Original subtitles

A fatal fall in the shower.

A woman's life cut short in an instant.

Sitting there talking to me two days earlier,

and now she's dead.

It was so sad and shocking.

Was it truly a tragic accident--

He claims that he goes into the bathroom.

And there she is, lying on the floor,

bleeding with a massive head wound.

- or murder?

Looking at it as a forensic pathologist,

she had head trauma, and it was not

consistent with an accident.

This starts to raise

some serious questions.

Leslie Neulander was born in the early 1950s and

grew up on Long Island, New York, before later

moving north to Syracuse.

Former local chief medical examiner Mary Jumbelic

met Leslie shortly after she moved to the same neighborhood.

Leslie Neulander was

a prominent woman in the community here in Syracuse.

And our social circles and business

circles over overlapped.

She belonged to the same synagogue

that my family belonged to.

And we would see each other at holiday

events and other community fundraising events in town.

Leslie was a devoted philanthropist.

And she donated her time to causes

like the Jewish Community Foundation,

Syracuse University, and loads of other charities.

It was always a joy

to see her because she had such a bubbly and kind personality.

She just had a way about her of making you laugh

and feel at ease.

And I always admired that about her.

In 1983, Leslie had married

prominent local obstetrician and

gynecologist Dr. Robert Neulander.

People looked up to him

greatly in the medical world.

And she had been a critical care nurse,

but had given up her career to raise her children.

Bob had been married previously and had two

children from that marriage.

And so she helped to raise those children as well,

and had a very full life.

But on the morning of September 17, 2012,

a distressing call was made from the Neulander family home

to emergency services.

On the other line was

Leslie's 23-year-old daughter.

Responders arrived at just minutes later at 8:27.

But unusually, they found Leslie not in the bathroom

but in the bedroom.

And Robert was kneeling down near her body,

covered in blood, with his daughter

just screaming in distress.

Robert told paramedics

that his wife had slipped and fallen in the shower.

The first police officer

arrived five minutes later.

They secured the scene and followed the trail of blood

from the bathroom to the bedroom, where

the first responders were working on Leslie's body,

giving her CPR.

Despite their best efforts, she was pronounced

dead at the scene at 8:42 AM.

Shortly after Leslie was pronounced dead,

the police went into the bathroom.

They found the shower still running.

And in the bedroom, there was blood everywhere.

And a trail running in the corridor between the bedroom

and the bathroom.

Robert explained that he had moved Leslie

from the bathroom, where she had fallen into the bedroom,

because he said, it was easier and more comfortable

for me to perform CPR on her there.

The movements that Robert said he made

checked out with the patterns of blood

that the police found at the scene.

This theory was actually backed up

on the 911 call, where we can hear

his daughter pleading with Robert

not to move her mom's body.

One of the next to arrive at the scene

was the medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stoppacher.

Dr. Stoppacher spoke very briefly

to some of the officers, but he was

advised that she had slipped and fallen in the shower.

She had a massive wound to the right side of her scalp.

It was probably about 6 inches long, maybe an inch wide.

And based on that preliminary examination, he looked at it

and said, yeah, this head wound is consistent with a slip

and fall in the shower.

In the shower itself, there was a stone bench.

If one were to hit their head with sufficient force,

it could cause a serious injury.

On the same afternoon,

Dr. Robert Stoppacher conducted an autopsy on Leslie's body.

He found that she'd had bleeding to the brain.

Her skull had been shattered in so many places.

And she also had bruising to her internal organs.

Taking into account Robert's version of events,

Dr. Stoppacher ruled that Leslie

had died from an accident, blunt force

trauma due to a fall, and that she'd slipped in the shower

and banged her head on the stone counter.

News of Leslie's tragic death

began to spread through the Neulander's close

knit community.

I had just arrived home

from Europe, where I had been hospitalized

and near death myself from a small fall and

subsequent infection.

And so, two days later, when I'm sitting in my recliner,

still recovering.

My son with me, he saw a post on Facebook that was suggestive

that Leslie had died.

And so then there were a lot of phone calls that went around.

And so, finally, I got hold of my husband,

and he said, yes, it's true.

You know, She fell in the shower and she's dead.

I felt shocked because she had just been in the home

two days earlier and now she's dead.

It was so sad and shocking, but I just accepted

that that is what happened.

Although Leslie Neulander's sudden death

at her home had been ruled an accident following

a fall in the shower, police followed standard protocol

in cases of sudden death by opening an investigation, which

would come to the attention of Onondaga County District

Attorney William Fitzpatrick.

I was advised that Leslie Neulander

had slipped and fell in the shower, struck her head,

and died.

And that's unusual for a healthy 60-year-old,

but not unheard of.

There's probably 2,500 people a year

in the United States, on average,

die due to bathroom accidents.

Most of them are elderly people caused by heart attacks.

But there wasn't anything reported to me

that indicated this was suspicious.

And, you know, the case just kind of sat in limbo.

While the police carried out

their investigation, friends rallied

around the Neulander family.

After Leslie died, and the next night,

my husband went to the home to visit.

Bob stayed in his room.

He didn't really come out, so my husband just

talked with the kids, and the rabbi was there

and they just had a conversation.

When he returned, he said it was a little awkward

that the kids seemed uncomfortable

when he would bring up how close their parents were

and how sad this was.

And I just attributed that to grief.

On September 20, 2012,

three days after Leslie's death, friends and family

gathered for her funeral.

Through the days that followed Leslie's death,

including at a funeral, at other social gatherings

where her name would come up, that the details were

not clear.

The only consistent story was Leslie fell in the shower.

And that is pretty much what everyone knew.

While friends and family

tried to move on from Leslie's tragic passing,

police continued to look into the circumstances

surrounding her death.

Although the medical examiner

had ruled Leslie's death as an accident,

the police still carried on their investigation.

And they now wanted to talk to their daughter

about what she had seen that day.

Meanwhile, following her illness,

Mary tried to return to normal life.

Mark and I decided

we would have a Thanksgiving party

to thank my friends for being helpful during my recuperation.

A friend of mine approached me at the party

and said she had information that a close friend of Leslie

had concerns about her death.

She said, please, will you talk with her?

And so I agreed to do it.

The friend had a lot to say about Bob's infidelity,

about Bob's financial problems, his behavior

on the day of Leslie's death.

The friend talked about how she was

sure that Bob killed Leslie.

And I was a bit stunned.

From my perspective as a medical examiner,

it didn't carry the weight of actual evidence or

forensic data.

After she finishes her story, I say, well,

why don't you go to the police and give them your statement?

So she called me afterward and said,

thank you for telling me to go.

They're going to bring Bob back in for questioning.

I heard he already has a lawyer.

And while she's telling me this,

I'm thinking, how odd is that?

If this was just a cold piece of information,

there's no way they would be saying to her,

we're going to bring Bob back in for questioning and

telling her about the lawyer.

And so I thought, wow, there's something already going on.

And a few hours later, Bob called the house.

Mark took the call.

They chat for a moment or two.

And he gets off the phone with Bob and says,

well, good for him.

He's going to Israel.

And now I'm sitting there thinking,

oh, gosh, I think he will just go to Israel and not come back.

It set off a red flag for me because I

was looking at those two pieces of information

and they were highly concerning.

He's supposed to give another statement to police.

He's leaving the country.

And why do the police want another statement?

The fact that the police were grateful the friend came in and

provided her own observations meant that the police are still

concerned about this case.

So I became concerned at that point.

Unbeknownst to Mary, the district attorney's office

was about to reopen the investigation

into Leslie's death.

Initial reports

were that this was a slip-and-fall accident,

and there wasn't anything that was brought to my attention

initially that indicated that this was

a homicide worth looking into.

And then came an anonymous letter to my office

that piqued my interest.

It focused on the financial aspects

of the Neulanders, the fact that they were

living in separate bedrooms.

Not only pointed that out, but pointed out

that Leslie was going to sign a lease arrangement

that day, which is something that I

certainly was not aware of.

Whoever he or she was, was concerned

that Neulander had a serious financial motive

to kill Leslie.

Now, he or she might not have said that in such overt terms,

but that was the clear import of the letter

that this was not an accident, that this was a homicide.

That kind of spurred a renewed interest, certainly by me,

in considering bringing in Mr. Neulander

for a further interview.

Just as the district attorney

resumed the investigation into Leslie's death,

Leslie's friend and former medical examiner,

Mary Jumbelic, got in touch.

I had worked for years with William Fitzpatrick.

And even though I hadn't spoken to him, probably at that point

in, you know, for years, I called him

because I just wanted to alert him

that someone the police is looking at

is going to leave the country.

I telephone Fitz, and I said I was calling

about a friend of mine.

Before I could say anything further,

he said, Leslie London Neulander.

It was a good guess on my part.

I did not know why Mary was calling me.

I did not know that she was very close to Bob and Leslie.

I hadn't really seen everything at that point,

because we were still in the embryonic stages of recharging

this homicide investigation.

But the crucial thing that I said to Mary was,

would you look at the file?

I realized that something about the cause and the manner

of death were not settled.

The only thing I knew was that Leslie

had fallen in the shower.

I didn't know what her injuries were.

I didn't know if she had a heart attack.

I didn't know anything.

But I had a drive to try to help and answer the questions.

That is what I spent my life doing, looking at the dead

and speaking for them and trying to understand

what happened to them.

And so then I said, yes, I'll look at the file.

That's when things really took off.

And it became a full-throttled homicide investigation.

Following an anonymous tip off,

District Attorney William Fitzpatrick

had reopened the investigation into Leslie's death.

Had she slipped and fallen in the shower, as her husband,

Bob claimed, or had she been murdered?

Hoping for a second opinion, William

sent the case file to former medical examiner Mary Jumbelic.

I focused really quickly on Leslie herself.

Because that is my area of expertise, the examination

of the deceased.

And so I focused on her body position,

the wounds I could see, what I could see at the scene,

and all the details that I could learn from the autopsy.

The photographs were very graphic.

It was shocking to see my friend in the photographs,

but even more shocking to see the trauma to her body.

Leslie's right side of her head was bleeding extensively

with a massive open wound there,

and the skull was caved in partly.

Looking like two blows to the head, at least.

And in addition to that, she had injuries on her face

and on her neck.

She had bruising on her arms.

She had injuries on her fingers with bruising.

The type of wound that she had, the amount

of fracturing of the skull, and the other injuries

that are present on the body all point to inflicted injury,

as opposed to just tripping and falling.

But other details documented

at the scene of Leslie's death also raised

questions about Bob's story.

She was laying on the floor of her bedroom,

face up, and had been scooched into an area between the end

table and the bed.

So not a really ideal position for CPR.

But why a physician would choose

to carry an injured person, who potentially

could have a neck injury, 60 feet to perform CPR?

Certainly, it's suggestive of a concern.

But in addition to that, there were

blood trails going all the way from the bed to the shower.

And not much per se in the shower itself,

even though that was the purported area of the fall.

The manner of death being called an accident

didn't capture what really happened to Leslie.

That she had head trauma, certainly, but was

not consistent with a fall.

She had been struck in the head, and it was a homicide.

Mary took her findings to William,

and he requested a search warrant

for the Neulander's home.

Around six months after Leslie's death,

Mary, William, and forensic pathologist

Dr. Baden visited the house, which they were

now viewing as a crime scene.

The house had been sold,

but the new owners hadn't moved in yet.

And the second floor was still untouched.

And we wanted

to focus on the area in the bedroom

where Dr. Neulander claims he took Leslie after he removed

her body from the shower.

Most of the blood on the wall had been cleaned away,

but several things of incredible importance remained.

So we ripped up the carpet, and there's a little rubber

undercarriage to the carpet.

That was completely soaked with blood.

And then when we lifted that up,

the floorboard, completely soaked with blood.

It should have been a minimal amount of blood

because she had no pulse.

In fact, there was a massive amount of blood completely

inconsistent with his story.

What that indicates to me is that while she's alive and

has a pulse and is bleeding, her head

is somewhere in that vicinity.

The other amazing thing that we were

able to get from that examination was the headboard.

Now, it is very, very difficult to see any physical evidence

on the board because it's a cloth-like material

and it's very, very dark.

And then when we examined that, there were several dozen

blood spatters from Leslie.

The new evidence discovered

at the Neulanders home was sent away for forensic analysis.

I knew Leslie's death

wasn't an accident when I looked

at the pictures of her body.

The scene was corroborative with the findings there.

This is a homicide.

This is not a fall from standing height accident.

Six months after Leslie's death,

her case was now a full-blown murder investigation,

but her death certificate remained an issue.

It would be very difficult to ask a jury

to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt of a homicide

when your medical examiner says, hold on,

she died as a result of an accident.

William and Mary presented their findings

to the medical examiner, Dr. Stoppacher,

to ask if he would reconsider the manner of Leslie's death.

We discussed our difference of opinion

and discussed the science behind it,

and talked about wounding patterns and

what happens to the brain in a fall versus blows to the head.

And at the end of that, I think the medical examiner

felt they needed more.

They needed more information.

They needed more opinion in order to budge

from the concept of the fall.

So we decided that the expertise

of a neuropathologist, and particularly

a forensic neuropathologist, would be useful to elucidate

this difference of opinion.

In December 2013, while William awaited

the forensic neuropathologist report,

he approached Bob's lawyer with a request

for a formal interview.

Robert said that he had nothing to hide,

so he voluntarily sat down for an interview

with officers and the district attorney.

During the questioning,

he admitted that there was difficulty in their marriage.

William soon turned his questioning to the day

that Leslie died.

He says that he got up that morning,

that he went jogging.

He came back, prepared a cup of coffee for his wife.

He cleaned up from jogging,

then began to make a small breakfast,

then goes back upstairs.

The shower is still running.

Now she's been in there, according to him, at least

35 minutes at that point.

He claims that he goes into the bathroom to see if she's OK.

This is a doctor of 30 years.

What's the first thing you would do if you had never

even seen a medical school?

There's a phone 5 feet away from them

on the counter of the bathroom sink.

Pick up the phone.

Call 911.

Instead, he leaves her there.

He does a cursory check to see if she's alive.

Claims that she's breathing.

Goes about 90 feet further into the house to get

his daughter to call 911.

Bob claimed he then carried

Leslie from the bathroom into the bedroom to continue CPR.

I then simply slid over to him

a number of photographs.

And said, Dr. Neulander, can you explain this?

Can you explain the blood?

And he looked at me, and he said, no, I can't.

Despite Bob's calm, matter-of-fact account

of the events surrounding Leslie's death,

William wasn't convinced by his story.

My theory that he attacked her

in the bedroom and left her, probably to die on the floor

while he's trying to figure out what to do.

This is not a premeditated crime.

He did not plot this out.

This was a rage homicide.

Something snapped.

They argued about something.

Whatever it was, it set him off.

And then he's faced with an opportunity.

Now, what do I do?

The only thing I can say to describe that wound

is that she fell in the shower.

But if Bob had murdered Leslie in the bedroom,

the one thing that didn't add up

was why the bed sheets weren't covered in blood.

Before questioning Bob, police had interviewed

the Neulander's housekeeper.

The housekeeper says,

I changed the sheets on Friday, and

Leslie was killed on a Monday.

She looks at the photos and says,

those are not the sheets that I put on the bed on Friday.

And she says, by the way, there's a pillow missing.

There's only three pillows there.

So when he was asked about the pillows,

oh, we didn't have a pillow in a guest room,

and we needed a pillow for that.

Well, who is that for?

Well, people were coming over.

Oh, yeah, people were coming over after she was dead.

The pillow was missing before she was dead, Doc,

what are you talking about?

There's no question in my mind that the original sheets

that she left on that bed Friday were on that bed

Monday morning when Leslie was assaulted.

And then soaked with blood, he removed

the sheets, removed the pillow that probably had blood on it

as well, removed the murder weapon.

And then while he went for his supposed jog,

he was actually going out to dispose of those items.

With missing bed sheets and no murder weapon,

investigators couldn't determine what

had been used to kill Leslie.

And with her death still ruled accidental,

police remained unable to charge Bob with her murder.

Then, 18 months after Leslie's death,

came the news they've been waiting for.

The neuropathology report,

an evaluation of the brain, indicated

it was inflicted injury, allowed

the medical examiner to be able to change the death

certificate to homicide.

The size the wound, combined

with the discovery of distinctive bruising

on the opposite side of Leslie's brain,

was consistent with being hit by an object,

not with a fall from standing height.

Based on the accumulation of evidence,

Dr. Stoppacher changed, not the cause of death,

but the manner of death.

Cause of death was still a massive blow to the head,

but the manner of death was now listed as homicide.

That was it.

There were no more avenues of escape for Dr. Neulander.

Three days later, on June 23,

Dr. Robert Neulander is charged with second degree murder

and tampering with physical evidence.

On March 16, 2015, 2 and 1/2 years after Leslie

Neulander was found dead at her home in Syracuse, New York,

her husband, Dr. Robert Neulander,

went on trial for her murder.

Big trials are part theater,

and no one knew that better than Bob Neulander.

Every day we would watch this litany of him walking

down the courthouse hallway.

And he'd have his daughter, his son,

or, in some instances, Leslie's sister,

consoling him as he walked.

It might look unusual

that the family of the victim are

seemingly siding with the accused perpetrator.

But you've got to remember, at this time,

the family do not have all the evidence that Mary has

or that the DA office have.

They have not been subject to all of that information yet.

And so at the moment, naturally,

a family going through a traumatic period

are rallying together.

You've also got to remember from the perspective

of the children, they've just lost their mother in really

traumatic circumstances.

And if they believe that their father did this,

they're also, in a way, losing their father.

So you can understand why people group together

in this moment, because they're just

trying to protect the little sort of normality

of their family unit.

The prosecution argued that Leslie's death

was no bathroom accident.

Instead, that she was murdered in the bedroom by her husband,

as proven by forensic evidence.

There's blood spatter on the wall

and on the ceiling from an object

being struck on Leslie's head.

And then when it comes back for another strike,

it gets cast off on the wall, in the ceiling.

There are blood droplets

on the lampshade, on the clock radio, on family photos,

on the headboard, on the blinds to, say,

nothing of the blood in the bathroom.

Here's the explanation they come up with.

So he went out for a jog, came home, showered up,

put his pajamas on, and then put another pajama top on,

for some reason.

And when he was carrying Leslie,

that top became saturated with blood.

He took the shirt off because it was uncomfortable for him.

And this blood cast off and spattered at various points

throughout the bedroom.

Secondarily, when the EMTs got there,

as they removed their gloves, they removed

them slingshot fashion.

And that spattered a lot of blood throughout as well.

Now there's two significant difficulties with both

of those explanations.

Number one, no one saw him with a second shirt.

The second thing is that the EMTs were all

very professional, and they are trained

on how to remove a glove to avoid

exactly this type of issue.

In addition to that, they also indicated, we hardly

had any blood on our gloves that we noticed

because she wasn't bleeding.

The prosecution also argued that Leslie's head

injuries were not caused by an impact in the shower

as Bob had claimed.

On the right side of the head,

the skull injury is caved in partly

in a pattern that is not consistent with hitting

the edge of a marble bench.

In addition, it appears there's two blows

on that side of the head.

So both of those things don't line up

with the stone bench theory.

If you leave aside

the medical evidence, the blood spatter,

I thought the most significant part was calling

the daughter to the stand.

The daughter was called as a witness.

And the 911 call was played in the courtroom.

What was chilling in the courtroom

was that the family is there listening

to the daughter's 911 call.

And it's just heartbreaking because you

can feel the pain that the daughter feels when she first

sees her mother being carried by her father,

and the terror in her voice, the sadness, the angst.

The problem was that perception of events

just didn't stack up to the facts.

One of the most crucial pieces of evidence

for the prosecution was the moment Leslie's daughter placed

the 911 call on hold, leaving her mother's office

to head toward the bathroom, where

she claimed Leslie was lying.

When quizzed about the 12-second

gap between switching phones, her story fell apart.

Her story had

changed significantly at trial in this very,

very important regard.

Yes, I went into the room with a bidet and the toilet,

and I picked up the phone.

But it wasn't working, so I dropped that phone.

I then assisted my father in removing

my mother from the shower.

We then took her a couple of feet.

We laid her down outside of the bathroom.

My dad began to perform CPR.

It didn't seem to be successful,

so we moved her again further into the bedroom

and dropped her just short of the bed.

I then went, remembering that the 911

operator was still on hold.

I picked up the phone, and I don't remember what I said,

but I can hear the tape and I understand that.

None of that is remotely possible.

You cannot do everything that she claims that she did in 12

seconds, which was the amount of time between the 911

operator being put on hold.

And the, oh, my god,

there's blood everywhere, resumption of that call.

It would have taken conservatively a minute

to do everything that she claims that she

did do in that 12 seconds.

Her statement

has some really contradictory points the evidence

can prove a false.

But you also have to remember that she has witnessed

something really traumatic, you know,

her mother dying in heinous circumstances.

And so trauma can do really strange

things to a person's memory.

So it might not be that she intentionally misleading

or proposing false information.

It might just be that, actually, she

can't remember exact details.

After she testified, the case was done.

After two weeks of hearing evidence,

the jury retired to deliberate.

The worst part of a trial

is waiting for a verdict.

And you always feel the same way.

You put your heart and soul into the case.

In some cases, you feel more confident than others.

I was nervous because juries are very earnest,

and they try very hard to do the right thing.

But it doesn't always come out as a forensic professional

might think it would.

After three days of deliberation,

the jury returned their verdicts.

They found Robert Neulander guilty of second degree murder

and tampering with evidence.

Everybody in this case was resolute.

They knew that he did it, and they felt comfortable

with their verdict.

And I felt great.

I was just professionally satisfied

that justice was done.

Four months later, he appeared in court.

And Robert Neulander was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Bob was facing incarceration

for the rest of his life.

But his defense team appealed and argued for a retrial,

citing serious juror misconduct.

An alternate juror pointed out

that they believed 1 of the 12 actual jurors

had been involved in something.

So the judge ordered examination

of this juror's phone.

This investigation found that this juror had sent over 7,000

messages during this three-week period

to family and friends talking about the criminal trial.

And this was in direct violation

of the judge's instructions for jurors

not to discuss the case with outside sources

or to get information from anywhere else.

And these messages included one from her father,

saying, make sure he is found guilty.

And she failed to disclose this to the court.

The outcome of all of this was that in June 2018,

the conviction was vacated.

It was annulled as if the trial and conviction never happened.

Robert was released on $1 million

bail until the retrial could take place.

They hired a very good guy, very good

lawyer out of New York City.

And we began to prepare for trial number two.

On February 28, 2022, almost

10 years after Leslie's death, the retrial began.

I thought another group of jurors

presented with these same information

would see it the same way.

But, again, you never know until it's

all the way through the trial.

The jury, to our amazement,

five hours after they retired, they came back

in with a verdict of guilty.

And I feel great about that.

When I heard the verdict of guilty

for the second trial, it was just, oh, thank goodness.

I hope the family can try to move on in some way now.

Because they really are carrying

a huge burden with them.

On May 2, 2022, Bob was sentenced to 20 years

to life for the second time.

Thanks, not only to the prosecution team,

but also Leslie's friend, former medical examiner

Mary Jumbelic.

I took Leslie's message--

look what happened to me.

And I gave it to people who needed to hear that.

And, yes, I do feel proud of it,

but I also feel like it was a fulfilling of,

you know, what has always been my calling,

which was to do that for the dead.

I remember Leslie for her lightheartedness

and her kindness and her humor.

But I remember her in death, too,

because it has helped other women who maybe are trapped

in situations with spouses or have

experienced domestic violence.

She was important in the community,

but she was just important on a personal level

of how she made others feel.

And I think those that knew her should think of that

and remember her.