Had this been a murder trial, Shayna Citron would have been the star witness, not just for her emotional testimony but for providing the critical element to a prosecution case: motive. Her accounts of tension in the Sneiderman household propel the theory that Andrea solved her domestic woes with murder. Using her feminine wiles—a prosecutor may well have argued—Andrea duped the mentally addled Hemy Neuman, blinded by love and torn asunder by her romantic teasing, into doing the dirty work and taking the fall. With no hard evidence against her, she would walk off with a couple of million dollars. In the end, the prosecution could have said, Andrea was undone by her lies and arrogance and the fact that she blurted out her husband was shot long before anybody told her so, to, of all people, Shayna Citron, the former BFF she treated so shabbily after the murder.
It was a tidy and compelling storyline, and DA Robert James seemed poised to present it before a jury up until literally hours before the start of trial. Even now aspects of it ring true. Andrea likely was unhappy in her marriage, much more so than she was willing to admit, evidenced by her behavior after she left part-time home employment for the big leagues at GE. She described the transition as “terrifying.” It upset the delicate balance of power and responsibilities in the marriage, left her both disoriented and, possibly, more vulnerable than she might otherwise have been to the attentions of another man. She acknowledged being flattered by Hemy’s attentions, his respect for her professionally, and his apparently genuine interest in her feelings. Andrea also seemed to savor being his confidante. She would try to paint herself as naive. And from much of what she told the judge at sentencing, she did seem genuinely unaware of the consequences of developing a personal relationship with her boss. She said she saw him as a friend and mentor, a kind father of three. She didn’t say he was also a husband.
Whether she was the driving, manipulative force in this relationship remained less clear. Andrea offered several strong denials. Hemy possessed the power, according to her. He controlled her career and therefore her life. The best she could do was go on the defensive, and in this, she said, she failed. She seriously downplayed his behavior. She called it “harmless attention” and his declarations “isolated inappropriate and insignificant comments.” She thought he was a man being a man and that she could handle him. Her biggest regret, she said, was not repelling his advances and running off to tell Rusty and the HR department.
But even a cursory review of the emails, combined with Andrea’s steely demeanor in court, suggests she was selling herself short in front of the judge. She was no helpless waif; nor was she, it appears, an evil seductress. She looked instead like a woman in over her head sometimes, more in control in others. Before GE, her office had been her home, and most contact with co-workers was via phone or email. Now she was navigating her way through a strange and scary new world of work intermixed with male–female relations, overcome with emotions that were new, perplexing, and frightening.
As the relationship deepened, she acknowledged that the “line of appropriate conduct” had become “blurred.” At first she suggested it was Hemy crossing those lines, not her. But the emails suggested that this was so much more than a randy boss hitting on her. She appeared fond of him, respected him as he respected her, and she was excited by the prospect of travel, dining out, drinking wine, dancing, and visiting overseas, all on the GE AmEx.
How close did they ultimately get? The Pulse bartender recalled kissing, butt grabbing, and close dancing. Whether it went any farther is impossible to tell. Hemy wavered on whether they had actually had sex, giving differing accounts to friends and mental health experts and finally just throwing up his arms and professing to a faulty memory. Andrea flatly denied it: “No sex.” But, she spoke of the “complete betrayal” she committed of “allowing him to get too close to me on a personal level” and sharing feelings with him in a way that she had never done with anybody but Rusty. Her pained emails after a fateful business trip suggested that the feelings ran even deeper than she was willing to admit even at her sentencing, and that they conflicted her.
What the emails didn’t reveal was any evidence of a murder plot. Nowhere did Andrea tell Hemy to kill Rusty. Nowhere did Hemy offer. Not a single witness could recount either Hemy or Andrea speaking of wanting Rusty gone. That scenario, under close inspection, made less and less sense. She could be mad at him, but how would killing him solve anything? The insurance money? They were already wealthy; she didn’t need it. To free herself of Rusty’s self-absorption and job-hopping? Shayna Citron painted a vivid image of an unhappy woman poised to have an affair—but murder? Shayna never heard the word, and neither did anybody else.
Lacking a “smoking email” and a clear motive, the leap to suggesting Andrea recruited Hemy as an assassin became a big one. Andrea predictably said she had no idea her mild-mannered engineer boss had the heart of a killer. But so did everybody else at GE, who had no reason to lie. In fact, it appeared the only one who thought Hemy capable of murder was Hemy. He put on such a front that virtually nobody saw the slightest indication of his inner demons. Outside of his sister, nobody even seemed to know he had emotional problems, much less severe bipolar disorder and delusions. Even Hemy’s own long-suffering wife denied having any knowledge of his mental issues. Nor, did it seem, did Andrea. There was no corroborating evidence—no emails, letters, testimony—that Andrea had a clue. Accepting the suggestions that she was a manipulator, Andrea may have seen in Hemy an escape from a troubled marriage or a pawn for promotion or a weak man to push around to boost her own ego. By the end she may even have worried about attentions and what motivated them, and as she distanced herself from him could have detected some of the psychoses that would later play such a big role in his trial.
Still, the investigation uncovered evidence that raised troubling questions and couldn’t go unexamined. Had she gone on trial for murder, Exhibit A would have been Andrea’s purported knowledge that Rusty was shot before she had been informed of this. She had related this information to Shayna. In a fictional murder mystery this would have sealed the suspect’s fate. How else could she have known unless she had arranged it? But in reality, a defense attorney could have shredded this evidence. The defense would only have had to step back to the chaotic scene at Dunwoody Prep in the hours after the brazen attack. A lot of people were coming and going, a lot of people were saying a lot of things. Rusty’s father was told over the phone that Rusty had been shot, but he couldn’t remember by whom. Couldn’t somebody else have told Andrea?
A homicide investigator—Gary Cortellino—talked to her at the school. He would deny later that he told her that Rusty was shot, but at a murder trial Cortellino’s credibility would come under attack. This was the same Cortellino, the defense could note, who professed he never heard Andrea mention Hemy’s name when she was being questioned at her home two days after the murder, when the tape recording showed she did. Could he have said it and forgot? Or did it slip out? Or could somebody else have said something at the preschool? A lot of people heard shots. That Andrea couldn’t pinpoint exactly who said it to her and when would be a flimsy foundation for a murder case, particularly one lacking any of the documentary evidence of a conspiracy.
The more compelling circumstantial evidence was the phone records. The fact that Hemy called her at key points—when he was out buying the gun, for instance, or heading to a costume shop—would be hard to ignore. But these were calls to her from him, and it wasn’t known what they said. Had any of the calls been followed by a text or an email that mentioned “gun” or “disguise,” even cryptically, a case could be made that Andrea must have known what he was doing. Lacking that, it seemed to be more smoke than fire.
This left the most provocative evidence, the phone records showing Andrea’s calls to Hemy the morning of the shooting. Andrea’s attorneys suggested she was merely calling Hemy to tell him she would be out of the office for an emergency. Here is where the relationship between Andrea and Hemy becomes relevant. And
rea may not have considered Hemy insane, but she received numerous emails in which he professed his love for her. He had proposed to her. Whatever the extent of their physical relationship, they had become much closer than Andrea would admit for a long time. It was possible that Andrea reached out to him as the friend she always said he had been, looking for somebody, anybody, to talk to, as she did when she called Shayna Citron shortly after the murder.
But there are other possibilities, ones that may strike to the heart of the case and explain so much of Andrea’s subsequent behavior.
The moment she found out Rusty was dead, apparently violently based on the police response, she could have feared that Hemy had killed him. The word crazy, which she’d use to describe him after his arrest and which she may, in the back of her head, have always suspected, may now have flashed like a big light-up sign. The evidence suggested that Andrea and Hemy had ended whatever relationship they had before Rusty’s murder—at least from Andrea’s standpoint. The emails had stopped, she and Rusty showed signs of getting closer again. But Hemy may not have been ready to let it go. Had she wondered that very thing? And now that Rusty was dead, had that wonder turned to terror?
The idea may still have seemed preposterous to her, as she would later claim. And so she may have called him not so much to confront him as to confirm if he was in the office, to hear him tell her that he had been there all morning, that he had an alibi, that her fears were irrational.
It may not have taken much to convince her.
When the detectives asked the day after the murder if there was anybody trying to break up her marriage, she provided Hemy’s name. She did this knowing he was still her boss, that she could be wrong about fingering an innocent man who had been a friend, that she could be exposing an unflattering chapter in her life in a case generating wide media attention. She would return to this point over and over. And while she did also mention others, from Rusty’s business associates to the exterminator, the name Hemy Neuman came from her mouth and was memorialized on tape. It wasn’t her fault the cops blew it.
But it set in motion an avalanche of complications that would ultimately bury Andrea. Within weeks police had arrested him, and it was clear they wanted full disclosure—and still she resisted. The longer she held on to the details of her travels and conversations with Hemy, the worse it got for her. Her recalcitrance fueled a frenzy. The more she dodged and weaved and eventually clammed up, the guiltier she looked, and the harder police pressed. Authorities don’t like to be challenged—anybody who gets pulled over for speeding knows not to argue with the cop—and Andrea violated every rule. Her behavior at trial, and on the witness stand, seemed to be the last straw.
By Andrea’s trial it had become a zero-sum game. “There is no evidence she has done anything wrong,” her attorney Thomas Clegg asserted in opening statements. She had her attorneys draw a line in the sand while forgetting one important thing. While there may not have been evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that she was murder conspirator, she did plenty wrong when the stakes couldn’t have been any higher. The defense couldn’t make good on its promise to the jury.
The final question, then, was not whether she lied, but why should she?
In the lead-up to Hemy’s trial, Andrea’s character and behavior drew the attention of mental health experts. Many of the findings reflected poorly on her. Psychologist Adriana Flores, hired by Hemy’s defense, suggested Andrea was a woman who had toyed with the emotions of a disturbed man. “It is a pattern of pushing him away and pulling him forward, pushing him away, pulling him forward,” she had testified. “Neuman is already delusional. She was giving him signs that were there. That’s what makes it more concerning. He already had this thought that children were his and he’d have a relationship forever and ever. It’s not all in his head because she was in fact having sex with him,” said Flores in her testimony. “However, she was giving him cues that were very much real.”
Flores’s opinions came with a proviso: She did not speak with Andrea, who refused to be interviewed. The prosecution’s witness, psychologist Pamela Crawford, did talk to her but appeared to have been left with no deeper insights. The interview was conducted under poor clinical conditions—Andrea’s attorney was in the room—and Andrea skirted details about her relationship with Hemy. “She maintained throughout my talking to her that [there] was no physical contact,” said Crawford, who finally gave up asking her about a possible affair. “It was clear to me that she was not going to acknowledge anything to do with having a romantic relationship. I wanted to try to get information from her and did not want to close the information down, so I did not want to push her on that.” When Crawford was asked if she had considered testing Andrea’s veracity, she said, “No, what I did was get information from her. I was trying to get info about Hemy Neuman, I didn’t with her in the interview, take emails to see if she was truthful.” That didn’t stop Crawford from forming a conclusion: ‘‘I thought it was unlikely she was being truthful from the information that I had.”
For all their probing of Hemy’s motivations the mental health experts never cared much about Andrea’s. They fulfilled the mandate of bulding a case for or against Hemy Neuman and somewhere along the line larger truths got ignored. Andrea emerged more as an abstraction than a person, one more factor shaping Hemy’s sanity like his troubled youth or financial woes. Nobody was interested in what Andrea felt or why she felt it. Had the mental health experts dug deeper, they may have found those motivations behind the behavior that cost her so and provided some answers to the questions that continue to bedevil the case.
At 12:22 a.m. on Monday, June 16, 2014, Andrea Sneiderman walked out of prison after serving 22 months of her five-year sentence. She left with a fat bank balance, custody of her children, the support of her parents, and an uneasy truce with her in-laws. But it will never really be over for her. The rest of her years promise experiences few can ever comprehend. She can start over, but the events surrounding her husband’s murder are forever preserved in a digital world that forgets nothing. Everything she did and said is but a mouse click away, to future neighbors, future employers, to her children.
And always will linger the question: If it weren’t for her behavior—in Greenville and Longmont and London, over email and text and cellphone—would Rusty still be alive?
Were there truths too painful for her to confront—to her family, to the police, to herself?
For now, she insists the institutions of authority spared her no mercy for her trauma and stripped her of her liberty for crimes she says she never committed. “I want to go back to the life I had with Rusty,” she told the judge at sentencing. “This is not a world I understand anymore.” And yet, for all her bitterness toward the justice system, “I am determined to raise my children to be happy, productive citizens of this country.” To the end, she remained a woman wrestling with contradictions.
* * *
One hundred and thirty miles due east of Atlanta, on the outskirts of Augusta, stands the Augusta State Medical Prison. Like the Arrendale women’s prison, this place of punishment is located in a pleasant community of trees and friendly folks—visitors are greeted by a sign reading, WELCOME TO GROVETOWN, A COMMUNITY THAT CARES. A century ago the rich of Augusta fled the stifling heat and swampy diseases of summer for vacation homes in Grovetown. Though called a medical prison, Augusta is no quiet hospital. An analysis of prison reports and state Department of Corrections data by the Augusta Chronicle found that Augusta State Medical Prison ranked among the highest in the state for serious attacks between inmates. In the summer of 2011 one inmate was stabbed to death with homemade shanks in the prison yard. Nobody is immune from the violence. Guards and even nurses, the Chronicle wrote, “are routinely slapped, punched and harassed by inmates.”
Hemy Neuman’s mug shot taken upon entering the prison shows a man with close-cropped hair, gray and thinning, head tilted to the left, eyes wide, with a curious almost whimsically resigned expression,
as if he’s saying, What can I do? It was a stark change from his trial. He looked more like the incarcerated mental patient he’d become than a high-level corporate manager he had been. “He’s surviving,” said his attorney Robert Rubin. “He’s on medication. He’s not being mistreated in prison. He’s trying to make the best of a very bad situation. He’s actually a very easygoing guy.” Hemy’s home was now a barracks-style building, not a cell, and he had not fallen victim to violence. It was behind these walls that the question of whether Andrea conspired to kill Rusty would be posed. Before her trial, the prosecution made overtures to Hemy. Locked up for life, he had little to lose, it would seem. If he would turn on Andrea, now would be the time. He didn’t. Andrea had nothing to do with the murder. Hemy acted alone. He never wanted her to know it was he who pulled the trigger four times. That’s why he wore a disguise and rented a van. He didn’t want her to be mad at him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL FLEEMAN is an associate bureau chief for People magazine in Los Angeles and a former reporter for the Associated Press. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Sign up for email updates here.
ST. MARTIN’S TRUE CRIME LIBRARY TITLES BY MICHAEL FLEEMAN
LACI
“IF I DIE…”
THE STRANGER IN MY BED
OVER THE EDGE
DEADLY MISTRESS
KILLER BODIES
SEDUCED BY EVIL
LOVE YOU MADLY
CRAZY FOR YOU
Crazy for You Page 29