i did not. i didn t hurt jody. i didn t push her. i didn t cause her death. i didn t kill my wife. we talked to steven scharf at the bergen koubtter geagain ber jail. he and his wife say they paid a high price for something he didn t do. our daughter is 2 1/2 and still never been held by her father. because we don t have contact visits. it s not just a tragedy for jody, it s a tranlg dgedy for j. it s a tragedy for my wife, it s a tragedy for my daughter. and for myself. still he decided not to take the stand in his own defense. but told dateline that what he first said years ago about his wife s death was the truth. i wish it didn t happen. i wish we had gone to the comedy club. i m innocent.
strange steven stoaid to her on the beach. he was under a lot of stress and the stress would be resolved by the end of september. two weeks later, jody sharp was dead. terry now sees that cryptic statement in a dreadful like. like, oh, no, the end of september and then the light bulb went off immediately. it open the before on for maryann. in perhaps the most chilling testimony of the prosecution s case, she told the jury that when she heard her friend was gone, she immediately remembered something jody said just weeks earlier. is she said that during this conversation that i have with him, if anything happens to me, you ll know who did it. you ll know it was him. the prosecutor s position was clear, a husband with a motive, the perfect setting, the violent intent to kill his wife. or was there another way of looking at that couple perched
the biggest reason the prosecutor argued was that steven did not want a divorce. he didn t want a custody fight. and he didn t want to split assets with jody. and there was yet another motive for steven said the prosecutor. a potential payout. usa life insurance company. an insurance representative testified about a $500,000 policy taken out against jody sharp months before her death. payable to a primary beneficiary. can you tell us the policy owner? steven f. sharp. jody sharp was simply worth more dead than alive. her friend, maryann, testified that jody feared steven might do something violent if she pushed for that divorce. even so, maryann said, jody was determined to get away from her husband. she was going to have divorce
cool and collected in the back of a police car. i didn t see any emotion from him at all. who later confessed the prosecutor said to killing his wife. and then i said it was an accident? and he said no. but those facts were not where the case ended. the prosecutor argued that they simply set the stage for the real case, a story told by the victim s friends, family and most importantly by a star witness. my opinion is that the manner of death is homicide. dr. michael boden told jurors the crime scene spoke of a murder, not an accident. if a person falls accidentally, the individual will be within a couple feet of the base of the building. and that didn t happen in the case of jody sharp. her body landed 50 feet out from
you didn t think this was a horrible accident? no. there wasn t any smoking gun really. just something dark he thought he could read between the lines in the police notes he reviewed the day after jody s death. he did not react like somebody who just lost his wife should have reacted. and so the detective moved his investigation from the physical evidence to the less tangible clues. he quickly learned from jody s friends that this was a couple not in love but in crisis. the subject wasn t wine and roses on those cliffs, it was divorce. she was going to go through with it, yes. absolutely. jody s longtime friend maryann told detectives that jody had been determined to take her 10-year-old son jonathan and leave her husband. she was convinced steven had been cheating on her. she couldn t prove anything, but women called the house.