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Get started for free at ancestry.com. jody's death on these cliffs had been a horrible accident. her husband said so. and the medical examiner wasn't arguing with him. but detectives have a kind of sixth sense about cases. it was telling james linum
>> on the charge of murder, your verdict is? >> guilty. >> guilty. >> later, jurors said what united them was the testimony of jody's friend, telling them that jody was terrified of her husband. >> that possibly she was telling everyone if something happens to me, it was my husband. >> and it was another woman in stephen's life that swayed the jury, that his stress would soon be over. >> that was something that pushed me towards what we decided in the end. >> it was the light bulb. >> to them, it wasn't jody who slipped, but her husband with that menacing statement. they believed it wasn't jus...
Something sinister had just happened. >> you didn't think this was a horrible accident. >> no. >> there wasn't any smoking gun really. just something dark linum 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 had 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...
Were you eating? >> drinking. >> you were drinking. >> i had lost my wife. my son lost his mom. >> there was plenty of sympathy among family and friends, to be sure. for the man newly widowed with a small child to raise on his own. his wife had died in a freak accident, off a cliff, of all places. how could that happen? and that's exactly what police who were there the night of jody's death wanted to know too. >> right away i got a feeling that there was something definitely wrong. >> it nagged as rescuer michael chofi. why was jody's purse on a ledge just feet below where her husband said she...
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 wasn't the only expert who saw it that way. >> -- the head and chest injuries are not consistent with someone that tumbles down the cliff face. >> dr. mary anne clayton was the bergen county medical examiner who first ruled the circumstances of jody's death could not be determined. now, on second look, she said, the victim's wounds, or lack of them, told her something differe...