In late July 2010, Hemy Neuman left for a business trip to Colorado, telling his wife, Ariela, he was meeting an HR representative. She would later find that the trip went on the family credit card and not Hemy’s corporate American Express. She was aghast that Hemy, who had put the cash-strapped family on a budget, found the money to dash off to Colorado for a few days. Pressed on his expenses, he admitted to Ariela that he had in fact purchased two bottles of wine during the meetings. Only later did Ariela discover what she called the true identity of the “HR representative.” So, too, did detectives.
Tracing Hemy’s travels for GE proved easy. Everything was meticulously documented in GE’s travel files, from dates and locations to the names of restaurants, hotels, and items purchased. GE Energy had a liberal travel and expense policy, leaving the details to the discretion of the boss. Hemy could decide how frequently and how extravagantly employees could travel on the company dime, and with whom he would travel. In the seven months before Rusty’s murder, his companion was usually Andrea.
Going through her expense records as well, investigators found the trips that she had spoken of in her police interviews. Her May 24, 2010, excursion to Florida shortly after she was hired was there. So was her July 13–14 trip to Minden, Nevada, where she said Hemy revealed he had feelings for her—the fleeting moment she said the two had quickly put behind them.
Investigators also found the June 21 overnight trip to Norfolk, Virginia, that Andrea and Hemy took. The receipts showed they dined at the Sirena Cuchina Italian restaurant downtown, with Hemy’s expense form showing a bill of $154.34, including a $50 bottle of wine. They also found the July 18 trip that Andrea took to Longmont, Colorado, north of Denver, where she stayed at the Hampton Inn, a Hilton property that gave her travel points.
Andrea told police that she traveled there solo for auditor training. But interviews with hotel staff revealed a different story.
Before Andrea arrived, the phone rang at the front desk. Hampton Inn day shift clerk Ruth Ingraham answered. It was 11:30 a.m. and a man was calling to say that his wife, whom he identified as Andrea Sneiderman, would be checking in that night after arriving on a 7 p.m. flight. He said they were newlyweds and that she had come to the hotel on business. He said they had never been apart since getting married and he worried that she would be very lonely.
“And he wanted me to purchase flowers, chocolates, and a nice card to write a note in to be put into her room,” Ingraham later said in court, repeating what she had told local police recruited to assist Dunwoody detectives. “And he said he would be flying out during the week as a surprise and that he would repay me.”
A new employee at the hotel, Ingraham didn’t know what to do. “I said it’s very romantic, but I just don’t know what the rules are,” she later recalled.
The man wouldn’t take no for an answer. Becoming “very insistent,” she said, he tried to talk her into buying the flowers and chocolates, but she refused. He finally gave up, but did ask if she would leave a message for Andrea when she arrived. Ingraham agreed. As he dictated, Ruth scribbled into the front desk logbook: “Andrea, for the sweetest and most beautiful woman in the world. Peaceful sleep knowing that you are always in my dreams. Love, Hemy.” For the clerk, he left his full name, Hemy Neuman, and a phone number with Atlanta’s 404 area code. When night clerk Brady Blackburn took over the front desk and read the log, he added his own notation: “WTF am I supposed to do with this?”
The insistent Hemy had become the talk of the Hampton Inn staff. At a company picnic the next day, Ingraham asked her boss, the hotel owner, what to do about the request to buy flowers and chocolates. He told her she didn’t have to buy the items. That night after the picnic, Hemy called again, this time telling Blackburn that his new wife Andrea would be lonely traveling without him. “He impressed upon me what a great travesty, what a problem that she was going to be apart from him,” Blackburn later recalled.
When Hemy asked Blackburn to buy the flowers and chocolates, the clerk suggested that he contact a florist himself to arrange a delivery to the room. But the man said the florists were closed and asked if the clerk could somewhere find flowers and leave them in the woman’s room, and then be reimbursed with a personal check when the man arrived a few days later.
Blackburn laughed. He told the man that would be impossible, that he couldn’t afford anything like that. The man asked why. The clerk told him it was none of his business and the request was outside of hotel policy. Through the conversation, the man struck a strangely familiar tone, telling the clerk, “You’re my friend.” When Blackburn repeated that he wouldn’t do it, the man was “disappointed, dejected, but he didn’t fight me on it,” he later said.
When Andrea Sneiderman checked in later that night, Blackburn told her she had a message. He didn’t read it verbatim, instead paraphrasing it: “Andrea, Hemy says he loves you.”
Andrea blushed and looked down, according to Blackburn.
Andrea got a room with two queen beds. But contrary to what she told police, she would not be alone in Longmont. Three days later, on Wednesday, July 21, 2010, Hemy took Frontier Airlines Flight 305 from Atlanta to Denver, arriving at 8:20 p.m., charging the airfare on his own credit card and not the corporate American Express, records showed. That morning, Andrea asked a clerk named Lindsay Clayton to move her to a room with a single bed. Andrea also said the room would have two guests instead of one.
And she requested a late checkout for Thursday, her last day at the hotel.
According to flight records, Andrea and Hemy returned to Atlanta on July 23 on the same Frontier Airlines flight, leaving at 11:48 p.m. from Denver. Andrea had arranged for a seat next to his, with GE covering Andrea’s expenses and Hemy paying his own way.
* * *
The day before the Longmont trip, Hemy had sent Andrea an email about a natural wonder called Ruby Falls in the Lookout Mountains near Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“It’s a waterfall in a cave and wishing I shared that tranquility with you,” he wrote on July 17. “Wishing you were here.”
Andrea responded, “Ditto.”
This was the first of hundreds of emails and text messages between them, obtained via subpoena, covering the months leading up to the murder and adding another layer of information about their travels and relationship. Two days later, on July 19, after Hemy had pestered the Hampton Inn staff to leave flowers and chocolates for Andrea, he sent a photo of roses.
“Those are gorgeous, seriously,” Andrea replied. “I have an appreciation for perfectly open roses, not sure what else to say but thank you. Unbelievably thoughtful of you.” She told him it was “so thoughtful and sweet. I knew you might try something like this.” In a message, Hemy alluded to his calls to the hotel staff, telling Andrea that a clerk called him “the last great romantic.”
“Romantic for sure,” Andrea replied. “Talk to you in a few.”
When they had both returned to Atlanta two days later, Hemy messaged her that he was “exhausted” after the trip but that, “You’re in my every thought.”
Andrea replied, “Try to get some rest. Please enjoy the day.”
Like Andrea, Hemy had not told police about going to Longmont, and when investigators later spoke with Hemy’s wife, she recounted how he had claimed it was a business excursion but ended up paying for it himself. Then, just two weeks later, on August 12, Hemy met Rusty. This was the lunch meeting that both Hemy and Andrea had told police about in which Hemy sought help getting a new job. If Hemy and Andrea were secretly having an affair, Hemy clearly hid it well. An email from Rusty (copying Andrea) showed that the men got along famously.
Hemy,
Thank you for making time to get together for lunch today. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I can see why Andrea is enjoying working with you.
During our conversation, you mentioned something about GE that reminded me of my favorite case in business school. It’s about a GE executive who leaves GE, buys a business and sells it a few years later for a significant profit. When you have a minute, you may want to check out his story.
Please let me know when you have time to continue our conversation. I am looking forward to it.
Talk to you soon,
Rusty.
Rusty then emailed business associates:
My friend, Hemy Neuman, is currently an executive with GE Energy and he is interested in learning more about future career options with growing private equity backed companies. Would you or someone on your team be willing to advise him on what additional skills, experiences, etc. he should try to obtain at GE to make himself more marketable to growing PE backed companies in the future? For reference, a copy of his resume is attached.
Meeting Andrea’s husband did nothing to dampen Hemy’s interest in Andrea. Four days later, on August 16, Hemy sent her a highly personal message. Under the subject line “Balance,” he offered advice on juggling work and home responsibilities. Mentioning nothing about GE Energy, Hemy’s message reflected an intimate knowledge of Andrea’s apparent struggles.
“There is no panacea for balance. You are overwhelmed because you are trying to find answers and get it all together,” he told her. “It will come. The small things you do to try to achieve that balance. So it starts today. You will reach your balance by doing these two things and you must do them.” He went on to recommend that she “leave at 3:30 p.m., pick up Sophia, go buy stuff with her, let her settle in at home and then start working at 5-ish,” then advised that she “let Rusty pick up Ian at 5:30 p.m. During the 3:30 to 5:45 p.m. [period] think of nothing else but Sophia. Nothing else matters at that time.”
Andrea followed up by text-messaging Hemy a picture of herself and her daughter, Sophia. This prompted Hemy to write her: “I just saw your text messages. I am so happy for you and Sophia. You can’t imagine. Thank you for sharing with me. I feel like I was there, standing by the doorway, looking adoringly with a huge proud smile on my face. It made my week.” It was signed “Hemy” with a happy face.
Andrea then sent him more pictures: an album of ninety-eight photographs taken at Sophia’s birthday party.
“You and the kids are amazing,” Hemy wrote back. “Thanks for sharing that with me.” The photos showed Sophia helping make her elaborate four-foot-tall cake. “Looks like you had fun,” Hemy wrote, “though a twinge of stress there for a minute.” A couple days later he emailed her coupons for a Sesame Street show and the play Peter Pan.
* * *
On Thursday, August 26, Andrea departed for her fifth business trip in four months. She would later say that she bid good-bye to Rusty, dropped off the children at school, and met Hemy, who drove them 135 miles to Greenville, South Carolina, where GE operates a sprawling plant. Hemy made the two-hour Greenville run frequently, though he usually treated this as a day trip. Travel records showed that Hemy and Andrea stopped for lunch at the Macaroni Grill in the Mall of Georgia in Buford, then went to a Publix Super Market to purchase a bottle of wine. The receipt identified it as a Shiraz from FishEye vineyards. Arriving in Greenville late in the afternoon, they checked into adjoining rooms, the records showed, before having dinner together at Cazbah, a tapas restaurant and wine bar. The bill came to $84.56—including a $31 bottle of wine. The name on the wine label said, “Bitch.” The next morning, they had a meeting, lunched for $29.65 at a P. F. Chang’s in Greenville, then hit the road for Atlanta.
Unlike the Longmont trip, the hotel clerks had nothing to offer police. The email traffic between Andrea and Hemy was a different matter. Whatever happened in Greenville, it left them both reeling.
“I caused you so much pain when all I wanted was to give you so much,” Hemy wrote on August 27, 2010, the day they returned. “I know it doesn’t help, but I am sorry. I shouldn’t have come over. You are so beautiful and such a great person. I discovered the mature, responsible Mama Andrea. Don’t respond.”
The emails didn’t disclose the reason for his apology. Whatever it was, it triggered days of soul searching for Andrea. “I really don’t know what to say at this point. I am angry. Your apology is heartfelt but it does not make the ongoing pain go away that I now have to repent and live with the rest of my life. Not sure what I was thinking. I’m also feeling that we may have ruined it. Not sure. I’m not trying to be hurtful. I’m just trying to be honest. I’m not sure how to live with this.”
“This is the last one from me,” Hemy wrote back. “I know it won’t help, but please never forget how much I love you.”
“I know,” replied Andrea, “but so do other people. I betrayed them all. I’m not sure how to deal with that for now—but my burden, not yours.”
Another day passed before Hemy—despite telling her he was done talking about the matter—sent her a late-night email: “One last thought: besides the birth of Tom and Lee, that was the most beautiful experience of my life.”
The next morning, at 7:46 a.m., Andrea wrote back, her tone sharp.
“I appreciate that, but please understand what I am feeling. I am having constant feelings of anger towards you, me, everything,” she said. “Yes, mixed with other feelings as well. But selfish feelings I am trying to suppress at every moment. Thursday night was one of best I had in a long time. It was such a great evening as a whole and now I feel sad I will never have that again. So many other things to say but not appropriate for email, most result in me getting angry.”
In his response, Hemy implored her to forget her anger and focus on something else.
“Marry me,” he wrote. “You’re thinking I’m crazy and you’ve made your intentions clear. But before you respond, spend a night thinking about it. It won’t solve anything but you know I will give you, Sophia and Ian the world. Together we can make it all work. Marry me.”
In a long email, Hemy told Andrea that her feelings of betrayal and anger are “not about you” and that feeling that was “a copout.” He then recalled their trip to Minden, Nevada, when they had dinner at Lake Tahoe, and the time they spent together in Colorado.
“It’s about how you felt when we looked at the stars in Tahoe, when we woke up Friday morning in Denver and we walked out of the restaurant on Thursday when you took my hand and nestled your head on my shoulder. Blaming it all on Friday morning doesn’t cut it. I keep trying to suppress thinking what it would be like to make Friday dinner together, to share a mah jong [sic] night with friends, or watch a movie in bed, that I know how to make you and Sophia happy even though I have never met her. You can’t stop thinking about it but you’re so locked in that it would not fail that it tears you apart. It’s a betrayal not to those that love you but to yourself and it happened way before Friday morning … I know now more than any other time, that it is you I want to share everything with and you are pained because it is also what you want but can’t have. Think about it. Be with me forever.”
Andrea wrote back, “I feel terrible that I have not supported you in your situation”—an apparent reference to his marital problems. “I want to do that but you know how conflicting the whole thing is. But I still want to do it. If you want to talk this week, and I’m available, please do call me. I will try to call you on my way home today, around 4 p.m. Andrea.”
Hemy responded, “Please don’t be, dealing with it, as difficult as it may be. Just knowing you are there for me is enough. Thank you for being my friend. And as your friend, I won’t do that to you because it just pains you.” Hemy said he would be out of the office on a business trip that afternoon. “I’ll be on the flight when you are freed up. Go home, relax on the way. Think of me and smile.”
Andrea told him that if his flight was delayed, “You will have no choice but to talk to me”—she added a smiley-face emoticon. “Not a lot of relaxing going on these days. I am trying to get there. I need a routine. Is that even ever possible?” She signed it “Me” with another smiley face.
* * *
A week later, on September 1, Andrea had lunch with her close friend Shayna Citron at a Fuddruckers hamburger restaurant near the GE complex. It was their first lengthy discussion in some time, their busy lives with children, husbands, and jobs leaving increasingly little time for some of the things they used to do. Close friends for eight years, they had met at book club, and over the years they went together to baby showers, playdates, birthday parties, and weekends at the Sneidermans’ lake house. That previous May, Citron and her husband attended Andrea’s dance recital—“She’s a very good dancer and always has been,” said Citron later—and afterward the two couples went out for dinner. Andrea gushed about her new job at GE but lamented it intruded on her dance practice. Watching Andrea interact with Rusty, Citron detected a change. “It was at that dinner that I saw for the first time that they were going through a rough time,” Citron said. “They seemed awkward and uncomfortable together, which I had never seen before.” Three months later, at a fifth-birthday party for Sophia, where the little girls got manicures and played in a jump house, Andrea “revealed for the very first time … that she and Rusty were having problems.” When they finally got together for the long lunch in September, Citron said, “I realized these issues were more serious than I once knew.” Halfway through the meal, she asked what was going on. “She said something like, ‘Rusty and I are having major problems,’” recalled Citron. “It all stemmed around work, travel, picking up the kids, who was doing what. She started to mention grumblings around the house about all this time she is spending at work, that she is not making the same amount of money as Rusty had been when he was working.” When Andrea came home at night, the children would run and cling to her, which troubled Rusty. It was clear the children missed her—and Andrea desperately missed them. Citron asked Andrea if she was happy with the job. “She said, ‘Yes, I am. This is the first time that what I’m doing, I’m important. I like the people I’m working with.’” Andrea felt she was making a difference and that her co-workers all told her she was doing an amazing job.
“Then she also told me that [her boss] told her that he was in love with her,” said Citron. Momentarily stunned, Citron asked Andrea how she felt about her boss. “She said that if maybe she had not been married she’d be interested in him.” Citron asked if he was good looking. “She responded saying, yeah, he’s got dark features. He looks professional.” When Citron asked if Andrea was thinking of getting a divorce, “She said to me that she would never divorce Rusty.”
Andrea then asked for advice on dealing with her boss, particularly when they traveled together. Citron, who also traveled for her work, said that she, too, had been hit on. “It’s sort of the nature of the beast,” Citron remembered telling her. “It does happen. You have to stay strong and stick to your guns, and the one thing I told her, for sure, without a doubt: Do not stay on the same floor in a hotel with someone that is hitting on you. Because I knew that if she were to get off an elevator and walk to her room and that person was there doing the same, it might become very uncomfortable if he would be walking her to her room. That might lend itself to an opportunity that married women shouldn’t be involved in.”
Andrea didn’t want to tell anybody at GE about her boss. She feared she would lose the best job she’d ever had. “She told me some things that she had never told me before,” recalled Citron. “She started talking about how everything in their married lives had always been about Rusty, whatever job he had, whatever problems were going on in his job.” It went back to when Rusty went to business school—Andrea worked to help pay his tuition—and after graduation Andrea agreed to follow him to Atlanta for a job opportunity.
It was supposed to be a one-hour lunch but turned into two hours. When it was over, a rattled Citron went to her parents’ house, lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling fan, and told her mother, who also knew the Sneidermans, that “Andrea has checked out of her marriage.” She later discussed it with her husband also.
Citron saw Andrea next at lunch a couple of weeks later at another restaurant near GE—she thought it was a Hoolihan’s or a Houston’s—to celebrate Citron’s birthday. A third friend joined them. Andrea was getting ready to go to London for business and talked excitedly about the trip, the castle she planned to see. Andrea asked if it was appropriate to go to a dance club with a co-worker, and Citron told her, “It just depends on how you’re dancing.” Regular dancing should be fine. “If it was risqué,” said Citron, “that would not be okay.”
The next month, after Andrea had returned from the UK trip, the families gathered at Citron’s parents’ house for an annual Halloween costume party. Andrea and Sophia dressed alike as sock-hop girls with poodle skirts and ponytails. “Andrea had a bright pink ribbon in her hair,” recalled Citron. “She looked amazing. She looked the happiest I had seen her in a long time, absolutely radiant and glowing.” Rusty came dressed as Fred from Scooby-Doo and Ian had on a Scooby-Doo costume. “Rusty was wiped out,” said Citron, “his eyes, everything.” She and her husband came as Fred and Wilma Flintsone and they tried to make silly small talk with Rusty about how both the husbands were dressed as Freds. Rusty wouldn’t have any of it. That’s when it occurred to Citron and her husband that this was the first year that Rusty and Andrea had not come dressed as a king and queen—instead of coordinating their costumes with each other they had coordinated with their children. “I remember my husband saying, ‘What happened to the king and queen?’ and Rusty said, ‘I had to dress this way to save my marriage.’”
Andrea expressed the same problems with another friend, Tammi Parker, that she felt it was unfair that Rusty was angry. Andrea said she only went back to work full-time because Rusty had quit his job at Discovery Point to pursue his business dreams, and that this was not Andrea’s choice. She told Parker she had grown tired of discussing the issue with Rusty. Weekends left the only time for Andrea to see not only Rusty and the children but also her friends. So when Rusty insisted that the family spend a weekend at their lake house—his “retreat,” as Andrea called it—Andrea struggled to muster the strength. Rusty was also pressuring her to socialize more often.
“I’m not sure I have much of a choice but to go to the lake, which is what he wants,” Andrea wrote to Tammi in September, shortly after returning from the UK trip. “I have been told I need to give him that for now and schmoozing with friends is not a top priority for the health of my marriage.” She then warned Tammi, “Please do not forward this one. I know you understand it is a rough patch right now for me. I guess I knew it was coming when I took the job but not this bad.” She told Tammi she’d try to get together with her later in the month, “but I cannot push it because it only ends in a fight and I am tired of fighting.”
Around the same time, Hemy also confided in friends. Late in the summer of 2010, Hemy met with Melanie White, a Realtor for Coldwell Banker. Melanie had known the Neuman family since May 2006 when she sold them their home in East Cobb. As with other clients, she kept in contact with them. About twice a year she spoke with Hemy by phone, usually small talk, asking him if he knew of anybody who needed a Realtor.
In one such phone call, Hemy requested a meeting in person. He told her that he was in trouble financially and wanted to discuss a short sale of his house. Two years into the recession, the real estate market was declining in Atlanta along with the rest of the country. Meeting at the Sunflower Café in Sandy Springs, they began by talking about what they usually did—his children, his work, the house. She then explained the parameters of a short sale, how banks will consider it once the borrower misses three mortgage payments. Hemy told her that he may qualify. He said he and his wife had chronic money problems, and more. He said he had moved out the night before and was staying in a Marriott hotel in Marietta near his office.
“What’s the problem?” asked White, who would recount the conversation for authorities.
Hemy told her they’d always had problems but now he “just couldn’t take it anymore. He told her that his wife never really had a job and that now the family needed her to work to keep up with the bills, including college tuition for his twins.
White asked him if there was somebody else in his life. He told her that there was one person, a woman at work who was married with two small children. He refused to give her name because she was Jewish and White likely knew her or knew somebody who did. When Hemy asked White for her advice, she told him, “Go back to your wife, go back to your kids, leave the other person alone. She’s married.”
If Hemy said anything in return, White didn’t remember it. Mostly, she said, he met her advice with silence. They left their meeting by agreeing to get together again to follow up on the short sale. Hemy noted that his wife was close friends with another Realtor in their subdivision but that if he had to sell the house he’d do everything he could to give the listing to White.
They met again that same month, September, in the food court of the Perimeter Mall, the Nordstrom-anchored shopping mall in Dunwoody. Telling her that he valued her opinion, Hemy said he and his wife had gone to marriage counseling—it was not going well—and talked about his continuing money troubles. Then he told her about an upcoming business trip to the United Kingdom in which he’d be traveling with the woman he’d mentioned before.
When White heard the dates, she was dismayed. Yom Kippur fell that year on the same Saturday that Hemy was to board a plane for Scotland. “I felt that was odd given that we’re all Jewish and that’s like the holiest day of the year,” she later said. She felt that rather than going to Europe with a potential lover, Hemy should be spending a day of atonement in temple, fasting and repenting for the sins of the previous year.
If Hemy had any pangs of religious guilt, he didn’t show it. He told her he was “excited” about the trip.
Andrea, too, was looking forward to it. This was to be her biggest work trip yet—and she made no secret of her own excitement. She recruited Rusty to help her with the itinerary. Both meticulous planners, they created a spreadsheet and entered the places Andrea wanted to see: the castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a West End show or two. She found out Dirty Dancing, Chicago, Billy Elliot, and Grease were all playing. Andrea also wanted to see the campus of Cambridge University and fancy London restaurants.
Andrea also went over the itinerary with Hemy. When Hemy suggested they go to a dance club, Andrea said that sounded like a “fantastic idea” but worried about fitting in. “I have always wanted to go to a club in London, although I am sure I am nowhere near cool enough,” she wrote. “My clothes are certainly not trendy enough.” She added a smiley face.
Departing September 18, they took the same flights and stayed in the same hotels, first in Scotland and then in London, meeting with GE employees at the company’s operations there. Andrea never did go to a dance club—she later said that would “not be appropriate”—but did see many of the sights.
But like the Greenville trip, drama accompanied them. It had begun before they left with Hemy asking if Andrea still felt comfortable traveling with him.
“I will continue to be the best boss you ever have or ever will,” he wrote a few days before. “I don’t have to go to England. But if you think that it is good that I go for work reasons then I will.”
Something then happened overseas, according to a cryptic email from Andrea to Hemy after they returned on September 25: “Honest is good and maybe I’m not being honest enough. Not sure, but I do not want it to ruin the trip overall and you know that. Desire versus reality as you know is a world I’m trying to ignore because I have to. So sorry, not fair to you, I know. I have other thoughts but not the time right now.”
Hemy forwarded this and other emails to Melanie White, who saved them and later provided them to police. Hemy had a quick turnaround—he left on another business trip on September 27, this time to Houston, and emailed White from the road. In one early-morning message on September 28, he recounted for White that the UK trip ended with a good-bye scene at the airport in which Andrea gave him a kiss.
“I guess I should put this in context for you,” Hemy told White. “We left the flight with a kiss knowing that I was traveling [to Houston] and I told her we really shouldn’t communicate over the next one to two weeks. She wholeheartedly agreed.”
By now, White knew Andrea’s name, though she didn’t know Andrea personally or her family. Hemy recounted how Andrea told him “that I’m the only one she can talk to about us and Rusty, that everyone else will be so disappointed. She tells people snippets, controlling the whole story. She also says that it won’t change the outcome, that she is staying no matter what. So any advice is pointless.
“Anyway,” Hemy continued, “on Sunday she sent me a text and then we went back and forth a few times regarding how the kids are great, etc. I did give the advice that she must concentrate on them. Today, as much as it killed me I did not contact her.”
It was Andrea who reached out to him. “She pinged me that she wanted to talk to me about some work thing,” he said. “Again, some chat and text when she agreed she would call me at 1 p.m. while I was waiting for my flight. She called and we spent 15 to 20 minutes talking about the kids and the presents we got them. She paid but we chose them together. I told her briefly that we never talked about my situation and that it was quite messy. I told her that I couldn’t have sex with someone I didn’t love and that it was killing me to pretend I was somebody I wasn’t.” They chatted more about work. She had to cancel a meeting they were to attend because she had a training session. Hemy wrote back to Andrea with a sad face. She wrote back “ditto.” They continued to text each other through the night.
Hemy told White, “I don’t want to lose her.”
White was mortified.
“Hemy,” she wrote him, “it continues to sound like she is lifting you up and knocking you down because she herself displays emotions that are up and down. Always in the end, she continues to tell you she is not leaving her marriage. I am not sure if she is trying to convince you or herself. In my opinion, a person does not have an affair, whether emotional or physical or both unless they have a portion of their heart and foot in/out the door.”
White told him that Andrea sounded “remorseful and confused” and that her emotions are jumping between wanting to be with him and the getting “angry at herself for thinking that way” and pushing him away. “It is a see-saw of emotions and will continue to be that way,” warned White. “Hold on. You must be patient and take care of yourself and your family. You’re going to have a lot come down on you once you positively announce your marriage is over and there is no way to get it back.”
Again, Hemy didn’t say whether he’d take her advice. He wrote nothing in response over email and remained impassive when they spoke about the same issues later by phone.
While in Houston, Hemy met with a longtime colleague, Orna Hanison. A native of England, Hanison had worked with Hemy in Atlanta and became what she’d later call a “fairly good friend” over the years, the two often talking about their children. She also would become friendly with Hemy’s wife, Riela, who in late summer or early fall of 2010, as their marriage was crumbling, asked Hanison to try to talk some sense into Hemy and persuade him to take counseling more seriously.
Now a human resources manager in the oil and gas division in GE’s Houston operations, Hanison met Hemy for dinner the night of September 28, 2010, the same day he had emailed White. They talked business at first, with Hemy expressing frustration about being passed over for a promotion and saying he wanted to test the job market. Hanison offered advice on interviewing skills. The conversation then turned to Hemy’s marriage. Hanison later recalled, “They didn’t love [each other] anymore, and that she had spent a lot of money and got them into a lot of debt.”
Hemy said he was pondering a divorce and that he was having an affair. “I told him I thought he was having a midlife crisis,” Hanison said, “and he should go home and go to counseling, and do what he could to save his marriage.”
Hemy, she said, responded with a laugh.
Hemy revealed little to her about the woman. He wouldn’t give her name but did say she was younger, had two small children, and was Jewish. When Hanison asked if she worked at GE, he said no. As an HR manager, Orna knew that sleeping with a direct subordinate violated company policy and an internal investigation could lead to a demotion or firing.
Hanison repeated that he should go to counseling and that he should be able to face his wife and children and tell them he’d done everything he could to save the marriage. As he had with White, Hemy didn’t respond.
The next day, Ariela Neuman called Hanison for an update on the dinner. Hanison told her said she had urged him to go into counseling, but Hanison couldn’t bring herself to reveal that Hemy admitted to an affair. Since Ariela never asked directly, Hanison never offered. “She and I were not the closest of friends,” Orna later said, “so I felt I would probably do more harm than good.”
After going over his personal issues with Melanie White and Orna Hanison, Hemy made a major life decision. On Sunday, October 3, while still in Houston, he sent an email to his wife, children, and fifteen relatives and friends including White.
“Dear Reli/Lee/Tom/Addie/Family/Friends,” he began. “I am writing this to everyone so as to prevent any confusion or misunderstanding. I know this hurts … I am sorry to everyone. I do love all of you very much.” He then addressed each person individually, starting with his wife. “Reli,” he wrote, “This morning I got up to yet another discussion about our future. Do you deserve to have an honest discussion … yes. But the truth is that I needed time to sort out my feelings, to understand, after all we went through, how I can make it happen.” He had come to the conclusion that while he tried to be more open about his feelings with her in the last month and had tried to be more affectionate—massaging her and holding her, kissing her and cooking for her—it still wasn’t enough for her, or him. Although he still considered her a “beautiful wonderful person,” and despite their “22 mostly wonderful years” together with three children, “this relationship is destructive.” The fault, he said, lay with him. Writing in staccato form with his thoughts separated by ellipses, he said, “I’m fucked up … probably … do I need help … probably.” Another trip to the therapist, he believed, would do no good. The children will be affected, he know, but he had to end it. “You have been a wonderful wife … no longer for me, unfortunately not anymore.”
To his children, he wrote, “Lee/Tom/Addie, I wish it was different. I wish you didn’t hate me right now. But you do.” Hemy insisted that he tried to make the marriage work but that the last “2.5 weeks” convinced him that to carry on would only result in him “hating myself, hating my life.” He noted that he had gone out into the garden and prepared it for the winter. “That’s who I am … I take care of those I love and I do not absolve myself of any responsibility,” he wrote. “Not to you. Not to your mother. Ever. I love you. I will always be there for you.”
Finally, in a section addressed to “Family/Friends,” Hemy acknowledged that they must feel “extremely disappointed” at the collapse of something that “all seemed so perfect” but said it was a facade. “I keep it all in … I have my poker face.” He urged them to support his wife and that he would be speaking to them all shortly. He signed the email, “I love you all, Hemy.”
The next day, October 4, Hemy returned to Atlanta—and moved out. He’d eventually end up in the apartment of family friend Ruthy in Buckhead.
The public airing of their private troubles in the email left Ariela embarrassed, stunned, and, she’d soon find, in a financial bind. This was in stark contrast with Hemy, who seemed relieved. About two weeks later, he had after-work drinks with an old friend at the Crown and Prince, a pub around the corner from GE Energy. James Vono, a fourteen-year GE employee, general manager of global operations for field services, in charge of the organization that fixes power plants around the country, used to supervise Hemy. From 2007 to 2010, they’d see each other a couple of times a week, emailed each other frequently, and collaborated on projects. Vono held Hemy in high esteem for his logical thinking and organization. They occasionally socialized, a couple of times after work and at office holiday parties.
Vono would later estimate they went to the pub on October 17. About to leave his position at GE, Vono told Hemy that he might be interested in the job. But Hemy had other matters on his mind. Usually reticent to talk about his personal life, Hemy now shared that he was going through a divorce, had moved out of the house, and was struggling to put two of his kids through Georgia Tech. Somber as he ticked off his problems, Hemy perked up when he mentioned he had met a woman and that they “were together,” Vono later said. Hemy said the woman was married with children, but considering leaving her husband. Hemy shared that he was in love with her and that they had amazing sex—“like magic,” in his words. She made him feel young again, like he was back in high school.
Hemy did not give her name and Vono didn’t ask, figuring if Hemy wanted to say it he would. (Although he worked at GE, Vono didn’t know Andrea Sneiderman—he’d later say that if he had met her in the office, he didn’t remember her.) The conversation left Vono uneasy. Though friends for a long time, Hemy had never confided in him like this.
* * *
Within days, the newly separated Hemy hit the road again with Andrea for a second trip to Greenville. On the way to Andrea’s house to pick her up, Hemy called Melanie White. “He was really excited,” she recalled, adding that the hotel reservation called for adjoining rooms. They checked in to the Hampton Inn on Saturday, October 21, 2010. The reservation originally called for two rooms anywhere in the hotel; it was changed to two adjoining rooms, according to travel records.
After check-in, Andrea and Hemy went down the street to Pulse, a nightclub/lounge. Open Tuesday to Saturday, Pulse offers live music, dancing, drinks, and sometimes a full dinner. Christine Olivera was tending bar when they walked in at about 8:30 p.m. October is past the busy season and nobody else was in the bar except for the DJ playing tunes. The couple had Olivera’s undivided attention on this slow night, and she’d remember everything clearly.
“I recall the music was playing,” she said later in court. “Mr. Neuman seemed very happy to be there. They ordered their drinks. He had a discussion with me about how happy he was and how nice the bar was.”
Andrea gave off a different vibe. She “seemed a little upset” and went to the bathroom a couple of times, Olivera recalled. It was during one of these trips to the ladies’ room that Olivera asked Hemy if everything was okay with his lady friend and if they needed anything. Hemy said that Andrea was “dealing with a real jerk at home.” That’s why, Hemy said, she needed to be someplace like Pulse, to get away from her troubles. Over the next hour, Andrea seemed to perk up, and Hemy’s mood soared.
“He asked if the band or the DJ played every night, said that the ambience was very nice,” Olivera recalled. “He kept thanking me for the service, and saying that she really needed this, again repeated that she was dealing with a jerk and going through some personal stuff and that she wanted to go out and take her mind off things.”
The two of them went on the dance floor, with Andrea spinning to salsa music. Andrea seemed to be dancing specifically for Hemy, giving him a little show, Olivera said. At one point, he pulled her toward him and they began “groping each other,” she recalled. “He had his hands on her rear end, she was hugging him,” she said, remembering that at one point she had to look away. They kissed about three times. Quick lip-to-lip kisses—“pop kissing,” she called it, “not like making out.” It happened while they were dancing.
After about an hour they started to leave, closing Hemy’s bar tab of $25.35, which he would expense to GE. Hemy asked about upcoming events at the bar and Olivera told him about the Halloween dress-up party at the club. She overheard Hemy telling Andrea that they should try to come back for that. They left “very happy,” the bartender said, their arms around each other.
Over the course of the evening, Hemy and Andrea had a drink or two each, but didn’t seem drunk. “They were fine, they left the bar fine,” Olivera said. “Responsibly, I could let them leave, they were walking to the hotel that they had mentioned.” Her lingering impression was that it was “like a first date.” Hemy’s demeanor suggested he was thinking: Wow, I got her. Said Olivera, “He was very excited to be with her.”
While in Greenville, Hemy called Melanie White with an update. He told her that he and Andrea had walked by a lake, had a drink, a nice dinner, and went upstairs to the hotel, ending up in the same room, where, Hemy said, “She gave in.”
Afterward, though, “Andrea was very distraught,” said White. “From what Hemy told me, she was very upset with herself and she wanted to sever personal ties with Hemy and just keep it business.” Hemy had a different reaction. According to White, “He could not leave that alone.”
After this, for the four weeks leading up to Rusty’s murder, detectives found no more messages of evidentiary value between Andrea and Hemy. But they remained in touch, both at the office and by phone.
Chad Fitzgerald, an FBI analyst, examined the phone records with specific attention to calls Hemy and Andrea made at critical junctures of the case. Much of what he uncovered detectives could already have surmised. On July 1, 2010, for instance, Hemy and Andrea’s phones both connected with a cell phone tower at the airport in Norfolk, Virginia, while they both traveled there. Later in July, phone records placed both of their phones at the Denver airport—they were calling each other—suggesting that he and Andrea traveled from the airport to Longmont together. And their phones pinged the same cell phone towers in Greenville, South Carolina, when they traveled there in late August.
Other calls, however, raised questions. On October 15, shortly after Hemy split with his wife and moved out, he placed twelve calls and texts that pinged a tower in Marietta near a business on Austel Road called Wild West Gun Traders. Among these was a sixteen-minute call at 1:45 p.m. to Andrea’s phone. A little over two weeks later, the same day that Hemy was in Dalton for the gun show on October 31, he sent a text to Andrea’s phone at 11:34 a.m. The contents of the message were lost; all that could be determined was that the text was relayed by the same tower used by the convention center hosting the gun show. Less than two hours later, he called Parnell’s Firearms and Range, where he arrived the next day with a gun and ammunition. On another day, Hemy called two costume shops—in between he called Andrea.
Finally, the FBI analyst checked Andrea and Hemy’s calls for November 18, 2010. Less than half an hour after Rusty’s murder, at 9 a.m., Hemy made a flurry of calls. Timed between 9:27 a.m. and 10:50 a.m., the fifteen calls pinged a tower far away from GE Energy. Of these, nine were to Andrea’s phone. All of them went unanswered or apparently went to voice mail until 10:30 a.m., when a call between Hemy’s phone and Andreas’s lasted forty-two seconds.
It was at about this same time that Andrea also spoke to Rusty’s father, Donald Sneiderman, and texted her co-worker Alan Schachtely, telling them that Rusty had been shot. Reviewing her statements to police, she claimed that at that time nobody had told her what happened to Rusty.
Had Hemy told her what he had done? Or had Andrea known all along?
* * *
After the murder there were no more emails or phone calls between them that caught police’s attention. Those who saw Hemy at the funeral and shiva said, even in hindsight after his arrest, that they saw nothing unexpected. Al Harris, the audit program manager at GE who had been hired by Hemy, would later describe his boss at the shiva as remorseful, sorrowful, concerned about Andrea and everybody else. “He looked sincerely sorry for what happened,” said Harris later in court, repeating what he told investigators after Hemy’s arrest. “He hugged Andrea for a long time and said so sorry.” Later in November or early December, Hemy reached out to a childhood friend of Rusty’s who had been at the shiva. In an email later obtained by WSB-TV, Hemy described Rusty’s death as “so tragic and unfortunate” and said it was “hard to find the words.” Hemy summed up his feelings this way: “Too much shock.”
Orna Hanison saw Hemy Neuman the week of Thanksgiving, about three or four days after the murder. Hanison had been transferred from Houston back to the Marietta office with a different job title, and Hemy popped by her new office. He gave her a hug, welcomed her back, and said it was great to see her again.
“We must do lunch,” Hemy said, she recalled.
Hanison remembered Hemy as being pleasant. He laughed about his new living arrangements—he had by now moved out of his house—rooming with an older woman in Buckhead, he told her. He jokingly called her his “girlfriend.”
And just days before his arrest, when Hemy had already been contacted by Sergeant Cortellino about the rental car, he showed no signs of stress. He called Hanison on December 3, to wish her a happy New Year, a message he also posted on his Facebook page. Hanison would describe his demeanor as “upbeat” and “normal.”
As for Andrea, she stayed away from work and mostly away from Hemy after the murder. In late December, she traveled to Florida with her parents to go to the synagogue where she was married for what would have been her tenth wedding anniversary. It was then that Hemy sent her the iTunes love song from Bruno Mars.
Then Andrea and and her friend Shayna Citron discussed the police sketch of the killer that had at the time been recently released. According to Citron, Andrea said the longer she looked at the drawing the more she “recognized the eyes.” They looked like Hemy’s.
It was an observation Andrea didn’t share with police.