Crazy for You

by Michael Fleeman

  “To an extent.”

  “He didn’t tell you about demons?”

  “He did not.”

  “Barry White?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t tell you about angels, Olivia Newton-John, did he?”

  “No.”

  Next the defense called Dr. Julie Rand-Dorney, the psychiatrist who described her “forensic evaluation” of Hemy along with Dr. Peter Thomas. She noted that Hemy never spoke of seeing angels or demons, but did see one in the inkblot test administered by Dr. Thomas, who also testified. The test also showed “disorder, paranoia, weird magical thinking—if he would think about something it would come true,” said Rand-Dorney.

  “We explored what demons were and were they part of hallucination or delusion. It wasn’t clear to us,” she said. “We concluded it wasn’t hallucination and that it was obsessive thought and he was tormented by those thoughts.”

  “Did he mention anything about Ian and Sophia Sneiderman being his children?” asked Robert Rubin.

  “He told us he felt the children were in danger. He said … I feel like I need to protect them. When talking to me, it felt like in a more paternalistic way.”

  After Dr. Rand-Dorney recalled how she recommended “further exploration of confusion, possible psychosis, mood disorder, paranoia disorder,” the expert who did that follow-up, Dr. Adriana Flores, took the stand to deliver testimony that served as the heart of the defense case.

  Rubin asked her: “Did you arrive at an opinion whether or not Hemy is criminally responsible for the death of Rusty Sneiderman?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your opinion?”

  “That Neuman is not criminally responsible for the death of Rusty Sneiderman.”

  “Why is that?”

  “At the time of the shooting of Sneiderman, Neuman did not have the mental capacity to distinguish between right and wrong in relation to the shooting.”

  “What is it about his condition that rendered him incapable of distinguishing right from wrong?”

  “He had a disorder, a mental illness called bipolar 1 disorder with psychosis,” she said, adding, “He was manic in that phase of the bipolar 1 disorder, and he was experiencing psychosis. Specifically, he was experiencing some delusions.”

  Giving the jury a tutorial, Flores sought to dispel some myths about bipolar disorder, telling them the swings from depression to manic behavior don’t necessarily happen overnight. Somebody could be depressed for months, then manic for months more, or go for long stretches in a “green zone,” when they’re “normal” and “balanced” for the most part with some episodes of mania or depression.

  While depression is marked by feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness, people in a manic phase, she said, have “racing thoughts” and are “abnormally active,” operating at a high energy level with only two or three hours of sleep. They also experience “hypersexuality,” she said. “Someone who is manic has very high sex arousal, a very high libido. Sometimes they get in trouble because they end up having sex with people, so it can get dangerous.” This recklessness can extend to other aspects of their lives, including spending money or gambling. They can be agitated, irritable, and “hyper-religious,” thinking they might be God. “They might be reading the Bible or the Torah,” she said. “There’s also talk of angels and demons.”

  The psychosis relates to a loss of touch with reality, perhaps due to delusions—feelings that are not real and highly resistant to change. Sufferers can have bizarre delusions, such as irrational fears of being poisoned by a neighbor, or the kind that Flores believed that Hemy suffered, what she called nonbizarre delusions. In this case, she said, he had two. One was an “erotomatic delusion.” He had “irrational romantic beliefs about one’s relationship with another person.” The other was a “rescue delusion,” an irrational belief that other people needed his protection and it was his job to save them.

  “He had erotomatic delusions at the time he shot Sneiderman,” she said. “He believed he was having more of an affair with Andrea Sneiderman than he was. He believed he was the father of her children, that the children were endangered, and that he was going to protect the children by killing Sneiderman and they, he would be, afterwards, with what he calls his family and his children, who are the Sneiderman children.”

  The order to kill, Hemy told her, came from the she-demon at the dinner party and that the angel returned a month later in the car. She stressed that Hemy never saw a physical embodiment of Barry White, only that he’d later describe the demon’s voice as deep like White’s; nor did he “see” Olivia Newton-John, but that the angel was “like” her but without the accent.

  All the while, Dr. Flores said, Andrea was “pushing and pulling him,” one moment expressing desire, the next pledging herself to Rusty. “It’s very clear that they were having an affair,” Dr. Flores said, but added: “It’s the nature of the relationship they were having that he was delusional about.” Hemy believed that his and Andrea’s special, soul-to-soul connection meant they were destined to be together forever. What Andrea thought could only be gleaned from her hot-and-cold emails—she refused to be examined by Flores. “It’s not all in his head because she was in fact having sex with him,” said Flores. “Andrea fed into Hemy’s delusions, manipulating him into believing what she believed and thinking what she thought.”

  Under cross-examination, Dr. Flores acknowledged that many of her conclusions hinged on statements from Hemy.

  “Other than what he told you, you have no idea what he was thinking at the time of the crime?” asked Don Geary.

  “If he in fact lied to me, I would be wrong. However, delusions are very difficult to fake.”

  “And if he’s worried about the police, he knows what he did is wrong, doesn’t he?”

  She didn’t immediately answer.

  Geary pressed, “That’s your opinion of the defendant’s mental condition?”

  “My opinion is that he—correct.”

  “You could be wrong?”

  “I could be wrong,” she said, “but I don’t believe I am, though.”

  Geary asked her about Hemy’s claims that he was driven to kill Rusty to protect the children.

  “He never spoke to those children after the shooting, not even at the shiva?”

  Flores rejected Geary’s suggestion. “His first and second choices were (1) Protect the kids, and (2) become a family with Andrea and the kids,” she said. “Everything I reviewed said that the mission he had was to protect the children.”

  But she acknowledged, “I cannot say with 100 percent certainty that what was in my report is accurate and my opinion is correct, but I believe both are correct based on my experience and testing. I do not believe I have evidence that is consistent with [Hemy] lying.”

  The defense wrapped up its case by calling its third expert, psychiatrist Dr. Tracey Marks, who reiterated that Hemy had suffered bipolar disorder with occasional delusional visits from demons for most of his life, never being diagnosed until after he shot Rusty. Her tests also indicated he was not faking a mental illness.

  “He didn’t believe that he was breaking the law,” Dr. Marks replied. “He didn’t see this as murder.”

  The cross-examination followed a familiar route, with Dr. Marks acknowledging she based much of her opinion on Hemy’s statements to her and bristling at the suggestion that her conclusions could be incorrect. “I don’t know if I’ve been wrong,” she told Geary. “It’s my opinion, so it’s not as though there’s someone who’s going to determine if my opinion is right or wrong … There’s not like there’s an ultimate person who says, Let me tell you after the fact that you’re wrong.”

  On the afternoon of Thursday, March 8, Hemy declined to take the stand to testify in his own defense. It was almost 4 p.m., but Judge Adams once again told lawyers to call another witness whose testimony would spill into the next day.

  The trial had just come off a two-day hiatus, the halt in proc
eedings abruptly called after a private session between the judges and attorneys, without explanation to the public. It was only after the resumption of testimony that an explanation was offered: The judge’s mother had died. There would be no comments about it in court and Adams showed no change in demeanor, nudging things along with his usual impatience.

  Before psychiatrist Pamela Crawford was to testify before the jury, she was grilled in a hearing by the defense, which objected to her testimony. Hemy’s lawyers argued that she didn’t have the credentials to be considered an expert. But despite her lapsed board standing and lack of license in Georgia, Judge Adams allowed her testimony.

  Crawford returned the next morning, Friday, March 9, and told the jury that Hemy easily could be faking his mental illness. Somebody of his intelligence could lie to therapists and manipulate the tests. Before his arrest, Hemy showed that he could cope—and thrive—particularly at work with no mental impairment, thinking clearly, planning, and following through on those plans.

  “It is my opinion based on the interview and based on the review of documentation and all the collateral information that Neuman would be considered under Georgia law criminally responsible for the death of Rusty Sneiderman,” she said.

  “In your opinion,” asked prosecutor Geary, “when he shot Rusty Sneiderman, did he know the difference between right and wrong?”

  “It is my opinion that there is no indication that he did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time that he killed him.”

  The prosecution then went to the videotape, playing snippets of Hemy talking about seeing a demon who sounded like Barry White and an angel that looked like Olivia Newton-John only without the Australian accent, the testimony the defense had sought to bar. The clips showed that while these details emerged in his interview with Crawford, it was Hemy—not the psychiatrist—who came up with the names. They also showed the clip of Hemy saying that the first time he ever said he was driven to kill by visions was when he was in jail talking to his attorney while trying to come up with a defense.

  The most chilling portions of the interviews came when Hemy explained his preparations to kill Rusty.

  “I had gotten my marching orders and this was just another one of the things that I needed to do,” Hemy was seen telling Crawford.

  “What did you have to do to plan that?” she asked in their jail interview.

  “Initially, like any project, the first thing that you do is say: What is the desired outcome? And you know the desired outcome is what I’ve been told and that is Rusty needed to die,” he said, leaving the only question of how it would be done. “One, poisoning, two, would be him in an accident, a car accident. Stab him? Shoot him? So you go through the different concepts.”

  “Did you write them down?”

  “No. I do all my planning in my head. I’ve always done planning in my head.”

  His project review, he said, led him to shooting as the best option. It would be, he said, “the cleanest way.”

  “So you got the gun?” asked Crawford.

  “The first thing I did, I took a class on gun safety. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Hemy then led Crawford through his first attempt on Rusty’s life on November 10, 2010, what turned out to a dress rehearsal, down to the disguise and use of a rental car.

  “I put on a disguise and there was a road, a street parallel to their street, with a pedestrian walkway through the woods,” he said. “So I had gone to their house at like 5 a.m., and the reason why I was in disguise was because in case something went wrong, Rusty wouldn’t recognize me and Andrea wouldn’t find out. So it was very simple. He knew my car. He also had seen my car a number of times, so the reason I changed the car was for the same reason.

  “Anyway,” Hemy continued, “I parked in the street and walked over to their house at 5 a.m, maybe 4:30 a.m. It was really early. I crawled through neighbors and made my way very quietly to the side of house. I just laid there and waited. I believed Rusty was going to take a walk and come back to the house. That was the plan, I was just gonna sit there and wait until Rusty came back.”

  “You got there at 5 a.m.?”

  “Yeah, 4:30, 5 a.m.,” said Hemy. “I just laid by the side of the house, where the air conditioner, gas, water is. Their house is on a hill so by laying down, people walking by the street wouldn’t see me. I had a wig, a mustache. I had jeans, a shirt, and a coat, because it was pretty cold. So the idea was I would see Rusty drive away.

  “First I made sure Andrea left with Sophia. Once that happened, the idea would be to have Rusty drive away and when he comes back, as the garage opens I would make my way into the garage and then shoot him.”

  The plan was foiled by a gas leak—which Hemy hadn’t caused—a pure coincidence that spared Rusty’s life for eight days.

  “He smelled the gas so he came to the side of the house,” Hemy said. “He saw me laying there. I think he thought I was a homeless person. He said something. I mumbled something back. He went back to get Ian and started to drive away. I got up and ran away and back to my car, went through the pathway and drove away.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “I didn’t feel like it was a problem,” Hemy said. “The next week I got a beard because he had already seen me with the mustache, so I got a different wig. I said I’ll just follow him to the school and make sure that he drops Ian off at the school and that’s it.”

  “And do it there?” asked Crawford.

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you get away with that?”

  “Yeah, once I put things in motion they happen. That’s the way I work. Once the ideas are fostered, and I put all the elements in place, I can almost oversee it to make sure everything is taking place and intervene if I have to, but I’m a great, great executioner. Once a plan is in place, it’s going to happen.”

  * * *

  After the tapes were played, Crawford was cross-examined. Rubin attacked Crawford’s credentials, but she insisted that while she wasn’t allowed to write prescriptions, her South Carolina standing allowed her to conduct forensic evaluations in another state, though she did acknowledge that she had allowed her South Carolina board certification to lapse. And she said she was charging the state of Georgia three hundred dollars an hour, for a total of sixty thousand dollars.

  As with other mental health witnesses, Crawford acknowledged that some of her opinion hinged on the truthfulness of those with whom she spoke, including Andrea, who denied having an affair with Hemy—a denial that Crawford didn’t believe. She also said that the records of the marital counseling sessions between Ariela and Hemy were incomplete, and that she had relied on Ariela’s accounts. But, she said, “Knowing that each person that I talk to may have their own bias, I take that into account. When you’re talking to an estranged spouse, an angry brother-in-law, the information is important but it has to be taken into context who these people are.”

  As for Hemy’s visions, “You’re not contending that Hemy Neuman told you that Barry White instructed him to ‘Come with me’?” asked Rubin.

  “No, I’m not contending that.”

  “You’re not contending that it was Barry White’s voice that that Mr. Neuman heard?”

  “No, I’m contending, what he said was that it was a voice like Barry White’s.”

  “The same for the angel. He’s not saying Olivia Newton-John told him to save the children?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “He’s not saying it was Olivia Newton-John’s voice that commanded him to save the children?”

  “No.”

  “He’s saying it was a soft voice like that Australian actress in Grease, Olivia Newton-John?”

  “Correct.”

  But there was nothing the defense could do on cross-examination to mitigate the power of the videotape and Hemy’s methodical and seemingly clearheaded account of how he carried out his plans to kill Rusty. To cap off the state’s rebuttal case, prosecutors called th
e jail’s mental health director, Dr. William Jerome Brickhouse, to recount how Hemy only reported feeling suicidal after his legal team had announced the insanity strategy. He also didn’t believe Hemy suffered bipolar disorder, only that he seemed to have the same depressed feelings that anyone else would have if suddenly incarcerated.

  The defense then came back with Dr. Marks again, who insisted that the prosecution’s witnesses were wrong in concluding the defense witnesses were wrong. Dr. Marks added that her opinions cost considerably less than Dr. Crawford’s: She’d billed just five thousand dollars. The prosecution did not cross-examine her.

  With that, the testimony in the sensational case came to an anticlimactic end, the last of the dueling experts leaving the stand as some jurors struggled to stay awake.

  Shortly before noon, the jury was sent home and told that closing arguments would begin the next day.

  CHAPTER 21

  At just before 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 13, 2012, Robert Rubin stood before the jury and talked about what his client had done to the family of Rusty Sneiderman. “They lost their son, brother, father,” he said. “There’s emotion they are going through that hopefully none of you or us will have to deal with, and nothing we have said or done has been unmindful of the respect and empathy they deserve.”

  If only Hemy Neuman knew better, he said, if only he had the capacity at the moment he pulled the trigger to realize what he was doing was wrong. “In fact,” said Rubin, “as bizarre as it sounds, he thought he was doing the right thing.” Acknowledging that at first blush all this “makes no sense,” Rubin opened his summation by reminding the jury what his experts had said repeatedly, that Georgia law does not hold a person criminally responsible if he doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong at the time of the offense.

  “We have to prove insanity,” Rubin continued, the courtroom filled with family and friends of both sides, including Hemy’s mother who sat behind him in the audience section. Andrea was still barred from the courtroom, but Rusty’s brother and father were there. Rubin said the legal threshold for proving insanity was a preponderance of evidence—more-this-than-that. It was not, he said, the far more rigorous standard of beyond-a-reasonable-doubt faced by the prosecution to prove the murder charge. Rubin laid out the options that the judge would later enumerate: not guilty, not guilty by reason of insanity, guilty, and guilty but mentally ill. That last option held the power of a conviction, and he urged the jury to reject that as a “compromise.” “Guilty but mentally ill is guilty,” Rubin said.