Dateline NBC - Murder in Broad Daylight

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

In this Dateline classic, Rusty Sneiderman was a young entrepreneur whose world comes crashing down one morning with four gunshots. A fatal triangle is revealed: Was this a crime of passion? Dennis Murphy reports. Originally aired on NBC on March 16, 2012.

He had deeper feelings for me than just friends. He managed to get me to care about him. He had my whole life wrapped up. She's at the center of a riveting courtroom drama. The wife whose entrepreneur husband was found murdered one cold autumn morning. Our whole family has lost its brightest light and we don't know why. He's the one accused of the crime. So why is she under the microscope?

She's gotten caught in the middle of this crossfire and it's really unfortunate. It goes against everything I know about Andrea. Was she cheating with her executive boss? Be with me forever. Would that be normal communication between your boss and you? Scheming widow or suffering victim? Who kills someone else's husband? There was no affair.

I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Dennis Murphy with Murder in Broad Daylight. Broad Daylight. Morning in a busy parking lot. Then pop, pop, pop, pop. Several shots were fired. A man gunned down at close range outside a nursery school in a wealthy Atlanta suburb. A silver minivan screeched from the lot. Startled witnesses saw the victim slumped on the ground. Right now his condition is unknown. Parents and teachers recognized the man who'd been shot as a dad who just dropped off his two-year-old son.

A preschool of all places had become a crime scene. We are told all the children are perfectly safe. The shooting victim being rushed to the hospital turned out to be 36-year-old Rusty Snyderman, a married father of two. You know, I just hung my head and cried. Rusty's older brother, Steve, was on a plane to Hawaii when he got the shocking news. Rusty was dead. You know, you're walking around on the plane, pacing around the aisles. And, I mean, I looked at the, I went to the bathroom and I looked at the door and I thought about jumping. He was desperate to get home to his family, desperate to find out what had happened to his little brother. My brother was murdered. No one should have to face that.

He appeared at a police press conference after the shooting to talk about the family's incomparable loss. Our whole family has lost its brightest light, and we don't know why. That was the question. Why Rusty? His friend, Laura Hester. Did any of it make sense? Were you able to come up with a theory of what had happened there? No, I mean, this was a man that just was so beloved by so many people. Jeffrey Moss lived across the hall from Rusty at college. Always had a giant smile on his face, no matter the situation. He used to end every conversation with, how can I help you? What can I do for you? In the tight-knit Jewish community where Rusty lived and was raising his family,

a man like him is called a mensch, Yiddish for a stand-up guy. And now that very supportive community gathered around his wife of 10 years, Andrea. She seemed to be a good fit for him. Absolutely. They'd been together since college. He always spoke about her with great affection and respect. The couple had moved to Dunwoody, an affluent suburb of Atlanta, after Rusty, a Harvard MBA grad, accepted a job with a software company. They had a great house in Atlanta. They had a summer house out at the lake. They had a boat. They had two great kids.

They were living the dream. A dream that was violently shattered that morning in the parking lot. The virtual execution of a young husband and father was in no one's frame of reference. The irrationality of the violence making it all the more terrifying. Local attorney Esther Panich. It put a lot of fear into a lot of people and to the whole community. The fleeting

thought, was it a hate crime? Was the gunman targeting Jews? The other line of speculation had to do with Rusty's work. He'd once handled money, major amounts of money, for some high net worth individuals. Had an investment portfolio gone horribly wrong? Here's a guy dealing with serious amounts of money. Right. The initial thought was that it was a professional hit by somebody who had lost a lot of money. And if so, was it someone the Dunwoody circle knew very well? Maybe even a mourner circulating at the memorial service for Rusty, sharing his condolences with the widow. Josh Golub, an old college roomie, wondered just that. I remember looking around, and I remember thinking to myself that, you know,

the killer could be there. You had that thought? Yeah. What made Rusty such a successful businessman, his vast network of friends and associates he was happy to put together in deals, made it all the more difficult for homicide detectives to single out that one person who could have such rage about Rusty Snyderman. He knew a lot of people. He was an excellent networker. He was constantly expanding his business and personal goals. But detectives caught a break. Some of the witnesses were able to give the cops a description of the killer and his vehicle. It is a possible white male with a beard. He's about 5'10", 5'11", in his 30s.

A police department sketch artist was able to render a portrait, a face with a dark beard, no mustache, and most arresting of all, two piercing eyes. The witnesses remembered those vividly. Come forward and face justice. Don't be a coward. Who was the man in the sketch? When we come back, the hunt begins with one giant clue. The getaway car caught on tape. Are police close to catching the killer, too?

I'm telling you, he was there when Rusty got shot. When Dateline continues. The shooter was no more than a police artist's rendering, no details filled in. But his victim was quite different. There was a very complete picture of 36-year-old Rusty Snyderman, the loving husband, father, brother, and son who'd grown up outside Cleveland. His mother and father, Marilyn and Don. In your happiest memory, what do you see Rusty doing?

Smiling and making you happy and laugh. He was wonderful to be around. He was a good kid, really was. But behind that wide grin and nice guy demeanor was a determined and ambitious businessman. Rusty had spent time in the corporate world, but now he was itching to go the Steve Jobs route. Rusty's wife, Andrea,

more than anyone, understood, and she backed Rusty to the hilt when he wanted to focus on a startup. They were really partners in every way, shape, and form, whether it was in life, whether it was through business ventures. I think they both were able to treat each other in a way that made each other better. And their marriage had seemed solid to people who'd known them, which is why the details that came out later surprised everyone. For now, Rusty's grief-stricken friends and family wanted answers, answers that seemed to be taking a long time in coming.

Robert James was the DeKalb County District Attorney. No one had any idea who did this, what had happened. For weeks after Rusty's death, police had been floundering, trying to untangle Rusty's business relationships. Suspicious that he'd been gunned down by a professional hitman, they were looking for a money trail to lead them to his killer. Chasing the money trail, did it cost you a lot of investigative hours? Time. It cost us thousands of investigative hours? Time. It cost us thousands of investigative hours and time. As it turned out, this crime wouldn't be solved by

following the money. It would be solved by following the shooter's minivan, a vehicle that had been caught on the parking lot's security cameras. Weeks after Rusty had been shot, investigators tracked the van to this rental agency and then contacted the man who'd rented it the day before the shooting. His identity would blow the investigation wide open. The man told them not only that, yes, he was the person who'd rented the minivan. What's more, he said he was Andrea Snyderman's boss. Rusty's widow worked for this guy. Was he the person in the police artist's sketch?

Did Andrea Snyderman's supervisor from work kill her husband? The boss was a man named Hemi Newman, a 48-year-old middle management supervisor at General Electric's energy division in Georgia. At GE, he was in charge of a multi-million dollar budget and thousands of employees, including his hire in April of 2010, Andrea Snyderman. Police asked Newman to come down to the station for an interview. It turned into a five and a half hour interrogation. You shake and you turn and you twist it. Hemi Newman appeared nervous and told the interviewers repeatedly that he'd been at work the day of the shooting. I was not there. I did not pull the trigger on the gun. The cops sweated him.

Don't raise your eyebrows. I'm telling you, he was there when Rusty got shot. A few hours into the interview, it looked as though Hemi might have something to tell police. But then he shut down. Even so, detectives thought they had enough evidence linking him to the crime. They arrested him and charged him with murder. Then an amazing turn of events. After his steadfast denials, the engineer admitted that, yes, he was the shooter. But he said he was not guilty of the crime because he'd been insane when he pulled the trigger.

A little more than a year after his arrest, Hemi Newman's trial for murder began. And the prosecutor argued that his insanity plea was preposterous. The case against him was a simple one of lust and greed, the prosecutor argued during the three-week trial. Hemi Newman had just one prize in his sights, Rusty's wife. Hemi Newman killed Rusty Snyderman because he wanted his wife, because he wanted his money, because he wanted his life. Period. And according to the prosecutor, the evidence would show that Hemi knew exactly what he needed

to do to accomplish that goal. Far from being crazy, the prosecutor said, he tried to plan the perfect murder. Just five months after hiring Rusty's wife, Hemi, the prosecutor said, started researching guns and gun shows on the Internet. And around Halloween of 2010, Hemi Newman made his purchase. He told me that it was just for protection, household protection.

The transaction took place in a parking lot. Newman bought a.40 caliber handgun along with 50 hollow point bullets for $375 cash from this man. He seemed like he didn't know much about guns, but he was interested in learning. Within days, Newman was at a gun range blasting away for 40 minutes at a man-shaped target. Nine days later, he put on a disguise and crept into the Snyderman's yard. Rusty spotted him and dialed 911. He's running. I think he has a gun in his back pocket. Was this a practice run or an aborted murder attempt? Newman had bolted when Rusty confronted

him. Still, he was back on the computer a few days later, this time searching for a local costume store, looking for another disguise. And then the prosecutors asserted the final countdown to murder began. 2.30 in the afternoon of November 17th, Newman rented a silver Kia minivan. The desk clerk remembered him. He was in a hurry and he was very impatient. Just after 5.30 in the morning on November 18th, a security camera recorded the silver minivan pulling into the parking garage on the GE campus. The camera then caught Newman walking up the stairs. He was headed to his office where he logged onto his computer and left his cell phone on the desk.

Was he trying to create an alibi? Next, Hemi Newman got back in his car. He was on the move. A few hours later, surveillance video across town picked up his trail, driving into the parking lot of the suburban Atlanta preschool where Rusty Snyderman was scheduled to drop off his son. Coming up, a seismic shift in the trial as the widow takes the stand. He had deeper feelings for me than just friends. Andrea Snyderman under just feet from the man who had slain their son, the one who'd stolen away their family's peace. I saw a man with no reaction to anything.

And I thought to myself, how can that man sleep at night? He is just a little weakling of a man. A little worm. I mean, just a nothing. Andrea, Rusty's widow, sat two rows ahead of Rusty's parents. What Andrea did and didn't know leading up to the crime would soon become a major focus of the trial. But now, as she listened to the prosecutor detail Rusty's last moments,

she could hardly contain her tears. The prosecutor described the killer walking up to Rusty. He didn't hesitate. And he shoots him three times. As Rusty falls in, to his chud bone, fires one last time. This is a brazen, outrageous crime. It was broad daylight, brazen, reckless abandon. Rusty Snyderman was shot perhaps about 30 feet from where children were playing.

A husband and wife testified they came running when they heard the sound. I went up to the victim. That's when I noticed that he was bleeding out. I saw him, like, gasping for air, and I wish I would have started CPR right there, but we were just in so much shock. My name is Rusty Snyderman. Rusty had been best man at Josh Golub's wedding. The radiologist said he found it hard to hear testimony about the medical details of his friend's last moments. It was the fourth and final shot. That's the one that went through his neck, through his spine, through his spinal cord,

and not only paralyzed him, but I think... He was dead at that moment. Yeah. That's one of the hardest things for me to see. After delivering the kill shot, witnesses testified that Newman calmly walked back to his minivan and melted into morning traffic. Within hours, he was back at his desk, observed juggling routine meetings.

What did he expect to happen next? The prosecution had explained how the murder had been plotted out, but now they wanted the jury to understand why. Rusty was the last person standing between Hemi Newman and the woman he loved, Andrea Snyderman. On November 18, 2010, did you know the defendant? Yes. Andrea offered juicy testimony for the jury to ponder. She testified that the accused, Hemi Newman, had

become obsessed with her weeks after she'd started working for him in April 2010, that he had stalked her and her family, she said, and finally gunned down her husband. The unwelcome courtship began at GE, she said, about six months before the shooting. How much time would you spend with him on a regular basis? There were meetings every other day, constant email communications about work and projects, constant phone calls. We spoke about work things constantly. Hemi Newman quickly became a fixture in her life. Extremely friendly individual, caring or pretending to be very caring individual. But one night during a business trip to Lake Tahoe, she testified, Emmy Newman stepped over the line. Did the defendant ever express his feelings for you?

Yes. Outside a restaurant before they had dinner together, he read her a poem. The insinuation of the poem to me was that he had deeper feelings for me than just friends. She says her boss confided in her that he was unhappy in his marriage and was thinking of moving out on his wife of 22 years. But Rusty Snyderman's wife said she made her position clear. None of those feelings were ever returned and I made myself completely clear where I stood. Hemi got the message, Andrea said, at least for a while. And when Hemi wasn't being inappropriate, she says he was a good friend. I admit to caring about Hemi Newman. He managed to get me to care about him, and that's actually the point.

He was very good at that, very good at manipulating everyone around him to feel bad for him. With Rusty launching a company from the ground up, Andrea said she felt she had to hold down her steady paycheck. She told the jury that she walked the tightrope the best she could. Given the situation that I was in and that he was my boss,

I handled them all with care and did the best I could to keep him at bay. Did you ever report the defendant's contact to anybody at GE? No. Why not? I would have been fired. I'm sorry, I didn't hear your response. I would have been fired. Andrea had kept Hemi's advances to herself

for the good of her family, she told the court. But now the prosecutor wondered this. The police artist's sketch, released days after the shooting, bore a striking resemblance to her boss. Why hadn't she demanded that police focus their investigation on Hemi? What was she hiding? When we come back, some pointed questions for the widow. Did you wake up together in Denver and Tahoe?

No. Was there an affair? They were groping each other. Did you see the party's kiss? Yes, I did. When Dateline continues. He pretended to be my friend, and I was doing the best that I can

to deal with that situation. And he had my whole life wrapped up. Jurors had heard a harrowing tale from Rusty Snyderman's widow of a monster of a boss who became obsessed with his new hire, Andrea. But now the prosecution was suggesting that the toxic triangle among boss, employee, and husband was even more complicated than it seemed. And that the wife, Andrea, was holding back important details of her story. Prosecutor Don Geary.

But there was this kind of Watergate question. What did she know and when did she know it? We went in, we knew she was lying. We told her we knew she was lying. And that didn't seem to affect her. So we knew what we had to do on the stand, and we simply did it. In court, Hemi Newman was the accused, but at times it looked as though Andrea was on trial too. The prosecution suggested Andrea had been a willing partner, not only in their relationship, but possibly in the murder itself. Hemi could not be insane, the prosecutor said, if he had been conspiring to kill Rusty. It says, think about it, be with me forever. Would that be normal communication between your boss and you? The victim's widow was aggressively

questioned by the prosecution about business trips with her boss that looked like a series of trysts in hotel rooms with him here and abroad. A week after that trip to Lake Tahoe, when Hemi read Andrea a love poem, he joined her in Longmont, Colorado. Did you pick the defendant up at the airport? Yes. Did you take him back to Longmont with you? Yes. Did you and the defendant share a room in Longmont? No. She denied they spent the night together in Colorado, but workers at the hotel remember a change of rooms. Our records do show that Andrea Snyderman, during her stay,

switched from a room of two beds and one person to a room with one bed and two people. A month later, in August, something happened on a trip they took together to South Carolina, something that Andrea felt she had to repent for. She read aloud in court what she wrote Hemi in an email. Your apology is heartfelt, but does not make the ongoing pain go away that I now have. What happened in Greenville, ma'am? We were holding each other's hands and that's it. It may sound worse than it is, but to me that was a betrayal. So you're repenting

in the email at least from holding his hand? Yep. But the work trips together continued, and the emotionally charged emails intensified. Hemi wrote her words like, marry me, I love you, and this. The betrayal and anger is not about what you, parentheses, we did. It's a cop-out. It's about how you felt what you wanted. How you felt when we looked at the stars in Tahoe,

when we woke up Friday morning in Denver, when you took my hand and nestled your head on my shoulder, did that happen? Did what happen? Did you wake up together in Denver and Tahoe? No. Andrea might not have known it, but during this time, Hemi, like a moonstruck teenager, was confiding in a real estate agent friend named Melanie White. He would get an email from her and he'd be so excited because it had a smiley face at the end of it.

The friend testified that Hemi shared with her all the messages he'd received from Andrea. To Melanie's eyes, Andrea wasn't pushing Hemi away at all. What I saw is that Andrea wanted Hemi and would lead him on, going out of town with him, holding hands with him, and eventually, from what I'm told from Hemi, actually having sex with him. On the stand, Andrea was adamant that a trip she and Hemi took to England in September was strictly business, even though their itinerary included plans to see a play and hit a nightclub. We did not go to that dance club. In fact, we did not do any of the things that are insinuated that we did on that itinerary. But jurors heard evidence that Andrea and Hemi did go dancing

on their last trip together to Greenville, South Carolina, a month before Rusty Snyderman was killed. The barmaid at a dance club testified that she saw public displays of affection that would have justified the taunt of get a room. He kept spinning her around. They were groping each other. Did you see the parties kiss? Yes, I did. How many times did they kiss? I would say about three times. Did you see the female push the male away? No. In one occasion, she actually kissed him. Andrea denied the barmaid's account. Did you kiss him or did he kiss you?

No. In this case, when you're talking about alleged affairs and someone else's husband being murdered, I think people tend to think they saw a lot of things. Andrea denied all the innuendo, sharing rooms, groping one another on the dance floor. She said she never had sex with Hemi Newman, a claim she repeated when her best friend Shana Citron confronted her about Hemi after Rusty's funeral. Andrea admit or deny the affair with you at that time? She denied it. Based on all the time you've known Andrea,

when she told you no, did you believe her? No, but my heart really wanted to believe her. Did she make a comment about if she wasn't married? Yes. What did she say? Maybe if she was not married, she would have been interested. However, she loved her husband and was not interested. That statement echoed something Hemi had told his friend. What did he tell you about the London trip? That he and Andrea got

closer. He and Andrea had decided that they were soulmates. He also told me that Andrea was adamant that she would not leave her husband and her two kids. Andrea was interested in Hemi but would never leave her husband. That was the message Rusty Snyderman's wife was sending her boss, the defense would argue. And the defense promised to prove to the jury that the inner turmoil these mixed signals stirred up in Hemi Newman was enough to push this mild-mannered but troubled man over the edge and into the realm of legal insanity. Coming up... I've been kicked, I've been slapped, I've been whipped.

And those things you don't forget. Haunting secrets from Hemi's past. And a question. Did celebrity voices drive him to kill when Dateline continues whose boss kills someone else's husband I don't care affair no affair there was no affair who kills someone else's husband? Hemi Newman was a killer. That's what the prosecutor told the jury.

That's what his alleged mistress told the jury. Even Hemi Newman himself said he did it, a police detective testified. He admits to the shooting, correct? Yes. But Hemi Newman's defense attorney said their client shouldn't go to prison because the 48-year-old engineer, outwardly so calm and rational, had one more secret to confess. He had been tormented by demons since he was a boy. Defense attorney Bob Rubin.

Mr. Newman's problems really began years ago, and they went undiagnosed over the course of his lifetime, and as a result, he got progressively worse. And the defense made a bold allegation to the jury that Hemi's violent act against Rusty was triggered by none other than Rusty's wife, Andrea. She had planted the seed. She had stoked the fire, And she knew that what she set out to do with somebody who is sick, that she had accomplished. His psyche was so fragile, the defense argued, that it hadn't taken much from Andrea to send Hemi over the edge. And if the defense team could prove Hemi Newman was not guilty by reason of insanity,

that he did no right from wrong when he pulled the trigger, there was a chance he would escape prison, if not a hospital bed in a psychiatric unit. Their first witness was Hemi's younger sister, Monique. She painted a picture for the jury of Hemi's painful childhood. Monique, would you describe for the jury your household at 6 o'clock in the evening when your father was coming home? Anxiety. Monique explained that their father, a violent and alcoholic man, had beaten both children savagely. I've been kicked, I've been slapped, I've been whipped.

And those things you don't forget. And Monique said Hemi took the worst of the beatings. My brother got up, went to get a bowl of ice cream, and before we knew it, the bowl of ice cream went flying. Hemi was getting slapped, and it just kept going and going and going. But it was at boarding school that Hemi had experienced his first delusion this defense expert testified, a demon. He described the demon as much bigger than him. He said that when he felt and saw this demon, he felt anguish, deep pain. By the time Andrea met him, Hemi Newman had a history of breakdowns,

and he was teetering on the edge of having another one, according to his defense. Hemi's fascination with Andrea began as a fantasy, according to the defense's mental health experts, something to help him escape his troubled life. But they say that that workplace infatuation soon became something much darker. Hemi's confidant, Melanie White, testified that it looked to her as though Andrea would wind Hemi up, turning hot, then cold. She treated him like a yo-yo. I mean, she would have him all the way up at the top, you know,

just saying that this is the greatest and we're soulmates and having a great time out of town. And then coming back in town and texting him and saying, we can only have a business relationship. We can no longer do this. Defense expert Dr. Adriana Flores said this yo-yo effect strengthened the delusions Hemi was having. Ann said the defense, in this altered state, he would listen to Andrea complain about Rusty, how the children were shying away from him. Their conversations or communication was saturated with discussions of the children, saturated with Andrea Snyderman's complaints about her relationship with her husband.

Hemi thought something needed to be done, said his defense, especially when the demon, an apparition from his childhood, returned. He described it in this jailhouse interview. When you say big, how big? Not as high as the ceiling, but almost. All right. So? Like towering over me. Hemi said this time the delusion took a surprising form.

A demon appeared before him, and he sounded like Barry White. Did you notice it's real? When he comes, I think he's real. Okay. He also says he saw an angel who sounded like Olivia Newton-John. The angel's message? It was as out there as the vision itself. According to Hemi Newman, the angel assigned him a deadly mission. Andrea's children, the angel told him, were at risk from Rusty Snyderman,

and it was Hemi's duty to kill Rusty to eliminate that threat. He thought he was doing the right thing because he thought he was saving those children from the same kind of trauma that he had. But the prosecution painted a very different picture of Hemi Newman. And you're saying he's faking it. He's running a number on these psychologists, psychiatrists. He was probably the smartest person in that courtroom. The prosecutor told the jury that Hemi had lied about his hallucinations to try and get away with murder, and that the defense experts had fallen for it.

And if he lied to you about that delusion, then everything in your report is off the table, correct? You're wrong. That is correct. The prosecutor called a parade of witnesses to the stand, Hemi's work colleagues who'd seen him every day. Did you ever see anything that made you question his mental stability? No, not at all. Have you ever observed him where you thought he was hallucinating? No. And according to the prosecution's own expert witness,

it would have been impossible for Hemi to have covered up such a serious mental illness. There is going to be some evidence somewhere of a marked impairment. Nor would someone so unstable have been able to methodically plot out not only the crime, but the covering of his tracks, as Hemi did. This was just another project for him. He did it. I've got a problem. I'm going to approach this like an engineer. How do I resolve the problem? He mathematically solved his problem. During that jailhouse interview,

Hemi explained to the prosecution psychiatrist. I'm a great, great executioner. It was just, once the plan is in place, it's going to happen. But amid all the expert witness testimony over several days debating Hemi Newman's mental health, a hypothetical question posed by the prosecution caught the most attention. If there was evidence that this is in fact a plan by Andrea and the defendant to get rid of Rusty so they could be together, then everything he told you would be wrong, and you would be wrong, wouldn't you? If I knew that they had corroborated together, yes, that would change my opinion.

This was the first time in Hemi Newman's trial that a direct reference was made to a potential plot between the shooter and the victim's widow. What did Andrea Snyderman know, and when? Coming up... Jures render their verdict. But one question still lingers. Is this case closed? When Dateline continues. Andrea Snyderman is playing each and every one of us for a fool. Investigators had harbored doubts about the grieving widow as soon as they had their suspect,

pushing Hemi Newman during his interrogation to see if he'd give her up as his accomplice. I think this was a plan. I think it's beyond you. I think it includes someone else. The idea that Andrea Snyderman wasn't just a passive bystander to her husband's shooting, but that she had been in on it, was a theory pushed hard by both the prosecution and the defense. I was crying a lot. I was bawling. An eyewitness testified that even after Rusty's body was whisked away in an ambulance, she, a perfect stranger,

was weeping at the scene. But the wife, when she arrived, not so much. She didn't have like a tear in her eye. Andrea had testified that when she arrived at the scene that morning, she'd been told only that Rusty had been involved in an accident, not that he'd been shot. I didn't know what happened to Rusty until I got to the emergency room. But listen to what both her father-in-law and her friend said Andrea told them before she got to the hospital. Andrea called us and she called and said Rusty had been shot. She was so, so sorry. She immediately at the same time was screaming to me that Rusty had been shot. How had Andrea known that fact, that Rusty had been shot, if no one had told her yet?

And perhaps most perplexing of all, within minutes of being told something had happened to Rusty, Andrea had dialed and redialed her boss. But her husband, who she believed was involved in an accident? How many times did you call Rusty? Call Rusty? Rusty. Zero times. And a demeanor issue for the widow. The jurors heard a tape of Andrea being told six weeks after her husband was shot that police have made an arrest. Are you serious? Yes. Can you sit down? You're making me very nervous.

Are you sure? Did Andrea know beforehand who the shooter was? According to a friend, Andrea had confided in her that she thought Hemi Newman resembled the police sketch. If she had any suspicion Hemi was involved, why hadn't she told police? She kept seeing Hemi's face in those sketches. Is that correct? Not the face. It was the eyes is what she said.

Andrea hugged her best friend Shana as she got off the stand. But once the two women were in the hallway, out of the view of the cameras and the jurors, Andrea reportedly threatened her. The best friend's lawyer says he overheard the confrontation. Andrea tells her, I understand why you did what you did, but now you're going to have to live with what I'm going to do. The trial judge banned Andrea Snyderman from the courthouse for the remainder of the trial. But what motive could Andrea Snyderman possibly have had for any of this? Investigators learned she had collected two million dollars in

life insurance after Rusty's death. But would that really compensate her for Rusty's lifetime of earnings? Was murder the only way out of a marriage that maybe wasn't as solid as friends thought? But a close friend says Andrea was a victim in that courtroom. She's gotten caught in the middle of this crossfire between Hemi and the prosecutors, and it's really unfortunate. Jeffrey Moss, who first knew Andrea as Rusty's college girlfriend and then watched them start a life together and a family,

doesn't believe Andrea had anything to do with the murder. It goes against everything I know about Andrea and her morals and her behaviors and her personality. During closing arguments, the focus was on Andrea Snyderman yet again. Had she manipulated the mentally unstable Hemi Newman into killing her husband as a defense contender? The gun in this case was in Hemme's hand, but the trigger, I respectfully suggest, was pulled by Andrea Snyderman. If he and Andrea... Or, as the prosecution argued, was Newman trying to hide behind a fabricated mental

illness to avoid answering for a murder plot that he concocted with his lover. He's not crazy. He's a co-conspirator. On the third day of deliberations, the jury announced it had a verdict. Andrea was not in the courtroom to hear it. We, the jury, find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but mentally ill. The jury foreperson told Dateline that the jurors believed Hemi was mentally ill, but nonetheless should go to prison. We were all very passionate that we were not going to be comfortable

with him and Newman thinking that he could actually walk. Was there a discussion of where's Andrea Snyderman? Why are we not talking about her? For us, it was still. This is not about Andrea Snyderman. If there was an affair, that's between Andrea Snyderman and Hemi Newman. Before imposing sentence, the judge heard from Rusty's killer. Hemi Newman's statement was brief. I am so, so, so sorry. I am sorry from the deepest part of me, Your Honor. And then it was over for the disgraced business executive.

Newman was led away after the judge sentenced him to spend the rest of his life in prison. And in a written statement issued after the verdict, Andrea Snyderman said she was grateful to the jurors and felt justice had finally been done for Rusty. But the prosecution was not finished. In 2012, Andrea Snyderman was charged in the murder of her husband, Rusty. Those charges were dropped. Then in August 2013, Snyderman faced new charges and was found guilty of perjury and hindering the apprehension of a killer. In 2014, Snyderman was released from prison

and completed her parole three years later. And in 2015, a break for Hebi Newman. Or was it? The Georgia Supreme Court threw out his conviction, saying the trial court erred in admitting evidence protected by attorney-client privilege. But in a 2016 retrial, a jury found Hemi Newman guilty once again. And this time his guilt was unqualified. Hemi, the jurors decided, was not mentally ill at the time of the crime. He was sentenced to life without parole plus five years.

That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.