Lina and Adam Kaufman

0:00 Hi, I'm Rich and I'm Tina. If there's one thing we've learned and over twenty years of. Marriage, it's that some days you'll feel like killing your husband. And some days you'll feel like killing your wife. Welcome to love, Mary Kill Hey Dina, Hey Rich. How are you today? I am good. How are you? I'm doing good. Actually I'm having some allergies today, but otherwise I'm great. Are you feeling well rested? Well? I did just take a nap. I'm a little jealous you accused me of taking a nap.

0:41 Well, your hair was a little old. Your hair is always perfect, Rich, You're literally the most consistent person in the world. You always look handsome every day. Your hair is always perfectly quaffed. And it was just a little askew on the site. And we had said, oh, we'll record it too, and I was like, okay, I'll take a little nap. The same Judy too. It was funny because I was I had fallen asleep and Clover was with me, and she was like meowing, trying to wake me up because she wanted some attention. And because I'm a mom, I'm able to, like you know, filter out noises like that. But then she kept touching my toe try to wake me up, and it worked. It worked. Clover gets to decide who gets to sleep and when they get.

1:22 To sleep, she sure does. I just saw a news report about a person that thought they want one hundred thousand dollars in the lottery and it was in Indiana, and it was a scratch off ticket. It's like a Space Invaders type of thing. And the thing came up and said, you want one hundred thousand dollars and they took it in and the lottery people said, oh, sorry, that was a mistake. That was a glitch. And it turns out a lot of people, I guess, had that same glitch, which is just kind of outrageous. I used to know a lawsuit coming. I hope there's a lawsuit coming right too. Yeah. I used to work at a grocery store and I worked behind the customer service desk and I sold tickets and people would stand there for like an hour and just chat and scratch their tickets. And I don't know if I've ever even bought one, but it just seems like.

2:13 You bought one once and you gave it to me for Christmas. Do you remember that it wasn't an actual lottery chicken, though. I still that was the cruelest prank you've ever. Played, or one could say, the best break. I didn't feel really bad because you were so excited. I was in shock. I was like, I was in disbelief. I remember like, I think, I'm not sure, but I think this way, and I can't remember how much it was, but it was like one hundred thousand dollars yet yeah, yeah, oh. That was bad. But before we get started, I wanted to give some shout outs to some of our listeners, Elias who sent us a bunch of cherry chip cake mixes.

2:53 She also sent some almond roca which I think I hid from you, but it was delicious. That was so kind, Thank you so much. And it happened to be Emma's birthday a couple of weeks ago, so made that cherry chipcake. And then also some people have left us some voicemails yeah on our website and that was really sweet too. And one of the people with Cindy and Cindy has been a longtime listener and in her message she said, I know you guys are too busy to answer my messages, so I try not to message you anymore. We always have time for you guys. So Cindy, thank you so much. That was such a sweet message and you can message us anytime. And the other one was from Michell and she's also just a really great person who we always love to hear from. Yeah. I really love the fact that people can leave us voicemails on our website, which is Lovemarykill dot com because it's so nice to hear your voices. Yeah too, So that's pretty cool.

3:42 You guys are the best. We really appreciate your support. Speaking of our kind listeners, somebody on Reddit made a comment about us the other day. It was on a thread that was about Murder with My Husband, which is another podcast that features a husband and wife. Who is fonentially more profitable. I was going to say slightly more well know, and then we are, but yeah, probably exponentially. But it was a very We always appreciate it. We people leave comments and Reddit and recommend us. But I was a little bit offended because the person said they're well, they're a cute husband and wife pair, which is nice. Then they said she gets him a snack for every pot. I'm like, I bring you a snack. Yeah. When I researched, they bring plenty of snacks for sure. Yeah, I just want to make sure that's clear.

4:23 There was somewhere someone said they're kind of funny, which made me laugh because our goal, honestly isn't to be funny, because I feel like true crime and humor. We try to be a little you know, cute and break the ice and are open and our clothes. But we you know, kind of funny is great. I'll totally take it. Any Reddit comment is awesome. We really appreciate it. Well, today's snack hungry? Okay, Well, I was said, I'm I'm really hungry girl. I know you hate when I call you girl. I hate I'm really hungry. Bro Okay, bro, Well, today's snack. I owe to our brother in law. My brother. Is he your brother in law or my or both? Consider I love Steve. I think he's my brother in law.

5:04 Okay, I just don't know how that technicy, I know it is. But anyway, he sent me a message the other day and he said, look, these look pretty interesting. So I went and got them, and I got a couple of flavors of oreos. As we know, the Oreo people have gone crazy and I got you the Oreo BTS flavor. Do you know who BTS is? Is that a Korean boy band? I think Steve must be a big fan of them. I don't know, but then he didn't recommend this, but I saw it anyway, and I got it. It is a Marvel tie in. Superdowers. Yes, it will apparently if you lick the cream, it will turn your tongue green, even though the cream is is brown and chocolate. So the BTS flavor is brown sugar pancake flavor.

5:55 Oh that sounds kind of good. Yeah. So I haven't seen them because I always kind of glance at the Oreo flavors when I go down the aisle, and I need to give you a little kudos. I believe I had the bag of double stuff in the cupboard and I said I had bought them for a to make something for you, and I think I yelled at you and you abstained. Oh no, I haven't stayed. Oh you haven't checked them, obviously. No. I did the other day because I was like, for our Patreon episode, I was going to make something with Oreos, but then I didn't have the marshmallows. But anyway, so you have been eating them? I have, yes, Oh so I take it. Thanks anyway, though, Well let's give these a try. Sure, what did you think of those two crazy Oreo flavors?

6:40 Well, first of all, you didn't bring me any milk. No I do, so that was you know, I missing your part. I don't normally eat two Oreos in a row. Like, I'm a one oreoted time person. So are you? I'm weird? I know. I kind of like the BTS one. I thought they're pretty good. There's like a little crunch in the cream of the marble ones. They're just kind of like muddy to me. Yeah, but it could be because I had one after the other. But good snacks. Thank you, and you because you gave Steve a shout out. Who else should you shout out at the same time. Your sister Julia and her business. Yeah, she's doing a lot of like art fair type things. Yeah, she makes really cool ear rings.

7:20 And what is her Instagram? Where you or Facebook? Where you can find her? You can find her by searching for Grandma Jay Baked Clay. That's g R A M M A Underscore j Underscore Baked Underscore Clay. She's great and super friendly and Steve is often there too with her, and you have our permission to ask her questions about growing up with rich Why do you have two little oreos over there on the side. I I didn't eat the outside of both. Oh, I thought it was cream. Why did you leave the cream? It's the outside part? All right? Well, let's be here too. I know I am just a couple of weirdos. With the podcast.

8:01 Today, we're going to tell the story of Lena and Adam Kaufman. It starts with a nine to one to one call that came in just after six in the morning on Wednesday, November seventh, two thousand and seven. On the line was Adam Kaufman, a thirty four year old real estate developer in Aventura, Florida, midway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. He was trying to stay calm, but his voice kept breaking. His wife, Lina, was on the bathroom floor. She wasn't breathing, and he didn't know what to do. By the time paramedics arrived, Adam was on his knees performing CPR, his face streaked with pink, frothy fluid that had been coming from Lena's mouth. A rescue team tried to intubate her. They tried three times, but they never got the tube in. They loaded her onto a backboard and rushed her to Aventura Hospital, but it was too late to save Lina. She was pronounced dead on arrival.

8:52 Lena Kaufman was thirty three years old, a mother of two, and by all accounts, perfectly healthy when she went to sleep the night before. Her sudden death was a complete shock and a total mystery. But as medical staff and investigators examined her at the hospital, they spotted something troubling, a series of distinct marks on her neck. That discovery kicked off a five year legal battle that would pit some of the country's top forensic experts against one another, spark an intense courtroom debate over medical evidence, and force a jury to decide between two different versions of reality. Was Lena murdered by her husband or did she suffer a sudden catastrophic medical emergency?

9:34 So she was found first thing in the morning in the bathroom on the floor, Yes, And she wasn't screaming or calling for help. He just happened in there, correct. Eleah Nora Kaufman went by Lena. She was thirty three years old when she died. A mother of two and the kind of person who naturally drew people toward her. She was born in Israel after her parents, Frieda and Gregory emigrated there from Russia. The family settled in South Florida, which became Lena's home. Growing up between different cultures made her incredibly adaptable. By the time she was an adult, she spoke Russian, Danish, Flemish, Hebrew, and a bit of Italian. When her parents moved to Denmark for a year in nineteen ninety four teenaged Lina chose to stay behind in Florida, moving in first with her close friend Rena Azule and later with her aunt Brona. It was during a brief stint modeling at eighteen that she first met Rena. Lena later trained as a dental hygienist and built a tight knit circle of Russian friends that she would keep for the rest of her life. Her friends knew Lena as fiercely loyal and direct, the kind of person who always spoke her mind. She kept an immaculate home and stayed active, hitting spinning and yoga classes, or going rollerblading. At least two or three times a week. In fact, by the fall of two thousand and seven, she was in the best shape of her life, having just lost the pregnancy weight after the birth of her second child. But her medical history also carried some red flags. Lina suffered from

11:06 heavy menstrual periods that often left her completely exhausted. Her mother also recalled that Lena had fainted several times, maybe a dozen, over the course of her life, and she frequently complained of severe headaches, But Lena and her parents had never sought medical help for any of those issues. There was also a piece of medical data buried deep in her records that wouldn't be scrutinized until years later after her death. Routine blood work from her pregnancy about twenty months before she died, showed extremely elevated levels of cytomegalovirus, a common virus that can occasionally cause severe complications. At the time, no one really made note of or followed up on the lab results. Whether any of these underlying health issues played a role in her death would ultimately become the battleground of the entire case.

11:57 You've already disclosed that the cause of her death is indetermed, and it sounds like she doesn't have a vast medical history. Like you said that, she'd fainted at least a dozen times, and if that happens, that's usually there's a reason why you're fainting so much. It's abnormal to faint so much. Yeah. I don't know in general about her medical history, other than the fact that she didn't seek out help for any of those issues that we spoke about earlier. And the cytomegalovirus. You know, it was tested and it was detected, but I didn't get the sense that anyone was alarmed or followed up on it. So she never really saw a specialist for any of these issues that she had.

12:37 I think we've had two cases where something called long QT syndrome has been detected and the people had sudden deaths. So I wonder if that could be something that she could have had too, and she was never tested for it. But I remember those people had issues with their sleep, like they were old and sleepy, Okay, and it sounds like she was fit inactive. Yeah, yes, for sure. We'll talk later about some of the potential causes of her death if it was natural causes. Adam Kaufman was born in New York one of a pair of identical twins. His brother, Seth, wasn't just a sibling. He was the closest person in the world to Adam. They practically shared a brain. Seth's wife, Raquel, later described the two of them as completely inseparable, saying they would call each other every morning just to talk about what they were eating for breakfast, and they would constantly finish each other's sentences. When the twins turned twenty three, they moved from New York to South Florida together. I think being married to a twin would be very.

13:39 Tricky, yes, I would imagine so. Adam's first job in Florida was teaching preschool to a private school in Broward County. He eventually moved to a public high school to teach social studies, but he was also working on his real estate license on the side. He left teaching behind and started doing on site sales at a development in Aventura. Soon he went to work for his uncle's real estate firm, Global Marketing Group, where he eventually worked his way up to senior vice president. Adam's critics would later try to paint him as a wealthy, high rolling developer. His supporters pushed back hard on that image, describing him instead as a regular middle class guy who just worked incredibly hard. But regardless of his bank account, his reputation among the people who actually knew him was spotless.

14:28 His mother in law, Frida, who had lived with Adam and Lina for five months, said he felt more like a blood son to her than a son in law. She knew him as a wonderful husband who had never once raised his voice at her daughter. Friends and family knew him as a devoted dad whose week ends completely revolved around his kids. Adam lived just two blocks away from his twin brother. His family was so tightly woven into Lena's that by the fall of two thousand seven, the two households had essentially become one big, intertwined family. Adam and Lina met at a party in nineteen ninety seven, when he was still teaching. They dated for three years before getting married in early two thousand, a wedding that nearly went sideways at the last minute when Lena's childhood friend from New York failed to show up. Lena didn't panic.

15:14 She just turned to her bridesmaid and close friend, Rena, and promoted her to maid of honor on the spot. They started their family in Miramar, then spent about five years in Pembroke Pines before finally settling into a home in the gated community of Aventura Lakes, just two blocks away from Adam's twins, Seth and his fiancee, Raquel. Their daughter, Hailey, was born in two thousand and two, when their son Jake followed in two thousand and six. To anyone looking in, the family was incredibly close. On weekends, Adam was the dad, taking the kids to the movies or to the mall. Lena kept the house pristine and worked part time helping bring in new clients for her father and brother's commercial kitchen business. They weren't rolling in cash, but they were comfortable and they were happy. Raquel later said that she admired Adam and Lena's marriage so much. She told Seth it was exactly the kind of relationship that she hoped they would have. As far as anyone knew, there was no history of domestic violence, no affairs on either side, no mounting debts, and no secret life insurance policy on paper, and by every account from the people who actually spent time with them, it was just a genuinely happy marriage.

16:25 This is very different than a lot of cases we cover where there are red flags all over the place. In this case, there are no red flags at all. That anyone had a couple of things that will come out later that may have been red flags, but up to this point there's no reason to question that they weren't completely happing to. Sound like a good family sear. Heading into November two thousand and seven, the entire family was focused on one thing. Seth was marrying Raquel on November seventeenth, and everyone was caught up in the wedding rush. Adam was said to be his twin brother's best man, and Lena was one of Raquel's bridesmaids. By all accounts, Lena was genuinely thrilled about the wedding. She talked about it constantly with Raquel, was working out to look her best, and had actually gotten her first ever spray hand the night before she died, specifically so she would look just right in the bridesmaid's dress.

17:16 But there was at least one source of tension, as the best man, Adam was supposed to walk down the aisle with the maid of honor, not with Lena. In the weeks leading up to the ceremony, Lena had reportedly been so upset about it that she threatened not to go to the wedding at all. Her friend Jennifer later confirmed that Lena was genuinely bothered by the arrangement. Adam would also acknowledge that it caused some friction, but he downplayed it, calling it a minor issue that never escalated into an actual fight. But depending on who you talk to, this detail means two entirely different things. To some, it was proved that the marriage had its hidden cracks. To others, it was exactly what Adam said. It was a completely ordinary, stressful disagreement between a husband and a wife in the chaotic final days before a massive family wedding.

18:02 I would imagine that kind of disagreement comes up a lot in weddings, because when you're a married couple and you're friends with another couple, you know, sometimes one partner might be the best friend and the other partner might be, you know, just a good friend, and you have to have somebody else be the maid of honor. So I think in most situations like that, the bride would probably try to keep the couples paired together, but when you know, it's the best man and the maid of honor. Right. But this to me sounds more of like an issue between Lena and Raquel. Like I don't see her and Adam fighting about that. I would think that they would talk about it and she'd be like, oh, this is really annoying to me, right, yeah, And I don't think it would like between us. I don't think it would cause a fight. I think you would be like, yeah, that's a bummer. I think we should try to move on from Yeah.

18:47 Yeah, no, I think that's a good point. It really. If there's any conflict there, it's between Lena and Raquel. We'll be back after a break. November sixth, two thousand and seven, started out as a completely ordinary Tuesday. Lena's friend Melissa saw her around three that afternoon in the carpool line at the temple where they picked up their kids. Later that evening, Lena made dinner for the family, and around seven o'clock she left to run a few errands while Adam stayed behind with Haley and Jake. Lina's first stop was that spray tan appointment, her first one ever. From there, she drove over to Sunny Isle's Beach to visit her friend Larissa at her condo.

19:34 The two women caught up over a glass of wine and some hummus. Before she left, Lena asked Larissa to double check the new tan to make sure it wasn't streaky. She took off her top and turned around so her friend could get a clear look. Larissa closely examined her from the waist up. Later, she would explicitly recall that there wasn't a single bruise, scratch, or mark anywhere on Lena's skin. Lena left the condo around a quarter to eleven. Security footage from the Aventura Lakes guardgate captured her pulling into the neighborhood just after eleven o'clock. From midnight onward, the timeline gets a little bit blurry. Adam later told first responders that he was already asleep by the time Lena walked through the door. However, the emergency room doctor who treated Lena the next morning noted something slightly different.

20:24 In his file. He wrote down that Adam claimed he last saw his wife around midnight and that she seemed completely fine. It was a minor contradiction, but it's the type of detail that can raise red flags with investigators. But he could have just meant that he was asleep and he sensed his wife getting home and crawling into bed. Yeah, but the fact that he told the doctor she seemed fine kind of indicates that maybe it was a little bit more than that. But you're right, there can be definitely. Ik, you know, I've gotten home late before and you've been in bed, and I think you know that I'm you know when I get there, but we don't like have a conversation or anything. Yeah. I think if I crawled in bed next to you would assume that I was fine, because if something was amiss, I would wake you up.

21:06 Yeah, No, that's fair, Adam said. He woke up around five the next morning, November seventh, and noticed that Lena wasn't in bed. The bathroom light was on, Assuming she was just using the toilet, he rolled over and went back to sleep. At five point thirty, he woke up again. She still wasn't there. This time, he figured she must be sleeping with one of the kids, and he drifted off a second time. By six o'clock, he was up for good. With Lena still nowhere to be found. He started looking around the house and finally found her on the bathroom floor, completely unresponsive. He dialed nine one one at six o nine am. On the recording of that twenty three minute call, Adam sounds frantic, begging the dispatcher for help and saying his wife was cold to the touch with pink foam coming out of her mouth. The dispatcher started walking him through CPR, and Adam did his best to keep up. Miami did. Fire Rescue was dispatched at six thirteen am. They reached the gates of the Aventura Lakes community just six minutes later, but then they lost precious time trying to actually find the house. The GPS wasn't working properly, and the neighborhoods winding gated streets were tough to navigate. It was six twenty nine, sixteen minutes after the initial dispatch before Captain Joseph Carmen finally walked through the front door.

22:27 Do you think that time made a difference. It couldn't have helped. I mean, it's really sad. I read later that the fire and rescue team they were only a half a mile away from where Adam and Lena lived, So really it boy it just should not have taken that long. But you know, sometimes you get inside these gated communities and it's just every condo looks the same and it's just hard to find the place. But really, it took them way, way too long. When Captain Carmen arrived, he ran upstairs and found Adam in boxer shorts and a red T shirt performing CPR. Atam's face was streaked with the pink, frothy fluid that had been coming out of Lena's mouth. Carmen and his crew immediately took over, moving Lina out of the tight bathroom so they had room to work. They tried to intubate her three times, but each attempt failed because Lina's airway was entirely blocked by the fluid, making it difficult to visually guide the tube. The monitor showed a sistily a flatline, no heartbeat, no blood pressure. At six point forty one.

23:28 They loaded her onto a backboard and rushed her to Aventura Hospital, pulling up just four minutes later. The er doctor John Stollard managed to suction the fluid, intubate her successfully this time, and administer emergency meds, but there was no response Lena Kaufman was pronounced dead. In other cases we've had, when the victim has a pink, frothy liquid in their system, it's indicated of drowning. Was she in water, No, there was no water involved in this case. We'll talk about later what that pink, frothy liquid might have indicated if it was a medical issue. Right after pronouncing her dead, doctor Stollard called the paramedics back into the room. He wanted them to look at something.

24:13 He pointed out petchial hemorrhaging in Lena's eyes, the tiny burst blood vessels that often hint at asphyxiation, and across her neck and shoulder, there were deep scratches, abrasions, and heavy redness. Suspecting a potential crime, an officer placed plastic bags over Lena's hands and taped them at the wrists to preserve any DNA under her fingernails. Meanwhile, back at the house, Aventura police were securing the scene. Officer Belinda Alvarez did a sweep of the home and walked into the closed garage. She would later testify that she heard a distinct ticking noise coming from the engine of Adam's silver Mercedes when she placed her hand on the hood, it was extremely warm, as if it had just been driven.

25:00 But according to Adam, he had just woken up to find Lena. He hadn't been out since the day before. A lot of times cars after they'd been turned off after driving for a while make sort of a tickling noise, so that was what she thought she heard. At least inside the primary bedroom, first responders noticed something strange about the bed. It looked like it had only been slept in. On one side, Lina's pillow was pressed down and stained with an orange tint that matched her fresh spray tan. Adam's pillows, on the other hand, were perfectly plumped, which investigators thought was strange for a man who claimed to have been sleeping on them all night. Then there was the confusion over what Adam was wearing. Captain Carmen, the first on the scene, found him in boxers and a T shirt, but other officers who arrived shortly after described Adam as fully dressed, wearing designer jeans, clothes, tow shoes, and smelling of cologne. Exactly when or why he would have changed was never clearly established. Over at the hospital, officers noted that Adam's behavior was shifting in ways that made them uncomfortable. They watched him swing from totally calm to what one officer called forced hysteria, and then snap right back to calm again. Minutes after his wife was pronounced dead, he started asking tactical questions, what would the autopsy show, when would they release her body? And then he asked how can a toilet bowl choke somebody? When Lena's mother, Frieda, arrived at the hospital, she was distraught,

26:30 wailing and asking how this could have happened. According to witnesses, Adam's response was to yell back at her, I don't fucking know why. Later that morning, a crime scene technician named Anna Howell came in to photograph the home. She noted that the house was immaculate, no overturned furniture, no signs of a struggle. She photographed the primary bathroom, including a magazine rack in the corner near the toilet. This magazine rack will become important, so I want to decribe it. It was made of a leather type material and was sitting on the floor in the corner in front of the toilet, holding maybe twenty magazines. It sort of looks like a picnic basket shape with a stiff leather strap that goes over the top that serves as a handle.

27:15 That strap has a buckle like a belt buckle on top. Does that make sense? Does that? Am I painting a picture of what that? So? I mean, it's just basically a box sitting on the floor made of leather, open at the top, but it's got a handle that goes over the top that you can pick up like a like a picnic basket. Okay, when you said rack, that kind of threw me. Yeah. They call it. They've been referring to it in all the materials that I've researched as a magazine rack, but it's more. Like a basket. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably a better way to describe it. And we will post a picture on our social media of that magazine. I think it's decades since we have had magazines in our bathroom, but I think that is something that we probably used to do.

27:57 Before we had phones. Yeah, exactly, under the direction of the lead detective Anthony Angulo, the crime scene technician Anna Howell didn't impound the rack or the magazines inside it, a decision that would come under heavy scrutiny. Later, by the end of the day, Adam's parents had moved into the house to help look after the kids. A cleaning service was brought in to clean the blood and fluid from the primary bathroom, and the family began making arrangements to sit Shiva Seth and Raquel's wedding was supposed to take place in just ten days. Right from the start, investigators ran into a problem with Adam's story. His account of exactly how he found Lena changed.

28:37 At the house, he told paramedics that he'd found her slumped over the toilet bowl with her head resting on the rim, looking as though she had been throwing up, but later over at the hospital, he gave a different description. This time he said she had fallen forward off the toilet, landing with her neck wedged directly on top of the magazine rack in the corner. Adam, however, later maintained that story never changed, arguing that he never told a single person and that version about the toilet bowl, but multiple first responders would later swear under oath that he did. There's no recording of this. Nobody had body cams or anything like that, so basically what we have as atom's word against some of these first responders.

29:19 Lena Kaufin's autopsy was performed the following morning, November eighth, by doctor Chester Gwynn, a forensic pathology fellow, under the supervision of doctor Setish Chandru. Lena was thirty three years old, five foot five and weighed one hundred and twenty four pounds. On the outside, she looked like a completely healthy, fit young woman, but the internal exam showed a significant amount of trauma. On the surface. The doctor's documented petechial hemorrhaging, those tiny burst blood vessels and the whites of both eyes, on her eyelids and on the inside of her lips. There were abrasions on her chin, scrapes underneath it, and multiple irregular red marks scrapping across the front and sides of her neck. She also had bruises scattered across her body on her left shoulder, upper chest, both elbows, her left knee, right thigh, lower right leg, and left ankle.

30:14 That's a lot of bruising. When doctor Gwynn dissected deeper into her neck, the damage went much further than skin deep. There was bleeding buried within multiple layers of muscle, including the strap muscles at the front of the throat, the right lobe of the thyroid gland, and deeper still, the muscles pressed right up against her spinal column at the back of her neck. There was bleeding on both sides of her upper back and shoulder muscles. These internal injuries penetrated three and four layers deep into her tissue. Interestingly, her hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage were both completely intact. There were no fractures, fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage, or common signs of manual strangulation. However, a lack of fracture doesn't rule out strangulation. At least thirty per cent and possibly more. Manual strangulations do not result in fractures, so the petchial hemorrhaging that is also a sign of strangulation, and that was present. Lena's internal organs raised more flags for the pathology team. Her heart weighed two hundred forty grams, which is completely normal for a woman her size with no visible structural issues. Her brain appeared normal as well, but her lungs were a completely different story. The right long weighed eight hundred fifty grams and the left was seven hundred forty, which is much higher than normal. They were entirely saturated with fluid, which was what had been pushed up into her airways and

31:44 created the pink, frothy discharge that Adam was trying to clear during the nine one one call. Her stomach also still contained about four hundred milli liters of partially digested food, meaning that she had died before her body had time to process her dinner, although how long after eating is hard to say, it's an inexact science. By the end of the autopsy, doctors Gwynn and Chun Drew strongly suspected mechanical asphyxiation, meaning someone or something had physically choked Lena to death, but they weren't ready to sign off on that just yet. They needed to wait for the toxicology results, and they wanted to give the police department time to move forward with their investigation, so for the time being, the official cause and manner of death were listed simply as pending. It would take more than a year before the medical examiners finally made an official decision. That must have been very frustrating for her family.

32:40 Oh incredibly so right, just not knowing what happened or how your loved one died, especially someone that young and in such apparently good health, not having those answers would be very frustrating. So you said her lungs weighed they were much heavier than they should have been. Do you know, like how much more were they? Like twenty percent heavy? Year? I read different accounts. It's funny you say that, because when I was looking over the script, initially what I read was that they weighed about three times as much as a normal lung should. But then I did a little more research, and it seems like it varies widely, so it's kind of hard to say. It seems like maybe it was not that much, maybe double or maybe not quite double, but it's significant either way.

33:23 Yeah. Yeah, So the trauma to her neck, the deep tissue that was damaged, and the bruising and the scratches, right, could that have been caused by the attempts to resuscitate her. Yeah. I think that's going to be part of the debate that's going to happen, is whether some of these things were caused either by that or by a medical issue that could have occurred. And also the you know, she had injuries to the surface of her neck as well, and like different parts of her body. Could those have been a result of, like her falling on the floor, falling on top of this magazine basket. So I think that's really what this case is going to come down to. Ten days after Lina's death, Seth and Raquel's wedding went ahead as planned. The family had consulted their rabbi, who told them that Jewish tradition dictates life should be celebrated, that life comes before death. Adam still served as his brother's best man, but out of respect, no one was brought in to replace Lina's spot as a bridesmaid. Just six weeks later, at the end of December, Adam attended a graduation party in the neighborhood. Still wearing his wedding ring.

34:28 He introduced himself to a woman named Farah Cornblum and the two exchanged phone numbers. He did not six weeks By February two thousand and eight, they were officially dating. Wanted to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, that's really fast. It was a rabbit timeline that prosecutors would later seize on to question Adam's grief Meanwhile, the Medical Examiner's office was undergoing a shake up, and the spring and summer of two thousand and eight, both doctor Gwynn and doctor Chundra, the two pathologists who had actually performed Lina's autopsy, left Miami Dade for other jobs. With a case still completely wide open, the file landed on the desk of the Chief Medical Examiner, doctor Bruce Heima. Doctor Heima approached it methodically, rather than rushing to a judgment that Lena had been strangled.

35:15 He spent the next several months systematically ruling out every single alternative theory. He ordered specialized toxicology screens to check for synthetic narcotics like ventanyl or signs of diabetic shock. They all came back clean. He even ordered heavy metal testing to rule out an early theory that Lena may have had a fatal allergic reaction to her fresh spray tand that came back negative too. By November two thousand and eight, doctor Hima was meeting regularly with the lead detective, Anthony Angelo, to pick apart the physical evidence. He tracked down the records for an elective breast augmentation Lena had undergone five months before her death. He went so far as tracing the serial numbers on the rest and place plans back to the manufacturer just to confirm the facility, and when he reviewed the anesthesiologist's notes, they showed that she had a perfectly normal heart rate with zero abnormalities throughout the surgery. By the spring of two thousand and nine, doctor Heimo was conducting face to face interviews with every paramedic who had responded to the nine to one one call.

36:20 He wanted to know exactly what they saw and precisely how they handled Lena's body, needing to be absolutely certain that their life saving efforts couldn't have caused the deep bruising on Lina's neck. All through this process, Adam and his family were constantly calling the medical Examiner's office demanding answers. Investigators reviewed this aggressive push as suspicious, but Adam and his family insisted that they just wanted to know what had happened. They also were terrified that Lena might have died from a hidden, hereditary heart condition that could one day take their two young children. As the months dragged on with no answers, the calls grew increasingly tense. Finally, in April two thousand and nine, Adam filed a formal complaint against doctor Heima's office with the Medical Examiner's Commission in Tallahassee. By a striking coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence, doctor Hima finally signed off on the official autopsy results the same day that Adam's complaint was filed. Doctor Heima's conclusion left no room for doubt. He ruled the cause of death as mechanical asphyxiation and the manner of death as homicide. In short, someone had physically choked the life out of Lena Kaufman. Surely after the ruling came down, police arrested Adam and charged him with second degree murder.

37:39 According to the officers who handcuffed him, Adam seemed to be in complete, genuine shock. You've got to be kidding me, he said, how could this happen? There's a mistake. What evidence is there? There's no evidence. Seth later described his twin brother's arrest, coming a full eighteen months after Lina's passing, as feeling like a second death in the family. Adam was eventually released on a five hundred thousand dollars bond, but the hearing itself turned bizarre. Because Adam and Seth are identical twins, the judge was concerned about a potential switch. To prevent any confusion, she took an extraordinary precaution in open court. She ordered both brothers to strip off their shirts so bailiffs could identify Adam by a specific tattoo on his upper left arm, before locking the ankle monitor in place. Both men were also forced to hand over their passports with a monitor strapped to his leg. Adam went home to his kids and began a grueling three year wait for his trial to finally begin.

38:41 It's kind of a funny detail about the twins. I can't imagine why you would offer to go to jail or go on trial for your twin brother. But I think they were just worried. You know, twins do have a tendency. Oh, they look exactly alike. There was a show that I watched that had both of them on there, and yeah, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. It reminds me of the case of Lynett Dawson. The brothers were identical too, but I could tell them apart they looked sometimes. Yeah, sometimes you see identical twins, and you're like, yeah, I can see differences, but and you know, maybe if I look closer at Adam and his brother, I would notice differences. But they looked to me completely identically. We did one have tattoos and one did not.

39:23 I don't know if they both had tattoos, one had a different tattoo. Yeah, that's interesting. We'll be back after a break. As we mentioned earlier, immediately after Lena had been pronounced dead, responding officers had taken the standard precaution of wrapping her hands in blue plastic bags to protect any potential evidence, but that protective seal didn't stay on for long. Later that morning, crime scene technician Anna Howell arrived at the hospital, removed the bags, took photos of Lena's hands, and personally clipped her fingernails right there in the room, sealing the clippings away in a box for the crime lab. When the lab results eventually came back, they were completely clear.

40:10 There wasn't a single shred of foreign DNA identified on any of the samples. To put it plainly, there was no trace of Adam Kaufman anywhere on his wife's body. This was definitely a win. For Adam, but behind the scenes, his defense team realized that the police had severely compromised the physical evidence. They would later bring in world renowned forensic pathologists doctor Michael Bodden to review the files, and what he found gave the defense a massive club to hammer investigators with. How is he involved in eighty percent of autopsies? It is insane and he's like two hundred years old, probably. Not quite that old, but he is not a young man.

40:52 The problem was that the police had fundamentally botched standard forensic protocol in three major ways. First, the hospital was the completely wrong venue and a technician was the wrong person for the job. To prevent contamination of victim's hands are supposed to stay securely bagged and untouched until the body is safely inside the controlled environment of the medical examiner's office. Once there, the collection is handled by a trained medical examiner using a specialized forensic kit, not by a tech on a hospital bed. Second, and most crucially, the technician skipped the most important step in the manual scraping. Forensic experts know that before you ever bring a pair of clippers near a victim's fingers, you must use a specialized tool to scrape underneath the intact nails. That scraping is what actually captures trapped skin cells, fibers, or an attacker's DNA. By skipping straight to the clipping, investigators likely crushed, lost, or destroyed the exact trace evidence that they were looking for.

41:58 But the defense's biggest attack turned and a piece of the prosecution's own evidence upside down. The police had documented chipped nail polish on Lena's right index and middle fingers, flagging it as fight back marks from a violent struggle. The defense, however, saw something much more careless. Clipping the nails of a deceased person is notoriously difficult if you don't get a perfectly clean cut and end up tugging the remaining edge off you shear the nail. The defense was prepared to argue that those chips weren't the results of a fight for her life. They were just the direct result of a technician botching the job. It meant that long before the case ever went to trial, the physical evidence was already in question. Did Adam's DNA genuinely never exist under Lena's nails, or had a sloppy police procedure accidentally erased it.

42:51 Oh boy, that's frustrating. It is frustrating, and it's interesting. There's not a shred though. Even if it was handled poorly, you think there would be, you know, a shred. Of evidence there, Yeah, you would think. So it is interesting that the position the defense was put in here because in some ways they must have been glad that the police botched the job because it didn't find any of Adam's DNA, But at the same time they realized, oh, we can use this against them, to basically say, this investigation was flawed from the very beginning. While Adam was sitting in pre trial detention in the spring of two thousand and nine, he was doing what almost every inmate does, calling home, and just like every other jail in the country, the system was recording every single second of those conversations.

43:37 Over a six week stretch, Adam made around one hundred and fifty phone calls, racking up more than one hundred hours of audio. Because of recording warning plays at the start of every call, Adam knew he had an audience. In an apparent attempt to get around it, he spoke in a strange, vague kind of code. In one tape, he literally started spelling out words instead of saying them out loud, words like wn and car to the detectives, listening in the spelling of wine indicated that Adam was trying to choreograph a story with his family to protect the initial excuse he had given to first responders on the morning that Lina died. Back on November seventh, Adam had repeatedly pointed paramedics, police officers, and the er doctor toward the fact that Lena had been out the night before drinking wine with a friend. He used that detail to bolster the theory that she had gotten sick and perhaps choked while throwing up. However, when Chief medical Examiner doctor Bruce Heimer ran Lina's toxicology report, the results came back entirely clean. Despite Adam pushing the wine theory to anyone who would listen on the morning of her death, Lena actually had zero alcohol in her system when she died.

44:53 To the prosecution, Adams spelling out WN on a recorded jail line wasn't an innocent legal discussion. It was a suspect trying to manufacture an alibi that science had already proven false. The state argued that this same guilty state of mind was on display when Adam brought up the primary bedroom layout. In one recording, he told his family, I'm not going to say much about that magazine rack, because if it wasn't the way that we wanted it, it would have been evidence already to prosecutors. This was a killer actively strategizing with his inner circle to control the narrative around the physical layout of the crime scene.

45:34 They argued that a genuinely devastated husband wouldn't be obsessing over crime scene logistics from a jail cell. He would be mourning. Well is eighteen months later, Yeah. And he is basically in a fight for his life, So of course he's going to be looking at these things. But by spelling out words, I don't understand the need to do that, unless, like, if you say why out loud, does it flag something in your cause? I really don't know what his motivation was for spelling out words, Like maybe he thought that, you know, a transcript would automatically pick up some words and maybe if he spelled them out, yeah, that they wouldn't To me, Yeah, but it really it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

46:14 But Adam's defense team would later argue that the prosecution was engaging in desperate speculation. They maintained that Adam's words weren't scandalous or sinister at all. He was just stating a plain, logical fact. The police had already searched the bathroom, photographed the corner, and chosen not to impound the magazine rack. Adam was simply pointing out that if the rack actually showed that he was guilty, the police wouldn't have left it sitting in his house. Furthermore, the defense noted that Adam was only speaking in that vague, cautious shorthand because his own lawyers had strictly ordered him not to discuss the case on a monitored jail phone line. Still, the prosecution believed they had him cornered, especially as he kept circling back to Lina's fire final errand. In one conversation, he told his family, remember, in preparation for the wedding, before she went, she did something at the salon that is a major major part of this. Later, he mentioned that someone had sent him an article about anaphylactic shock from cosmetic treatments, telling his family he had forwarded it to his lawyer because it was quote extremely interesting.

47:24 Before the trial began, both sides fought a series of legal battles over what the jury would and wouldn't be allowed to hear. Both sides knew that the judge's decision on what evidence could actually enter the courtroom would shape the entire trial. The state scored its biggest victory when it came to those jailhouse phone calls. The defense fought to keep them out of the courtroom, arguing that Adam's vague code words would unfairly prejudice the jury and that he was only speaking that way because his lawyers had told him to. But the judge ruled that because inmates are warned that they have zero expectation of privacy, the tapes were fair game. The judge did offer one concession to the defense. If prosecutors played a damning thirty second snippet, the defense had the right to play the full thirty minute conversation to give the jury the proper context. But the defense scored two victories of their own that kept the prosecution from completely destroying Adam's character. First, the state wanted to call a confidential informant who claimed Adam had once choked a college roommate, and they tried to introduce a ten year old arrest record from West Virginia for assault and battery. The judge threw it all out, ruling the allegations were too old, too remote, and too inflammatory to be fair.

48:44 I wasn't able to find out any more about those two allegations. Intriguing. Yeah, it is intriguing, but yeah, I don't have any details about who reported those or what the details of the assault and battery charge were. Second, the defense successfully blocked the state from mentioning that Adam had started dating Farah Kornblum just weeks after his wife's death. At least initially, the judge agreed that letting the jury hear about a new girlfriend so soon after the tragedy would prejudice them too deeply to be relevant. However, during the trial, the judge decided to allow the Farah Kornblum evidence, saying the defense had opened the door to it by repeatedly calling witnesses who talked about how good Adam and Lena's marriage was. With those decisions made, the defense made one final aggressive play to get the entire case dismissed before it could even start. They argued that the police had fundamentally violated Adam's constitutional rights by failing to take the magazine rack into evidence, essentially destroying evidence that could have proven his innocence. But the judge shot down the motion, drawing a hard line between a sloppy failure to collect evidence and the deliberate act of destroying it.

49:59 Because the police had never actually taken the magazines into custody, their loss didn't cross the line into a constitutional violation. Prosecutors finally began to lay out their case against Adam Kaufman in May twenty twelve, almost five years after Lena's death. Their goal was to prove that in the quiet early morning hours of November seventh, two thousand and seven, Adam had manually strangled his wife and then spent the rest of the morning staging the bathroom to make it look like a tragic accident. The bedrock of their case was the medical evidence. Three different forensic pathologists took the stand to testify that Lena had died from mechanical asphyxiation. They pointed to those tiny burst blood vessels in her eyes and lips as classic markers of someone being starved of oxygen while they were still alive, But the evidence that carried the most weight was the deep tissue damage. The state argued that the bleeding buried four layers deep in Lina's neck muscles all the way down to her spine, required significant sustained physical force. These weren't surface scrapes. The state argued that they were the literal markers of a strangulation, and they happened before she died, meaning they couldn't be blamed on Adam's frantic CPR or the paramedics trying to slide a tube down her throat. To dismantle the defense's theory that Lena had simply fainted and fallen onto the magazine rack, causing the injuries to her neck, the state

51:33 called a physicist named doctor James Ipsur. Using computer simulations, Ipster testified that a simple forward fall from a toilet seat couldn't generate anywhere near the velocity needed to crush deep neck muscles. More importantly, he noted a glaring detail if a human being faints and falls forward like a tree, the forehead and nose absorbed the impact, and while Lena did have a couple of abrasions on her chin, she had no injuries to the rest of her face, including her nose, brow, eyebrow ridges, or forehead. Beyond the science, the state hammered away at Adam's behavior, painting him not as a grieving widower but as a man desperately fishing for information. They reminded the jury that his story shifted within hours, telling paramedics he found her slumped over the toilet rim then telling hospitals staff that she was wedged against the magazine rack, and prosecutors highlighted the specific tactical questions Adam asked officers mere minutes after learning his wife was dead, while will the autopsy show, when will the body be released? And how can a toilet bowl choke somebody?

52:41 Then came the jelhouse tapes. Prosecutors argued that an innocent, heartbroken husband would be using those hours of phone calls to mourn his family or check in on his kids. Instead, Adam was caught spelling out words like wn and car, which the state argued was a clear attempt to choreograph alibis for why his wife was over the toilet and why his car engine was warm, and that car engine was just one piece of a bizarre scene. First responders documented. At the house, police found Adam's Mercedes Hood radiating heat inside a closed garage, suggesting that it had been driven in the middle of the night. I just thought of something.

53:21 So a Mercedes obviously a nice car, but it's two thousand and seven. So does it have like, you know, the data of like the GPS in it. I don't know the answer to that. But what I do know is that they lived in a gated community with video cameras everywhere, and there was no cameras that showed the car leaving or coming. Sounds like a red herring. Pin seems like a red herring to me. Inside the bedroom, the mattress was only indented on one side, and Adam's pillows were perfectly plumped. Even Adam's clothes raised eyebrows well he claimed that he had just leapt out of bed in a panic. Arriving officers noted he was fully dressed in designer jeans, closed toe shoes, an expensive watch, and smelled distinctly of cologne. Finally, the state took aim at the defense's image of a perfectly healthy woman who suddenly dropped dead in a happy marriage to prove Lena didn't have a hidden heart condition. They brought up her breast augmentation from the five months earlier, noting her heart monitor didn't get a single beat during the entire surgery, and to shatter the portrait of the grieving husband, they called Barah Kornblum to the stand. She testified that just six weeks after Lena died, Adam approached her at a party, got physically affectionate, took her number, and they quickly started a sexual relationship. Piece by piece, the state argued that the timeline, the physics, and the behavior all pointed to the same conclusion. Adam Kaufman killed his wife. Well be back after a final break.

54:58 When the defense team took the stage, their entire argument came down to one sentence, No crime was committed. What the state was calling a brutal murder scene was actually just the tragic aftermath of a sudden natural death, a medical emergency that police had completely misread because of sloppy investigative work and a desperate desire to close a case. To counter the state's pathologists, the defense brought out their own heavy hitters, forensic experts doctor Michael Boden and doctor John Marraccini, and when they looked under the microscope, they saw a completely different cause of death. Where the state saw strangulation, the defense saw a heart that had been silently failing from the inside out. Bodin and Marrucini discovered scarring and active inflammation in Lena's heart tissue, microscopic damage, they argued the medical examiner's office had completely missed. They concluded she was suffering from undiagnosed myocarditis, likely triggered by that viral infection flagged during her pregnancy, which caused her heart to suddenly short circuit into a fatal arrhythmia, and that pink, frothy fluid that poured from her mouth. Doctor Bodden testified that heavy fluid saturated lungs are the absolute textbook hallmark of congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema. He told the jury point blank, it was a clear sign of a medical collapse, not a strangulation.

56:23 So I'm a little confused about the heart here, because you said that the heart. The two pathologists who initially did it said that it looked healthy, it was a normal weight. It just goes to show you how two scientists can look at the same thing and come to very different conclusions. So frustrating if you're the person that's on trial for murder. Yes, remind us about the viral infection that was flagged during pregnancy. Yeah, I believe it's called cytomegalovirus, and it was something that was detected but not followed up on that she had high levels. It's a common virus that a lot of people have, but the levels that she had it were very high. So they're saying that left permanent damage exactly. Also, kudos to you for saying that word.

57:04 Thank you. In their cross examination, the prosecutor not so subtly reminded the jury that doctor Michael Boden was being paid to render his opinion. Here's a clip, Doctor Voon. It is that your thirty thousand dollars opinion today? Your own our objection. This is improper. My opinion is independent. Most of my opinions are given done pro bono. And if I were testifying for you for the prosecution as I usually do, or for the defense as in this, I didn't ask your honor. I want to answer the question that you accused me of being unethical. No, sir, hi question, Judge, I don't get I'm sorry. Yeah, my opinions are no way affected by whether I'm being paid for my time or who is paying me. That would be the exact same opinion. And I think that, yes, in this instance, I'm getting paid whatever you say, but has nothing to do with my opinion.

58:10 In the matter. Doctor Boden getting a little a little his hackles raised a little bit there, Yeah. For sure, And I just want to say, I'm sorry, doctor Michael Bodden for saying that you're two hundred years old. That wasn't very nice of me. We talk about this all the time with experts in testimony getting paid, and you know, I totally understand what he's saying there is that my opinion is not going to be swayed. I'm a professional, it's not going to be swayed by being paid. But it's always we're hired because you have that opinion exactly. So I always have a hard time with that. I feel like if I was a juror, I would discount a lot of that testimony from expert witness.

58:50 Yeah, because you're always going to be able to find somebody to testify the way that you want to. As for the neck injuries, the defense accounted for them. Inch by inch, Marucini literally mapped out the external scrapes on Lena's neck and shoulder, matching them against three specific points of contact on that metal magazine rack, proving she could have easily caused those marks by collapsing straight onto it, and the bleeding buried deep in her neck muscles. The defense argued that wasn't from a killer's hands, It was from the frantic, brutal reality of the life saving efforts that followed a panicked husband doing amateur CPR, paramedics desperately forcing breathing tubes down a blocked airway, and first responders dragging her limp body across a hard floor just to give themselves room to work. From there, the defense went to work picking apart the state's circumstantial clues one by one.

59:44 That warm Mercedes engine, the garage wasn't air conditioned, and the car was parked inches away from a massive heat emitting refrigerator. Plus there was no GPS data, no toll records, and no gait camera footage showing that the car ever left the neighborhood that morning. And what about the neatly plumped pillows and the unslept in bed. The defense reminded the jury that paramedics had ripped the duvet off the mattress to wrap Lena's body for transport, so how could they say that one side of the bed hadn't been disturbed and Adam's expensive watch and designer jeans. The defense pointed to Captain Joseph Carman, the first paramedic through the door.

1:00:24 He testified under oath that he found Adam upstairs in boxer shorts and a T shirt, drenched in sweat and fluid from doing CPR. Whatever clothes Adam put on after his wife was rushed away didn't change the reality of how he was initially dressed. But the defense saved the most dramatic moment for the police department itself. They exposed that the lead detective on the case, Anthony Angulo, who happened to be a rookie who had never led a homicide investigation in his life, had a secret romantic affair with Anna Howell, the crime scene technician processing the house under his command. In a dramatic moment of the trial, Howell denied the relationship under oath before finally being forced to admit it. Here's a clip from that fiery exchange.

1:01:11 You're married, right, I. Am married and I have three kids. My job. Is important to me and it has not No, this is very important, sir, because this is my life. Here, okay, my testimony here about what I did on the crime scene that day. I have never had any issues the whole entire ten plus years that I've worked for the City of Avas or a. Police I would request the court to admonish the witness to answer the question. You answer the questions the best of your abilities. Simple question, ma'am. Are you married yes? Did you have an affair with Detective Angula?

1:01:51 Yes, and my husband is well aware of it, sir. And I am happily married and I don't have any issues with that any longer. So this was amatic moment in the courtroom. I'm not sure it really matters that much, to be honest. I'm surprised the judge allowed that conversation. Yeah. The judge seemed to be very permissive, permissive with allowing people to do whatever. Every I watched a lot of the court the trial, and anytime anyone would object, she mostly with default to overrule. The defense argued that this relationship completely tanked the integrity of the investigation. They pointed directly to Detective Angulo's baffling decision to leave the bathroom magazine rack behind the defense's own crime scene expert digitally enhanced photos of those discarded magazines and the bathroom wall, showing clear traces of spray, hand transfer and bodily fluids.

1:02:47 Had the police actually impounded that rack instead of leaving it behind, the defense argued the science would have proven that Lena fell exactly where Adams said she did. And if the jury needed any more reason to doubt the state's case, the defense reminded them that Adam filed his formal complaint against Chief Medical Examiner doctor Heima on the exact same day Heima suddenly decided to sign off on the homicide ruling after a year of stalling. They characterized doctor Heima as an embarrassed bureaucrat making a quarter million dollars a year who signed the homicide ruling to put an end to Adam's complaint. Finally, Adam's defense team leaned into the glaring absence of a motive. There was no mounting debt, no secret life insurance policy, no affairs, and zero history of domestic violence. The defense asked the jury a simple question, why would a man who deeply loved his wife, whose family adored her, suddenly destroy his entire world in the middle of the night for absolutely no reason at all. Of all the witnesses to take the stand during the trial, none sat in a more complicated position than Frieda Eismann. Freeda was Lena's mother, but she was testifying for them defense for the jury watching from the box, that fact alone must have spoken volumes. Frieda told the court that when she got the call that Lina had collapsed, she was completely devastated, but she wasn't entirely surprised. She revealed that her daughter had a lifelong

1:04:17 history of health issues, fainting at least ten to twelve times over the years. Lena suffered from blinding headaches, chronic exhaustion, and terrifying episodes where her legs would completely give out, leaving her unable to even care for her kids. In fact, Freda testified that Lena had been visibly ill just two days before she died. She also dropped a bombshell about the police department, telling the jury that she had desperately tried to share this medical history with the lead detective, Anthony Angulo. Freda claimed that she and her family called Angulo twenty five to thirty times, but he never returned a single call. When he finally agreed to sit down with them six months later, she said he was in a rush and completely brushed off the information about Lina's fainting spells. According to Freda, he flat out told her it was a murder case and he wasn't interested when it came to Adam. After having lived with the couple for five months and talking to her daughter three to five times every single day, Frieda repeated that Adam felt like her own son. She swore under oath that he had never once raised his voice, never laid a finger on Lina, and that she believed without a doubt that he had absolutely nothing to do with her daughter's death.

1:05:33 She also went straight after the prosecution's timeline. An officer named Robert Myers had previously testified that he heard a distraught Freda wailing at the hospital, demanding to know what Adam did to her daughter, and that Adam had aggressively snapped back at her. Frieda looked right at the jury and told them that conversation never happened. Her testimony created drama. During the prosecutor's closing arguments, he suggest that Frieda was motivated to support Adam in order to keep access to her grandchildren. Sitting in the gallery, Frieda could not stay silent. Here's a clip. Do you think for a second she would be seeing her grandchildren with her husband in Italy and her son in Denmark.

1:06:17 She's all alone here. This is her tie, the joy of her life. You think she's going to go against him? Are you accusing me any life? All right, I'm not going to have any outbursts from the audience. You can have a seat outside, Thank you, Bernie. I would never ever. Ever accuse her of want members the jury disregard the outbursts from the family member. Are you able to do that? That cannot come into factor in your deliberations. I did not hear the outburst. Can you repeat what she said? She does that? Are you calling me a liar? She was sitting in the gallery, so it wasn't as clear, but yeah, she definitely was. Could not remain silent after that point.

1:07:06 That's bananas to me what they are trying to say about her, Like what mother would would say that you know their son in law was innocent unless you truly felt that way. Yeah, no, I agree with you. The jury went behind closed doors to begin deliberating at ten o'clock in the morning. They would stay in that room for eight hours. During that time, they sent just a single note back to the judge. They wanted to see the microscopic slides of Lena's heart, the ones that the defense expert, doctor John Marraccini, had used to show the cellular inflammation during his testimony, but the judge had to turn them down. Because the slides had only been used as a visual aid on the stand and never formally entered as physical exhibits, they legally couldn't be sent back to the jury room even without the physical slides in hand. That one request made it clear where the jury's heads were at. Out of everything they had been bombarded with over the weeks, the jailhouse tape, the warm Mercedes engine, the timeline, the forensic tech affair, the one thing that they were obsessing over was Lena's heart. Just before sixth that evening, they filed back into the courtroom. The verdict was not guilty.

1:08:13 I was such a good girl and I didn't even look at the script beforehand because I thought you were going to do that thing where you're like, well, what do you think? Well, what were you going to say? If I had asked you. That, I would have come with not guilty as well. The jury foreman, Bernard Jennings, spoke after the trial to explain how they got there. He said they didn't spot a single smoking gun that cleared at him, but rather they found reasonable doubt in how the entire police case fell apart under scrutiny. Jennings explained there was a plethora of circumstances that led to reasonable doubt. There wasn't just one circumstance. He also admitted that after looking at all the evidence, he personally believed the defense's theory that Lena's heart simply gave out and she fell forward into the magazine wreck. Five years after his wife died on their bathroom floor, or Adam Kaufman walked out of the Miami Courthouse a freeman. On June fifth, twenty twelve, a jury decided that the State of Florida hadn't proven that Lena Kaufman was murdered in the eyes of the law. A not guilty verdict doesn't mean the jury knew for a fact that Adam was innocent. It just means the evidence couldn't clear the bar of reasonable doubt, the standard for a guilty verdict in our legal system. At the end of the day, two sets of top tier forensic experts looked at the exact same tissue slides and reached completely opposite conclusions. There were also questions of physical evidence being ignored and allegations of unethical conduct. In these situations, the system is designed to default to a not guilty verdict. Sadly,

1:09:46 when it comes to the question of why Lena Kaufman died, there will always be questions. Was her heart a ticking time bomb that chose that evening to give out, or did her husband get away with murder? We may never know for sure. Rest in peace, Lena. There are a few things I want to discuss before a weird wrap up. So you said you were expecting a not guilty verdict. Do you believe that he is innocent? That's different than saying there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. Yes, I tend to think he is innocent. And why do you believe that? I don't know there just didn't seem to be like a ton of evidence. And I think like the evidence of like the damage to her throat could be explained by the attempted intubations and you know, the medical procedures.

1:10:32 Yeah, it's it is. Hard though, because we don't know what do you think? I also think he is most likely innocent. I definitely agree with the jury's verdict. There wasn't enough to convict him. I do have some question about whether he actually killed her or not. I think a lot of times I think when somebody is strangled, like it leaves like hand marks around their neck. And I never read anything about any kind of hand marks or you know, prints around her neck. And if she was being strangled to such a degree that you know, the damage went through all the layers over her neck, the hyoid bone, which is pretty easily broken being intact, I think is a little bit of evidence there too. Yeah, I think. And there was no history of abuse, right and or even on unkind word.

1:11:16 Really yeah, if there had been like more red flags, then I might have leaned a little more towards potential guilt. I mean, really, the biggest dread flag to me is he started dating six. Weeks after, Although that gives me a huge ick factor. I think that a lot of men just don't like to be alone. And you had two young kids, and yeah, right, no that is not cool. But I feel like we judge people in that a lot, and until you're in that situation, I don't know. Yeah, you better not date six weeks after I die. Do you think the affair between the lead detective and the evidence technician was relevant at all? Now? Yeah, I don't think there. No, I don't think so. Not even if they were having an affair, and I believe she testified that the affair was over by the time of this investigation. They were working together on a professional level, which they had been doing for years. Even if they were having an affair, I'm not sure that would really taint the collection of evidence.

1:12:11 Yeah, I'm super naive though in those situations, But yeah, I wouldn't think that they would collaborate and you know, try to sway the evidence in a certain direction. Right, And the fact that they didn't collect the magazine rack as evidence, I think that was just a mistake. It wasn't like, right, not collecting that isn't going to help their case against him. For murder. So I think it was just an oversight, a mistake, and yeah, they should have. But just to clarify, you said that the magazine rack did have her DNA on it and some of them. No, Oh, I thought you just said that. No, what I said was that the photos that they took of it, the defense enhanced those photos and you could see evidence of like the spray tand that she had like that her face had been lying against it potentially, but they wouldn't. They should have tested it for DNA, but they didn't.

1:13:00 Do you have any follow up what happened to Adam? No, I wasn't able to track down any information about what's happened to him since this trial. He was interviewed in the forty eight Hours episode I watched, which was interesting and actually helpful for me to kind of make up my mind because the one thing they did that I really appreciated is they brought in their own medical expert, yeah, to look at the evidence. And their medical expert came back and said, I am very confident that this was a heart issue that Lena had. Like looking at the slides with her cells, there was definitely signs of an issue there. Interesting, so That made me feel more confident because this person was pretty independent of either the prosecution or the defense.

1:13:43 I had mentioned the long QT syndrome and I dismissed it because she didn't have a history of exhaustion. But then when her mother testified, she did mention the exhaustion, so I am a little curious about that. Yeah, still a bit tragic. I mean, such a young woman with two young kids to die. Yeah, really sad situation. And fortunately, if you believe that Adam's innocent, it was a situation not made worse by putting him in prison and you know, not being there for his children. Yeah. True, But definitely interested to know what all of you think as well. This episode will be published on June twenty second for most people, which is the day after Father's Day, since I don't get a special episode with either of our children, which is my own fault. It's it's not their fault, they're your fault.

1:14:37 Why would it be my fault? I write. You actually put in the work to write that, But it does make me a little bit sad. But I did want to talk about some Father's Day traditions around the world. In Germany, Father's Day is observed on Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter, and is actually a public holiday rather than traditional family time. It is known as Men Day or Gentlemen's Day. Groups of men and bark on hiking or biking tours, pulling wooden wagons filled with beer, wine and hardy food. Kind of a nice tradition. Yeah, men just go out and do whatever they want for that day. Sure, some men go golfing on Father's Day here, that can I think I've done that maybe once or twice way back in the day.

1:15:19 But yeah, when women for Mother's Day, we are expected to spend the day with our kids and husbands. But that's okay. In Mexico, Father's Day is celebrated every year on the third Sunday in June. Thousands of dads and their families flock to a national park for a half marathon. There is even a highly competitive dedicated Father and Sun division. After the athletic achievement is rewarded with huge citywide street parties with live music and plenty of traditional food. Just to be clear, I do not want to run a half marathon on Father's Day. Could if you wanted to. Our son and I did run a five k together once and that was that was a lot of fun. He beat me by a lot, but. It's a pretty good right. In Japan, alongside high end saki or a meal of fresh crab, it is incredibly popular to give dad perfectly grown fresh round or mat fruit, flawless melons or peaches, meticulously raised and presented and elegant silk lined wooden boxes can cost upwards of one hundred dollars or more and are seen as the ultimate sign of thoughtful gratitude.

1:16:22 One hundred dollars for a piece of fruit seems like a lot. Yeah. In Nepal, Father's Day occurs in late August or early September, based on the lunar calendar, referred to as go Karna Osi. Celebration literally translates to the day for looking at father's face. Children perform a beautiful sign of respect where sons touch their heads to their father's feet and daughters touch their heads to their father's hands. It is also deeply focused on honoring ancestry. Those whose fathers have passed away make pilgrimages to sacred temples to perform rituals and offer food in their memory. I don't need to have the kids touching my hands, their feet with their face. But I like the idea of a day for looking at father's face. They could just look at my face and admire it for a while.

1:17:07 That I mean, you have a lovely face. Yes, well that's what we're doing yet. But I hope you have a great Father's Day. I hope all the dads that are listening, both of them, have a wonderful Father's Day too. Well, interesting because I was looking at our audience. We know that our audience is mostly women, but do you know women the percentages of men that listen. To I would guess maybe twelve percent. So eight and a half percent of our listeners are men. But interestingly, if I look at the Just the Facts podcast that we have launched, twelve percent of those listeners are men. So men don't like banter as much. They like to get straight to the point. Or the men who listen to our podcast, yes specifically, Well, yes.

1:17:49 We wish you all a happy Father's Day. We hope you had a happy Father's Day. If it's the day after that you're listening to this, but yeah, we. It's a great if you've got a good one, celebrate that. But you know that's all. I hope you celebrated in yesterday, but you would take a late Father's Day. Yeah, right, absolutely, you can celebrate me any day you'd like. Okay, well we do most days. I'm still waiting for my superpowers to kick in from the oreo. M h yeah, I haven't kicked in, no superpowers, how about you. Well, my tongue turned green, but other than that, it. Was more like a row. Really, because you did you look in the mirror, because you asked me take it out. Now that's pretty much back to normal. It looks like you might be a little dehydrated, a little disappointing. Do you want to tell everyone how you locked me outside this week?

1:18:33 I didn't lock you outside at all. You locked yourself outside, I'm pretty sure is what happened. And you texted I don't know. I think you could have done it covertly when I like. Well, our screen on our when we go out to our back deck, the little lock thing is a little bit touchy. So because you were convinced that someone has locked you out and no, it's just I don't know what happens. It just gets jammed and you really can't open it. But it was funny because I texted you, Hey, can you let me in? The door is locked, and you didn't answer me for like five minutes. And then It's just kind of funny because it didn't even occur to me that I should go down the deck stairs, walk around the house and get in and one of the other many doors that we have inside our house. I was just staying me in.

1:19:19 Well, I saw your text when it came in, but I was actually I was in a meeting and it wasn't just a meeting where I could step away from. I was actually in the middle of talking in the meeting, right. But I was a little concerned because if your wife is like, I can't get in the house, it's an emergency, which I don't think I exactly said. I would think that you would just quickly pardon yourself from a meeting, because you're not a neurosurgeon, right right, and you're not, like, you know, charge of the nuclear code. Talking about a very important thing in our meeting about our website. That is, Oh, I'm sure that couldn't. And I knew that you could if you really wanted to walk around the outside of the house and get in through the garage door. I wasn't mad, really the door wasn't even locked.

1:20:02 But well, in either case, thank goodness you made it back into the house. I would have felt really awful if you. Could have gotten the sunburned. Do you know how pale this this lady is. I know, speaking of how pale I am, you're talking about spray cans and I have never had a spray tn in my whole four hundred years of life. Well, you kind of have a nice you have a nice color to your skin. You have kind of an olive. Yeah, do you want to get a sprayn? No? Not really, No, No, I think I'm okay with being. Pale, but I think you look great so too. Well, I have your self tanner before, but not in a really long time.

1:20:42 I don't recall ever seeing that. One more thing that I wanted to mention, And this is kind of funny. One of my many toxic traits is that our house isn't like immaculate. But if I'm ever, like you know, in that situation where the police have to come in the house I want them to buy, I can say, well, this is a this is a really nicely decorated home. Like before the paramedics saved my life. You know any of that. I want them to look around and well organized. Everything is in a place. Look at this spice cabinet. It's Alpha twice. This woman she's just on point. She's amazing. Let's just save her life. Now. They want it to be in the police report. I'm sure it was. The house was a maculate.

1:21:23 It'll be on dateline actively decorated. Keith Morison will be. The host was a maculate. Everything was in its place. Tina, she really just you know, she was. She could light up a room, but she really knew how to organize. You watch me light up a room now, mister. Pick your priorities. Is it lighting up a room or is it having an immaculate house? Yeah? Well, once again you've wasted a perfectly good hour and twenty minutes listening to Love Mary Kill. We appreciate it. Please rate, review, follow and subscribe. Find us on social media or YouTube or the web, lovemykill dot com, Kill dot com, send us a voicemail, or you can email us at Lovemrykill at gmail dot com.

1:22:06 I sounded like a robot, and if you feel like it, you could support us by joining us on Patreon for only five dollars a month. You got early ad free episodes and a monthly bonus episode. Go to patreon dot com slash love Mary Kill until next time. Don't kill your wife and don't kill your husband.

1:23:09 Fractures of the hyoid bone. I'm gonna go take on the app alright one more time. Fractures of the hyoid point, what's getting worse? Getting worse? Fractures of the I'm necessarily laughing high weid bone, hioid, hioid, higoid aid, Oh boy, Okay, lot more time