“We categorically deny each and every one of the charges that were filed against Andrea today,” Morgan said in a statement. “We are looking forward to a vigorous and complete defense to ensure that Andrea is fully exonerated of these false accusations. We are confident that, when an unbiased jury hears the facts of this case, it will be clear that Andrea is innocent.”
At a press conference, DA Robert James said as little as possible. “My staff, my investigators handled the arrest along with the Putnam County investigators,” he said. “My understanding is the children were not present.” He declined to answer questions about the evidence against Andrea, leaving that to the indictment, which offered a detailed narrative, starting with Andrea’s hiring at GE by Hemy, her business trips with Hemy, what the indictment called their “affair,” and through the days before the murder. Rusty originally was to have been killed on November 10, 2010, the indictment said, alleging that it was Andrea who provided Hemy with Rusty’s schedule and told him of a secluded path behind her house that he could use to escape. When that failed due to the gas leak alerting Rusty, Andrea gave Hemy Rusty’s schedule for November 18, and the plot was carried out to its deadly end. The motive came down to money and passion. The pair “conspired together to murder Rusty Sneiderman so that they could enjoy a life together, eliminate Neuman’s debt problems and fully benefit from the assets the Sneidermans had acquired as well as the proceeds of Rusty Sneiderman’s life insurance policies,” the indictment read.
Afterward, Andrea “misled police by indicating she was not in a relationship with Neuman,” according to the indictment, even though she confided in Shayna Citron that she had suspicions about Hemy. This turned Andrea’s longtime and once closest friend into the potential premier witness against her at trial, a role Shayna appeared ready and willing to take. “My client knew that she was not telling the truth,” Shayna’s lawyer, Jay Abt, told My Fox Atlanta. “You can tell when your best friend is lying sometimes. In this case, Shayna was able to know and understand that Andrea was not being truthful about denying a relationship with Hemy Neuman.”
Rusty’s family also issued a statement. “The arrest and indictment of Andrea Sneiderman is another important step in the pursuit of Justice for Rusty. This action, however, brings us no joy. We thank District Attorney Robert James, ADA Don Geary, Investigator Mark Potter and the rest of their team for their relentless pursuit of the truth in this case and we will continue to support their efforts in every way through the trial. We will NEVER stop fighting for Justice for Rusty.”
But for all the detail in the indictment, it—like the petition in the wrongful death case—offered little in the way of new evidence. It didn’t say how prosecutors intended to prove that Andrea gave Hemy the schedule for Rusty for either day he was targeted to die—whether it happened in an email or a phone call or in person. It referenced no evidence at all that said Andrea had any inkling that Hemy intended to kill Rusty or that Andrea herself had harbored such feelings. For all the emails presented at Hemy’s trial, none came close to that. Nor did the indictment suggest that Hemy had provided new information or intended to testify against Andrea, a problematic scenario at best since his entire defense was that he was insane.
After nineteen days in jail, Andrea Sneiderman appeared before Judge Adams for a bond hearing on August 21, 2012. Her attorneys called a series of witnesses to show that Andrea had strong ties to the community and family and would not jump bond. Her father, Herbert Greenberg, took the stand to describe how close Andrea was to her children. “Her children have been the highlight of her and our life,” he testified, the first person to say anything under oath on Andrea’s behalf. “Before Rusty was murdered, every decision relative to the children was made by both of them planning together.” Her friend Joanne Powers called Andrea “the best mother ever” and said, “Sometimes I’m really amazed at her patience.” Her rabbi, Hirsh Minkowicz, described Andrea as an active member of the synagogue. Her friend and former sorority sister Tracey Carisch said Andrea is so rooted in the Atlanta area that she had turned down Carisch’s suggestion to move to Chattanooga after the trial to get away. When asked if Andrea would be capable of abandoning her family and children if granted bond, her other friend Tammi Parker said, “Oh, gosh, no.”
It was left to Shayna Citron’s lawyer Jay Abt to present another side, recounting how Andrea was “threatening” toward Shayna at the trial, quoting Andrea as saying, “You’re going to have to live with what I’m going to do to you.” The statement, the prosecution suggested, showed that Andrea would be a threat to the community if sprung from jail. But Andrea had an answer for that, too. The defense called to the stand Joanne Powers, who also said she saw Sneiderman and Citron embrace in the courtroom. She said she went outside and observed Sneiderman and Citron sitting on a bench holding hands as though they were friends. She said she heard Sneiderman say, “I need people around me who trust me and believe in me and you don’t believe in me so we can’t be friends.” Powers said Sneiderman’s voice and demeanor were loving and kind, not threatening.
After hearing arguments, Judge Adams agreed to spring Andrea on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bond with a number of restrictions, the strictest of which was that she had to remain under house arrest with her parents. She had to wear an electronic ankle bracelet that would alert authorities if she went outside the boundaries of her parents’ home in Roswell (she’d have to pay for the device). The only time she could leave was to see the doctor or her attorneys. She also would have to give up her passport and those of her children. She could visit her parents, brother, sister-in-law, children, and rabbi, but could have no contact with any potential witnesses.
Two days later, on Thursday, August 23, her attorneys delivered a $250,000 cashier’s check to the court—another condition was that half the bail had to be put up in cash. She raised the money even though as part of her arrest the prosecution had frozen many of her assets, including the two-million-dollar life insurance payout after Rusty’s murder. The rest of her bail was secured by a bond backed by real estate. She had one request before being released; she asked to change out of the shorts and black top she had been wearing when arrested. The sheriff agreed, and at about noon she walked out of the jail in a smart black pantsuit, the cuff covering her new ankle bracelet.
Reporters converged on her, one of them asking, “Andrea, when your children get older and you have to talk to them about this—when they start asking about the situation and their father, what will you tell them?” She ignored the questions, got into a minivan with one of her attorneys, and drove off.
In the end, Andrea did not run away and did not try to intimidate any witnesses. She stayed and fought—against the prosecution’s murder case, against Rusty’s brother who continued to press his wrongful death lawsuit. She made court appearances and never wavered from declaring her innocence, though always expressing herself publicly through her attorneys. (Andrea to this day has not granted a media interview.) She would fight for more freedom. Soon her bail conditions would be loosened to allow her to attend Jewish services including Yom Kippur in September, Sukkoth services in October, and the lighting of the first candle for Hanukkah in December.
All the while, questions mounted about whether prosecutors had overreached. In October prosecutors formally turned over their evidence to the defense. At first look it appeared intimidating: 9,233 pages, ninety-one CDs of interviews, and a number of other video and audio recordings. But a closer examination showed that it was almost the exact same evidence prosecutors had used a year earlier against Hemy. There were the same witnesses, the same emails, the same phone records. The prosecution arguably could build a case that Andrea had an affair with a man who later killed her husband, but nowhere did it appear they had any direct evidence that she’d ordered Rusty killed or even wanted him dead. Nor was there anything between them suggesting they talked about the murder afterward. The prosecution case appeared to hinge on Andrea’s behavior after the murder
—her alleged lies about an affair, her apparent knowledge of the means of her husband’s murder before it was officially revealed, and her demeanor on the witness stand at Hemy’s trial. It could be argued she possessed a consciousness of guilt, but it was all circumstantial, a rickety case that Andrea’s top-flight defense team savored attacking.
As before, however, the prosecution got an unexpected boost—from Andrea herself. Her behavior continuing to raise eyebrows. In November 2012, the case took a strange twist when Steven Sneiderman’s attorneys suggested as part of the wrongful death lawsuit that Andera had begun a relationship with a man named Joseph Dell. Dell was among the many who had come to Andrea’s aid since Hemy’s trial, voicing their solidarity on a blog called “Friends of Andrea,” a forum to both support her and rip into the DA’s office. According to jailhouse phone logs, Andrea had called her parents fifty-five times and Dell fifty-eight times. Recorded by the jail, one of the calls had Andrea asking Dell to move in with her parents, whom Dell called “Mom and Dad.” On the day of Andrea’s indictment, Dell called her and “is heard crying and professing his love for Defendeant Sneiderman,” according to the court papers. “This bold romantic gesture is met by Defendant, who is apparently aware of the recording, with a response eerily similar to her handling of Neuman, ‘I do not know what to say,’” the filing says.
The question soon arose over how long the alleged relationship had gone on. Steven Sneiderman’s lawyer Esther Panitch wrote in a court filing that the relationship between Andrea and Dell had roots earlier. Dell separated from his six-months’-pregnant wife in June 2011, several months before the trial, around the time media reports had begun divulging details about Andrea’s travels with Hemy. On the day that Andrea testified at the trial—February 21, 2012—Dell’s wife filed for divorce. Dell was with Andrea at the courthouse, according to Panitch. “Despite the lack of finality in his divorce case, Mr. Dell was already well ensconced with defendant,” Panitch wrote in her brief to the court, saying the divorce, which cited irreconcilable differences, wouldn’t be finalized for another six months, in August 2012. When Andrea was arrested in August, Dell was in the house with her.
“What is known today about defendant’s [Andrea’s] relationship with Mr. Dell bears a striking similarity to defendant’s relationship with the man who shot Rusty,” Panitch wrote. “It is unknown when Dell became involved in Defendant’s life but upon information and belief, it was prior to the murder of Rusty as Andrea and Mr. Dell arranged ‘playdates’ with their children.” Panitch sought court permission to question Andrea to find out “whether Joseph Dell was the ultimate reason for manipulating Neuman to kill Rusty.”
Andrea’s lawyers in the wrongful death case strongly denied that anything involving Dell had a role in Rusty’s murder. Andrea’s civil lawyer Mark Trigg denounced that suggestion as “preposterous” and contended that Steven Sneiderman’s attorney lodged it both to harass Andrea and to try to get Hemy to turn on Andrea. “It seems likely that the assertion at this late date that Andrea had another so-called ‘paramour’ is made in an effort to manipulate Mr. Neuman so that he will fall into a jealous rage, decide to no longer tell the truth in this regard, and finally provide something that so far is completely lacking: any direct evidence that Andrea Sneiderman was a co-conspirator in her husband’s murder,” he wrote.
The issue immediately spilled into the criminal case. It arose at a hearing that had been intended to focus on a completely different issue. Andrea had sought permission to leave house arrest to visit Rusty’s grave on November 18, 2012, the second anniversary of his murder, for yahrtzeit, the Jewish observance of the death of somebody close. At the last minute she withdrew the request, her prayers and lighting of the twenty-four-handle candle, fearing an invasion of reporters and TV crews. “It was going to be a madhouse,” one of her lawyers, John Petrey, said. Instead, the hearing turned to the revelations from the civil case, with prosecutors suggesting that it was another potential motive for murder. Now prosecutors expanded their case from an alleged love triangle to something more complicated and sinister. “Evidence is starting to come up that might show that it was not for Mr. Neuman to be with the defendant but for someone else,” prosecutor Don Geary told Judge Adams at a subsequent hearing in the criminal trial. “Mr. Dell might be that someone else.” At the very least, the prosecution said, Dell was a potential witness at trial. And under the terms of Andrea’s bond, she was not to have any contact with any witnesses while under house arrest. Geary sought to have all contact between Andrea and Dell cease immediately.
It was a hardball tactic, taking on Andrea not just legally but personally. If granted, it would leave Andrea more isolated. To suggest Rusty died because of this relationship was “incredible on its face,” said one of her criminal lawyers, Thomas Clegg, and “has absolutely no bearing on any issue in this particular case.” Clegg, however, tiptoed around whether Andrea and Dell had a romance, saying the “exact status of their relationship is best described as to be determined.” Clegg portrayed Dell as something of a domestic helper. “She lives with her parents, but again they can’t do everything on her behalf,” Klegg told the judge. “She needs, quite frankly, some help and I don’t see that there is any downside to allowing her to have contact with this gentleman.” To add Dell to the witness list, and therefore remove him from Andrea’s life, would cost her somebody to help pick up her children and care for them while she remained under house arrest.
Although Dell had apparently been in court with Andrea, few took notice of him and little was known about him until the court filing. On the Friends of Andrea website, Dell described his relationship with Andrea. “I hardly knew Andrea before her husband was murdered but I have gotten to know her and her family as an extension of my own,” Dell wrote on September 28. “For anyone who knows Andrea, there is no mystery and no mystery man. The mystery man was Hemy Neuman: the mentally ill individual who was convicted of murdering Rusty Sneiderman. But the jury got it right and he is in jail for the rest of his life. The rest of the noise is an attempt to smear Andrea and any of her friends and family.” He added in an apparent reference to Steven Sneiderman’s lawsuit, “There are those who want to paint a picture and concoct a story about something far more salacious. I’m sorry to disappoint everyone but it just isn’t there.”
About a week and a half after the hearing, on November 26, 2012, Judge Adams issued a written ruling: “The Court … hereby DENIES defendant’s motion and further ORDERS that the defendant have no contact with the witness Joseph Dell.” Within days, the defense fought back, asking the judge again to remove Dell from the witness list. Arguing that there was no evidence Andrea and Dell had a relationship before Rusty’s murder, the defense called the matter irrelevant and asked the judge to bar the state from bringing it up in court before a jury. The request came in a sweeping motion filed in early December 2012 to throw out all the charges against Andrea. Describing the indictment as ambiguous and confusing, the defense said it “fails to spell out what acts Sneiderman committed to warrant a murder charge.”
This represented Andrea’s biggest counteroffensive since police first began to wonder whether she had anything to do with Rusty’s murder. It was accompanied by an aggressive publicity move. Although she again stayed away from reporters, Andrea’s camp marched out a series of surrogates. While Andrea had remained close to some of her friends from before the murder—Tammi Parker among them—she had been joined by a growing circle of supporters drawn to her during and after the trial, connected via the Friends of Andrea website. Among them were a couple named Ryan and Elizabeth Stansbury who were at the forefront of Andrea’s PR campaign that included interviews on 48 Hours and in the local media.
“I think anybody who knows her for more than five minutes realizes that she didn’t do this,” Ryan Stansbury told WSB-TV the second week of December 2012. “It’s been very difficult for her, for both she and her family.” His wife added, “I think it’s been a travesty that peopl
e are starting to show empathy to the villain, the murderer, the one that orchestrated this all on his own, and that’s Hemy Neuman.” Anticipating that prosecutors would show the criminal jury scenes from Andrea’s testimony in Hemy’s trial, Ryan also sought to explain why Andrea seemed to come off so badly. “Both the defense and the prosecution, for their own reasons, were both out to get Andrea,” he told the news station. “They needed her to make their cases.” The couple repeated their thoughts for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but this story also noted how the murder case had caused a rift not just among family members but also among friends. The case forced people to take sides: between Andrea and Rusty’s family. “There’s been a lot of angry emails that have gone back and forth between friends,” Josh Golub, a radiologist who lived near Rusty’s parents in Cleveland, told the newspaper. “Rusty would be so upset that his friends were fighting. He was always one to avoid trouble. He’d be trying to find a way around this.”
Along with the media moves, Andrea’s attorneys went after Hemy’s wife, seeking a mountain of documentation, including scheduling calendars, diaries, and any papers that may relate to efforts to sell the rights to her life story. The lawyers portrayed this as an effort to amass evidence to help Andrea’s defense, though many saw it also as a dig at Ariela’s attorney, Esther Panitch, whom Andrea’s civil attorneys had already accused of misconduct with her suggestions that the Dell relationship played a role in Rusty’s murder. Panitch didn’t take it quietly, blasting Andrea again and generating a headline-making revelation. Her papers filed in February 2013 quoted Andrea from her jailhouse conversations with Dell as talking about possibly selling her life story and asking Dell if “every day or every couple of days, you could jot a couple notes down.”
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