On Saturday, March 2, 2012, Donald Sneiderman had sent Andrea an email. The trial of Hemy Neuman was winding down with mental health experts debating Hemy’s sanity at the time of the murder. It was a weekend break. Donald asked to visit his grandchildren for ice cream.
“Unfortunately, we are not available this weekend,” Andrea emailed back. “You can try to schedule something for next weekend.”
Two weeks later, with the verdict in and Hemy sentenced to life in prison, Donald asked again to see the grandchildren.
“This will probably be our last weekend in Atlanta for a little while,” he wrote. “We would like to see Sophia and Ian on Saturday evening perhaps for ice cream again.”
Andrea replied, “Don, I am sorry but tomorrow just doesn’t work with our schedule. We will set something up whenever you can in the future. We just can’t make it this weekend.”
In March 2012, after a year of frustrated attempts to see their grandchildren, Donald and Marilyn Sneiderman sued for visitation, invoking the language of the most bitter custody battles. A family devastated by the murder of Rusty Sneiderman now was being torn apart by his death.
“Prior to and subsequent to the death of the father, the grandparents had a loving, caring and consistent relationship with the minor children,” said the petition filed in Fulton County court, the jurisdiction where Andrea now lived with her parents. “Subsequent to the father’s death, the mother has unilaterally limited and most recently eliminated contact between the grandparents and the minor children.” As a result, the petition contended, “The health or welfare of the children would be harmed unless such visitation is granted.” The Sneidermans said they were also “ready, willing and able, should the court find it in the children’s best interests, to accept primary custody of the children,” the petition states. At the very least, Rusty’s parents wanted a the court to appoint a guardian to “investigate and make a recommendation as to what is in the children’s best interest.”
Responding to the visitation filing, Andrea’s attorney, Jennifer Little, told CBS Atlanta News in a statement that there had been “multiple in-person and Skype visits with the family, the most recent being immediately before the trial began” and that “we confirmed to them that Andrea is willing to schedule visits with her children, just as she has done in the past.” Beyond that, Andrea didn’t want to discuss the matter publicly.
“We believe very strongly that it is not in the best interests of the children for matters related to them to be discussed in the media,” her lawyer said in a statement. “Anyone who has their best interests at heart would recognize that this is a matter to be privately addressed within the family.”
As they did with so much when it came to Andrea, Rusty’s family disagreed. They continued to blast her in the media, adding a publicity campaign to the legal pressure on her. Hemy’s trial had left Rusty’s relatives convinced that Andrea had something to do with his murder and was now covering up that fact.
“We know that she’s lied; we watched her lie on the stand,” Rusty’s brother, Steven Sneiderman, had said in a Today show interview the day after the verdict. “She lied about the nature of her relationship with the killer. She clearly had an inappropriate relationship with him. We know that she lied about critical information that could have led law enforcement to, you know, arrest him much faster than they did. We knew that she lied about when she knew that Rusty had been shot. And those [lies] raise giant red flags and raise a lot of questions for all of us as to what … happens here.”
Steven’s wife, Lisa, added, “The last time I spoke with her, we were speaking right after Hemy Neuman was arrested, and she indicated to me that she felt she was suicidal when she thought of how much worse this could get for her. I immediately was alarmed and I said ‘What do you mean by that?’ She said ‘What do you think I mean by that?’ and I knew immediately that she was in big trouble.”
The Today show was not the only media appearance by Rusty’s family. His parents expressed their doubts about Andrea in an interview on WSB-TV that had been taped before the verdict but aired after. Donald Sneiderman recounted a phone conversation with Andrea shortly after the murder in which he asked her if she had lied to police when she initially said she didn’t know who could have killed Rusty. Andrea responded by hanging up on him, Donald said.
“I thought she knew on January 4,” he said. “I asked her if she had lied to me. All this whole charade has done is confirm everything that I thought. Nothing’s changed my mind … I think she knew. I don’t know what she knew.”
While the Sneidermans went at each other, Hemy’s wife went to court to finish off their marriage. On March 22, Ariela Neuman—already legally separated from Hemy—filed for divorce in Fulton County Superior Court. In the petition, she asked the court for everything the family had amassed during their marriage, from their home at 2208 LaSalle Drive in Marietta to “household furnishings and appliances and automobiles, banking accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts and other property.” Their “substantial personal debts” were the responsibility of Hemy.
But the petition said much more, listing as the grounds for separation what it called the “misconduct” by Hemy, including adultery, “the crime of moral turpitude”—being convicted of murder—and the “cruel treatment” of Ariela. She sought to return to her maiden name, Ariela Barkoni, asked for full custody of their minor child, their daughter, and wanted Hemy to pay for all costs related to the get, the Jewish Bill of Divorcement, “with a rabbi of her choosing.” Struggling to make ends meet on three jobs and Hemy’s small pension, Ariela acknowledged that Hemy’s lifelong incarceration made it unlikely he’d ever be able to pay alimony or child support. But she added a just-in-case clause. “If husband’s current financial position changes then the wife shall have the right to petition an appropriate court to recoup monies not paid since the date of husband’s incarceration,” it said.
The divorce action removed marital privilege that prevented Ariela from being compelled to testify, though her lawyer said she was prepared to take the stand against Hemy all along. “[The state] had enough overwhelming evidence of [Hemy Neuman’s] sanity as well as his guilt, so they didn’t need her,” Esther Panitch told 11Alive news. “I didn’t want her to be subjected to those ridiculous assertions that maybe she helped drive him insane or anything that the defense would’ve come up with.”
A different situation faced Donald Sneiderman, who not only did testify but likely would again. One of the unexpected developments in the trial was his growing importance for the prosecution. Called primarily to put a human face on the toll of Rusty’s murder, he had mentioned that during the tumultuous morning of the murder Andrea said in a phone call that Rusty had been shot. Interviewed after the trial, prosecutor Don Geary told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he had no idea that Andrea would say under his questioning that at the time of that phone call she still had no idea how Rusty had died. “It was the first time she had ever said those things,” said Geary. His boss, District Attorney Robert James, added in the same postverdict interview, “We were surprised she admitted it … We did not expect her to be as forthcoming as she was.”
In the days after Hemy’s trial, prosecutors wrestled with whether they had enough evidence against Andrea. “We have strong beliefs about Mrs. Sneiderman’s involvement,” James told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But, he added in another interview with WSB-TV, “I’m a public official, and I hear what people say, and it’s important to me what people think. But at the end of the day, when Mr. Geary and I walk into a courtroom with a case, he and I are satisfied that we have a good shot at proving that case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
* * *
As a tactical move, the prosecutors had deferred a decision on charging Andrea until after Hemy’s trial, gambling that she would shun taking the Fifth and testify. The gambit paid off. Andrea’s two days on the stand—her sarcasm, defensiveness, and, in the prosecution’s view, outright lying—could be another weapon against her in court. She presented herself so poorly, James believed, that a cold written transcript wouldn’t do her appearance justice. So in April 2012, James took the unusual step of subpoenaing from WSB-TV the video of “the entirety of Andrea Sneiderman’s testimony during the Hemy Neuman murder trial.” Already shown live in the Atlanta area, the testimony could be presented to a grand jury. James didn’t say when or whether that would happen, but Esther Panitch told 11Alive news that “every step that the DA takes to further investigate their case is a march closer to justice for Rusty Sneiderman and may result in the arrest of his widow Andrea Sneiderman for her role in not only his death, but also covering it up afterwards.” At the very least, Panitch guessed, prosecutors would slap Andrea with perjury charges, using her own words and what the lawyer called Andrea’s “level of arrogance” against her. “I think it would take a criminal charge to bring her back down to reality and realize that what she’s alleged to have done is very, very serious,” Panitch told the station. “This is not a joke. This is not a game. This is someone’s life who was taken, and this is someone’s life who will be affected by criminal charges, so the decision [to charge Andrea] has to be very deliberate.”
As prosecutors pondered their next move, Andrea took her first substantive step to fight back. In a blistering response to her in-laws’ visitation petition, Andrea’s lawyers accused Donald and Marilyn Sneiderman of “litigation strategy” to see the kids and questioned the couple’s true feelings about their grandchildren. She said that before the trial they visited the children twice a year for three days at a time. “They may love the children very much,” said Andrea’s court papers, “but they have shown very little outward affection during their visits.” Blasting Rusty’s parents for their statements to the press, Andrea’s papers said, “Clearly that was not in the best interests of the children for their grandparents and uncle to publicly make such terrible accusations about their mother.”
Two weeks later, in early May 2012, the public squabbling over the children ended when the two sides reached an agreement. Appearing in public for the first time since Hemy’s trial, Andrea sat near Rusty’s parents in a Fulton County courtroom to finalize a visitation arrangement, the terms of which weren’t revealed except that Rusty’s parents would be required to temper their comments about Andrea if they wanted to continue seeing their grandchildren.
The deal offered only a momentary respite. About two weeks later Rusty’s brother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against her, pinning blame for Rusty’s murder on Andrea. The petition stated, “On November 18, 2010, Defendant Sneiderman, through her Co-Conspirator, Defendant Neuman, shot and killed Rusty Sneiderman as he dropped off one of his minor children at preschool in DeKalb County, Georgia.” The lawsuit alleged that Andrea “utilized her illicit relationship” with Hemy “to manipulate and influence him to attempt to murder Rusty Sneiderman.” Andrea knew that Hemy intended to kill her husband, the lawsuit alleged, and “actively and knowingly participated in the murder and the planning of the murder.”
In a statement to the media, Steven Sneiderman said he filed the lawsuit “to protect the interests of Rusty’s children for which he worked every day of his life to provide, to protect Rusty’s legacy by making sure the truth about the circumstances surrounding his death are publicly disclosed and to try to bring closure, once and for all, to all of the issues that continue to haunt us.” One of his attorneys, William Ballard, said that Steven would be seeking the millions of dollars controlled by Andrea, including the life insurance payout, “to make sure it all goes to Rusty’s and Andrea’s two children, and not to Andrea.”
Despite the strong allegations, the lawsuit did not provide new evidence that Andrea had either had an affair with Hemy or been involved in the murder. Asked if he had such evidence, Ballard told 11Alive news, “I wouldn’t have filed the case if I didn’t think we were going to make the case.”
The wrongful death case also brought another familiar face deeper into the case. Ariela Neuman’s attorney Esther Panitch now also was representing Steven Sneiderman.
Andrea didn’t let this go unchallenged. In her biggest move yet, she recruited a heavy-hitting legal team led by J. Tom Morgan, a former DeKalb County district attorney, and a lineup of some of Atlanta’s best-known criminal defense lawyers. “We categorically deny each and every one of the allegations in the complaint filed today,” her new legal team said in a statement. “We are looking forward to a vigorous and complete defense to ensure that Andrea is fully exonerated of these false accusations.” The statement went on to say the lawyers were “disappointed” in Steven Sneiderman for filing a complaint “supposedly to benefit Andrea’s children, when all he is now doing is forcing Andrea to incur legal fees that will, at the end of the day, simply take money out of the children’s pockets.”
In their response, Andrea’s lawyers not only addressed the allegations but took aim at Panitch herself. “Steven Sneiderman and his attorney Esther Panitch have been attempting to try Andrea in the media for months,” they said in the statement. “We look forward to vigorously representing her in a court of law where, for the first time, she will have the opportunity to tell her side of the story. We are also carefully considering our legal options regarding the outrageous and libelous statements that have been made to the media about Andrea, without the benefit of privilege, by various individuals.”
* * *
As the civil litigation ground on, the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office had finally resolved the question of whether it had enough evidence against Andrea. At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 2, on a muggy Georgia morning, armed DA investigators and deputies from Putnam County converged on Andrea’s parents’ house on Blue Heron Drive. With her children in the house, Andrea was arrested, handcuffed, and hauled off in a police car to jail. She did not resist.
A grand jury had handed down a nineteen-count indictment. The charges included malice murder, criminal attempt to commit murder, insurance fraud, perjury, and making false statements to authorities. By noon she arrived at the DeKalb County Jail. Photos by a Fox 5 camera taken from a distance through a chain-link fence showed Andrea in profile, her hair thrown back in a hasty ponytail, surrounded by policemen. She wore white shorts, and her hands were cuffed in front of her.
She posed for a mug shot, grim-faced, her mouth downturned, her eyes averted from the camera.
“Obviously she is in a state of shock right now,” attorney J. Tom Morgan told reporters. “She was arrested with the children in the home with her. She was not even allowed to say good-bye to her children.” Scrambling to file papers seeking bond, the former DA seemed beside himself. He complained that he had offered to work with authorities to turn in Andrea if she were indicted; instead they sent “a SWAT team” to get her while her children were in the house. The first he heard of her arrest was in a phone call from a reporter. He signaled that Andrea would launch a full-throttle defense, conceding nothing, not even an affair with Hemy.
“We categorically deny each and every one of the charges that were filed against Andrea today,” Morgan said in a statement. “We are looking forward to a vigorous and complete defense to ensure that Andrea is fully exonerated of these false accusations. We are confident that, when an unbiased jury hears the facts of this case, it will be clear that Andrea is innocent.”
At a press conference, DA Robert James said as little as possible. “My staff, my investigators handled the arrest along with the Putnam County investigators,” he said. “My understanding is the children were not present.” He declined to answer questions about the evidence against Andrea, leaving that to the indictment, which offered a detailed narrative, starting with Andrea’s hiring at GE by Hemy, her business trips with Hemy, what the indictment called their “affair,” and through the days before the murder. Rusty originally was to have been killed on November 10, 2010, the indictment said, alleging that it was Andrea who provided Hemy with Rusty’s schedule and told him of a secluded path behind her house that he could use to escape. When that failed due to the gas leak alerting Rusty, Andrea gave Hemy Rusty’s schedule for November 18, and the plot was carried out to its deadly end. The motive came down to money and passion. The pair “conspired together to murder Rusty Sneiderman so that they could enjoy a life together, eliminate Neuman’s debt problems and fully benefit from the assets the Sneidermans had acquired as well as the proceeds of Rusty Sneiderman’s life insurance policies,” the indictment read.
Afterward, Andrea “misled police by indicating she was not in a relationship with Neuman,” according to the indictment, even though she confided in Shayna Citron that she had suspicions about Hemy. This turned Andrea’s longtime and once closest friend into the potential premier witness against her at trial, a role Shayna appeared ready and willing to take. “My client knew that she was not telling the truth,” Shayna’s lawyer, Jay Abt, told My Fox Atlanta. “You can tell when your best friend is lying sometimes. In this case, Shayna was able to know and understand that Andrea was not being truthful about denying a relationship with Hemy Neuman.”
Rusty’s family also issued a statement. “The arrest and indictment of Andrea Sneiderman is another important step in the pursuit of Justice for Rusty. This action, however, brings us no joy. We thank District Attorney Robert James, ADA Don Geary, Investigator Mark Potter and the rest of their team for their relentless pursuit of the truth in this case and we will continue to support their efforts in every way through the trial. We will NEVER stop fighting for Justice for Rusty.”
But for all the detail in the indictment, it—like the petition in the wrongful death case—offered little in the way of new evidence. It didn’t say how prosecutors intended to prove that Andrea gave Hemy the schedule for Rusty for either day he was targeted to die—whether it happened in an email or a phone call or in person. It referenced no evidence at all that said Andrea had any inkling that Hemy intended to kill Rusty or that Andrea herself had harbored such feelings. For all the emails presented at Hemy’s trial, none came close to that. Nor did the indictment suggest that Hemy had provided new information or intended to testify against Andrea, a problematic scenario at best since his entire defense was that he was insane.
After nineteen days in jail, Andrea Sneiderman appeared before Judge Adams for a bond hearing on August 21, 2012. Her attorneys called a series of witnesses to show that Andrea had strong ties to the community and family and would not jump bond. Her father, Herbert Greenberg, took the stand to describe how close Andrea was to her children. “Her children have been the highlight of her and our life,” he testified, the first person to say anything under oath on Andrea’s behalf. “Before Rusty was murdered, every decision relative to the children was made by both of them planning together.” Her friend Joanne Powers called Andrea “the best mother ever” and said, “Sometimes I’m really amazed at her patience.” Her rabbi, Hirsh Minkowicz, described Andrea as an active member of the synagogue. Her friend and former sorority sister Tracey Carisch said Andrea is so rooted in the Atlanta area that she had turned down Carisch’s suggestion to move to Chattanooga after the trial to get away. When asked if Andrea would be capable of abandoning her family and children if granted bond, her other friend Tammi Parker said, “Oh, gosh, no.”
It was left to Shayna Citron’s lawyer Jay Abt to present another side, recounting how Andrea was “threatening” toward Shayna at the trial, quoting Andrea as saying, “You’re going to have to live with what I’m going to do to you.” The statement, the prosecution suggested, showed that Andrea would be a threat to the community if sprung from jail. But Andrea had an answer for that, too. The defense called to the stand Joanne Powers, who also said she saw Sneiderman and Citron embrace in the courtroom. She said she went outside and observed Sneiderman and Citron sitting on a bench holding hands as though they were friends. She said she heard Sneiderman say, “I need people around me who trust me and believe in me and you don’t believe in me so we can’t be friends.” Powers said Sneiderman’s voice and demeanor were loving and kind, not threatening.
After hearing arguments, Judge Adams agreed to spring Andrea on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bond with a number of restrictions, the strictest of which was that she had to remain under house arrest with her parents. She had to wear an electronic ankle bracelet that would alert authorities if she went outside the boundaries of her parents’ home in Roswell (she’d have to pay for the device). The only time she could leave was to see the doctor or her attorneys. She also would have to give up her passport and those of her children. She could visit her parents, brother, sister-in-law, children, and rabbi, but could have no contact with any potential witnesses.
Two days later, on Thursday, August 23, her attorneys delivered a $250,000 cashier’s check to the court—another condition was that half the bail had to be put up in cash. She raised the money even though as part of her arrest the prosecution had frozen many of her assets, including the two-million-dollar life insurance payout after Rusty’s murder. The rest of her bail was secured by a bond backed by real estate. She had one request before being released; she asked to change out of the shorts and black top she had been wearing when arrested. The sheriff agreed, and at about noon she walked out of the jail in a smart black pantsuit, the cuff covering her new ankle bracelet.
Reporters converged on her, one of them asking, “Andrea, when your children get older and you have to talk to them about this—when they start asking about the situation and their father, what will you tell them?” She ignored the questions, got into a minivan with one of her attorneys, and drove off.
In the end, Andrea did not run away and did not try to intimidate any witnesses. She stayed and fought—against the prosecution’s murder case, against Rusty’s brother who continued to press his wrongful death lawsuit. She made court appearances and never wavered from declaring her innocence, though always expressing herself publicly through her attorneys. (Andrea to this day has not granted a media interview.) She would fight for more freedom. Soon her bail conditions would be loosened to allow her to attend Jewish services including Yom Kippur in September, Sukkoth services in October, and the lighting of the first candle for Hanukkah in December.
All the while, questions mounted about whether prosecutors had overreached. In October prosecutors formally turned over their evidence to the defense. At first look it appeared intimidating: 9,233 pages, ninety-one CDs of interviews, and a number of other video and audio recordings. But a closer examination showed that it was almost the exact same evidence prosecutors had used a year earlier against Hemy. There were the same witnesses, the same emails, the same phone records. The prosecution arguably could build a case that Andrea had an affair with a man who later killed her husband, but nowhere did it appear they had any direct evidence that she’d ordered Rusty killed or even wanted him dead. Nor was there anything between them suggesting they talked about the murder afterward. The prosecution case appeared to hinge on Andrea’s behavior after the murder—her alleged lies about an affair, her apparent knowledge of the means of her husband’s murder before it was officially revealed, and her demeanor on the witness stand at Hemy’s trial. It could be argued she possessed a consciousness of guilt, but it was all circumstantial, a rickety case that Andrea’s top-flight defense team savored attacking.
As before, however, the prosecution got an unexpected boost—from Andrea herself. Her behavior continuing to raise eyebrows. In November 2012, the case took a strange twist when Steven Sneiderman’s attorneys suggested as part of the wrongful death lawsuit that Andera had begun a relationship with a man named Joseph Dell. Dell was among the many who had come to Andrea’s aid since Hemy’s trial, voicing their solidarity on a blog called “Friends of Andrea,” a forum to both support her and rip into the DA’s office. According to jailhouse phone logs, Andrea had called her parents fifty-five times and Dell fifty-eight times. Recorded by the jail, one of the calls had Andrea asking Dell to move in with her parents, whom Dell called “Mom and Dad.” On the day of Andrea’s indictment, Dell called her and “is heard crying and professing his love for Defendeant Sneiderman,” according to the court papers. “This bold romantic gesture is met by Defendant, who is apparently aware of the recording, with a response eerily similar to her handling of Neuman, ‘I do not know what to say,’” the filing says.
The question soon arose over how long the alleged relationship had gone on. Steven Sneiderman’s lawyer Esther Panitch wrote in a court filing that the relationship between Andrea and Dell had roots earlier. Dell separated from his six-months’-pregnant wife in June 2011, several months before the trial, around the time media reports had begun divulging details about Andrea’s travels with Hemy. On the day that Andrea testified at the trial—February 21, 2012—Dell’s wife filed for divorce. Dell was with Andrea at the courthouse, according to Panitch. “Despite the lack of finality in his divorce case, Mr. Dell was already well ensconced with defendant,” Panitch wrote in her brief to the court, saying the divorce, which cited irreconcilable differences, wouldn’t be finalized for another six months, in August 2012. When Andrea was arrested in August, Dell was in the house with her.
“What is known today about defendant’s [Andrea’s] relationship with Mr. Dell bears a striking similarity to defendant’s relationship with the man who shot Rusty,” Panitch wrote. “It is unknown when Dell became involved in Defendant’s life but upon information and belief, it was prior to the murder of Rusty as Andrea and Mr. Dell arranged ‘playdates’ with their children.” Panitch sought court permission to question Andrea to find out “whether Joseph Dell was the ultimate reason for manipulating Neuman to kill Rusty.”
Andrea’s lawyers in the wrongful death case strongly denied that anything involving Dell had a role in Rusty’s murder. Andrea’s civil lawyer Mark Trigg denounced that suggestion as “preposterous” and contended that Steven Sneiderman’s attorney lodged it both to harass Andrea and to try to get Hemy to turn on Andrea. “It seems likely that the assertion at this late date that Andrea had another so-called ‘paramour’ is made in an effort to manipulate Mr. Neuman so that he will fall into a jealous rage, decide to no longer tell the truth in this regard, and finally provide something that so far is completely lacking: any direct evidence that Andrea Sneiderman was a co-conspirator in her husband’s murder,” he wrote.
The issue immediately spilled into the criminal case. It arose at a hearing that had been intended to focus on a completely different issue. Andrea had sought permission to leave house arrest to visit Rusty’s grave on November 18, 2012, the second anniversary of his murder, for yahrtzeit, the Jewish observance of the death of somebody close. At the last minute she withdrew the request, her prayers and lighting of the twenty-four-handle candle, fearing an invasion of reporters and TV crews. “It was going to be a madhouse,” one of her lawyers, John Petrey, said. Instead, the hearing turned to the revelations from the civil case, with prosecutors suggesting that it was another potential motive for murder. Now prosecutors expanded their case from an alleged love triangle to something more complicated and sinister. “Evidence is starting to come up that might show that it was not for Mr. Neuman to be with the defendant but for someone else,” prosecutor Don Geary told Judge Adams at a subsequent hearing in the criminal trial. “Mr. Dell might be that someone else.” At the very least, the prosecution said, Dell was a potential witness at trial. And under the terms of Andrea’s bond, she was not to have any contact with any witnesses while under house arrest. Geary sought to have all contact between Andrea and Dell cease immediately.
It was a hardball tactic, taking on Andrea not just legally but personally. If granted, it would leave Andrea more isolated. To suggest Rusty died because of this relationship was “incredible on its face,” said one of her criminal lawyers, Thomas Clegg, and “has absolutely no bearing on any issue in this particular case.” Clegg, however, tiptoed around whether Andrea and Dell had a romance, saying the “exact status of their relationship is best described as to be determined.” Clegg portrayed Dell as something of a domestic helper. “She lives with her parents, but again they can’t do everything on her behalf,” Klegg told the judge. “She needs, quite frankly, some help and I don’t see that there is any downside to allowing her to have contact with this gentleman.” To add Dell to the witness list, and therefore remove him from Andrea’s life, would cost her somebody to help pick up her children and care for them while she remained under house arrest.
Although Dell had apparently been in court with Andrea, few took notice of him and little was known about him until the court filing. On the Friends of Andrea website, Dell described his relationship with Andrea. “I hardly knew Andrea before her husband was murdered but I have gotten to know her and her family as an extension of my own,” Dell wrote on September 28. “For anyone who knows Andrea, there is no mystery and no mystery man. The mystery man was Hemy Neuman: the mentally ill individual who was convicted of murdering Rusty Sneiderman. But the jury got it right and he is in jail for the rest of his life. The rest of the noise is an attempt to smear Andrea and any of her friends and family.” He added in an apparent reference to Steven Sneiderman’s lawsuit, “There are those who want to paint a picture and concoct a story about something far more salacious. I’m sorry to disappoint everyone but it just isn’t there.”
About a week and a half after the hearing, on November 26, 2012, Judge Adams issued a written ruling: “The Court … hereby DENIES defendant’s motion and further ORDERS that the defendant have no contact with the witness Joseph Dell.” Within days, the defense fought back, asking the judge again to remove Dell from the witness list. Arguing that there was no evidence Andrea and Dell had a relationship before Rusty’s murder, the defense called the matter irrelevant and asked the judge to bar the state from bringing it up in court before a jury. The request came in a sweeping motion filed in early December 2012 to throw out all the charges against Andrea. Describing the indictment as ambiguous and confusing, the defense said it “fails to spell out what acts Sneiderman committed to warrant a murder charge.”
This represented Andrea’s biggest counteroffensive since police first began to wonder whether she had anything to do with Rusty’s murder. It was accompanied by an aggressive publicity move. Although she again stayed away from reporters, Andrea’s camp marched out a series of surrogates. While Andrea had remained close to some of her friends from before the murder—Tammi Parker among them—she had been joined by a growing circle of supporters drawn to her during and after the trial, connected via the Friends of Andrea website. Among them were a couple named Ryan and Elizabeth Stansbury who were at the forefront of Andrea’s PR campaign that included interviews on 48 Hours and in the local media.
“I think anybody who knows her for more than five minutes realizes that she didn’t do this,” Ryan Stansbury told WSB-TV the second week of December 2012. “It’s been very difficult for her, for both she and her family.” His wife added, “I think it’s been a travesty that people are starting to show empathy to the villain, the murderer, the one that orchestrated this all on his own, and that’s Hemy Neuman.” Anticipating that prosecutors would show the criminal jury scenes from Andrea’s testimony in Hemy’s trial, Ryan also sought to explain why Andrea seemed to come off so badly. “Both the defense and the prosecution, for their own reasons, were both out to get Andrea,” he told the news station. “They needed her to make their cases.” The couple repeated their thoughts for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but this story also noted how the murder case had caused a rift not just among family members but also among friends. The case forced people to take sides: between Andrea and Rusty’s family. “There’s been a lot of angry emails that have gone back and forth between friends,” Josh Golub, a radiologist who lived near Rusty’s parents in Cleveland, told the newspaper. “Rusty would be so upset that his friends were fighting. He was always one to avoid trouble. He’d be trying to find a way around this.”
Along with the media moves, Andrea’s attorneys went after Hemy’s wife, seeking a mountain of documentation, including scheduling calendars, diaries, and any papers that may relate to efforts to sell the rights to her life story. The lawyers portrayed this as an effort to amass evidence to help Andrea’s defense, though many saw it also as a dig at Ariela’s attorney, Esther Panitch, whom Andrea’s civil attorneys had already accused of misconduct with her suggestions that the Dell relationship played a role in Rusty’s murder. Panitch didn’t take it quietly, blasting Andrea again and generating a headline-making revelation. Her papers filed in February 2013 quoted Andrea from her jailhouse conversations with Dell as talking about possibly selling her life story and asking Dell if “every day or every couple of days, you could jot a couple notes down.”
“I know when this book comes out one day or movie or etc., it would be good for me to know in general what’s happened out there while I was in here,” Sneiderman said, according to the document. “I was thinking if Sandra Bullock wasn’t so old, she’d be a good choice. I watched the ‘Miss Congeniality’ movie … I thought she kind of has my personality, so, you know, that would be a good choice, but I think she might be a little old, so we’ll see.” (Andrea was thirty-six, Bullock was forty-eight.)
In her court papers, Panitch wrote, “It is the height of hypocrisy that the same Defendant who has already chosen the actress to play her in the movie about her life would seek to impeach a victim of her own wretched acts. Notwithstanding the objection, Ariela Neuman has not sold her life rights or otherwise entered into any contract to sell her name or pictures, nor written a book, unlike Defendant’s desire to do so.”
Back and forth the battle went. At a February 2013 hearing in the murder trial, Andrea’s attorney Thomas Clegg again sought to have Dell removed from the witness list. “Make no mistake: This is an ordeal. She is entitled to companionship during her ordeal,” Clegg told the judge. District Attorney Robert James this time could only muster a shaky response. He finally acknowledged that he kept Dell on the witness list even though authorities had not contacted him. It was the first sign of a fissure in the prosecution’s case. Seizing on this, Clegg snapped that James should “put up or shut up,” to which James shot back that he didn’t have to do any such thing until trial.
The defense next filed a motion in March, seeking dismissal of most of the sixteen counts against Andrea. They derided the perjury charges as “vague, uncertain, indefinite and devoid of specificity.” Ditto for the counts alleging Andrea hindered the apprehension of a criminal, giving false statements and concealing material facts. The prosecution countered that it had more evidence than most had realized. At a hearing in April, an investigator testified that records of Andrea’s calls and texts with Hemy the day of the murder had been erased from her BlackBerry. The investigator said it was impossible to tell who erased them or why, but noted that other calls and texts between Andrea and Hemy before the murder had not been deleted.
Whatever boost the prosecution got was temporary. Not only did the judge rule that Andrea would be allowed to converse again with Joseph Dell, but buzz began building that the prosecution’s case was crumbling. Twice after Andrea was originally charged the prosecution had to go back to the grand jury for new indictments, tweaking the lineup of counts. The essence of the case remained the same—that Andrea allegedly had something to do with Rusty’s murder and then lied to authorities—but the tinkering with the charges sent a message of a lack of certainty on the prosecution’s part. As the trial grew near, the situation grew worse for the state. The evidence James wanted simply never arrived. And in late July the word had gotten out. Local media outlets reported that the DA was planning to drop the most serious charge against Andrea, that of murder.
With a gag order imposed, neither side could confirm or deny the reports. This set the stage for a critical pretrial hearing where the prosecution would have to disclose its intentions. Televised live locally, the hearing was set for July 26—just three days before opening statements—and in the course of two tense hours in court tempers would fly. It began with lawyers debating a motion to allow the testimony of Hemy’s friend and confidante Melanie White, the prosecution calling her observations relevant, the defense saying it would be too prejudicial.
When Judge Adams then asked about the second motion, the defense immediately called for a session at the sidebar. Several minutes of animated discussion ensued, the lawyers’ words fuzzed over by the judge activating his static switch. At the defense table Andrea sat nervously, wringing her hands.
“All right, we’re back on the record, Mr. James!” the judge boomed as lawyers returned to the seats.
“Yes, sir,” said the DA as he walked up to the lecturn, “at this point the state would make a motion.”
James asked to remove counts one, two, and three of the indictment.
“Mr. James,” the judge said, interrupting him, “the way it’s listed is count one is malice of murder, count two is felony murder, and count three is aggravated assault?”
“That’s accurate, Judge,” said James.
“Go ahead.”
The prosecutor began tentatively. “Um,” he said, “as is customary and I believe as is also required, um, I would tender a reason, um, to make this, um, to make this motion.”
He noted that the court was aware that jurors had been called in and that he would “not be too detailed” about the evidence, but that his perception of the case changed after he went through the discovery evidence provided by the defense.
“After we received the second batch of discovery, we, the state, went back and reinterviewed most if not all of our witnesses in this case,” he said. “I have an ethical obligation not to seek convictions but to seek justice, and I believe it would be unjust and unethical for the DA’s office, for the state, for the district attorney of this county to go forward with a charge that I am not 100 percent sure someone is guilty of.” Therefore, the DA was dropping the murder charge against Andrea.
Defense attorney Thomas Clegg couldn’t disagree, but took a swipe anyway.
“There is no smoking gun in there leading anyone to conclude: Wow, looking at this, all of a sudden I can say they don’t have a murder case,” said Clegg. “I believe they have known all along they did not have a murder case. Be that as it may, I welcome at this time Mr. James’s admission that he does not have the degree of certainty necessary to go forward with a prosecution for these counts. So I have no objection to the dismissal of counts of one, two, and three.”
The judge seemed taken aback by the last-minute move. “Mr. Clegg, before you take your seat, obviously the court will have some say in this.”
“I understand that, sir.”
“And no one has presented to me a case that says the court must accept the state’s motion.”
The judge would call a recess without ruling. Afterward, a clearly rattled Robert James returned to the lectern.
“Your Honor, I’ll make this very brief,” he said. “What I was going to say I won’t say. But what I will say is I’ve been prosecuting cases for fourteen years. I have never—as an assistant DA, as solicitor, and now as the elected district attorney—I have never indicted a case where based on the evidence I had in front of me, I did not believe that an individual was guilty of the charges that I was indicting them for. I have never tried a case, on the other hand, where I have doubts, or where I believed there was a possibility I could be wrong.
“That is why I’m before the court,” he continued. “That is why I made this motion. I’m standing before the court and standing before millions of people, perhaps, asking for the court to [dismiss] right before the trial. I’m struggling to see how that lacks ethics. I’m doing what I think is right.”
By the end of the day, despite his reservations, Judge Adams granted the prosecution’s request. The Andrea Sneiderman murder trial suddenly became the Andrea Sneiderman perjury trial.
The decision may have been a letdown for the national media—HLN had lost its marquee live murder trial—but the stakes remained high. Andrea still faced up to twenty years in prison. Her children could see her only behind razor wire and under heavy guard. All, Andrea maintained, for crimes she claimed she never committed.