Denver Man Convicted Of Murdering Wife After She Learned Of His Latest Affair

A Denver man accused of killing his wife in 2015 and staging the scene to look like a natural death has been convicted of her murder.

Robert Feldman, 58, was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury on Tuesday after only three hours of deliberations in the killing of Stacy Feldman, 44, in March 2015, Denver NBC affiliate KUSA reported.

“Despite his creative efforts to evade justice, today Robert Feldman was found guilty of murdering his wife, Stacy Feldman,” Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said in a statement on Tuesday.

Though the conviction required a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole, Denver District Judge Edward Bronfin held a sentencing hearing immediately after the conviction before Robert Feldman was remanded to custody, according to KUSA.

Stacy Feldman's family addressed the court and her killer during it.

"If you really loved your children, you wouldn’t have killed their mother,” Stacy Feldman's mother, Dorothy Malman, told the man convicted of killing her daughter, according to Denver Fox affiliate KDVR. “You wouldn’t have taken their mother from them. The only person you love is yourself.”

“This is all because you couldn’t keep your pants zipped and agree to the divorce Stacy wanted," she added, according to KUSA. "You are evil.”

“Instead of letting her go to be happy, he killed her,” Stacy Feldman's older sister, Susan Malman Altman, told the court in her statement, according to KDVR.

Robert Feldman declined to give a statement.

Prosecutors had argued that Robert Feldman had just recently cheated on his wife and the woman, to whom he had lied about his relationship status, emailed and then spoke to Stacy Feldman on the morning of her death. After dropping the couple's children off at Sunday school at the family's synagogue, they said, Robert Feldman returned to the house and was confronted by his wife about his most recent (but, by his own admission, not his first) affair. They said that Robert then beat his wife, strangled her to death, cleaned up and staged the scene and only eventually returned to pick up his children and take them to a church carnival after receiving several phone calls from his 9-year-old daughter and the synagogue to do so.

Robert Feldman's lawyers had argued that Stacy died of natural causes and fell in the shower, and Robert Feldman only discovered her body when he arrived home with the children.

At trial, the woman with whom Robert Feldman cheated on his wife just three days before her murder testified.

She testified that she and Feldman had met on a dating app and that he'd repeatedly lied about his name in ways that she was able to discover, but that she gave him a second chance at his insistence, after he claimed he used fake names because of an ugly divorce and a stalker in his past, KUSA reported. After dinner and great deal of discussion, she said, the two had sex on Feb. 26, 2015 and made plans to meet the following weekend.

But when he almost immediately backed out, she turned to the internet yet again and found Stacy Feldman's email. 

At 6:20 a.m. on March 1, 2015 — the day Stacy Feldman died — the woman emailed her to tell her she'd met and gone out with her husband but only just recently discovered the two might not actually be separated, KUSA reported.

The two exchanged a series of emails in which the woman provided Stacy Feldman with the correspondence she'd exchanged with Robert Feldman — in some of them, he pressed her for nude photographs before they'd even met — and she testified that Stacy called her just before 9:00 a.m. that morning. (Police previously said the phone call occurred at 8:52 a.m..)

According to his arrest affidavit, Robert Feldman was dropping the couple's kids off at Sunday school when Stacy Feldman called the other woman.

The woman then told Stacy Feldman that Robert had not only claimed that the two were separated, but that she was an absentee mother, which she said Stacy Feldman called "unbelievable."

“I’m done with him,” Stacy Feldman told the woman, according to her testimony — and indicated to the woman that she'd thought the couple was "done with that," by which she meant Robert Feldman's infidelity.

The woman came forward in June 2015 after Googling the Feldmans to see if they'd divorced and discovering an obituary that said Stacy Feldman had died shortly after the two spoke.

Robert Feldman's lawyers argued that the February 2015 affair was one of many, that Stacy Feldman had known about the others and that, despite what they termed "periods of separation," Stacy had previously made the decision to remain in the marriage — and that there was no evidence, despite what she said to Robert Feldman's most recent partner, that she actually confronted him on the morning of her death, KUSA reported.

The forensic evidence in the case was mixed, at best: three pathologists testified that they did not believe Stacy Feldman was murdered, while an outside expert in domestic violence strangulation, Dr. William Smock, testified that the cuts and bruises on Stacy Feldman's body and petechial hemorrhages in her eyes were more consistent with a beating and strangulation than her dead body being pulled from a tub and having CPR performed on it, according to KUSA.

First responders noted in testimony that they'd never seen a body being pulled from a tub without water getting everywhere, and there was none on the floors when they arrived. In his arrest affidavit, police noted that, despite being on 911 and claiming to be performing CPR, there was no evidence that Robert Feldman had done so before his arrival.

Robert Feldman was ultimately arrested on Feb. 18, 2018 and was released shortly thereafter on maximum house arrest and a $1 million bond.

According to KDVR, he used $550,000 of his wife's $750,000 life insurance policy to pay for criminal defense lawyers over the objection of the guardians of the couple's children. He was cited for multiple violations of the terms of his bond in April 2021, according to KUSA, and unsuccessfully petitioned the court to return to work in June 2021 (when KUSA also found that multiple dating app profiles using Feldman's pictures and personal info — including the fact that he was a widower — were seemingly active).

He's currently incarcerated in the Denver Downtown Detention Center.