“There’s a man who was sleeping in my backyard,” Rusty Sneiderman was heard telling the emergency operator. “He’s running. I think he has a gun in his back pocket and now he’s running away. I don’t know who the hell he is and I don’t want him by my house.”
This was a recording of the 911 call Rusty placed on November 10 after he stumbled on the man on the side of his house. As promised, police followed up on Andrea’s suspicions that this incident may have been linked to Rusty’s murder. Detective Thompson not only reviewed a police report but listened to what in all likelihood was the last time Rusty’s voice would be recorded. It was touched with fear.
“This is a house, you said?” asked the operator.
“The house,” Rusty replied.
“What did he look like? Was he black? White? Hispanic?”
“He looked Hispanic with a mustache. He was wearing a hat and earmuffs, black mustache. I walked around the side of my house this morning—”
“What sort of shirt and pants did he have on?”
“Jeans and it looked like a gray jacket. He’s running now. He ran past Manza Court down the hill towards—I don’t know what the name of the street behind us is. Hold on, I can tell ya. He looked like he was drunk and passed out. He’s running towards Valley View Court.”
“You can still see him right now?”
“No, he just ran off into the bushes. I’m in the car right with my son. He’s two—”
“When did you last see him?”
“Twenty seconds ago.”
“Okay, did you see a gun?”
“No but he was holding the small of his back just above his pants and I don’t know if it’s a gun or what, but I think it’s unusual to be running away from something holding on to that. But it scared the hell out of me. I walk around the side of the house, there’s some guy laying there sleeping on the side.”
In the background Ian can be heard crying.
“I know, bud,” Rusty comforted him. “I didn’t get your water bottle. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” said the emergency operator, “we’ll get an officer out there as soon as possible. What’s your last name?”
“Sneiderman.” Rusty then spelled it. “Should I stay here? I’m in my car.”
“It’s up to you if you want to stay and make a report. If not, they’ll post an officer in that area to check on the subject.”
“Well, I want to make a report because we had a problem.” This was a reference, Thompson knew from Andrea, to the October 20 call about his garage door being opened.
“Just stay there and a Dunwoody officer will be out there with you,” the operator said. “Are you still at home now?”
“I’m in front of my house right now in a silver car waiting.”
“A silver what?”
“A silver four-door Infiniti.”
Impatience now crept into Rusty’s voice. “I’m in a cul-de-sac. I’m the only car on the street, ma’am.”
After reviewing the police report and the recording, Thompson canvassed the neighborhood asking if anybody else had seen the man. Thompson walked the path through the woods that the man had apparently used. He spoke to people at the construction site. But nobody else had seen the man or anything else unusual around that time. The lead seemed to be a dead end, one of what would be many in the early days of the investigation.
But the possibility that Rusty’s killer may have been somebody familiar with his house—and probably Rusty’s routine—still had credence. Lawrence Minogue, a Dunwoody resident, heard about the shooting on 680 The Fan, Atlanta’s sports radio station, on his car radio at about 1 p.m. on November 18. He called police to report he had seen the silver van mentioned in the news report at about 8:15 a.m. that morning in front of the school as he dropped off his son. Minogue didn’t believe the van belonged to a parent because it had no car seat. He thought it might have been a delivery van. The driver appeared to be in his mid- to late thirties of Middle Eastern descent with a bushy beard so jet black that it had to be fake and what appeared to be short hair sticking out of the hood of a sweater. The van pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Mount Vernon Road.
A few minutes later, another witness, Jack Gay, who lived on Manget Court near Rusty’s house, was taking his recycling can to the curb when he saw the silver minivan. It was around 8:30 a.m., he guessed. The van barreled toward him well past the twenty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit, then slowed down as it neared, the driver turning and facing him for three to five seconds. From about twenty-five feet away, Gay saw what he described as a dark-complexioned man, either Latino or Middle Eastern but not black or Asian, clean-shaven and wearing a hooded sweatshirt. The van then left the neighborhood more slowly, going toward Chamblee Dunwoody Road in the direction of the preschool, where within minutes the security video would again pick it up following Rusty’s car into the parking lot.
The day after the shooting, Minogue went to the Dunwoody Police Station and worked with artist Marla Lawson to draw a sketch of the man who may appeared to have been staking out Rusty’s house before the murder. Lawson—who got her professional start by drawing Atlanta subway commuters in early 1970s—would create police sketches in a number of high-profile cases for local agencies and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Of the hundreds of pictures of killers, rapists, and thieves in her portfolio, her most famous picture was a sketch of the Atlanta Olympic bomber in 1996. Working off Minogue’s descriptions, Lawson created a drawing that Thompson would distribute to the public after rejecting sketches from two other witnesses. To Lawson’s artistic eye, it was the wrong choice. “They didn’t circulate the one I thought was best,” she’d tell the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But on the evening news the night after the shooting, Atlanta residents were presented the black-and-white image of a swarthy man with a beard and no mustache, a cap, broad nose, and full lips. The effect was sinister. If anybody could put a name to the face in the sketch they did not come forward. None of Rusty’s friends, business associates, or family members recognized the man in the drawing.
It was a rocky start to the investigation. The man and the van both seemed to vanish. Taking his cues from the interview with Andrea, Thompson focused most of his efforts in the first few days on Rusty’s business history. Aside from the man on the side of the house, Andrea spent the most time talking about Rusty’s various employers and financial deals, with one job ending in a layoff and the other in an acrimonious firing. The detective interviewed several people at Discovery Point as well as Rusty’s partners in Star Voicemail, looking for evidence of animosity, checking out alibis. It was a time-consuming effort and in the end fruitless. Nobody provided any information helpful to the investigation, and one by one everybody Thompson talked to was eliminated as a possible person of interest. The exterminator was interviewed and also cleared.
Follow-up interviews with Rusty’s family and in-laws generated no leads. The questions touched on everything from Rusty’s finances to his social activities, even his sexuality. His parents and father-in-law sat in horror as they were asked whether they thought Rusty could have been gay or bisexual. “The questions were just to figure out if Rusty had a secret lifestyle,” Thompson later explained. Everybody insisted that Rusty was a dedicated father and husband, as straight as they come.
On Tuesday, November 23, five days after the murder with Thompson getting nowhere, the police department summoned reporters to headquarters for a press conference. It started just after 4 p.m. and local TV stations cut away live to carry it. Dunwoody police chief Billy Grogan, all authority in his crew cut and dark uniform, three gold stars on his epaulets, began by summarizing the stark facts about the murder of Rusty Sneiderman.
“This does not appear to be random in nature,” he began in his smooth southern accent. “The victim was shot multiple times at what appears to be point-blank range. We do have several witnesses that actually saw the shooting and from those witnesses we were able to get a composite, or a sketch, of what the suspect may look like. And this is the sketch.”
He pointed to the drawing tacked to the wall behind him.
“We also, in talking to our witnesses, have been able to get a more accurate make and model of the vehicle,” he continued, pronouncing it “vee-hickle” in the local fashion. “The vehicle appears, according to one particular witness—who has some knowledge about automobiles—that vehicle was a Dodge Caravan, a newer-model Dodge Caravan.” He then gestured to a photo of that car on the wall.
The chief then got to the point of the press conference. “The Dunwoody Police Department is asking for the community’s help in finding Rusty’s killer,” he said, calling out for anybody in the Dunwoody Village shopping center area between 7:30 and 9 a.m. that previous Thursday to contact the department “if they saw anyone matching this description, saw a silver Dodge Caravan.” He noted that at the time of the crime the van may not have had license plates but could have them now. “Any information would be greatly appreciated and needed.”
He then announced that the Sneiderman family was offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction “of the person or persons responsible for this terrible crime,” before introducing the next person to address reporters: Rusty’s brother.
Like all of the family members, Steven Sneiderman had spent much of the three days since the funeral sitting shiva, speaking only to police and refraining from any public comments. He appeared nervous as he gazed at the reporters through his glasses.
He took a deep breath, exhaled with a sigh, and said, “Thank you for this opportunity. I’m here today to speak for my brother who can’t speak anymore, and I’m here today to speak for my family and to reach out to this great community to help us. My brother was murdered. No one should have to face that. Our family has been devastated. My niece and nephew will never know their father. My sister-in-law has had an entire lifetime of dreams ripped from her.”
Overcome with emotion, he struggled to continue, his voice breaking, tears welling. He breathed rapidly. “Our whole family has lost its brightest light, and we don’t know why. Can you imagine that? Put yourself in our shoes for just one moment. It’s why I’m here. We need your help desperately. Any information, anything at all could help. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we need every shred of information that we could get to help us solve this crime.”
He urged the public to look closely at the sketch and the photo of the Dodge and “search your memory and help us to find the killer. Our family will be forever grateful. Thank you.”
As Steven stood red-eyed and sniffling, Grogan took questions.
“Chief, what leads you to believe, what evidence do you have to lead you to believe this was a targeted crime, not a random crime?” asked one reporter.
“We don’t want to get into any details of our investigation too much at this time, but there doesn’t appear to have been any exchange of words between the suspect and the victim. From our witnesses’ accounts the suspect just walked up to the victim and started shooting.”
“Mr. Sneiderman,” the same reporter asked, “is there anything that would lead you to believe that somebody could have targeted your brother for any reason?”
“That’s what’s so hard to understand,” said Steven in a soft voice. “To know my brother was to love my brother. He just had an energy about him that drew people in, and he would do anything for anybody, and I can’t fathom for a moment what could drive someone to do this. We’re just grasping and were devastated. You never think something like this could happen to your family. It’s something on a TV show. It’s not real. But this is real. We need help from the community.”
Another reporter asked, “Could you talk about what makes your brother special, something that will stick out to friends and family that they will always remember?”
A smile came to Steven. “It’s hard to say. It’s just—I mean, he’s Rusty,” Steven said. “If you talked to anybody who knew him, you’re hearing that. He was Rusty. And he just, he had such a giving heart, he would do anything for anybody. And it haunts me. But I see that smile and that light in his eye. He was always there for everybody. That’s all I can tell you.”
Steven then addressed his comments directly to the public. “Imagine if it was your brother and come forward,” he said. “I would like to think that if I wasn’t in this spot, and I had that information, I would have that courage to come forward. We would be so forever grateful.”
* * *
The press conference and the sketch brought a torrent of leads. Police tracked them down, no matter how far-fetched. Tips came in that Rusty was targeted by al-Qaeda or the Taliban. One call came from as far away as California. A Beverly Hills detective wanted to compare notes with Thompson on an unsolved case with vaguely similar details. Ronni Chasen, a Hollywood publicist who as far as anybody knew didn’t have an enemy in the world, was gunned down on November 16, two days before Rusty’s murder, in her car on the way home from the premiere of the movie Burlesque. Both were Jewish, both had been killed for no apparent reason, both had Hollywood connections, though Rusty’s were tenuous. Thompson and the Beverly Hills investigator would find nothing tying the cases, and Chasen’s murderer would turn out to be an unemployed felon who opened fire from a bicycle in a robbery.
The leads kept Thompson busy—and distracted—and brought him no closer to solving the case. He admitted as much the day after the press conference when he interviewed Andrea for the second time. Thompson wanted to get Andrea away from her relatives and the distractions in her house. He spoke to her in a designated interview room with a wall-mounted video camera that he activated with a switch outside the front door. Sitting across from Andrea, he had taken off his coat and wore his dress shirt and jacket. Andrea dressed in a long-sleeved sweatshirt and appeared tired.
“This tragedy has never happened to me personally,” he began by telling her. “I would be ignorant to think that I know what you’re going through … however, I can sympathize knowing what it’s like losing a family member in general.”
“I wish he could have died of a heart attack,” Andrea told him. “I wish it was just a heart attack. Then I would have the answer.”
“It’s the not knowing that drives people crazy,” Thompson agreed. “It’s driving me crazy because I don’t know what exactly to focus on.”
Thompson told her that six days into the investigation, police had made little progress. “This is not going to be a quick process,” he said when the interview was interrupted by Sergeant Cortellino, who poked his head through the interview room door to say that Andrea’s mother had arrived at the station and was sitting outside.
Thompson continued, “I can’t tell you how long because I don’t know. Somebody could walk through the front door tomorrow … Could be the person who did it who had a sudden crisis of conscience. That’s movie stuff. This is a real-life movie that you had no intention of being a character in. My feeling right now is that this is going to be a lot longer than anybody whose dealing with this wants to take. I am not at the point going to say this is a cold case and we have to close it until we get some information from some source. The department is far from that.”
He told her about the Beverly Hills detective with the Ronni Chasen case, and Andrea noted, “This Star Voicemail is all about celebrities. We had just started sharing this publicly.”
He told her about a Philadelphia detective “that has a case that has similarities to this” and how they were comparing files.
“What we’re going to be talking about today, some of it is going to be hard questions,” he said. “They’re going to be hard for me to ask. I just don’t like to ask certain kinds of questions regardless of the situation. They’re going to be hard for you to hear. You may end up walking out of this interview hating my guts because of the questions I need to ask. The reason I’m asking a lot of these questions is because this is still a fishing expedition. There might be something you might not have thought of.”
He assured her that the interview room was soundproof and that nobody in the station could hear or see them. When Andrea asked if it was being recorded—“I’ve seen a couple of crime shows,” she said—he acknowledged that it was. “My memory is not that good,” he said.
“Any kind of sensitive information that you tell me is going to remain in the inner circle of this investigation,” Thompson continued. “I’m not going go talk to your parents about it, I’m not going to talk to Rusty’s family about it. They have no need to know. The reason I’m saying that is I need to know things that you may consider embarrassing to the family, things that may be disgusting to some people … I’m sure every couple have little secrets that they do that they don’t want their parents to know about.”
Once again acknowledging her standing in the community, “I know that you’re a very educated woman, you’re very intelligent. You’re not the normal person that we get back here. That is the whole thing. If I come across like—”
“If you’re attacking me?” interjected Andrea.
“It’s not personal,” he said.
“I understand,” she said.
After covering some of the same ground from the previous interview, he began by asking about her relationship with Rusty.
“If you don’t tell me something voluntarily or in response to specific question and I end up finding out later down the road from somebody else, it could be an issue. So I have to come back and ask you why didn’t you tell me this.”
“I get that,” she said.
For the next half hour, he brought her through the entire story of her marriage, from meeting Rusty at the weekend retreat at the Hillel at the University of Indiana, through their moves to Chicago, San Mateo, Boston, and Atlanta, their wedding in the synagogue founded by their grandparents, having children, and settling in Dunwoody for the good public schools. Andrea was effusive and seemed to enjoy sharing her memories—until she suddenly stopped.
“I still feel unsafe,” she said.
The fear after the murder had her considering hiring private security.
“This is akin to a terrorist act,” Thompson said, urging her to continue with her life. “One way to let the terrorists win is to stop doing your routine. That makes me angry.”
She then continued with her life story, talking about her difficult pregnancy with Sophia, how her daughter was born with health problems and had to be on a heart monitor for six months. “Rusty was a mess, I was a mess,” she said. “I was exhausted, I was probably a raving lunatic.” But Rusty, she said, “has been a great parent, a great husband.”
She talked about her easier pregnancy with son Ian and how she worked at home while taking care of her son until Rusty’s job at Discovery Point was ending and she started working at GE Energy. It gave the family a steady income and health benefits, even if her travel put a strain on Rusty.
“There was a period this summer, I was gone one or two weeks in a row, and he was responsible for taking them and picking them up everywhere,” she said. “When I got back from that trip, he was an ass. He couldn’t get any work done.” They spoke about it and sometimes he raised his voice, though she added, “He didn’t raise his voice at me, he raised his voice out of frustration. We did argue and then we made an agreement and said we need more help in the house.” They hired a part-time nanny and “the past couple of weeks it’s been great.”
They talked about the Sneidermans’ lake house, the weekend trips boating, the parties with friends. Andrea broke down. Her voice shaking, she said, “I want to have the memories that we’re talking about and not the four times that we’ve fought.”
Thompson changed the subject, taking her through the family’s daily routine. He asked about the cruise the couple took shortly before the murder and took down the names of the people they met on the ship. He asked her about work on the house and got the name of her “rain-gutter guy” and the contractor. He got more names of business associates. He took down her passwords for the social networking site Facebook and her email.
An hour into the interview, he finally got to the questions he’d warned her about.
He asked if Rusty ever dated women before meeting Andrea. She assured him he was monogamous—“just the kind of guy who wanted a girlfriend around.”
Thompson then asked, “People do things to experiment: Has he ever talked to you about experimenting about being with another man? Has he ever talked to you about a desire to do that?”
She shook her head no.
“Has he ever shown to you as possibly being bisexual or having some sort of unexplored homosexuality?”
“No, never.”
“Since he has been with you, has he ever expressed to you a desire to experiment with having another person with you, a threesome, sex parties? Have you ever expressed an interest in trying that with him?”
“No.”
“Same thing for you: Have your ever experimented with another woman?”
“No.”
“You told me about your boss: Has there ever been another woman that approached you?”
“Woman? No.”
“Let’s talk about your boss,” Thompson said. “This is your current boss?”
“Yes.”
“How did he approach you in expressing an interest?”
“We traveled for business together and we were at dinner.”
“On one of your trips?”
“Uh-huh. And he said—what I think I said to you—which is that he thinks I’m fantastic and that was kind of it. [He] would love to have a relationship with me but knows that that’s probably unlikely. That was sort of—”
“So it was a sort of polite come-on?”
“Very,” she said. “That’s right. He really respected me as a person.”
“Was it out of respect for you as a person or out of fear for keeping his job?”
“I don’t have an answer to that.”
“That’s a fair answer. That’s reasonable. Is he married?”
“Oh, yes.”
“He has children?”
“Yes.”
“Did he go into any other further detail about how he would want to work [a relationship]?”
“Not really,” said Andrea. Her tone now changed. She became business-like. “Let me describe this to you. I feel like you’re asking me a question—I want to tell you. We’re close friends, he and I. Even once he said that, and I said no, and we worked together a lot, traveled together a lot, I enjoy his—I admire him as a professional. I enjoy learning from him. I learned a ton. We talked a lot, talked a lot of business. He talked about his family, I know. We’re friends. I want it to be clear, it wasn’t just that ‘You’re great and I’m interested,’ and it’s that or nothing. Am I saying that the right way? We continued our relationship.”
“It sounds to me like you had a strong enough friendship beforehand that this didn’t disrupt anything, was a blip on the radar and got past it?”
“Exactly.”
“How often do you do business trips?”
“I went on them once a month. Maybe July I went twice. I went to a training class one week. I went to a site, a software location where we build software. Minden. And the next week I had auditor training—I trained to be an auditor as part of my job. Longmont, Colorado. Those just happened to be back-to-back because of poor timing. That was the July where Rusty was like: Are you kidding? Two weeks of kids?”
“Didn’t have time to work?”
“Exactly. But you asked how often I traveled? That was a long trip. In September I went to England.”
“How was the trip?”
“England was great. I hadn’t been there since with Rusty.”
That trip lasted a week. She had also traveled to Melbourne, Florida, where software was built, and to Greenville, South Carolina, where GE made turbines.
“How many of your business trips does your boss go with you?”
“All of them.”
“All of them?”
“Besides Longmont, Colorado, for some training,” she said, “he went to all of them and I’ll tell you why. He hadn’t been to the sites, either. And it was part of his goals and objectives, and he’ll tell you that from his boss, and he needed to get out there more, and he wanted to introduce me to people also. And so he went with me. I could have shown up to those places by myself, but I’m not sure I would have gotten the respect or the attention. Does that answer your question?”
“Yes, it does.”
“And, of course we travel together, so we became friends, right?” she said. “A million hours, you’re in the car or you’re on the plane.”
“You can’t help it,” said Thompson. “If you don’t get along it’s going to be a very long trip.”
“And we saw eye-to-eye from a business perspective on a lot of things,” said Andrea.
“Did the company pay for hotels, or it came out of your own pocket and got reimbursed?”
“Corporate cards.”
“What hotels did you guys normally stay at?”
“I like Hilton points so I would stay at Hiltons. Maybe all of them were Hiltons.”
“To be convenient, did you have rooms on the same floor?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “We didn’t control it, you know what I’m saying? We didn’t always control where the hotel put us. I have no problem being next door to each other. It’s neither here nor there. Again, we were friends. It didn’t bother me, I guess.”
Moving on to another topic, Thompson returned to a question he had asked her at her house.
“Anybody you can think of that would be interested in pursuing your husband? Your reaction was a little odd. You laughed, you smiled, and you said no one would be interested.”
“I’m laughing now,” Andrea said. “He doesn’t have time to go to the bathroom, let alone have an affair. It’s one of those things. Of course, through this whole thing people bring that up—vengeance or revenge, I have no idea. Honestly, he didn’t have time to pee. I can’t imagine him fitting that in. He loved me so much, and made that clear a million times a day, so I laughed because—”
“It’s so absurd?”
“It’s absurdly ridiculous,” she said. “There’s actually more words I can use.”
Thompson chuckled and said, “Understood.”
Without prompting Andrea then said, “My mom knew about this Hemy thing. I mentioned it to her—he expressed an interest. I needed to tell someone.”
“She’s the only one that didn’t jump up,” Thompson said, a reference to the family’s reaction when he asked the question during the interview at Andrea’s house.
“There you go,” said Andrea. “There’s no point in telling the rest of the family.”
“There is no point,” the detective agreed.
“No one needed to know.”
“I was sort of surprised you said it with everybody around.”
Speaking in a whisper, so softly the interview room microphones barely picked it up, Andrea said, “I’m not hiding—”
Thompson assured her, “I don’t get the impression that you’re hiding anything.”
“And I don’t think that this Hemy thing is anything. I really don’t,” she said, her voice louder. “If I did, I’d sit here and give you fifty other reasons why. I don’t know, that’s up to you to figure out, I guess. Or decide if that’s on your list. I don’t know how you guys figure out what your priorities are.”
“It’s one of those things that we have to look into and prove it one way or the other,” Thompson said, “so that when it comes to a trial, if a defense attorney brings it up, if they happen to get their hands on the information, we can say we investigated it, this is what we found, this is why we didn’t do anything with it.”
Andrea said, “Okay.”
Thompson and Cortellino would agree on priorities; looking into Hemy Neuman could wait, favoring other avenues of investigation. Thompson changed the subject “You guys met in 1994, you got married in 2000…”
And on it went. The interview lasted a few more minutes before Thompson ran out of questions and sent Andrea on her way.