Dentist Won’t Face Charges in Wife’s Death

BEVERLY HILLS —  The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office has not been able to determine whether the death of Beverly Hills dentist Robert Tupac’s wife was an accident or murder, so no charges will be filed in the case.

Marianne Tupac’s body was found in the bathtub of the couple’s Westwood home 20 months ago. Robert Tupac told coroner’s investigators that his wife had talked about suicide in the previous weeks. But members of her family discounted a suicide theory and maintained that her death had to have been a homicide. Because Tupac was home alone with her at the time of her death, their suspicions fell on him.

The decision not to prosecute came after Los Angeles Police Department detectives presented a theory of death by suffocation to forensic pathologists across the country.

“We had inconsistent positions among three different coroners’ offices, and the problem was establishing it was death by criminal agency,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Barshop. Such a finding is required for a murder charge.

“This is not something we’ve done lightly, neither the investigation nor the conclusion not to proceed with it,” Barshop said. “We’ve had a lot of dialogue with the victim’s family. A lot.”

Attorney Richard Marmaro, who described himself as the dentist’s friend and lawyer, said Tupac would have no comment.

“My comment is that the district attorney did the right thing, because nothing happened,” Marmaro said. “It was a tragic event, but they did the right thing.”

The decision, revealed last week, left the family of the Westwood woman at a loss.

“It appears for now that it was the perfect murder,” her brother, Mag Frieberg, said in a telephone interview from his home in Maryland.

“I never had a chance, nor has the rest of my family, to grieve for Marianne,” he said. “We’ve been too busy trying to solve it and come to terms with it from that angle.”

“I think we’ll ultimately come to the truth someday, no matter how long it takes,” said Helena Frieberg, Marianne’s younger sister. “Without understanding what happened that evening you never get into the accepting phase of the grieving process.”

It was Mag Frieberg who drew the attention of West Los Angeles detectives to the Feb. 13, 1991, death, which was originally listed as a drowning of undetermined origin, possibly complicated by the ingestion of sedatives.

The family also brought in New York pathologist David Baden, who examined the autopsy results and concluded that the 36-year-old woman was suffocated before her body was put in the tub.

In November of last year, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office issued a supplementary ruling, saying, “given the unusual circumstances of this unwitnessed and unexpected death, Mrs. Tupac’s death must be medico-legally considered a homicide.”

But the same evidence failed to persuade San Francisco Medical Examiner Boyd Stevens, who was asked this summer to review the case before the district attorney’s office would proceed.

“His conclusion . . . was that he was not prepared at this point in time, based on the evidence presented to him, to make the call that it was death by criminal agency,” said Barshop.

He noted, however, that there is no statute of limitations for murder, something that the dead woman’s relatives have taken to heart.

“I don’t believe anybody gets away with anything ultimately,” Mag Frieberg said. “Ultimately there’s always punishment, or retribution, if you would.”

Since his wife’s death, Tupac has married his office manager, sold his Westwood home and moved to Bill Cody Road in the gated community of Hidden Hills, near the Ventura County line. The dead woman’s siblings said he has not spoken with them nor allowed their mother to see her two grandchildren.

Tupac and Marianne Frieberg had been married for 13 years when she died on the eve of Valentine’s Day, 1991.

According to police reports, Tupac told investigators that his wife could not sleep when they went to bed at about 9:45 p.m.

He said he fell asleep when she got up to take a bath. When he arose shortly before midnight, he found her lifeless body in the glass-enclosed, blue-tiled tub.

An empty bottle of Halcion sleeping tablets that he had prescribed for her was on a medicine cabinet.

“He surmised . . . that she had overdosed on those pills and that the death was a suicide,” a police report said.

Tupac told a coroner’s investigator that his wife had been depressed about her business, a children’s computer school that she had recently bought with $50,000 loaned by her mother. He said that she had spoken of suicide three weeks before.

The dentist has since declined to cooperate with investigators. The office manager, Tierney Bocek, was called before a grand jury to tell what she knew about the case, but a Superior Court judge ruled that she was protected by a spouse’s immunity from having to testify against her husband.