Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  “I almost turned and snapped and told her to shut up,” said Geary. “But that wouldn’t have been proper as well.”

  During the embrace with Citron, Geary said, a DA investigator tried to stop Andrea, but she pushed him out of the way. The hug, Geary contended, was “for show,” because afterward Andrea confronted Citron in the hall, saying that she didn’t believe her and that they weren’t friends anymore. Citron would quote Andrea as also telling her that in light of the testimony, “I will do what I need to do.” Citron called the experience “surreal” and didn’t know if Andrea had been making a threat.

  When Andrea returned to the courtroom, said Geary, “We told her: Do not go in our witness room. We got a look that I could describe but I won’t.”

  He said that several other witnesses, including her co-workers at GE, asked the DA to keep her away from them. “She’s not following our instructions,” Geary said. “From what I’ve seen yesterday, she’s not following the court’s instructions. Everybody here has way too much into this to have her, on her own agenda, cause a mistrial. The state’s purpose is to convict the man that murdered Rusty Sneiderman. I wish she could be here. I no longer have the opinion that she can be and make sure our trial is protected. We are moving to have her removed from the courtroom. Actually, we’re moving to have her removed from the courthouse.”

  Hemy’s attorney Robert Rubin reminded everybody that the defense had already asked for her to be booted from the courtroom, and said the prosecutor now “has certainly provided the court with sufficient reason … We would join in the court’s motion.”

  The judge agreed. “I am going to direct that Ms. Sneiderman be removed from this courtroom, not have any direct or indirect contact with any witness or potential witness,” he said. “I will say it as firmly as I can: Do not contact either directly or indirectly any witness or potential witness.”

  The rest of the trial would proceed without Rusty’s wife in the courtroom.

  Rusty’s family later said they weren’t surprised by any of it. “As a result of Andrea’s actions yesterday,” his brother Steven said in a statement, “today’s extraordinary action is yet another example of Andrea’s behavior that has been deeply troubling to our family for some time.”

  Shayna Citron had a different take. “I became frightened after she was banned from the courthouse because I was thinking back to what she had said.” For years, they had been the closest of friends. Her children called her “Aunt Andrea.” Now she wasn’t so sure.

  “When I learned that she was banned, I called my attorney,” Shayna said, “and I called my children’s school.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The blowup over Andrea’s behavior in court overlapped the main work at hand—determining whether Hemy Neuman should be found guilty of murdering Rusty Sneiderman—and witnesses continued to testify. Just after Shayna Citron left the stand came what would be the most emotional testimony of the trial.

  “Mr. Sneiderman,” asked District Attorney Robert James, “do you know Rusty Sneiderman?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered the witness.

  “And how do you know Rusty Sneiderman?”

  “He is my son.”

  Donald Sneiderman’s face showed all the strain of the last fifteen months. He sat uncomfortably in the witness box though his voice was clear.

  “Do you remember the day that he died?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what day was that?”

  “November 18, 2010.”

  “How old was Rusty on that day?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “Did Rusty have any children?”

  “Yes, he had two. A boy, two, a daughter, five.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Sophia and Ian.”

  James didn’t ask if Rusty had a wife.

  The DA then showed Donald a photo and asked if he recognized it.

  “That’s a picture of Rusty.”

  “Is that a fair and accurate representation of Rusty while he was living?”

  Donald grinned. “He had a bigger smile most of the time, but, yes, that’s a fair representation of him.”

  Called in part to humanize the victim and show the emotional destruction caused by the murder, Donald Sneiderman described Rusty as a responsible man, “terrific” with money, a good provider for his family who died with $1.1 million in bank.

  “How did you find out that Rusty had been shot?”

  “Around nine thirty in the morning Andrea had called us and she called and said, ‘Rusty had been shot.’ She was so, so sorry, and that she was going to Dunwoody Prep to find out what had happened.”

  “Are you sure it was around nine thirty?” James asked

  “Well, we had talked to Rusty over the Internet about nine, and he had taken Ian to school just a little before nine, so it was about nine thirty.”

  “And she said she was on the way to Dunwoody Prep?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Donald found out about his son’s fate over the phone from a doctor at Atlanta Medical Center who said Rusty had been shot multiple times and did not survive. Donald and his wife flew to Atlanta, drove straight to Rusty’s house to be with Andrea and their grandchildren, and made funeral arrangements.

  “Do you recall the funeral?”

  “It’s kind of a blur, but yes,” he said,

  “At Rusty’s shiva, do you recall meeting someone named Hemy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell us how you met Hemy?”

  “My wife introduced him to me, talked to him for about thirty seconds. I recognized the name, that Rusty had told me he was Andrea’s boss, that he had tried to look for a job for him.”

  “Do you remember what if anything Hemy said to you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he shake your hand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And did you shake his?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see him in the courtroom today?”

  “Yes, sir.” His glanced to his left.

  “Can you identify him for the jury?”

  “He’s sitting at the defendant’s table,” Donald said in a shaky voice, gesturing to his son’s killer, “third one from the right.”

  The defense did not ask any cross-examination questions.

  * * *

  The prosecution, having established now that a second witness heard Andrea say Rusty was shot before she would have gotten that information from the hospital, now shifted the trial toward Hemy’s activities surrounding the murder. Greg Gibbons, service director at Ed Voyles Honda, talked about Hemy bringing in his Honda Odyssey for recall service but not staying around for the quick repair. Christina Testa, the Enterprise Rent-A-Car manager, spoke of Hemy appearing “impatient,” “fidgety” and “very uneasy” while waiting for his car. GE employees who had long known and worked with Hemy talked about a relatively normal day at work shattered by news of death. They spoke of how Hemy had rescheduled a morning meeting and wasn’t seen until afternoon, after the murder, when he seemed normal. Nobody had ever seen signs of mental illness in Hemy and had certainly never heard him talk of an angel or a demon. The only hint of something going on between him and Andrea was that they seemed to sit next to each other a lot at meetings.

  A security chief at GE brought the jury through Hemy’s actions as recorded by the key-card readers and video cameras, showing that Hemy had sufficient time to leave the office, commit the murder, return the rental van, and get back to his desk—all without an alibi. GE’s IT forensic examiner next brought the jury through Hemy and Andrea’s travels together as documented in their forms seeking reimbursement for hotel rooms and wine.

  The next witnesses were the people on the scene on November 18, 2010, describing the silver minivan racing through Rusty’s neighborhood, then following his car into the preschool parking lot, the gunman in the fake beard calmly shooting Rusty dead before screeching away. The graphic descriptions of the shooti
ng reverberated through the courtroom. Rusty’s brother, Steven, cried as Aliyah Stotter said, “His eyes were still open and he was gasping for air. There was quite a lot of blood everywhere. He was laying on a slant, so you saw blood running from the school towards the pediatrician’s office.”

  Once again, the trial boomeranged back to Andrea. School official Donna Formato recalled getting Andrea Sneiderman’s name from the daycare center’s emergency information sheet and calling her.

  “I told her that something had happened at the school, that Ian was okay, and that she had to come to the school right away.”

  “Did you not tell her that Rusty had been shot?” asked Robert James.

  “No, I did not.”

  “Are you certain that you did not tell her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was worried for her to drive to the school knowing that her husband had been shot. I didn’t want her to have an accident or anything on the way.”

  Then when Andrea arrived, her behavior at the crime scene struck witness Stotter as odd.

  “One of the detectives was interviewing me right there when she pulled up,” Stotter told DA James. “We actually had to move out of the way because she sped in so fast and barely put the car in park. So it was still kind of rolling a little bit. The doors swung open and she got out and she was just like screaming, ‘What happened? What happened?’ It was cold that day. I had a hoodie on. I put the hood up because I didn’t want her to see me. I was crying. I was bawling. Later on, I told my husband, Craig, that it’s really weird but she didn’t have a tear in her eye. I told the detective that as well.”

  Emergency room doctor Mark Waterman also was taken aback by Andrea’s behavior. The doctor, who came to court wearing his blue hospital scrubs over a T-shirt, recalled pronouncing Rusty dead, then going into the family waiting room where he “found the wife.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sat across from her, probably two feet away, and told her [that] her husband had come in, had multiple gunshot wounds, and I just pronounced him dead.”

  “What was her reaction?”

  “Not very emotional, not crying, screaming, not wanting to know what happened. In fact her first request was to ask for a child psychologist.”

  “Did she tell you why she wanted a child psychologist?”

  “So that that person could inform her children of his passing.”

  “No screaming, no crying while you were there?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Would you call that, in your twenty-seven years, normal?”

  “Unusual to say the least.”

  * * *

  The trial was barreling along—all these witnesses squeezed into the first four days—when the prosecution turned to the police investigation. Detective Andrew Thompson took the stand late in the afternoon of February 24 and brought the jury to the scene of the crime, showing security video footage of Hemy’s van following Rusty into the parking lot. Thompson recounted the epiphany in the case—linking the stickers on the van windows to the possibility the van was a rental—then described the painstaking process of tracking down all the Kia Sedonas in Georgia and the Carolinas until finding the murder van at the Enterprise agency. The detective also spoke of the interview with Andrea the day after the murder and how she revealed that Hemy had hit on her, but said little of what police would later find out about them.

  After the coroner described Rusty’s autopsy—his family sat grim-faced, heads down during this testimony—Lieutenant David Barnes talked about the interrogation of Hemy. “It was a very long interview,” Barnes said. The prosecution then played the entire five-and-a-half-hour video, the images of Hemy and the detectives grainy from the wall-mounted camera. The audio proved so bad that the video came with a closed-caption-style running transcript. The video consumed all of day five of the trial, with the judge breaking to allow jurors to stretch and snap out of catnaps.

  Even during the testimony about Hemy’s interrogation, the subject of Andrea returned. Barnes pointed to several of the things that Andrea never revealed: that Hemy had been with her in Longmont, the phone calls to Hemy the morning of the murder, that Hemy had given her the laptop at the shiva. Barnes spoke of his growing unease with Andrea when he and Deputy Chief Sides interviewed her after Hemy’s arrest.

  “When you talked to her on [January] 5, would it be fair to say you were pretty angry?” asked defense attorney Robert Rubin.

  “Was I angry? No.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “No.”

  “Confused?”

  “No.”

  “Did you try to portray that you were angry?”

  “Yes.”

  And while she did disclose more about her travels with Hemy, she still did not reveal her anger and guilt after the first Greenville trip, or sending Hemy photos of her daughter’s birthday party, or dancing at the Pulse nightclub, or that she had cashed out a two-million-dollar life insurance policy on Rusty.

  “You asked her specifically why it took her so long for her to tell you the defendant killed her husband?” James asked him on redirect examination.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you satisfied?”

  “I was not satisfied.”

  “At that point you became suspicious of Andrea Sneiderman?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  After the prosecution laid out its evidence about the murder weapon with testimony from ballistics expert Kelly Fite, the case against Hemy Neuman featured one last witness. On February 28, day six of the trial, FBI electronics examiner Chad Fitzgerald spoke of the secrets found in Hemy’s iPhone. By showing which cell phone towers pinged his many calls, Fitzgerald could draw a map for the jury: Hemy in Norfolk with Andrea, in Denver with Andrea, in Greenville with Andrea. He texted her the same day he went to a gun show. On another day, he called a costume shop, then called Andrea, then called another costume shop.

  He told the jury of Hemy’s fifteen calls after killing Rusty—nine of them to Andrea’s phone, one answered, the forty-two-second call at 10:43 a.m. while Andrea was on her way to the hospital. On November 19, 2010, the day Andrea spoke to a detective, there were two calls between them of about three minutes each.

  Overall, according to Chad Fitzgerald, from May 1, 2010, when Andrea started working at GE Energy, through the day of her husband’s murder, she made 1,426 phone contacts with Hemy—and 882 with Rusty.

  Fitzgerald left the stand. The State of Georgia rested its case.

  CHAPTER 20

  Hemy’s lawyers tried to keep Olivia Newton-John and Barry White out of the courtroom. As expected, the media jumped all over it after the revelation came out in a pretrial hearing just days before opening statements. Virtually every news report included clips of Newton-John singing in Grease and White booming “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” At the hearing, the defense asked that the judge allow only evidence that Hemy had visions, but to bar detailed questions about them. The prosecution objected. “When their report talks about six-foot demons that sound like Barry White and six-foot angels that sound like Olivia Newton-John, we have to prepare for the defense they led us into,” said Chief Assistant DA Don Geary. “If he wants to say that’s not what they meant to say in the report, we are so fine with that it’s not funny.” The judge sided with prosecutors; the evidence would be coming in.

  Although Hemy pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, the prosecution did not call any witnesses about Hemy’s mental state. It didn’t have to. The burden to prove he was insane fell to the defense. The prosecution’s theory was that he knew full well the difference between right and wrong when he gunned down Rusty. It would wait to see the affirmative defense, then try to chip away at it through cross-examination and a rebuttal case.

  As Hemy’s attorneys laid out their case, their first push was to show that his mental illness was no laughing matter. To do this, they called Monique Metsch, Hemy
’s younger sister, to tell the jury of growing up with a father who survived the Nazi death camps only to bring some of the horrors home.

  “He was a very angry man, so there was always fights or screaming,” Metsch said, describing her father’s double-scotch-fueled outbursts of violence. “You never knew how he was going to react. He was very erratic in his outbursts. We never knew how the evening was going to go.”

  Their father—though barely five feet tall but full of rage—would “always blame everything on Hemy,” she told the jury, saying that he hit Hemy with an open hand. “It was more like rage, he was angry with God, he was angry with my mom.” The slaps were “continuous,” she said. Sometimes he also kicked and whipped both Hemy and her.

  “I would be sitting at that table, and if I didn’t finish my soup he would pull my head back,” she said. “He once shoved vegetable soup down my nose.”

  After recounting other troubles in Hemy’s life, from the boarding school to the marital woes, Metsch revealed the first time Hemy had spoken about a new woman in his life. He mentioned her in December 2010, the month after Rusty’s murder, when Hemy visited his family in Florida for the funeral of his father’s wife.

  “He told me that he had befriended a colleague of his and that he had become close with her in the sense that, for the first time, he was able to really open up to someone about our childhood and talk,” Metsch said. “He realized for the very first time that he didn’t have that kind of communication with Reli but that this relationship was special because of that.”

  During cross-examnation DA Robert James sought to show that that while Hemy may have suffered trauma in childhood, it didn’t translate to the sort of mental illness Hemy now claimed.

  “Fair to say you knew your brother well?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Talk often?”

  “Yes.”

  “Confides in you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “He told you about a woman?”