Broken Vows: The Shocking Murder of Rabbi Fred Neulander's Wife by Eric Francis

Author:Eric Francis [Francis, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Murder, Biography, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781429996945
Google: GUKc1yVhDU8C
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2002-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

To the public watching the case unfold in the headlines, it looked like Len Jenoff had ruined any chance Fred Neulander had of saying he wasn’t involved in Carol’s death. After all, this was a confession, not a tip; and how could Jenoff have known these insider details if things hadn’t happened the way he was now reporting? Normally, that line of reasoning would make for an openand-shut assumption of truthfulness; however, the main problem with the confession was that it was coming from Len Jenoff, and six years after the fact.

It would have been one thing if Jenoff had confessed six hours after the murder, when few other people knew the specific details of the crime scene. However, Jenoff was a private investigator, and even though he worked out of his bedroom with the aid of psychics, he still had managed to gain solid access to just about everyone involved in the case, including Fred Neulander. On the one hand, what he was saying sounded very much like the inside scoop from a hitman who had been there, but on the other hand, he’d had six years to insert and embellish any details he wanted to add, and make them fit with the facts and the time-line.

Neulander’s defense would ultimately hinge on the question of who was the bigger liar: a religious leader who was willing to have sex with his mistress right in his office at the synagogue he’d worked decades to build and consecrate; or a man who carried around a forged note from the President of the United States and liked to imply that he had killed communists in Nicaragua for the CIA, even though the closest he’d ever gotten to the region was a vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Both sides of the Neulander case knew that Len Jenoff was not an inherently credible person. He had lied about any number of things over the years, he had exaggerated even more, and his record as a private investigator was checkered with numerous run-ins with the legal system and private firms, because he had repeatedly pushed the limits of situational ethics into the red zone.

Hitmen don’t usually get a receipt for their services, so even if Jenoff testified that Fred Neulander had hired him to kill Carol, it was still going to require more proof. Normally a jury might take someone’s word for something like that—after all, why would they lie? But with Len Jenoff, lying seemed to be part of the territory. What he had to say about Neulander’s actions and motive certainly looked compelling as narrative, but to a jury, it had to be compelling beyond a reasonable doubt. And there were lots of reasons people might doubt Len Jenoff.

Wixted and Zucker wasted no time in zeroing their sights in on Jenoff’s record of past transgressions and exaggerations.

Len Jenoff was a poser and a fraud in most of his dealings, and he had admitted to killing a woman he didn’t know for idiotic reasons.

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