Page 4 - Jody Sharp News Today

>> do you remember whats going through your mind? >> how badly she hurt. why isnt she coming back to me? >> thats when an officer walked in the room and broke the news to steven. jody was gone. >> i dont remember who came in and told me. >> that was your reaction? >> denial. how could this happen? >> that question would haunt him and many others and it would take years for the answers to finally come. >> coming up -- >> he was rubbing his eyes to make it look like he was crying. >> you thought h...

Were. i was stunned. >> what did you do? >> i got down on my stomach. i stuck my head over and just yelled, jody, jody, talk to me. i just yelled down there. >> but no response. he grabbed a flashlight and flagged down a motorist who came here to the palisades interstate parkway police station. lieutenant walter seer i was on duty. >> until he came through that door, it was a quiet night. then all hell broke loose. >> a frantic man was telling him, a woman had fallen from the lookout above and t...

Critical way, though. she determined that jody had been drunk the night she fell off the cliff. she had a blood alcohol level of .12. that was over the legal limit. would be equivalent to approximately four average-sized drinks, wine or beer, something like that. >> a drunken slip and fall, argued the defense. to back that up, the lawyer had his own heavy hitter. famed forensic pathologist dr. cyril wex. he had a resume of star studded investigations too, as high-profile as the prosecutions doct...

The top of the cliff and 30 feet to the north. >> she had to have been propelled from that point. >> jody had to have been thrown or pushed to her death, he said, and likely from another spot entirely on those cliffs. he wasnt the only expert who saw it that way. >> the head and chest injuries are not consistent with someone that tumbles down the cliff base. >> dr. maryan clay was the bergen county medical examiner who first ruled the circumstances could not be determined. now on second look, sh...

But women called the house. sometimes they called and hung up on her. >> she had served her husband divorce papers on september 8, 1992. less than two weeks later, she was dead at the base of the palisades. the timing made him more eager to talk to the wid other scharf. >> hes consented to talk, right? >> yes. >> two days after his wifes death, steven scharf was freely answering detectives questions. yes, he and his wife were talking divorce, as they had sometimes done during their tempest euhus...

Something sinister had just happened. >> you didnt think this was a horrible accident? >> no. >> there wasnt a smoking gun, really. just something dark that he could read between the lines in the police notes he reviewed the day after jodys death. >> he did not react like somebody who just lost his wife should have reacted. >> the detective moved his investigation from the physical evidence to the less tangible clues. he quickly learned from jodys friends that this was a couple not in love but i...

They had been talking breakup for years. the divorce papers just the latest legal -- in a growing spat. >> the prosecution paints a picture of someone who frankly is furious about this divorce. >> no one person ever indicated that my client was furious over this divorce. they had talked about divorce for years. saying one thing and not following through. >> though it is true steven scharf did not want a divorce, he says he wanted to give the marriage another chance. and as for that former girlfr...

At the first point, i said maybe this was a hoax. maybe she never went off the cliff. he and another rescuer began to walk along the base, pointing flashlights north. finally, about 30 feet away, the beams landed on something white. it was jody lying motionless next to a tree. >> there was a lot of blood on that tree. the blood was actually raining down the tree. thats where the severe impact took. >> jody sharp had not survived the fall. it was clear she had slammed into that tree. as he began ...

>> not just one thing. it was like the totality of the circumstances. everything -- every little thing was clicking in my mind and saying to myself, this isnt right. something is wrong here. >> gut instinct is one thing. but evidence is quite another. people handle terrible events in different ways. the police are paid to be suspicious. maybe their view of steven was too jaundiced. there really was nothing to indicate that her fall was anything but an accident. a few months later, the ruling was...

>> he believes that was a stunning confession. he ran to tell the other detectives, including lineham. but they had spent hours grilling the man. >> we werent getting that feeling that a reinterview at that point would have done anything. >> they still believed they could find solid evidence but they didnt. >> the cause of death at that time was listed as undetermined. so officially, it wasnt a homicide. >> in time, the detectives moved on to other cases. steven scharf moved on, too. 14 years af...