Page 32 - Stephen S News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> i did not. i did not. i didn't hurt jody. i didn't push her. i didn't cause her to get hurt. i didn't kill my wife. >> reporter: we talked to stephen scharf at the bergen county jail where he was held for more than two years after his rest in 2008 he and his wife tina say they have paid a high price for something he didn't do. >> our daughter is t and a half and has never been held by her father because we don't have contact visits. >> it's not just a tragedy for jody. it's a tragedy for john. it's a tragedy for my wife. for my daughter. and for myself. >> reporter: still, he decided not to...

>> without a word said. >> reporter: stranger still was how calm the husband seemed. when the officer heard stephen describe how his wife had fallen he made a mental note. >> there was no emotion in it. no emotion. like he was reading a script. >> reporter: did it occur to you that he was maybe in shock? >> no. i have seen people who lost loved ones. i have never seen anybody act that way. >> reporter: it was a particular moment later, inside the station house that really caught the officer's attention. >> he asked if he could get a drink from the water fountain. he was looking over his should...

>> reporter: yet, was stephen violent enough to kill his wife? an unlikely but powerful witness was about to testify against stephen scharf. >> i'm here for my mother. >> reporter: his own son took the stand against him. now a businessman, jonathan scharf painted his father as an angry, violent man who terrorized his mother. >> did you see tt abuse? >> i did. >> reporter: jonathan scharf said he realized his father had likely killed his mother only after that arrest in 2008. this videotaped interview shows him recalling the dark past for the first time to police. >> she got coffee thrown at he...

He ran to tell the other detectives, including linum but they had spent hours grilling the man. >> we weren't getting the feeling that a reinterview would have done anything. >> reporter: the detectives still believed they could find solid evidence to implicate stephen, but they didn't. >> we took it as far as we could go. the cause of death was listed as undetermined. so officially it wasn't a homicide. >> reporter: in time, the detectives moved on to other cases. stephen moved on, too. 14 years after his wife's death he remarried. tina said he's been a loving, ideal husband. >> it was like w...

Labor day weekend. >> he was under a lot of stress and the stress would be resolved by the end of september. >> reporter: two weeks later, jody scharf was dead. terry now sees that cryptic statement in a dreadful light. >> i was like, oh, no, the end of september. then the lightbulb went off immediately. >> reporter: it also went off for marion. in perhaps the most chilling testimony of the prosecution's case she told the jury when she heard her friend was gone she immediately remembered something jody said just weeks earlier. >> she said that during this conversati that i had th him, if anyth...