“Good morning,” DeKalb County district attorney Robert James greeted reporters at his office. “During the course of the last four weeks, my office began to work with the Dunwoody Police Department to investigate the death of Mr. Russell Sneiderman.”
Robert James was young, handsome, and ambitious. Raised in Tennessee, James is the son of NFL star Robert James Sr., a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end for the Buffalo Bills in the late 1960s and early 1970s who after football became a minister and assistant high school principal. His mother Barbara James also was an educator. After graduating from Middle Tennessee State, where he played basketball and was president of the African-American Student Association, Robert Jr. moved to Atlanta to study law at Georgia State. Stints as Rockdale County assistant district attorney and DeKalb County solicitor-general, the office that prosecutes misdemeanors, earned him a spot on Georgia Trend Magazine’s “40 Under 40” list. In 2010, he ran for DA in a special election to complete the remaining three and a half years of the term of Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, who resigned when President Obama appointed her to a top post in the Environmental Protection Agency. The thirty-nine-year-old James trounced attorney Constance Heard with 64 percent of the vote.
Three days after James took office, Rusty Sneiderman was murdered. The new DA seized the moment. James not only provided investigators, but also controlled the flow of public information. After the police department announced Hemy’s arrest, Chief Grogan wanted to hold a second news conference on January 6, two days later, but James nixed it. “At that point we were deep into an active investigation,” James later told the Dunwoody Crier. “You want to control the integrity of whatever information comes out and goes in. If certain things get out, it makes it difficult for us to conduct our investigation. We really wanted to make sure that no one would talk to the media and the only way to do that was to close ranks and take it over at an earlier-than-normal phase.”
If Grogan felt slighted, he kept it to himself. Others in Dunwoody weren’t so quiet. “Information Blackout in Sneiderman Murder,” complained the Crier in a headline, which reported on a tense Dunwoody Homeowners’ Association meeting following Hemy’s arrest. About two hundred people packed Dunwoody United Methodist Church, anxious to hear from Grogan what was going on with the murder case. “I’m going to talk about our community outreach programs,” the chief told them. “I know what you all want to know, but I can’t comment on that issue.” The pressure reached City Hall. Councilman Denny Shortal sent an email to constituents: “Many of you have asked why there isn’t more information released to the public concerning our progress in these investigations. Folks, investigating a crime, especially a capital crime, is not a public-affair event. In fact, it is just not good practice to release information to the public on the progress of investigations.”
It was shades of the bad old days of DeKalb County rule for many residents. For the next month, Dunwoody remained subjected to what the Crier called the “party line of no comment,” all part of James’s strategy to keep the case from buckling under the weight of growing media interest and public pressure for answers. James later admitted in the Crier interview that his tactics were “challenging, given that it was so early in the administration.” But he insisted he had no choice.
Now, on Tuesday, February 8, James was front and center before the TV cameras with the first official statement in weeks.
“Since Mr. Sneiderman’s death in November of last year, the Dunwoody Police and my investigators have worked tirelessly to bring justice to the loved ones of Mr. Russell Sneiderman and the citizens of DeKalb County,” he said. “Today, at 9 a.m., the DeKalb County Grand Jury returned a two-count indictment of Hemy Neuman. The indictment is currently being filed with the DeKalb County Clerk of Superior Court. Neuman was indicted by the Grand Jury for one count of malice murder and one count of possession of a firearm during a commission of a felony.
“Our collective goal,” he continued, “is to continue to seek justice and preserve the public safety of our community, not only for the Sneiderman family but for anyone who has lost a loved one because of violent crime.”
The announcement came as a surprise. Most had expected a preliminary hearing, where James’s office would present a bare-bones case against Hemy to secure a charge. The hearing could have answered some of the burning questions regarding why Hemy Neuman had allegedly murdered Rusty Sneiderman. By taking the case to a grand jury, James kept the details under wraps. Grand jury proceedings are conducted in secrecy, even from defense attorneys, and charges are virtually assured in all cases.
“We will not try this case in the media nor will we discuss the evidence that will be presented at trial,” James explained. “Our job is to the present the facts, the truth and to seek justice.” He underscored that the policy of secrecy would continue. “I cannot comment on what may or may not happen in the future as far as our evidence,” he said, but added, “If I were not confident I would not have presented the case to the grand jury this morning.”
The next step, he said, was an arraignment for Hemy, where a judge would formally present the charges to him, allow him to enter a plea, and set a trial date. “Again,” James said, “to ensure the integrity of this case, I will be unable to answer any questions from the media as it pertains to this case.”
Not only were the media and public left in the dark, Hemy would also have to wait to find out what evidence prosecutors had against him. Soon after his arrest, his mother, Rebecca Cohen, and her boyfriend reached out to a family friend who was a lawyer. That lawyer referred them to Robert Rubin and Doug Peters, who have a three-partner practice in Decatur, not far from the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit Superior Court building where Hemy’s case was being handled.
In January, the two attorneys squeezed into a cubicle in the visitor area at the DeKalb County Jail and through Plexiglas spoke with Hemy Neuman. “In every case, when you meet someone whose life is in jeopardy and they’re looking for someone to put their trust in to save their life, you hope to build a rapport,” Rubin said later. “We had an immediate rapport with Hemy Neuman. It was more of a personal connection. He felt comfortable talking to us. We felt good about him. We liked him. He was a very likable guy.”
Both attorneys have long practiced in the Atlanta area. Raised in Ohio, Rubin moved to Atlanta in the late 1970s to complete his undergraduate studies and law school at Emory University, northeast of downtown and close to Decatur. After working as a public defender in Fulton County, Georgia, and in the Georgia Attorney General’s Office prosecuting doctors appearing before the state medical board, he went into private practice while also teaching criminal litigation as an adjunct professor at his alma mater.
His three decades in Atlanta have given him a trace of a local accent, though he doesn’t come close to his partner. With his bow ties, pocket hankies, and smooth drawl, Douglas Peters affects the very picture of a gentleman southern lawyer. Born and raised within a few miles of his law offices, Peters attended the University of Georgia for his bachelor’s and law degrees, served as an assistant district attorney in Clayton County, Georgia, and as a municipal court judge in the city of Lithonia, twenty-five miles west of Atlanta, before hanging out his shingle in Decatur.
The two lawyers had their share of high-profile cases dealing with the darkest aspects of the human condition. Rubin represented one of the defendants in the Final Exit Network case, four members of an alleged assisted-suicide group being prosecuted for their roles in a man’s 2008 suicide. Peters has developed an expertise in representing people accused of child abuse and child molestation, including women in shaken baby syndrome cases.
“When we first sat in that attorney’s booth, the first time we heard Hemy give us his account of what had happened—I’ll never forget that—we both knew, Bob and I, that things were not adding up,” said Peters. “We felt he was out of touch with reality in terms of what he described to us about the offense. Bob and I are not psychiatrists or psychologists. But from the first time we met him, it was not rational how he described it.”
They needed more information. While awaiting the prosecution’s discovery—the police reports, interview transcripts, lists of physical evidence—the attorneys hoped to learn more from a preliminary hearing.
“We were anxious to have an opportunity to have an individual judge evaluate the presentation of the case,” Peters told reporters after James announced the grand jury indictment. “Unfortunately, that is not going to be the case.” Until they started getting discovery materials, Rubin added, “We don’t know what the District Attorney knows.” Until then, Hemy would remain behind bars without bail. “He’s obviously distraught,” said Rubin, “for his family and the Sneiderman family.”
With little known to the public about Hemy or his alleged motivation, the lawyers sought to fill in the gaps. “The arrest of Mr. Neuman is also a tragedy,” Rubin told reporters. “There are a lot of people affected by Mr. Neuman’s arrest: his family, his kids, his friends and coworkers are also affected by this. He’s very emotional, very distraught, very worried about his family and worried about the Sneiderman family.”
The lawyers also dropped some tantalizing hints that there was more to the case than what had been released publicly. “We do believe there’s somebody else the police should be looking for,” said Rubin. “However, we don’t have the resources of the state to do that kind of investigation.” He didn’t say whom they should be looking for, but the media connected the dots. The next day the Journal-Constitution noted that “the extent of the relationship between Neuman … and Andrea Sneiderman has not been disclosed,” adding with a journalistic wink that “they worked together often.”
The day of the grand jury indictment brought another player in the case to the forefront. Since Hemy’s arrest his wife, Ariela Neuman, had stayed out of the public eye, all the attention focused on Andrea. Now for the first time her side of the story would filter out. Ariela, too, had hired an attorney, Esther Panitch, a Miami-raised, magna cum laude graduate from the University of Miami’s law school with a local civil and criminal practice. Comfortable in front of the microphones, quick with sound bites, and fond of colorful camera-friendly attire, Panitch would become a constant presence throughout the Sneiderman case (as well as a legal analyst on HLN in other cases) and a force to be reckoned with for both the prosecution and the defense attorneys.
She made her debut by saying Ariela was “stunned by the allegations and the indictment which came down today,” and revealed that at the time of the murder, the Neumans were separated, having split in October after twenty-two years of marriage. When asked by a TV reporter if Ariela wanted to pass on any thoughts to Rusty’s family, Panitch said, “Mrs. Neuman and her children feel a great deal of compassion for the Sneiderman children.” Her answer pointedly left out Andrea Sneiderman.
It would be the beginning of an increasingly loud drumbeat: What was Andrea’s role? She still was not talking to the media, but her lawyer did release a statement:
“The murder of my husband, Rusty Sneiderman, has been devastating to me and our families. I was thankful and relieved when the police made an arrest but I was shocked to learn that the man charged with the murder was my former boss, a person who we thought was a friend of our family.
“I have been assured by the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office that Mr. Neuman is Rusty’s killer and that they will do everything in their power to bring him to justice. My family and I are cooperating in any way we can to assist them in their efforts.”