On December 8, 1988, Robert Samuels was beaten to a pulp and finished off with a shotgun blast to the head inside his own home in Northridge, California. The scene had been ransacked to simulate a robbery, but something didn’t add up. Detectives were struck by the attitude of his wife, Mary Ellen. She arrived at the police station in a low-cut dress and, at one point during the interrogation, rested her hand on one of the investigators’ bald head and remarked how attracted she was to bald men.
What police took months to confirm was that she herself had orchestrated the crime. The hitman was Jim Bernstein, her own daughter Nicole’s boyfriend and a known drug dealer. The motive: Robert was worth more dead than alive. Half a million dollars in insurance and real estate that Mary Ellen collected without waiting for the divorce. When the investigation began to point toward both of them, Jim turned up strangled and in an advanced state of decomposition on a road in Ventura County. Mary Ellen had also had him eliminated.
The piece that sealed her conviction was a photograph found in her house during the search. She, completely naked, writhing on a wad of life insurance cash, an image taken by her new boyfriend. In April 1994, the jury found her guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. Judge Michael R. Hoff noted that she had even involved her own teenage daughter in the plan. Mary Ellen Samuels was sentenced to death and, at 76 years old, remains on California’s death row awaiting an execution date.
