Daniel McNaughtan was a 19th-century Scottish woodturner who had grown to hate the ruling Tories and Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. On what historian Richard Moran described as a “raw January afternoon” in 1843, McNaughtan walked up to a carriage he believed to be carrying Peel along Downing Street in London and, according to the Times of London, “put the muzzle of the pistol into the back of the unsuspecting gentleman. He then fired.”
It turned out the gentleman was not Peel but his private secretary Edmund Drummond. There is some dispute about whether McNaughtan meant to kill Drummond or if it was a case of mistaken identity; the newspapers of the day were not yet able to print photographs, so the appearances of government officials weren’t well known. The gravely wounded Drummond stumbled to his brother’s Charing Cross banking house and, despite receiving the best medical care of the time, died five days later. McNaughtan was quickly apprehended and charged with first-degree murder.
In a sensational trial in the Central Criminal Court of London, McNaughtan’s lawyers called nine medical experts to prove he was driven by a “fierce and fearful delusion” that caused him to believe the government was persecuting him. He suffered from what would be called “such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind” that at the time he pulled the trigger he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.
In a shocking decision, the court agreed. It found McNaughtan not guilty and spared him the gallows. Public outrage followed. The Times of London said the doctors who testified on his behalf had hijacked the trial. “The judge in his treatment of the madmen yields to the decision of the physician, and the physician in his treatment becomes the judge,” the Times wrote. The Standard griped about “mad doctors” who delivered testimony that was “crude” and “absurd.” Even Queen Victoria weighed in, calling for judges to take a firmer control of the courtroom. “The law may not be perfect, but how is it that whenever a case for its application arises, it proves to be of no avail?” she wrote to Peel, complaining that the “ablest lawyers of the day … allow and advise the Jury to pronounce the verdict of Not Guilty on account of Insanity—whilst everybody is morally convinced that both the malefactors were perfectly conscious and aware of what they did!”
One hundred and seventy some years later, on September 10, 2011, Hemy Neuman’s lawyers Doug Peters and Robert Rubin held a news conference. It was held on the porch of their offices in front of a sign reading PETERS, RUBIN AND SHEFFIELD, TRIAL LAWYERS with a picture of a scale. Peters told reporters, “Mr. Neuman had a mental illness, because of that mental illness, at the time of the shooting, he just was unable to understand the difference between right and wrong.”
He was referencing what had become to be known as the McNaughtan Rules on criminal responsibility adopted after the Scotsman’s case and dominating Anglo-Saxon law ever since. Most American states, including Georgia, still use this as an insanity test either by itself or in conjunction with another test, the best known being diminished capacity. Hemy planned to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
“This is our notice to the court that what this trial is about is not what happened, but why it happened. It is our notice that this is about the people who are involved and how this transpired,” Peters said. “This case is not about whether or not he pulled the trigger. He is the one who did the shooting. The question is, and what is provided by Georgia law, is What was his mental capacity at the time?”
Hemy’s lawyers didn’t reveal what they believed Hemy’s mental illness to be. He was currently being “evaluated by the best and they feel very, very confident in their diagnosis in the case which of course will be revealed,” said Peters. “Mr. Neuman, through us, has always maintained that he is innocent, that he is not responsible for this crime. A crime requires criminal intent, there was never criminal intent in this case … We have confidence that there will be a jury that can be seated here in DeKalb County that will give us a fair trial.”
The insanity plea announcement didn’t go over any better in 2011 than it had in the 1840s. Leading the charge was Ariela’s attorney Esther Panitch, who said Ariela was “devastated” to find out her estranged husband admitted to killing Rusty, but couldn’t accept the reasoning.
“She always believed the evidence from the district attorney, but to hear it come from the defense really brought it home,” said Panitch. “I don’t think anyone wants to believe their spouse is capable so there’s always some scintilla of hope that they couldn’t have done this and this wipes out this hope.” She noted Ariela saw “no sign of mental illness” and suggested the tactic was a ruse. “He acted like a man who was cheating on his wife and tried to lie about it,” she said, adding, “The inability to fight the overwhelming desire to be with your lover is not a legal reason for insanity.” She also questioned why it took nearly ten months after his arrest to decide that he was insane. “I suspect there has been so much overwhelming evidence of his guilt that this might be the only thing that they feel they have.”
Andrea’s attorney Seth Kirschenbaum released a statement saying, “We are relieved that Mr. Neuman has admitted that he killed Rusty Sneiderman. This was a cold-blooded, premeditated murder, however. Hopefully, the prosecution is prepared to rebut his insanity defense.”
DA Robert James seemed as surprised as anyone. Nothing in the investigation to this point had turned up a trace of mental illness. On the contrary, the witnesses all used words like calm and methodical and organized to describe Hemy. His restraint under pressure during the interrogation was such that he never raised his voice, never broke down, never grew angry, leaving the detectives frustrated. After the murder he acted as he always had. There were occasional times he broke his reserve—the breakup email with his wife was the most dramatic example. Otherwise friends and co-workers described him, if anything, as boring.
The same held true after his arrest. When Hemy was processed into the DeKalb County Jail, just another of the thousands of inmates who go through each year, he underwent a routine psychiatric evaluation. Dr. William Jerome Brickhouse, the jail’s director of mental health, said Hemy also got a follow-up examination based on some of the findings of the screening the next day, on January 6, 2011. Working off a checklist, Brickhouse asked Hemy about a range of topics, from how many children he had (three) to whether he had suffered any hallucinations (he said none). Hemy had said that two weeks earlier he had “contemplated” suicide by drowning himself in the ocean while he was visiting Florida but that he didn’t go through with it because of his love for his children and his Jewish beliefs that it would be a sin. Brickhouse determined that Hemy was safe for regular incarceration, that he was not suicidal or homicidal—not a risk to himself or others—and found no signs of a serious mental disorder.
By March, Hemy appeared to be adjusting to jail life. He was held in a two-person cell in an area—the jail calls them pods—with thirty-two inmates and reported no problems. “We talked about the living situation, his accommodations,” Brickhouse said. “Had he been threatened? Assaulted? He said he was fine.” With his Spanish skills, Hemy had become something of a mediator between the Hispanic and black inmates in his pod. “He said he was comfortable and had no request to be relocated,” said Brickhouse.
The prosecution went to the judge seeking “information, documents and recordings relevant to defendant’s claim of insanity.” Hemy had been visited by mental health professionals hired by the defense, and the prosecution wanted to know what Hemy told them—and how they came to their conclusions. The prosecution also wanted its own experts to examine Hemy. The defense countered that Hemy didn’t have to do this as it could infringe upon his rights against self-incrimination. The law “does not require a defendant to cooperate with the court’s expert and provides no sanctions against a defendant who refuses to so cooperate,” according to a defense motion. “In this case, the defendant retains his Fifth Amendment rights, and does not intend to waive those rights beyond what is required to give the state a fair opportunity to present its own expert testimony. Accordingly, there will be no examination and report generated by a court-appointed psychologist or psychiatrist.”
The judge disagreed, handing the defense yet another defeat. Hemy’s case file would be open to the prosecution. The story of Hemy’s insanity defense unfolded.
* * *
It began in March 2011, three months after Hemy’s arrest. At the time, things were looking bad for the defense. In addition to the media leaks from the search warrant affidavits and the battle with Hemy’s estranged wife, the ballistics examiner had just determined that the “souvenir” shell casing provided by Jan DaSilva’s girlfriend matched the shells at the murder scene, linking the gun scientifically to Hemy. Attorney Robert Rubin called Dr. Julie Rand-Dorney, a forensic psychiatrist. As an instructor at Emory University and the lead physician for the forensic unit at Georgia Regional Hospital in DeKalb County, Rand-Dorney was a highly sought expert in criminal cases, testifying for the prosecution sixty-one times, the defense twenty-eight times. Rubin asked her to conduct a screening to determine if Hemy showed signs of psychological issues that would be relevant to a defense, and, if so, whether he was faking those signs.
She began by taking a personal history from Hemy. It turned out that Hemy’s reserve hid a lifetime of pain. In an account to Rand-Dorney, with details added when he spoke to other mental health experts later—and echoed in court in the testimony by his sister, Monique—Hemy described a life of fear, isolation, and physical pain, the seeds of which were rooted in the Holocaust.
His father, Marc Neuman, was among 130 family members taken to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp. This included Hemy’s great-grandparents, grandparents, six uncles, and various cousins and other relatives. Of them, only twelve survived, including Marc and his brother—Hemy’s uncle. After the war, Marc Neuman made his way to Mexico. He was a small man, barely five feet tall, but apparently had his charms, for he married the stunningly beautiful and very young Rebecca Cohen, seventeen years old to his thirty-six. They had a boy—Hemy’s older brother—followed by Hemy and, eighteen months later, his sister, Monique.
The concentration camp never stopped haunting his father, seared into his psyche like the number tattoo on his forearm, Hemy claims. Hemy and his sister said Marc Neuman was a detached father and husband, the marriage strained by constant arguing. Hemy was born in Mexico but grew up in Puerto Rico after the family moved there when he was young. His father had jewelry shops selling to tourists, but went bankrupt at least twice.
Hemy spent little time with his mother; she was a socialite who would be out on the town or traveling to see relatives in Venezuela and Mexico, Hemy’s sister would later say in court. With their mother largely absent and the father consumed with business troubles or his personal demons, Hemy and his sister fended for themselves. They would say that they felt no attachment to their parents and spent most of their time together. When their father was around, it became even worse. In an account under oath from Hemy’s sister, Marc Neuman would come in around 6 p.m. from work, the children never knowing what his mood would be. When their mother was around, she, too, was tense. The smallest things would set him off. If the children’s hands were dirty, he’d erupt. Their mother would make sure the children washed before he came home. He’d scream if he couldn’t find his nail clippers where he usually left them, according to Hemy’s sister.
The first thing Marc Neuman would do was drink one or two scotches, Hemy’s sister would say in court. Then whoever was home would sit for dinner. If Hemy’s mother was there, the first of the night’s arguments would start at the dinner table. The shouting would lead to violence, according to Hemy and his sister. Hemy’s father would slap the children with an open hand, they claimed. He once shoved a vegetable spoon into the nose of Hemy’s sister, she said. He would scream at his wife, but she wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t control her, and that made him even angrier, Hemy would tell therapists. Hemy’s sister, Monique, recalled coming home one day with shaved ice, and for some reason this set off her father. He yanked a picture off the wall and hit her with it. She could remember being hit so much her buttocks were the color of eggplant. Then the storm would pass and Marc Neuman would become a doting father.
Hemy said he bore the brunt of the abuse. With his older brother away at college, Hemy was the only boy in the house. His father would hit him with his hands and swat him with a belt, Hemy told therapists. The violence was unpredictable and impossible to understand, according to Hemy and his sister. One night, Hemy’s sister said in court, the children were playing a game of Mastermind—Hemy, his sister, and some cousins—when Hemy got up for ice cream. Their father was lounging on a La-Z-Boy. Hemy stumbled and the ice cream went flying, enraging his father. According to Hemy’s sister, their father slapped Hemy repeatedly. His sister burst into tears, fearing it would never stop.
If his mother was there, she would implore Marc Neuman to stop hitting Hemy. This only seemed to make his father want to hit Hemy more, Hemy and his sister claimed.
In time, Monique said, she devised ways to get out of the beatings. Sometimes crying worked. Other times, she’d blame Hemy for something going wrong—and Hemy would take another beating. Once, his sister recalled, she blurted out the word “bitch” while they were driving. Her father asked her where she’d learned the word. It was actually from a cousin, but she told her father it was Hemy. Their father pulled over to the side of the road, leaned Hemy up against the car, and beat him.
When it was over, Hemy looked at his sister and said, “Thanks a lot.” But Hemy never resented his sister for this; he was a protective older brother and often took the blame to spare her.
“I was the sandwich. I was in the middle,” Hemy would explain to a therapist. “My sister would do something stupid and then blame me for it. She was my father’s little princess. He would come home and hear it and give me a beating. I was just getting it from all sides. I might as well just stay away. Just leave me alone.”
Their mother missed most of this. She’d be with friends, playing bridge or gambling at a casino, according to Hemy’s sister. Their father became enraged when he didn’t know where she was or realized that she wouldn’t take orders from him, Hemy and his sister said. The children didn’t seem to blame her for being away. They would, too, if they could.
When they came home from school, if their mother was there, she would be sleeping off a big night before. Their father didn’t want her awakened. It was her beauty sleep and he wanted to protect her beauty, he would say, according to Hemy’s sister. The family always had a maid, who would let the children in, feed them, watch them. But the kids always felt as if they raised themselves.
Despite it all, Hemy did well in school. He was the bright one in the family. Things seemed to come easily to him.
When Hemy turned thirteen, his already difficult life was plunged into upheaval. “Pack, you’re going to Israel,” his father told him one day.
Hemy was being sent to a boarding school. He had never been to Israel and didn’t speak Hebrew. His mother apparently knew nothing of this and was out of the picture at the time, separated from their father. His father drove him to the airport, dropped him off, wished him good luck, and gave him a piece of paper with the father’s phone number and the name of the boarding school. The plane arrived in Israel at 11:30 p.m. The person who was supposed to pick him up at the airport never materialized. Young Hemy hailed a taxi, which took him to the school, but the gates were closed that late.
Hemy would later describe his feelings as “scared shitless.” A guard came up but Hemy couldn’t speak to him. The man was short and scary—like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hemy would recall—but he opened the gates and let him in. It was now past midnight. Hemy spent the first few weeks not in the classroom but in the infirmary in a sickly haze, his temperature soaring to 104 degrees. A nurse asked him where his parents were so they could pick him up. Hemy said they were in Puerto Rico and wouldn’t be coming. He said he had relatives in Israel but didn’t know where they were or how to contact them. As Rosh Hashanah approached, the nurse asked where he would spend the holidays. Hemy said he didn’t know. So the nurse brought him to her home. She placed him in what Hemy later described as a shack that lacked heat in January. He felt orphaned and abandoned and plunged into what would later be determined to be depression.
After boarding school, Hemy went to the United States to study at Georgia Tech. There he would be a solid student. But in 1981, his sophomore year, the dark feelings returned. He lacked energy, had no motivation, didn’t want to go to class, didn’t want to study. All he wanted to do was sleep. When he was awake, he felt in a fog, unable to focus. His GPA fell and for the first time he didn’t make the dean’s list. That summer the depression lingered, even though he joined his sister in Miami.
Their parents had divorced by then and their mother remarried. Their father also would remarry and move into an apartment with his new wife. The divorce did them well. Their father’s rage subsided—he was a different man without their mother around. Every day, Monique would thank God that her parents had divorced. The nineteen-year-old Hemy stayed with his mother and stepfather and his sister at their town house. The new husband bought Hemy a new Mustang, but that couldn’t pull him out of the depression. For weeks all he did was sit on the sofa and watch HBO.
After graduating from Georgia Tech and returning to work in Israel, he married Ariela. He had a good job and they started a family, welcoming the twins. Then in 1998, Hemy surprised everybody. During a trip to South Florida to visit his family, he impulsively bought a house in Boca Raton and moved his family there. He quit his job and was unemployed when they arrived. They lived off the proceeds of selling their house in Israel. He put the twins in a private Jewish school. His energy level soared; he couldn’t sleep. He toyed with becoming a pilot. He never found employment. The money ran out and tensions ran high at home between him and Ariela, family history repeating itself, though their fights were always verbal.
They moved back to Israel, where Hemy worked for a few years before returning to the United States for his job at GE. The steady, high-paying employment didn’t seem to make matters better at home. When his sister visited in 2008, she could feel the tension. Money problems had been mounting. The family could barely afford a housekeeper and yet when Monique arrived she saw her brother installing a garden with a waterfall. Ariela had a new diamond ring. Hemy seemed manic. They threw an elaborate birthday bash for the twins. Hemy was the life of the party, something he never had been before. He paid for his sister to visit, another thing he hadn’t done in the past.
At work, Hemy described himself as a “terror.” The company asked him to erase a sixty-five-million-dollar budget deficit and he did it. Yet at home the spending spun out of control. Between March and August 2008 the Neumans burned through seventy-one thousand dollars. They paid college tuition and bought an air-conditioning system for the home. He cashed out a hundred-thousand-dollar pension with the idea of paying off seventy-seven thousand in credit card debt. Instead, by year’s end, the credit balance hovered at seventy-four thousand dollars.
Hemy’s moods would swing wildly, up for one stretch, down the next. His sister had flashbacks of her father. During a visit for the twins’ college graduation, a party for which he spent twenty-five hundred dollars, Hemy exploded at his mother for no reason while they were taking pictures of the children. His mother reeled. Everybody felt uncomfortable and embarrassed.
By 2010, his marriage was in trouble. He claimed that he had tried to work on it, coming home and greeting his wife with a hug. But she would only cross her arms, he said. He felt alone again, like when he was sent off to boarding school. He felt as if he was slipping at work. A big project he had developed ended up going to another employee. He felt his energy ebb; all he wanted to do was sleep.
The only thing that kept him going were his children—and a new woman entering his life.
Asked by Dr. Rand-Dorney how he felt about Andrea, Hemy recounted a biblical story. He had been reading the Bible and the Torah more frequently of late and said the first and second books of Samuel spoke to him. In the passages, David, the first king of the Jews, saw a beautiful and beguiling woman named Bathsheba bathing in the open on a nearby rooftop. Hemy said this reminded him of his August trip to Greenville, South Carolina, when he fantasized about Andrea and, according to the therapist’s notes, “thinks he saw her naked” coming “out of the shower toweling herself.”
“She was a beautiful person,” he told Dr. Rand-Dorney. “I thought of her as Bathsheba.”
Hemy took it a step farther. He became fixated not just on Andrea, but on her children. He told Rand-Dorney that he “went back and forth” on whether he believed Sophia and Ian actually belonged to him and not Rusty. Becoming confused at times, he started to think the children were in danger. He told the psychiatrist, “I feel like I need to protect them.”
After speaking with Hemy for several hours at the jail, Dr. Rand-Dorney found symptoms of a psychotic disorder and the possibility that he was driven by obsessive thoughts. He developed toward Andrea what mental health professionals call “erotomanic delusions” but wavered on whether he actually had sex with her or just thought he did. “As that relationship evolved, he became more and more consumed by it but depressed at the same time,” Rand-Dorney later said. “At points he said he had sex with this woman, and then I’d ask, and he’d say, ‘I don’t know if it’s true.’”
Rand-Dorney’s screening found signs of paranoia, psychosis, and delusions, but more testing would be needed for a solid diagnosis. Another expert, Dr. Peter Thomas, a licensed psychologist and former president of the Georgia Psychological Association, was recruited. Although he had decades of experience, he had never been involved in a criminal case before. His work had mainly focused on child and family counseling. When his colleague Julie Rand-Dorney asked for his assistance, he agreed to advise the defense as long he did not have to testify.
On May 11, 2011, he met with Hemy at the jail for a clinical interview and psychological testing. As with Rand-Dorney, the work was preliminary, the tests intended to find potential issues, not to come up with a diagnosis. Thomas’s first impression was that Hemy spoke in a way that was “very naïve yet sophisticated,” with statements that came off as both “confusing” and “bizarre.” Hemy seemed to be driven by a mission that other people didn’t understand. In the ink blot test—the famous Rorschach test—Hemy kept seeing in the blotches a “demon” trying to engulf him with its evil. When discussing his relationship with Andrea, he couldn’t say for certain whether they had been sexually intimate. Thomas thought Hemy might have “psychotic behaviors” and recommended more evaluation. “I wasn’t sure if he knew what was real and what wasn’t,” Thomas said.
After this limited assessment, the defense moved on to another expert for a detailed examination. Two months later, in August 2011, when the pretrial hearings were not going well for Hemy, his lawyers placed a call to Dr. Adriana Flores, one of the top forensic psychologists in Georgia. She had conducted a dozen evaluations previously; her opinion was so valued that DA Robert James also had contacted her in September but he was too late. She visited Hemy in jail on September 8, 2011, for the first of three sessions. Her work would consume one hundred hours, requiring her to read through binders of reports and conduct additional interviews with people close to Hemy, including his parents and sister. Flores wanted to talk to Andrea, but she refused.
Hemy once again recalled his difficult childhood, his abrupt relocation to a boarding school, and the horrible time in the cold shack, only this time he added details.
“One day in the shack he experienced a demon,” Flores later said. “He was feeling really, really horrible, asking God what he did to deserve this, why have I been forsaken.” He described the demon as over six feet tall in a heavy cloak. “He said he felt anguish, deep pain,” said Flores. “At that moment he did not want to live and he prayed to God to take him.” The demon was there to take Hemy away, but he didn’t go.
Hemy said the demon would periodically return, the next time in 1981 when Hemy was a sophomore at Georgia Tech and suffering the depression that left him unable to do schoolwork and constantly craving sleep. Hemy did not see the vision again for years, absent during his manic years when he moved to Florida, then back to Israel, then to Atlanta, where he was a fiend at work and ran up bills at home.
Then in February 2010, it reappeared. At the time, the financial and marital strains had sent Hemy into another depression. “He was feeling like a failure, a wreck, very low energy, oversleeping, wanted to sleep life away,” Dr. Flores would later say. During a day trip for business to Greenville, the demon emerged in Hemy’s car. It seemed to wrap itself around him in an evil embrace and spoke to Hemy: “Come to me, I won’t ever abandon you.”
The feelings of pain and abandonment overwhelmed Hemy. Up ahead on the road was a concrete barrier. Hemy considered slamming the car into it, then changed his mind. He couldn’t do that to his children. He continued on to Greenville and the work of GE Energy.
It was shortly thereafter, in March 2010, that he received the résumé from Andrea Sneiderman. He hired her and they began traveling together, Hemy feeling an immediate connection. They chatted easily and commiserated and drew ever closer, bonding over their shared personal problems at home. She was, Hemy told Dr. Flores, the first person he could ever really talk to, and he held back nothing, his childhood stories about his abusive father and the boarding school flooding out of him for the first time. During the trip to Minden, Nevada, they had what he called an intimate dinner in Lake Tahoe, where he read her a poem and told her she was beautiful. He said they kissed, a chaste kiss but one he’d never forget.
A few weeks later, when Andrea went to the training session in Longmont, Colorado, Hemy initially stayed behind, he said. But then a spectral vision appeared. This time it took a female form, sort of an angel. Materializing while Hemy was attending a dinner party with his wife, the angel told him that Ian and Sophia Sneiderman were his children and that he needed to let Andrea know.
It was on this night that Hemy frantically called the hotel in Longmont and tried to get the staff to buy flowers and chocolates for Andrea. He then spent his own money to fly there. Andrea met him at the airport, he told Flores, and joined him for dinner. Hemy told Andrea, “If you search the world over there is no better father for Sophia and Ian than me.” He related Andrea as replying, “That may be, but I made a commitment to Rusty and I’m not breaking up.”
For Hemy, what he saw as a growing relationship with Andrea brought both joy and sorrow. While in Longmont, he said, he could feel her putting up an emotional wall. They returned to the hotel and shared a bed, but Andrea did not want to have sex, he claimed. He tried to cuddle but she resisted. The next day she was angry and he bought her flowers. But over dinner her mood changed. They shared a bottle of wine and spent the night in the same bed, the morning spent cuddling. She stroked his chest. He would describe it as the most incredible moment of his life. Then she would change again. She sent him the email expressing confusion and regret.
The next time a vision came was after Hemy saw Rusty during a visit to the Sneiderman house in August 2010. While driving home, a female angel appeared in the car. According to Hemy, she told him that Andrea’s children were at risk from Rusty. “He’s going to hurt them,” the angel warned. “And you have to protect them. You can’t let this happen again.”
A tremendous pain overcame Hemy.
“As he’s driving he thought: I have to kill him,” said Flores. “And he said that from that point on he said: ‘I got my marching orders. I was a faithful soldier doing what I had to do.’” He never second-guessed the orders or analyzed them. His only thought was: How do I do it?
He considered poison. He thought about running Rusty over. Then he decided on a gun. It would be a “fire and forget mission,” homing in on the target and then proceeding without looking back, according to Hemy, all to protect the children. It was around this time that Andrea had sent Hemy the photos from Sophia’s birthday party. The fact that Rusty wasn’t in any of them reinforced Hemy’s belief that Rusty posed a threat to the children.
Entering another manic phase, Hemy made the Greenville trip with Andrea on August 26. In his retelling to the psychologist, they had adjoining rooms and fed each other during a dinner of tapas and wine. Returning to the hotel with another bottle of wine, they cozied up in bed and watched The Goodbye Girl on the computer, both in their pajamas, kissing and cuddling. His memory now faded. They may have had sex, but he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that afterward she was upset, the feelings she later expressed in her emails when she told him she felt horrible and would have to live with this the rest of her life.
For weeks there was emotional push and pull, and Hemy wavered on whether to go to the UK with her, eventually deciding to, only to face more mixed emotions from Andrea. When they made their second trip to Greenville, the pattern continued, one minute Andrea expressing regret, the next dancing with him at the Pulse nightclub. Their communications would become more frequent and intense, emails and texts and phone calls, Hemy’s obsessions building, his plans to commit murder coming into focus.
The first attempt came on the morning of November 10, 2010. The homeless man lurking around the gas meter at the Sneiderman house was in fact Hemy wearing a disguise, lying in wait to shoot Rusty. But then Rusty called 911 and Hemy had to flee into the woods, which he knew about because he’d visited their home previously.
Eight days later, Hemy set out again to kill Rusty. He bought a different disguise, rented the Kia Sedona minivan, followed Rusty into the preschool parking lot, and this time shot him dead. Hemy took full and complete responsibility; Andrea knew nothing about it, he told Dr. Flores. If anything, he worried what Andrea would say if she found out the killer was Hemy. The fake beard was not intended to fool Rusty, he told Dr. Flores, but so Andrea wouldn’t know who killed Rusty. Hemy didn’t want her angry at him.
Dr. Flores diagnosed Hemy as suffering a bipolar 1 disorder with psychosis manifested by delusions. The mania and depression spoke to the bipolar disorder, as did Hemy’s “hypersexuality” at the time. The angel telling him to protect Andrea’s children indicated delusions. How much of his relationship with Andrea also was a delusion was harder to determine, Flores said. She found enough independent evidence to suggest they had at least an emotional affair, but how far it went physically couldn’t be determined.
Dr. Flores believed that Andrea played a strong part in Hemy’s emotional problems, giving him “cues” that reinforced his delusions and created his perceived attachment to her. Andrea, according to Dr. Flores, was “manipulating him into believing what she believed and thinking what she thought.” Andrea’s inconsistent rewards and punishments perversely created a strong emotional bond. No matter how much she distanced herself from him, Hemy could count on Andrea coming back, Dr. Flores said. Whether Andrea did this wittingly or unwittingly was unclear, though Dr. Flores would insist, “The only person who could’ve known he was delusional … was Andrea Sneiderman, because the delusions were about her.”
His mental illness was so severe, she concluded, that he was not criminally responsible for Rusty’s murder and that at the time he pulled the trigger he did not know the difference between right and wrong. “Everything,” she said, “points to him being criminally insane.”
There was always the possibility that Hemy was faking all this, inventing the demon and angel only so that he would appear insane and wiggle out of a murder rap. So much of Dr. Flores’s findings hinged on what Hemy told her—if he was lying, her conclusions would be wrong. Dr. Flores conducted a battery of tests to determine if Hemy was faking mental illness—“malingering” in psychological parlance. She concluded that Hemy was telling the truth. His mental illness, she said, was so severe that typically somebody in his condition would be committed to a mental health facility.
A second defense expert, Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, would also meet with Hemy, in September 2011, and come to the same conclusion. “Mr. Neuman, at the time of the alleged offense, was unable to distinguish right and wrong” due to his bipolar disorder, she’d later say. In fact, months after the murder, Hemy was still delusional about Rusty’s murder. “He really believes this stuff … and has such little insight into the gravity of this stuff,” Marks would say. “People who have no insight don’t get it, and he doesn’t get it.”
The prosecution predictably cast a skeptical eye. For one thing, the timing seemed suspicious. For the better part of a year, he had been a model prisoner—no fights or complaints, no reported problems with other inmates. That suddenly changed in October 2011. Just days after his attorneys’ press conference announcing the defense strategy and shortly after Hemy met with Dr. Marks, Hemy sent a request to speak with Dr. Brickhouse. Unavailable at the time, Brickhouse had the on-call clinician follow up. Hemy reported that he had grown concerned for his safety. A new group of inmates had moved into his pod, among them two men who “were contemplating throwing him down the stairs,” said Brickhouse. “They took exception to the fact he was Jewish and made reference to the fact that Jewish people did not accept Christ.”
The jail moved Hemy to protective custody, an area with a smaller pod—twelve inmates—and single-inmate cells. A day later, on October 12, Hemy sent a “sick slip” with another plea to talk to Brickhouse, this one marked “urgent.” After conferring with the clinician, Brickhouse met with Hemy, who related the threats. He said he now felt physically safe but had come to feel suicidal. Asked if he had made any plans to act on this, he said that he had five razors he had been keeping for some time in case. “At that time,” Brickhouse later said, “he shared that he had committed the murder he was charged with, something he did not mention in January. He also shared that he changed the nature of his legal defense,” an apparent reference to his plans to plead not guilty by reason of insanity although Brickhouse didn’t know the details at the time.
Brickhouse wasn’t entirely convinced Hemy wanted to kill himself, but he told Hemy that ethically he would have to take action. As a precaution a guard searched his cell, finding and seizing the razors, and the jail transferred him to a section called 3A, the mental health ward, with twenty-seven beds staffed twenty-four hours a day by nurses and security. Under observation by nurses making rounds every fifteen minutes, Hemy spent his time reading and praying. He showered and shaved and seemed to have no trouble sleeping. He suffered what would be labeled “situational depression,” not unusual for someone suddenly stripped of their liberties and locked up, but Brickhouse saw no signs of a more serious psychosis. After about two and a half months, Brickhouse spoke to Hemy. They discussed the timing of his transfer—whether it should happen before or after the Jewish holidays and Christmas. The decision was made to do it after the new year, in January 2012. “His mental state was completely unremarkable during that period of time,” Brickhouse later said. “There was never any documented evidence of any delusions, there was never any documented mental health requests. His behavior was exemplary.”
* * *
To see if there was any evidence that Hemy was faking his problems—and to build ammunition to rebut a defense insanity case—prosecutors hired their own expert. Dr. Pamela Crawford was a former US Air Force psychologist who retired as a major. Licensed as a psychologist in South Carolina, Dr. Crawford did not have a license in Georgia where the trial would be held. She also was not currently board-certified, having allowed her certification to lapse three years earlier. This, along with the fact that she would charge the state about sixty thousand dollars for her work, would make her vulnerable at trial. But her review was extensive, including two interviews with Hemy.
More important, unlike the other experts, Crawford conducted her interviews on video.
They met on November 4 and 5, 2011, after the four defense mental health professionals had already talked to him. They covered the same issues, from his childhood through the hiring of Andrea Sneiderman, but Crawford delved deeper into Hemy’s claims of seeing the visions. Crawford asked first about the demon that appeared at the boarding school, at college, and then in the car.
“How far away from you is he typically?” Crawford asked.
“Probably arm’s length,” said Hemy. “I mean, he’s big.”
“How big?”
“Not as high as the ceiling but almost. Like towering over me.”
Crawford asked what the demon sounded like. “It’s a voice outside your head? Is it a low or high voice?”
“It’s a deep voice. I’ve never been asked before—almost like Barry White.”
The female angel that appeared at the dinner party was also big, tall enough to reach the ceiling, he said. She had a wide face and a flowing light-pastel-blue robe. Hemy could both hear her and feel her, like an embrace.
“What does the voice sound like?”
“I compared his to Barry White,” he said of the demon. “She’s got a light voice.” Hemy tried to think of whom the angel reminded him of. “What’s her name? Oh, goodness, I can just hear her. The Australian who played in Grease, what’s her name?”
“Olivia Newton-John?”
“Yes, like that kind of soft.”
“Does she have an accent?”
“No.”
“Not Australian like Olivia?”
“No.”
Crawford asked Hemy if he thought the visions were real.
“When he comes, I think he is real.”
“Do you think he is real now? What do you think he is?”
“Now I’m talking to you and sort of analyzing,” Hemy said, “probably not.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, my own fears, insecurities I have coming manifesting themselves in a physical way. I don’t know.”
Asked who else knew about his visions, Hemy said that he never told anybody until after he was arrested.
“You said you tell Andrea about things,” said Crawford. “Tell her about the demon?”
“No.”
“Do you remember consciously not telling her about it?”
“I don’t know that we ever got—once again, it’s not a very pleasant experience.”
The first person he told, he said, was his lawyer Robert Rubin.
“What made you talk to him about it?” asked Crawford. “What made it significant to you?”
“We couldn’t figure this out. For the life of us we couldn’t figure it out,” said Hemy, “and then it hit me because we talked about the angel.”
* * *
At best, an insanity defense is a major gamble, and history was not on Hemy’s side. Daniel McNaughtan may have avoided execution, but he did not escape punishment. He wound up in Bethlem Hospital, the infamous asylum for the mentally ill—from which the word bedlam comes—then transferred to another hospital for the criminally insane. He died in 1865 among the lunatics, remembered only as a legal abstraction.
There was, however, one wild card in the defense strategy. While Hemy would admit that he killed Rusty Sneiderman, both the prosecution and the defense came to believe he was driven by more than spectral visions and voices.
Andrea Sneiderman, the object of his passion and infatuation, was with him every step of the way, texting, emailing, talking, and phoning.
How much blame for her husband’s death could be laid at her feet? And what did she have to say now?
The wait for answers would not be long.