Jurors Blame Thin Case for Adair Result

Prosecutors seeking to send a woman to prison for life on charges of beating her husband to death with a baseball bat presented a believable theory but failed to prove it, two jurors said last week in their first detailed comments about the case.

One juror and an alternate told The Times that the evidence presented during the three-week trial of Jeanie Adair was so thin they had no choice Monday but to acquit her, although they suspect she may have been involved in the killing.

“We were all waiting for the smoking gun or the bloody fingerprint and it never came,” said alternate juror James Garber, 33, of Lake View Terrace. “When the prosecution rested, it was kind of a letdown.”

He and Francis Fry, 65, criticized the Los Angeles Police Department investigation as disorganized and ineffective, pointing out what they thought were missed opportunities to gather more definitive evidence in a case tinged with allegations of deceit, infidelity and jealousy.

“I think a better investigation should’ve been done at the house,” Fry, a retired truck driver, said Saturday. “That’s where they really blew it.”

The panel’s first vote, after nearly five hours of deliberations, was a resounding 11-1 for acquittal, Fry said. It took about eight more hours of deliberations to sway the single holdout.

Prosecutors have complained that they lost the case because the judge unfairly kept from the jury vital evidence about motive, including alleged loud arguments between the couple.

Such evidence would have been helpful, Fry and Garber said, adding that it was never proven that the couple was splitting up or that she harbored enough rage to crush his skull. But they could not say whether that evidence would have changed the trial’s outcome.

Robert Adair, 40, was killed in 1996 in his Sylmar condominium during his lunch hour by three crushing blows to the head.

Jeanie Adair told police she and her husband were victims of a home invasion robber posing as a gas company employee. She said he tied her up, beat her, robbed her and then killed her husband when he came home for lunch. It took her more than an hour to free herself and call for help, she said.

Police didn’t believe her, and after a two-year investigation, the mother of two was arrested on murder charges and allegations that she killed for $400,000 in life insurance proceeds.

The heart of the case, presented by Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein, was three telephone calls the defendant allegedly made to her husband and lover at a time when she had said she was bound and gagged.

Secretaries testified for the prosecution that they recognized the defendant’s voice, but Garber and Fry said that without phone records they could not be sure who made those calls or whether they were made at all.

Defense lawyer Richard Plotin alleged that the secretary in the medical clinic where Robert Adair worked as a nurse made up the calls to help the prosecution. He said that Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro, whose husband was having an affair with Jeanie Adair, could have impersonated the defendant in the call to her husband, Encino orthopedic surgeon Michael Shapiro, the day of the murder.

Plotin had argued that Mindy Shapiro arranged for thugs to stage a robbery and disfigure her nemesis, Jeanie Adair. Robert Adair, Plotin argued, simply came home at the wrong time.

Plotin named the attacker, an ex-con with an admitted penchant for baseball bats and knives whom Jeanie Adair tentatively picked out of a lineup.

Following the legal instructions given by the judge, which specified that if there are two explanations for evidence that the defendant must prevail, Adair was clearly not guilty, the jurors said.

“I’m not saying that she’s innocent,” Fry stressed, “but she’s not guilty.”

“We really felt bad that we weren’t able to give the justice that Robert’s family was looking for,” Garber added. “You felt for them, but it wouldn’t make it right to convict Jeanie based on what we heard.”