multiple gunshot wounds and that he was dead. I don’t remember anything they said after that. I fell to the floor.”

  “You found out at the hospital that Rusty had been shot.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You say the Death Room. At that point, did they tell you or indicate to you that Rusty was in fact dead?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that the first time you found out he was dead?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you found out he was shot?”

  “Yep.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The first day of the trial of Hemy Neuman was nearly completed and so far it had little do with him. Except for the early questions about the demon and hallucinations, there had been virtually nothing to build a case showing that Hemy was not so mentally ill at the time of the killing that he didn’t know right from wrong. It was all about Andrea. Her tone—defensive, snarky, condescending, lecturing—stunned those in the courtroom.

  The prosecution pressed on.

  “Do you remember telling Tammi Parker in late December that you knew who it was that killed Rusty?” asked Geary.