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Ex-Doctor Who Claimed Wife Slipped In Shower Convicted Of Murder For A Second Time
Despite being convicted of murder in his wife's 2012 death for a second time, Robert Neulander's children insist he is no murderer.
A former upstate New York doctor has been convicted again for the 2012 death of his wife, who he claims died after she slipped and fell in the shower.
Robert Neulander, 70, was convicted on Thursday for killing his wife Leslie in 2012, a death that was originally ruled an accident, Syracuse.com reports.
Neulander has maintained that his wife died after she slipped and fell in the shower inside their DeWitt mansion for nearly a decade. But after listening to evidence in the case, the jury has decided that Leslie, a 61-year-old mother of two and philanthropist, did not die in that manner.
It took the jury six hours to come to the unanimous decision — and it isn’t the first time a jury decided that Neulander killed his wife. A jury came to the same conclusion in 2015 after 18 hours of deliberation.
That 2015 conviction was overturned in 2019 by New York’s highest court after it was determined that one of the jurors was texting about the proceedings after being warned not to do so.
During the more recent trial, Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick told jurors that the scene was too bloody to be an accident and presented to the jury “mummified fat tissue” from Leslie Neulander's head, found on the headboard of the couple’s bed, as evidence that pointed to murder instead of an accident in the show, local outlet WSTM reports. He called Neulander’s claim about his wife's death being an accident “ridiculous," maintaining instead that the "unfaithful" former obstetrician-gynecologist killed his wife in a fit of rage.
The couple’s two adult children, however, do not believe that their father is a murderer.
Their son Ari Neulander told WSTM-TV that the conviction is a “travesty of justice.”
“We’re going to get him out again, however long that takes,” he said. “We’re going to appeal the decision.”
He called the prosecutor, Fitzpatrick, a “bully” and a “predator" for targeting his father.
Ari Neulander claims that “every one of my family members would have been taking a stand against my father if he had done anything to our mother.”
The former doctor’s sentencing is scheduled for April 11.
