Adair Prosecution Lacked ‘Smoking Gun,’ 2 Jurors Say

Prosecutors seeking to send a woman to prison for life on charges of beating her husband to death with a baseball bat presented a believable theory but failed to prove it, jurors said last week in their first detailed comments on the case.

A juror and an alternate told The Times that the evidence presented in the three-week trial of Jeanie Adair was so thin, they had no choice Monday but to acquit her, although they suspect she may have been involved in the killing.

“We were all waiting for the smoking gun or the bloody fingerprint and it never came,” said alternate juror James Garber, 33, of Lake View Terrace. “When the prosecution rested, it was kind of a letdown.”

He and Francis Fry, 65, criticized the Los Angeles Police Department investigation as disorganized and ineffective, pointing out what they thought were missed opportunities to gather more definitive evidence in a sensational case tinged with allegations of deceit, infidelity and jealousy.

“I think a better investigation should’ve been done at the house,” Fry, a retired truck driver, said Saturday. “That’s where they really blew it.”

The panel’s first vote, after nearly five hours of deliberations, was a resounding 11-1 for acquittal, Fry said. It took about eight more hours of deliberations to sway the holdout.

Prosecutors have complained that they lost the case because the judge kept vital evidence about motive and loud arguments from the jury in retribution for prosecutors’ successfully appealing an early ruling to a higher court.

Such evidence would have been helpful, Fry and Garber said, adding that it was never proved the couple was splitting up or that she harbored enough rage to crush his skull. But they could not predict whether that evidence would have changed the trial’s outcome.

San Fernando Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt, who worked as both a prosecutor and defense lawyer before his ascent to the bench, said he was ethically barred from commenting about his rulings.

Home-Invasion Robbery Claimed

Robert Adair, 40, was killed in 1996 in his Sylmar condominium during his lunch hour by three crushing blows to the head.

Jeanie Adair has consistently told police she and her husband were victims of a home-invasion robber posing as a gas company employee. She said he tied her up, beat her, robbed her and then killed her husband when he came home for lunch. It took her more than an hour to free herself and call for help, she said.

Police didn’t believe her, and after a two-year investigation, the mother of two was arrested on murder charges. It was alleged she killed for $400,000 in life-insurance proceeds.

The heart of the case, presented by Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein, was three telephone calls the defendant allegedly made to her husband and her lover at a time when she had said she was bound and gagged.

Secretaries testified for the prosecution that they recognized the defendant’s voice, but Garber and Fry said that without phone records, they couldn’t be sure who made those calls or whether they were made at all.

Defense lawyer Richard Plotin alleged that the secretary in the medical clinic where Robert Adair worked as a nurse made up the calls to help the prosecution.

He also said that Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro, whose husband was having an affair with Jeanie Adair, could have impersonated the defendant in the call to her husband, Encino orthopedic surgeon Michael Shapiro, the day of the murder.

Plotin had argued that Mindy Shapiro arranged for thugs to stage a robbery and disfigure her nemesis, Jeanie Adair. Robert Adair, Plotin argued, simply came home at the wrong time.

Plotin named the alleged attacker, an ex-con with an admitted penchant for baseball bats and knives whom Jeanie Adair tentatively picked out of a lineup.

Defense Theory Deemed Plausible

The two jurors disagreed over how much of Plotin’s theory they believed, but agreed that he gave plausible explanations for key prosecution evidence. They said a back injury purportedly received during the attack seemed real. In addition, she didn’t seem capable of the deadly swings, given recent knee surgery, and seemed truly devastated in a taped interview after the crime, the jurors said.

Following the legal instructions given by the judge, which specified that if there are two explanations for evidence that the defendant must prevail, Adair was clearly not guilty, the jurors said.

“I’m not saying that she’s innocent,” Fry stressed, “but she’s not guilty.”

After the reading of the verdict, Garber said several jurors immediately turned to the alternates, asking whether they’d done the right thing.

“We all said yes, we would have done the same thing,” Garber said.

“We really felt bad that we weren’t able to give the justice that Robert’s family was looking for,” he added. “You felt for them but it wouldn’t make it right to convict Jeanie based on what we heard.”