They were unlikely allies -- the family of the victim and the attorney representing the wife of his killer.
But together, they helped piece together the puzzle that led prosecutors to make Andrea Sneiderman a focal point of Hemy Neuman's murder trial in DeKalb County. By the end of the month-long trial, DeKalb District Attorney Robert James implied she was a co-conspirator in the slaying of her husband, Rusty Sneiderman.
Defense attorneys made similar assertions in court, sayingAndrea Sneiderman manipulated their client into killing her husband. Hemy Neuman admitted shooting Rusty Sneiderman outside a Dunwoody day-care facility on Nov. 18, 2010. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Today, a jury found him guilty but mentally ill.
Esther Panitch, who is representing Ariela Neuman in separation proceedings against Hemy Neuman, her husband of 22 years, said she first became suspicious of Andrea Sneiderman once she read emails provided by her client indicating a possible affair between Sneiderman and Neuman, her supervisor at GE Energy.
By then, Rusty Sneiderman's immediate family had also begun to question Andrea's truthfulness, they said in an exclusive interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Prior to the trial's verdict, four family members -- Rusty's father and mother, Don and Marilyn Sneiderman; older brother Steve; and Steve's wife, Lisa -- sat down with the AJC to discuss the personal toll the events of the last year-and-a-half have taken on them. Don, Marilyn and Steve were interviewed at the offices of WSB-TV on Sunday. Lisa Sneiderman spoke with the AJC on Wednesday outside the DeKalb County courthouse as jurors deliberated the case.
Though Andrea Sneiderman has not been charged in connection with Rusty's murder, the Sneidermans leave no doubt they believe she had a role in it. Andrea Sneiderman"s attorney did not respond to requests seeking comment; in court, the widow denied any prior knowledge of Neuman's plot to shoot her husband. She also denied having an affair with Neuman.
Don Sneiderman, the victim's father, said he began to doubt his daughter-in-law's claims that her relationship with Neuman was strictly professional the moment he learned, from Dunwoody Deputy Police Chief David Sides, of the former GE engineer's arrest.
"Once [Sides] told me who it really was, then everything started clicking into place," Sneiderman said. "And about two and half hours later Andrea called us sobbing and in tears, and I asked her if she had lied to me. And her brother said, ‘We're hanging up now.'"
It would be their last substantive conversation.
Piecing together what happened
Since Rusty Sneiderman's death his family has sought to confirm their suspicions and fears about his death.
"We spent so much time over the last 15 months looking at this from an intellectual exercise, trying to understand what happened," said Steve Sneiderman, Rusty's older brother. "Who talked to who and as they were originally building the case against Neuman before the insanity nonsense."
Many of those discussions, beginning in February 2011, were with Panitch, who had developed a bond with Steve's wife, Lisa, also an attorney.
"People couldn't understand why I was talking to her," Lisa Sneiderman said. "I mean, she's representing the wife of the guy who killed [Rusty]. But we were desperate for information about the case."
Rusty's sister-in-law said her doubts about Andrea intensified after a conversation in late January.
"She told me, ‘I get suicidal when I think how much worse this could get for me,' " Lisa Sneiderman told the AJC.
Lisa asked her what she meant by that. Andrea's reply: "What do you think I mean?" said Lisa Sneiderman, adding the conversation "sent chills down my spine."
So when Panitch made contact with the Sneidermans, who live in Ohio, they saw her as an advocate, one who was supplying information they weren't getting from police or Rusty's wife.
Andrea Sneiderman has not been charged in connection with her husband's murder. She was banned from the courthouse during the trial’s first week after prosecutors said she was interfering with witnesses. Efforts to reach her attorney, Seth Kirschenbaum, were unsuccessful.
Panitch has been criticized by those close to Andrea Sneiderman, who say she has used the trial to build her public profile. One day, during the trial's first week, they taunted her outside the courtroom.
But Rusty's immediate family members say she's been a godsend, dedicating literally hundreds of hours, pro bono, to the case.
The sleuthing began a little more than a year ago. Ariela Neuman told Panitch she first began to suspect an affair in July 2010, when her husband unexpectedly traveled to Longmont, Colo., where, it was revealed in the trial, he sought to have flowers and chocolates delivered to Andrea's room.
That same weekend, Rusty Sneiderman and his two young children visited his family in Ohio, according to Lisa Sneiderman, who was also suspicious of her sister-in-law's relationship with her boss.
They were now convinced there had been an affair. A more disturbing revelation was yet to come.
When did she know?
Panitch told the AJC that, in May of 2011, she learned that Dunwoody Prep officials "may not have told" Andrea Sneiderman her husband had been shot when they called to inform her there had been an "accident" in the daycare facility's parking lot on the morning of the murder.
The school's director confirmed in testimony that she never mentioned a shooting when she talked to Andrea Sneiderman.
"Without telling Lisa why I was asking, I asked her to find out how Andrea informed her in-laws about the shooting," Panitch said.
At 9:37 a.m., 21 minutes after the 911 call reporting the shooting, Andrea called her husband's family. Don Sneiderman said he'll never forget his daughter-in-law's words.
"She said ‘Rusty's been shot, I'm so so sorry,"‘ he said. "Those are calls that will be engraved in my brain forever."
Panitch said she alerted the DeKalb district attorney's office that she had "found something important." The timeline ended up playing a pivotal role in the prosecutors' case against Hemy Neuman -- and stoking their suspicions about Andrea Sneiderman.
But Don Sneiderman said he still wanted to give his daughter-in-law the benefit of the doubt. That changed when he heard, during the second day of testimony, Andrea Sneiderman testify that she first learned of the shooting from an emergency room doctor at Atlanta Medical Center. When she called Don Sneiderman, she hadn't even arrived at Dunwoody Prep. From there, she testified, she went home before going to the hospital.
"She knew. She knew in advance. She knew then what was going on," Don Sneiderman told the AJC. "How she knew or what she knew, I don't know."
Those questions have yet to be answered. Until they are, justice won't be served, said Rusty's mother, Marilyn Sneiderman.
"We need to know all of the answers. Good, bad or indifferent, we could be wrong," she said. "And we need to know if we're wrong, but we also need to know if we're right."
But, they acknowledged, they have reason to believe the worst about Andrea, who married Rusty after both graduated from Indiana University.
DeKalb District Attorney Robert James apparently shares their conviction, implying Tuesday during his closing argument that Andrea Sneiderman was a co-conspirator with Neuman.
"Hemy didn't hide his crime from Andrea because Andrea already knew," James, who has declined to discuss the case until after a verdict, told jurors. "How could she know 30 minutes after [Rusty] was shot that he had been shot?"
The Sneidermans have grappled with that contradiction for nearly a year.
"If all she had done was have a relationship that got away from her, then all she had to do was say that and, yeah, there would have been consequences for that and it would have been very, very difficult to get over," Steve Sneiderman said. "But instead she created this circus as much as he did and put us through so much pain. And for what?"
Steve Sneiderman learned of his brother's shooting while on a plane bound for Hawaii. Upon landing he immediately caught another flight for Atlanta, arriving at his brother's house the night of murder.
From the beginning, he said, Andrea insisted her husband's slaying was random.
"There was a lot of fixation on Rusty's wallet; the police didn't recover Rusty's wallet and they wanted to search the house and [Andrea's parents and brother] didn't want to let them search the house and there was all this back and forth about that," Steve Sneiderman said. "Andrea seemed to lock onto [the theory] it must have been a robbery."
He recalled negotiating with Andrea's family about giving police more access to the Dunwoody home she shared with Rusty.
"I was shocked but I was also in shock, I wasn't thinking like a lawyer in that scenario," Steve Sneiderman said.
The trial, meanwhile, "has been far worse than I ever imagined," Steve Sneiderman said.
They are a private family, reserved by nature, thrust into the media spotlight. Rusty, they say, was the outgoing one in the family.
"It's not the circus, this is the trial of the man who shot my brother, and I think that's getting lost in the process here and that's been very hard for me to accept," Steve Sneiderman said.
Disturbing information
But the worst part, they agree, was hearing Neuman, in videotaped conservations with defense mental health experts, testify that Andrea often complained about her husband, saying at one point her children were "shying away from Rusty."
"My blood just boils every day when we hear those things," Steve Sneiderman said.
His mother recounted the last conversation with her son the morning of the shooting. They talked almost daily online via Skype, a routine Rusty maintained because he wanted his two children to know their grandparents.
"The morning Rusty was shot, we had breakfast with him and Ian, and they were so happy," she said. "Rusty was all excited. He was all dressed up for a big meeting -- he was starting a new company. He was going to California the next day."
The Sneidermans say they don't get to see their grandchildren much anymore, a result of the strained relationship with Andrea. Though they've been in Decatur for the last month, they say they've been allowed just one visit.
"We saw [Ian, Rusty and Andrea's youngest child] once when we were here and he's grown about a head taller and now his hair is all dark," said Marilyn Sneiderman, adding that Ian is a dead ringer for his dad.
"I would like them to remember us," she said. "I would like them to be proud of their dad."
Though their family has been devastated, the Sneidermans managed to keep their emotions largely in check through weeks of often difficult testimony. They buckled when they heard, for the first time, how Rusty was observed gasping for air before he died.
"I wanted to believe that he had died almost instantly," Steve Sneiderman said.
But on Tuesday, after closing arguments concluded, the emotions became overwhelming. Outside the courtroom they shared a tearful embrace with the DeKalb district attorney, mindful that Neuman's trial may not be their last.
"There's been a lot of really disturbing information that's come out during the course of this trial," Steve Sneiderman said. "There's been a lot of stuff that I think we still don't know. There's answers that we need in order for our family to put our heads around where we go from here."
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