3 cases tagged “Bedford Hills Correctional Facility”
Convicted: Carolyn Warmus
On the night of January 15, 1989, Paul Solomon unlocked the door to his Greenburgh, New York condominium and found his wife, Betty Jeanne, sprawled on the living room floor. She had been shot nine times and pistol-whipped about the head. He had spent the evening bowling with friends, then drinking and having sex with his mistress in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. The two stories would collide in a courtroom spectacle that transfixed a nation. Carolyn Warmus was 25 years old, the daughter of a Michigan insurance mogul worth an estimated $150 million, a Columbia University-educated teacher working at the same Scarsdale-area school as her married lover. She was beautiful, ambitious, and, prosecutors argued, capable of cold-blooded murder. The press called it the 'Fatal Attraction' case, a nod to the 1987 thriller about a married man whose affair spirals into obsession and violence. But the deeper you look at this story, the more the tidy tabloid narrative frays at the edges. Who was the real obsessive? Who, exactly, had the most to gain? And was the woman convicted of Betty Jeanne Solomon's murder actually the one who pulled the trigger? Nearly four decades later, those questions remain stubbornly, disturbingly alive.
Convicted: Pamela Ann Smart
On the night of May 1, 1990, Gregg Smart came home to his condominium in Derry, New Hampshire, and found two teenagers waiting in the dark. One pressed a .38-caliber pistol to his head and fired. Gregg was 24 years old. His wife, Pamela, had arranged to be elsewhere. She was 22, a media director for a school district, and the woman who had seduced 15-year-old student Billy Flynn and, prosecutors argued, steered him toward murder to avoid a costly divorce and collect $140,000 in life insurance. When Pamela's own friend put on a police wire and recorded her coaching a witness to lie, the case cracked open like a fault line. What followed was the first murder trial in American history broadcast live on television, gavel to gavel, drawing roughly 150 reporters from around the world and turning a quiet New Hampshire courthouse into a global theater. Pamela Smart sat at the defense table and showed no emotion when the jury came back. She has been in prison ever since, more than three decades now, still filing petitions, still insisting the system failed her. The teenagers who pulled the trigger have all been paroled and gone home. She has not.
Convicted: Lee Ann Armanini Reidel
On a cold January night in 2001, a man stepped into the rear parking lot of a Long Island gym to grab a CD from his car. He never made it back inside. Alexander Algeri, 32, was shot three times in the head and neck by a hired killer who mistook him for his best friend. The intended target, Paul Reidel, was alive. His wife had paid to have him killed. The case of Lee Ann Reidel is a story about money, a crumbling marriage, a mob-connected boyfriend, and a conspiracy so tangled that it destroyed everyone it touched, including an innocent man who had been the best man at the very wedding that set these events in motion. When the jury finally returned its verdict in a Suffolk County courtroom in March 2004, Lee Ann wept. She had smiled through most of the six-week trial. That detail alone tells you something about the woman at the center of this story.
