Police Investigate Wife in Man’s Beating Death

It’s been a year since Jean Adair told police she was bound and gagged during a home invasion robbery in Sylmar by an intruder who beat her husband to death with a baseball bat.

The slaying in the couple’s gated condominium complex sent police on the trail of a man posing as a gas company employee. The case remains unsolved, but Los Angeles police have stopped looking for an outsider--and instead are looking at Jean Adair. She had been engaged in a six-month affair with a San Fernando Valley physician at the time of the killing.

“Because she has refused to give a formal statement, we have been unable to eliminate her as a suspect,” said homicide Det. Patty Ferguson. “Are we focusing on anybody else? No.”

Adair, through her attorney, maintains her innocence.

A year ago this week, Adair was ringing a neighbor’s doorbell, screaming for help, red marks on her face, tape hanging from her wrists. She later told police a gruesome tale of how her husband had come home for lunch and surprised an intruder who had already bound her. The Adairs’ children, Christopher, 9, and Erin, 11, were at school at the time.

“She had nothing to do with this,” said Richard Plotin, one of Adair’s two attorneys.

Plotin pointed out that Adair, 37, was injured in the attack, and underwent surgery earlier this year for a smashed disk in her lower back.

He said she also voluntarily gave police a blood sample and fingerprints about a month after her husband’s slaying.

“She was trying to exonerate herself,” Plotin said. “She was trying to cooperate and show she had nothing to hide.”

Since then, detectives have refused to rule her out as a suspect, and for that reason, Plotin said, he has advised her not to talk to the police.

“It’s somewhat of a Catch-22, I guess,” said Ferguson, the homicide detective. “But there’s obviously stuff that needs to be cleared up. And the only one who can do that is Jean Adair.”

It is not only police who suspect Adair.

“I risk my soul going to hell, but I believe that she did it or had someone do it,” said Robert Adair’s mother, Margarita Sutcliffe, who visits her son’s grave every day.

Sutcliffe and other relatives said there were several life insurance policies on Robert, worth more than $500,000 after his death.

“But the police let all the insurance companies know that [Jean] is a . . . suspect in a murder investigation and that if they want to pay, they’re paying at their own risk,” said John Adair, the victim’s brother.

Ferguson confirmed that insurance investigators have been told that Adair is a suspect.

One of four children, Robert Adair was born into a wealthy family and raised in Beverly Hills.

“He was what some might call a mama’s boy,” his mother said. “He would call almost every day just to ask me how I was doing.”

Adair went to work for the Sylmar Medical Center about a decade ago, earning about $24,000 a year as a medical assistant.

The Medical Center is where Robert Adair met Jean, who worked in the billing department.

They married and had two children. But Sutcliffe said the marriage had been troubled for several years. Talk of divorce began three years ago, she said.

“But I told him it takes years to build up a relationship and just one minute to destroy it,” she said. “So I told him to stay.”

But things didn’t improve, she said. Robert suspected his wife of having affairs and learned of her relationship with Michael R. Shapiro early last year.

Plotin, Adair’s attorney, said he believes that suspicion focused on Adair after accusations by the ex-wife of the doctor with whom Jean Adair was having an affair.

The relationship, which became public after Robert Adair’s killing, was a factor in the divorce of Michael Shapiro and Melinda Shapiro, according to court papers.

Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro said she filed for divorce in June when she discovered a hotel bill for a daytime rendezvous, allegedly between her husband and Jean Adair, a longtime patient.

The court filings, which also document a bitter custody fight over the Shapiros’ two children, contain allegations and counter-allegations involving the Shapiro marriage, as well as the killing of Robert Adair.

For example, Mindy Shapiro said the breakup of her marriage was reasonably smooth in the beginning. Her husband, who reportedly earns nearly $250,000 a year as an orthopedic surgeon, made child support payments, and the two even dined together occasionally.

“Things only began to turn ugly when I began to learn about Ms. Adair’s alleged involvement in the bludgeoning death of her late husband just prior to his attempt to divorce her,” she said in a court declaration filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Lawyers for both Jean Adair and Michael Shapiro have sought to portray Mindy Shapiro as an emotionally unstable and jealous woman who is concocting lies about her ex-husband and his new lover.

“She’s doing everything she can to make his life miserable,” said Michael Shapiro’s lawyer, Arthur Soll.

In one court document, Michael Shapiro seeks to link his ex-wife with the killing of Robert Adair.

“Prior to Mr. Adair’s death . . . [Melinda Shapiro] made many threats to me regarding Ms. Adair. [She] stated several times that she had plans to ‘destroy’ Ms. Adair’s life, and said that she had ‘connections’ and had made ‘arrangements,’ ” Michael Shapiro stated in the court papers. “During one conversation [Melinda Shapiro] said, ‘Wait and see what I got you for your birthday.’ Nov. 5, 1996, the day Ms. Adair was beaten and Mr. Adair was murdered was indeed two days before my birthday.”

Detectives have questioned both Shapiros extensively and said neither is a suspect.

Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein and Beth Shuster contributed to this story.