Hollywood, California. The factory town that churns out American dreams. She didn’t want to live in the real world. She wanted to live in a fantasy world where everyone bowed to her feet. Mary Ellen’s dream becomes her husband’s nightmare. She was just a femme fatale that nobody ever wants to run into in their life.
But Bob did and he paid the price. It’s a diabolical plot straight out of the movies. With some truly unhappy endings. My name is Steve Schirripa. I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I’ve seen good people turn bad and bad people turn worse. Some took contracts to carry out a hit. Some were victims of a hit.
To hitman, life and death are just part of the business. It’s nothing personal. It’s early December 1988. A two-bit drug dealer named Jimmy Bernstein is getting ready to do what hitmen call a piece of work. Bernstein’s target is Bob Samuels. Samuels is a nice guy who’s made a solid career working on Hollywood production crews.
But he never figured on a starring role in the bizarre story of his own demise. The problem in Hollywood is separating fantasy from reality. Bob Samuels works on fantasies, but he lives in the real world. As an assistant cameraman, Bob works behind the scenes. The past few weeks he’s been putting in long hours on the movie Lethal Weapon 2.
It’s an irony he won’t live to appreciate. Would-be hitman Jimmy Bernstein is a loser who’s never killed anybody. He’s been hired for the job by Bob’s wife, Mary Ellen. She’s been dreaming of a life without Bob. Mary Ellen Samuels was a truly evil woman. She used everybody that came into her life and she did it for financial gain.
How does a beautiful Hollywood wife turn from trophy to husband-killing harpy? Well, you know how they say beauty is only skin deep? Mary Ellen Samuels is who they’re talking about. To understand why a contract has been put on Bob’s life, I need to give you a little of what we call in the business backstory.
Bob Samuels grew up 20 miles and a world away from the Sunset Strip in Santa Ana, California. Well, Santa Ana at the time was very rural and we had bean fields, orange groves. You could play in the streets and it was almost like the country in Santa Ana at that time. Bob has dreams and talent. He likes photography.
Old friend Helen Potts and old flame Sherry Toomey always knew he’d make it. Bob and I would go to the movies a lot. He always liked to see films and to see how it was, you know, you read the credits and all. He always used to tell me, “I’m going to do that someday.” He used to tell me all the time that looking through a camera always gave him a second look at life.
Bob gets an eyeful of that second look. He becomes an assistant cameraman on big features. The kind that have the budgets to hire the best guys in town. 14, 4, take 11. Bob isn’t the kind of guy to let it go to his head. Hitting the big time was something to share. Bob would call me quite often when he was filming out of the state.
I remember one night they were filming a a movie with Kurt Russell and Kelly McGillis and Goldie Hawn was there, too. And he passed the phone around and we all talked. Movie stars liked to hang around with Bob because he’s such a nice guy. Now, working behind the scenes isn’t glamorous.
Sure, you meet a lot of big stars, but the work’s hard, the hours are long, and nobody’s inviting you onto the red carpet. I mean, roll it up, maybe. Pose on it? Uh, not so much. Bob is doing great professionally, but working crazy hours and traveling for months on end can take a heavy toll on your love life. The serious live-in relationship Bob has with Sherry Toomey in the late ’70s falls apart.
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I didn’t really enjoy um the lifestyle. He was on location quite a bit. And I always said, “I’m not going to marry somebody who’s not going to be around.” It looks like Bob will never find the right woman to settle down with and start a family. But before the decade is out, he meets the girl of his dreams. Well, he actually has known her since they were kids.
But back in high school, dreaming about a beauty like Mary Ellen Gernik was about as close to her as a guy like Bob Samuels was ever going to get. Looking at her could stop your heart. As it turns out, it will stop his. Too bad he can’t see past that skin-deep beauty. She was a bright um talented young child.
She was, you know, the star of the plays in school. She’s very popular high school um homecoming queen, things like that. When she leaves Santa Ana High, Mary Ellen was headed for stardom. She gets about as far as her sock drawer. Well, a little better than that. Those shapely gams of hers do their turn in the dazzling lights. Showing up in quite a few stocking ads.
As for her acting talent, well, let’s just say Mary Ellen’s legs never carry her to Hollywood. Instead, she gets married, has a kid, gets divorced, and a decade after high school, she’s back in Santa Ana. A single mom with a daughter, Nicole. And there she runs into Bob Samuels. But now, nerdy old Bob has the glow of Hollywood about him.
The formerly unattainable homecoming queen is his for the asking. Unfortunately for him, he does. They seemed very happy. She had She had a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of spunk. She was a character. Real outgoing. Before you could say action, Mary Ellen is starring in her own production of Wedding Album 2.
She and Bob tie the knot in 1980. He had a home that he lived in when he married her. He made it their home. Nicole was already in the picture. He adopted her. He sent her to private Catholic schools. He was just a very caring, loving, hard-working family man. So, Bob gets his dream, a sexy wife, an instant family, and Mary Ellen gets her fantasy.
An entree into Tinseltown’s star-studded social scene. But you know the problem with dreams? You wake up. Happens every time. I think she probably believed she would have this glamorous lifestyle and when she realized that they lived in a home in the San Fernando Valley and she he got up and he went to work and it was just your normal average everyday life, uh she got a little bit bored.
The parties are occasional. The work is constant. Mary Ellen has a hard time waking up and smelling the cappuccino. She isn’t the center of the celebrity universe. She’s a nobody. And gazing across the pillow at Bob Samuels doesn’t sweeten that bitter pill. Mary Ellen was I don’t know if she was in love as Bob was with her.
She was very flirtatious. Luckily, she still has some assets and she works them. I know Bob used to get upset with her all the time about the kind of clothes that she would wear because they were very revealing. Mary Ellen was just not conservative. So, what happens when your visions of heaven crash to earth? You choose.
Reconcile or run. Mary Ellen goes running, all right. Running up bills. One evening he called me and he said, “Sherry, Mary Ellen spent $22,000 in one month and I have nothing to show for it.” And so I think um at that time is when he realized there may be a problem. She also finds a crowd who treats her like a star.
But they aren’t exactly A-listers, more like degenerates. And she’s very close with her fans. She’d have herself a boyfriend, you know, with different ones and she was running with a real unsavory bunch of people. Bob was aware that Mary Ellen cheated on him. They broke up several times, but then Mary Ellen would always lure him back again.
When people told him, you know, maybe should have second thoughts, but he was determined to stay married. He wasn’t the type of person to fail at anything. So, Bob had a plan to save his marriage. He bought Mary Ellen a sandwich shop. Now, that sandwich shop, it’s kind of the whole story on a bun. The guy’s thinking, “I know what the little woman needs.
Something to do, you know, a little mad money.” But that’s not her dream. It’s her nightmare. Slinging subs in the San Fernando Valley? Oy! And she’s thinking, “Boy, did I hitch my wagon to a dog. This boy’s got to go. For all of its glamour, Hollywood is a dog-eat-dog town. If you don’t make it as a top dog, you become a marginal mutt like Jimmy Bernstein.
A shifty, low-rent opportunist. Jimmy carries a business card that reads, James V. Bernstein, specialist. But his only specialty is posing as a player. Thanks to Mary Ellen Samuels, he’s a player tonight. And the game is murder. It took a couple of years for Bob Samuels to understand that he had a bit of a fantasy-reality problem of his own.
He wooed and won the hottest babe in Santa Ana, but she wasn’t in reality the woman he fantasized about. He loved Mary Ellen very much. But um who he met in high school obviously wasn’t who he married. And I don’t think she became real until he was married probably about 4 years. The whole purpose I think was of marrying Bob was monetary because I don’t think she had very much growing up.
And so all of a sudden she was, you know, into this great life and and it is a good life. She partied all the time. Other than Bob Samuels, who was a normal person, Mary Ellen didn’t associate with anybody who had a steady job, um who who had family values. Most of the people that she associated with either were selling drugs or were using drugs.
And the sandwich shop that’s supposed to give her a pastime and an income, it doesn’t quite pan out. Mary Ellen doesn’t roll up her sleeves, but she does expose her claws. The place becomes a combination coke den and piggy bank. When he’d go away on location, she would always get robbed. He told me that he got her a safe and he put it in the back room and he told her, “Don’t leave that much money in the drawer.
Take it back and put it in the safe.” And he’d come home from location again, all her money was stolen again, been robbed again. But that’s not what was happening. And she was involved with drug sales and using drugs herself. Mary Ellen was into a lot of cocaine and that’s where all the money went. Poor Bob tried everything.
He begged, he pleaded, he read books about how to keep a marriage together. Mary Ellen had no time for it. For one thing, she was busy bringing daughter Nicole over to the dark side. By the time she’s hit her teens, Nicole has taken a lead role in her mother’s unhinged trauma. Nicole Samuels, she was a 16-year-old girl, very attractive young lady.
She had a wonderful life. And yet she seemed to be a good student for Mary Ellen Samuels. She grew up in this school of manipulation. She also learned very early on to dress provocatively and go bar hopping. Mary Ellen and Nicole were like twins. They like to do everything together. I remember one time there was a wedding and they came and it was a nice, pretty afternoon wedding and Nicole and Mary Ellen walked in there with matching twin leather jumpsuits.
Skin tight. I mean, they looked like Catwoman. Mary Ellen doesn’t just suck in her own daughter, she brings along all Nicole’s friends. This vixen is den mother to a whole gang of party kids, including Selina Kroll. Nicole was my best friend, my confidant. We talked about a lot of things. We used to go to clubs with Mary Ellen.
I was only 16 at the time and although we were underage, we still got in, we still drank, we did everything that a 21-year-old would would do. We used to go to Beverly Hills, anywhere in LA, you know, the sky’s the limit cuz we didn’t pay for anything. And we weren’t expected to. Mary Ellen for the most part hung out with people who were much younger than her.
She actually spent quite a bit of time with her daughter Nicole’s friends. She was just overboard at all times. I mean, even down to her clothing. She was just, you know, always hanging out and just, you know, the shortest dress she could put on and the highest heels she could possibly wear. She was the cool mom. She was, you know, if you want to have a good time, go hang out with Mary Ellen and Nicole.
And who’s stuck with the bill for this night crawling? You guessed it, Bob. But what hurts more than the bar tabs is financing his adopted daughter Nicole’s transformation into a mini version of her mother. Let’s not forget Bob has raised and cherished Nicole as his own. Bob was so unhappy, you know, with the situation cuz Mary Ellen was not a very good mother and not directing her in the right way that she should have done.
Finally, in 1986, Bob admits to himself that he and Mary Ellen are doomed. After 6 years of tumultuous matrimony, Mary Ellen moves into a condo and takes Nicole with her. Bob is devastated. She does fine. And why not? The bills still go to his house. So even after they separated, Bob supported Mary Ellen and her lifestyle.
I mean, this broad had some expensive tastes. Bob’s heart is breaking and his wallet keeps groaning. Mary Ellen continues to shower his cash on her pleasures. Clothes, jewelry, vacations, cocaine, you get the picture. If you don’t, check out her license plate. The license plate was a custom one and it said nasty vixen.
Which was um uh pretty prophetic. Things go on like this for a couple of years. Bob clings to the fantasy that his dream girl will someday return. But Mary Ellen has no desire to become someone she never really was. So, Christmas 1988 was not the most wonderful time of the year for Bob Samuels.
Bob and Mary Ellen had been separated for 2 years. So, he’s heading into another Christmas alone in an empty house. Could it get any more depressing? Turns out, it certainly could. By 1988, something has changed. Maybe turning 40 that fall makes Bob decide to move on with his life. Whatever his epiphany, he gets serious about a divorce. Mary Ellen does the math and quickly concludes that for her, divorce would be a disaster.
Widowhood, on the other hand, now that could work. One of Hollywood’s greatest, Mae West, had that line. Is that a gun in your pocket or you just happy to see me? Mary Ellen Samuels was not unfamiliar with flirtatious repartee, but this time she really was looking for a guy with a gun in his pocket. By the fall of 1988 with divorce looming, Mary Ellen Samuels is getting desperate.
For 2 years she’s been trolling amongst LA’s bottom feeders for someone she can beguile into bumping off Bob so she could get all he owns. She spent 2 years pretty much talking to everybody that she met in those circles about how much she hated her husband and how much um she wanted to have him killed.
But it’s kind of like her acting career. No one takes her seriously. Maybe it’s that her plots seem straight out of Tom and Jerry cartoons. She talked a lot about a lot of things. And it wasn’t this one scenario, it was a hundred different scenarios. Let’s drop something on his head. Let’s have the garage door opener come down on top of him.
She told so many people that it was kind of comical. If you’re looking to have someone killed, discretion might seem like a good idea. It’s unbelievable that nobody calls the cops. Gives you an idea of the crowd Mary Ellen’s running with. There were a couple of people who appeared to take her up on it, at least two or three occasions where people um agreed to have Bob killed or to kill Bob, um only to take the money and run.
I was still young at the time and naive. You don’t really think that people are going to do something like that. Maybe old Mary Ellen was just getting a little long in the tooth to inspire homicide, even for money. But Nicole, now she was a babe. They are so close, so tight, that mommy dearest enlist her darling daughter into helping with her little problem.
She she used her 16-year-old daughter to look for a hit man. She drew her 16-year-old daughter into this evil plot. Nicole and I were at school one day and she said, “I need to get a gun.” People don’t usually carry those things around with them or have them in their locker. Nicole became like her mom.
She really did um in several aspects because her mom molded her to be a little Mary Ellen. It was all about appearance and what this guy could give you. And that was the bottom line. Even baiting her honey trap with Nicole isn’t an instant success. But Mary Ellen has a predator’s eye for picking out the vulnerable or weak-willed.
Jimmy Burnstein is just the prey she’s been hunting for. James Burnstein was very tall, a heavy-set guy, a loner. I don’t think he had any friends. He was a drug dealer and not typical person you would see Nicole with. Jimmy is over the moon. Nicole is way out of his league. He can’t believe his good luck.
She needed something from James Burnstein and that’s why she was with him. Jimmy Burnstein even asked her to marry him. So did some other guy. To most girls that would be a dilemma. To Mary Ellen’s daughter it was more of a brain teaser. Which fiance went with which ring? Nicole had two engagement rings and she would switch them back and forth depending on who she was seeing or not seeing.
It was pretty much a yo-yo game. Jimmy doesn’t know he’s one of a pair of potential grooms. He’s only engaged to one girl and he loves her. So, Jimmy’s in love and now Mary Ellen spins him a tale. She tells him that Bob Samuels is an evil abusive man who’s been raping his beloved Nicole since she was a kid. Mary Ellen started talking about how he used to abuse her and and how, you know, she needed to take care of it because she couldn’t live like this anymore.
She had, I think, a black eye and maybe some bruising around her neck or her shoulder and she told the neighbors that Bob had beaten her up and it turned out that she just had plastic surgery and she was just using this plastic surgery and the natural bruising to to perpetrate this myth. So, um there was never any evidence.
Jimmy swallows it hook, line, and the sinker. Nicole pretended to be engaged to Jim Burnstein while she was engaged to somebody else to draw him into this plot so that he would feel so outraged at what they claimed was happening to them that he’d go out and have Bob killed. They wanted him to do it with sort of a sense of righteousness like, you know, riding their white horse into the sunset trying to save these damsels in distress.
That was part of their manipulative uh brilliance. So, Jimmy’s being played for a fool, but it’s hard not to empathize with the guy. He really thinks the girl he loves is being abused by an evil evil man. I mean, what would you do? Would you cross the line? Mary Ellen had herself a hitman. Robert Samuels was not an abusive husband, although that’s certainly is what Mary Ellen and Nicole wanted the world to believe.
So, just as the 1988 holiday season is getting up to speed, Jimmy Burnstein is fired up with a misplaced desire to protect his beloved. Perfect timing for Mary Ellen, who seems to have gotten wind of Bob Samuels’ new resolve to cut her loose. She even feeds Jimmy cash to keep his anger stoked and his mission clear.
A whopping 1,500 bucks. As for Bob, he sees Mary Ellen and Nicole from time to time. Too bad that Spider-Man movie is stuck in development. If he was working on that one, he might know what his spidey senses are picking up. We had talked and um he had told me, he said, “I think there’s something going on.
” You know, he goes, “I don’t know what it is.” He told me that he had had a great life and that he had done everything that he wanted to do in life. And I said, “Well, well, what are you saying?” Cuz it it really surprised me by the way he was talking. He had a premonition. Bob Samuels’ marriage is about to end. That much is certain.
He was telling me that it was almost final. It was he was going through with it this time and he was going going to finish this divorce. Mary Ellen’s plan is to make sure what ends it is that till death do us part thing. And love-struck Jimmy Burnstein is her unwitting tool. When you watch a movie, you don’t think about what goes into making it.
Bob Samuels was one of those guys who made sure everything was perfect so that when the lights go down, we’re transported into a story that seems real. In her own way, Mary Ellen was a great actress. In the dim lights of those sleazy San Fernando bars, she nailed the part of the abused and protective mother.
And that act tricked a guy who got another guy who got a gun and 2 days later, showtime. It’s the night of December 7th, 1988. Bob gets back from work. He has a shower. Somebody gets in the house somehow. Bob has bought a tanning bed. Hey, you got to look your best when you’re working show biz.
The cops think he might have been headed to it. Who knows? Wherever Bob was going, he never gets there. He is jumped in his front hallway, clubbed, hurt bad, but still alive. A pillow is put over his head. He was 40 years and 2 months old. We don’t know for sure who was here the night Bob got killed, but we know enough. It could have been just Jimmy Burnstein, Nicole’s fiance, or it could have been a guy named Mike Silva, Burnstein’s pal.
Or it could have been both of those guys. But no matter how you slice it, poor Bob Samuels was dead and the grieving widow knew it. Hi Bob, it’s Mary Ellen. Listen, I’d like to leave the dog with you for a while this Friday. Nicole and I have something to do. Could you call and let me know if that’s all right? Hi Bobby, it’s me.
Haven’t heard back from you about Friday. I guess you’re busy working. But could you give me a tingle? Are you there, Bob? Why aren’t you picking up? Maybe I’ll just bring the dog over anyway. So, that was part two of Mary Ellen’s plan. She leaves Bob a bunch of messages even though she already knows he’s dead. That will prove she wasn’t involved, right? I mean, who leaves messages for a dead guy? She let him lie there dead in the hallway for 2 days leaving message after message to his corpse.
Then finally, Mary Ellen Nicole turn up at the house just like the messages said. Burnstein has been told to make the hit look like a burglary gone wrong, but he flubs it. So, what do Bob’s wife and daughter do? If you want something done right, you do it yourself. They pull out drawers, they topple furniture.
They even take a crowbar to the door frame until it looked like, well, a fake burglary. Nicole called me um the day after um it happened. It’s done. We went to the house. He was there. It didn’t look messed up enough, so we messed it up some more. Yeah, I didn’t want to know that. I didn’t think it was going to happen in the first place and then to be put in that situation, I just didn’t know what to do at all.
Satisfied with her handywork, Mary Ellen finally calls 911. Detective George Daily gets the case. Mary Ellen called 911 and said that she had gone over to her husband’s house uh having not been able to contact him by phone and when she got there, found him lying deceased in the hallway. And as such, she, like all other family members, are uh start out as persons of interest and once they’re ruled out, uh we go on to you know, other things.
So, uh we took her story for what it was and we worked our way through everything else from there. But right from the get-go, things looked screwy. It was amateurish. You could tell just that a burglary hadn’t occurred, that this scenario was set up. The flaw in Mary Ellen’s plan? She forgot to take anything valuable.
Detectives pick up on little details like that. That’s why they call them detectives. Down at the cop shop, Mary Ellen is still playing her widow to young C. She throws in a big helping of [ __ ] [ __ ] because it’s always worked for her. But hey, this is a tough crowd. Well, Mary Ellen was a deceptive kind of person.
Uh you could tell that right away. Here we’re involved in a murder investigation and she’s flirting and uh trying to be cute. She tried to look cat-like all the time. I guess she felt that people would they be drawn to her. Everything about her just seemed to be wrong. The cops didn’t buy her act. Like I said, tough crowd.
They knew Mary Ellen had to be involved. But life isn’t a movie. Making a case in the real world involves more than seeing through an act. For starters, you need some evidence. And unfortunately, there isn’t any to be had. Mary Ellen walks off scot-free. She gets to keep playing the widow. But the reviews of her performance, especially at Bob’s funeral, are not altogether positive.
Mary Ellen told me they went on quite a shopping trip. They they had to have new dresses for the funeral and Mary Ellen came with a real tight backless black black dress on. I mean, it was uh like a cocktail dress. And she was actually like enjoying herself. Oh, hi. Hi. She was running around like it was a some kind of a showing.
Like a party instead of a time to mourn. Nicole’s supporting role is also deemed to be lacking a certain authenticity. Oh, her daughter was the same way. I mean, they were all glamorized, you know? I looked at Sherry and I said, “Sherry, this is not a woman in mourning. I smell a rat.” We got the tombstone. Mary Ellen didn’t pick it out.
His sister did. She never even knew what it said. Now, with Bob 6 ft under, Mary Ellen’s lifestyle dramatically improved. And why not? She inherited everything he worked his entire life for. On top of that, she had a cool quarter million from Bob’s life insurance company. Oh, yeah, they paid. They had to.
Nobody was charged. Mary Ellen even moved back into Bob’s house. The crime scene in the house was in the hallway. And instead of cleaning the carpets, they threw a throw rug over it to hide it and just went as normal. Like nothing happened. With the housekeeping taken care of, Mary Ellen got to the real business of coping with her husband’s unsolved murder.
All that new cash proved helpful. She found solace in a Porsche. She mourned in the dressing rooms of a hundred boutiques. And she wiped her tears on lacy little peekaboos she picked up at Hollywood’s trashy lingerie. In total, Mary Ellen Samuels got the equivalent of about $500,000. She uh threw herself a very elaborate birthday party, hired limousines, bought a condominium in Cancun, bought fur coats.
Um she was leading the life that I suspect she thought she deserved. But not all of the plays in Mary Ellen’s drama have her panache. Remember Jimmy Bernstein, Nicole’s fiance? You know, Bob’s killer? Jimmy is having a hard time. He figures out he’s being played for a chump. Getting dumped by the new heiress is salt in the wound.
He sees the flamboyant lifestyle that Mary Ellen Samuels is living and he’s not a part of it. So, whether it’s pangs of guilt that caused him to decide that he maybe he should go to the police or jealousy, who knows? But he was definitely suggesting to people around him that he’d out it and he was going to go to the police.
It looked like Jimmy Bernstein was going to be the showstopper who brought down the curtain on Mary Ellen and the fantasy life she was now living for real. But Mary Ellen had an interesting way of dealing with problematic relationships. And Jimmy Bernstein was now in her crosshairs. If I was Jimmy, I’d be looking over my shoulder.
Mary Ellen Samuels had few choices. I suppose she could have tried to seduce him as she had others, but how long would that last? And it was it was sort of natural for somebody like Mary Ellen. She’d gotten away with it once before. Why not just get rid of him? So, how do you rid yourself of a used-up patsy? Hit those dark and dingy bars, tone over those rocks, and find another.
Mary Ellen Samuels was very good at identifying people who were at a point in their lives where they were easily manipulated. Either young vulnerable people, people who um had issues or problems with drugs. Uh Paul Gall was a guy who, because of his economic circumstances, almost didn’t have a chance against Mary Ellen.
They bribed him with money and he accepted because uh he didn’t have any money. She knew Gall had lost a brother to drugs. Jimmy was a dealer. Dealers deserve to die. Paul could see her point. To seal the deal with her latest assassin, Mary Ellen sucked in another needy stooge, Gall’s girlfriend, Ann Hamley.
She was the woman who had her own issues, probably didn’t have a lot of confidence in herself. Didn’t have much going on in her life and here comes Mary Ellen Samuels, this wonderful, exciting, flamboyant lady. And apparently owed some money to Mary Ellen and she recruited Paul Gall and Daryl Ray Edwards to do this thing on James Bernstein.
And I guess they agreed to do it to wipe out Ann Hamley’s debt. Paul Gall was the one who orchestrated the plan. He was living with the friend Ann Hamley. Together they decided to let Jim Bernstein move in with them so that they could keep close track of him until they were ready to execute their plan. So, Mary Ellen’s acting career is finally taking off.
I mean, how many people do you know who’ve roped in not one, not two, but up to four people to kill on her command? Jimmy and Mike for Bob. Now, Paul and Daryl for Jimmy. Very impressive. Incredible. Take that, Melrose Street. For most women, life as a widow starts out pretty rough. Sometimes people need to get away, clear their heads, take a break from all that grief.
Sometimes they need to head to Cancun with a sack full of cash and indulge in a little fashion shoot with their new squeeze. This year’s color? Green. As in greenbacks. Lots of them. The two of them were partying in their room and somebody got the brilliant idea that it would be fun to take pictures of her covered in this money.
Sometimes you need to get away to find solace and inner peace. And sometimes you need to get away to establish an alibi because you’ve hired a guy to kill the man you tricked into murdering your husband. Hey, it happens. Mary Ellen Samuels has blown through most of the half million she inherited since husband Bob was put in his grave 6 months ago.
Back in LA, Jimmy Bernstein’s about to pay the price for falling into Mary Ellen’s web. The guy delivering the invoice will be Paul Gall and his chum Daryl. Paul’s an amateur, just like Jimmy was. So, he steadies his nerve with some brewskis. In fact, he could barely stand. How they managed to get into the car, thoughtfully lent by Mary Ellen, is a mystery.
Jimmy thinks he’s going along to help them steal some drugs. The plan is to strangle Jimmy in the car. Turns out, Bernstein doesn’t want to die. Unlike Bob Samuels, he has a split second to run for his life. But unfortunately, he doesn’t run fast enough. Paul took him, he punched him in the esophagus a whole bunch of times so that he would not be able to breathe.
It takes about 3 to 5 minutes of sustained pressure on somebody’s throat in order to strangle them. They did that. Threw his body over a ravine, took all of his identification and tossed that. And then they went back to Ann’s house and partied. It took a month to find Jimmy in that ravine. ID’ing him took a while, too.
But they did. When investigators went to his house, they found some paperwork that linked him to Bob Samuels’ killing. They also discover a $25,000 life insurance policy Jimmy had taken out the day after Bob was whacked. Naming his soon-to-be ex-fiancée Nicole as his sole beneficiary. Poor Jimmy was another deluded sap with a fantasy-reality disconnect.
Detective Daley calls Mary Ellen in for another heart-to-heart. To break the ice, he asks about Bob’s murder. This is where it happened, in the bar. Somebody walked right up to you and you I was sitting at the bar, some guy came over, he bought me a drink, went general conversation. I was madder than hell at Bob at this particular time.
made you make a comment? Did you make a comment or something that elicited this guy to say that he would be glad to help kill your husband? What kind of a comment would elicit some kind of a thing like that from a stranger in a bar? You’d be surprised at conversations that happen in a bar. But the main piece of evidence they find is Ann Hambley, Paul Gall’s housemate. I don’t know.
We had drinks. She knows the whole story and it pours out of her. What did you hear? Being party to a homicide wasn’t sitting too well with Ann, who also feared she might know too much for Mary Ellen’s comfort. She had that right. Mary Ellen was beginning to plot the murder of Ann Hambley for for much the same reason.
She really knew too much. So, she gave up Paul. When Paul discovered that shutting up Jimmy Bernstein was enough to put him in the gas chamber, Paul traded Mary Ellen’s neck for his own. This this is what doesn’t make sense. If I supposedly, okay, was going to have this done, you think for a minute I would open my mouth to a lot of people? Does that make any sense to you? If I ever was going to do something You know what’s funny about it? It doesn’t make any sense to me because I think if I was planning to have my husband done away
with, I don’t think I’d mention it to anybody. I’ve said I hate you and things like that, but I’ve never ever in my life wanted the man dead. She was manipulating. She was conniving. And we had it in our mind that this was all a big act. You’re a principal accessory to murder. Oh, yeah. See? Well, I’m not.
And all of these things are going to get put together and and Mary Ellen, you’re going to you’re going to have to pay the price of this thing. Well, I’m telling you something right now. This is just bull. I have never ever Who else can we look to, Mary Ellen? I put my handcuffs on her and we brought her to jail. That was rewarding, I tell you.
That’s a buy most people never ever attain in their whole life. She just never envisioned that this was ever going to happen to her. That she just thought she was home free. But yeah, the wheels of justice roll slowly, but they will roll over you at times. At her trial, Mary Ellen tries to revive her desperate abused wife act.
The jury finds it unconvincing. She was trying so hard to be this, you know, caring, loving, endearing personality. I was there every day of trial. And they tried to make her out to be a Girl Scout cookie mom with a midlife crisis. One of the things that she did was to try to turn things around on the police. And she testified on the stand that the only reason that the police zeroed in on her and arrested her to begin with was that they wanted to ask her out on a date and she refused.
That performance tanks, too, especially compared to the sordid tale the cops unfold. They have the check she’d written to her hitman. She tried her best to be regal and to be, you know, prim and proper and all that. But as the trial went on, I think she was totally disrobed. I mean, you know, she she really was shown to be what she was, an avaricious, greedy woman.
They wowed the court with Mary Ellen’s Cancun road show. Mary Ellen lying on a bed, nude, covered in approximately $20,000 in $20 bills. It just showed right through this photograph exactly what this woman was made of. That happy snap was the most effective modeling Mary Ellen ever did. She makes headlines and she earns the moniker the green widow.
She was just a femme fatale that nobody ever wants to run into in their life. But Bob did and it he paid the price. That shot even gets her into California’s most exclusive club, Death Row. At long last, Mary Ellen is going to socialize with people who can appreciate her talents. The defense at that time brought in Mary Ellen Samuels’ elderly parents and they were elderly and they were ill and they were very feeble and it was very heart-wrenching for anybody sitting in the courtroom to watch these elderly people that basically begging the jury
to spare the life of their daughter. And they talked about how she had everything, was given everything as a child. They didn’t know anything about the condo in Cancun. They didn’t know anything about her Porsche. They were living on a fixed income, not too far, about 2 hours away from Mary Ellen during that year when she’s out there leading this lifestyle.
She went once to visit her elderly, fragile parents. So, to me that was if you didn’t know before, you knew at that point who Mary Ellen Samuels was. She could have had a good life the way it was, but she chose not to. She chose the other path. She didn’t want to live in the real world. She wanted to live in the fantasy world where everyone bowed to her feet.
Can you imagine going out to dinner talking about how you’re going to kill your your husband? And then to actually have somebody do it for 1,500 bucks? I was very angry with her. I mean, he would have paid her any amount of money she wanted. He would have done anything to keep Mary Ellen. And really, I’m surprised she didn’t know that.
Paul Gall takes the stand against Mary Ellen. He does his time and is now out on parole. His accomplice, Daryl, is still rotting away in prison. As for Nicole, well, the DA decided not to charge her. She changed her name and moved away. She now has grown-up children of her own and says she doesn’t want to talk about the past.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s not. I mean, the way the DA figured it, Nicole was just a kid with an evil mother. Me? I’m not so sure. Bob Samuels is buried in his hometown, Santa Ana, California. He shouldn’t be there. He should be alive. He was a good, hard-working guy who didn’t deserve to be the target of a homicidal plot.
And there’s nothing clever to say about that. It’s just a dirty, rotten shame. All he did was love her. And consequently, it’s what got him killed. Poor guy. And Mary Ellen? Well, she did get what she always wanted, the lead role in a great piece of theater. The end isn’t quite what she had in the script, but hey, that’s Hollywood for you.
Somebody’s always messing up your masterpiece.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
