places. how could that happen? and that s exactly what police who were there the night of jody s death wanted to know too. right away i got the feeling there was something definitely wrong. it nagged at rescuer michael chiofi. why was jody s purse on a ledge just feet below where her husband said she d fallen? where is she? she should be here. or part of her should be here. that s the first thing that came to you. either she should be here or the pocketbook should be down with her. and it wasn t fitting. another thought dawned on him. if jody had tumbled, why hadn t she hit the side of the cliffs? there was no blood or hair anywhere on the rocks. and the location of jody s body seemed off to chiofi, way off. she was like 30 to 40 feet away from us to the north. a person falls off the cliff, usually they re going to go south or they re going to go right down.
was dead. terry now sees that cryptic statement in a dreadful light. i was like oh, no, the end of september, and then the light bulb went off immediately. it also went off for marian hilferty. in perhaps the most chilling testimony of the prosecution s case, hilferty told the jury that when she heard her friend was gone she immediately remembered something jody said just weeks earlier. she said that during this conversation i have with him if anything happens to me you ll know who did it. she said, you ll know it was him. the prosecutor s position was clear. a husband with a motive. the perfect setting. the violent intent to kill his wife. or was there another way of look at that couple perched high on those cliffs on a summer night? stephen s new wife says the prosecution has it all wrong.
in a new light. such was the case in the trial of stephen scharf, accused of killing his wife nearly two decades ago. there is no statute of limitations on murder. the prosecutor promised the evidence would tell a story as simple as it was brutal. a husband determined to avoid a costly divorce lured his wife to the edge of a cliff and forced her off it. if he has lied, he is guilty. the state marshalled some familiar facts to tell its story, starting with the crime scene, where the prosecutor said the cliffs showed no sign of an accidental tumble. no debris, no clothing, no blood, no hair, no tissue. and then there was the husband himself. cool and collected in the back of a police car. i didn t see any emotion from him at all, sir. who later confessed, the
or pushed to her death, he said, and likely from another spot entirely on those cliffs. he wasn t the only expert who saw it that way. the head and chest injuries are not consistent with someone that tumbles down the cliff face. reporter: dr. marianne clayton was the bergen county medical examiner who first ruled the circumstances of jody s death could not be determined. now on second look she said the victim s wounds, or lack of them, told her something different, something vital. if jody had tumbled innocently down the palisades, she would have had broken bones everywhere. she did not. there were no visible injuries on the back of mrs. scharf s body. but why would stephen have killed his wife? the biggest reason, the prosecutor argued, was that stephen did not want a divorce.
later. my client never said this wasn t an accident. and as for that hammer police thought was a weapon the hammer was examined by the forensic experts. there was nothing found on that hammer. and the defense attorney pressed the medical examiner on her flip-flop. undetermined manner of death in 93, now it was a homicide? really? are you trying to say that you re learning from your mistakes on this case? you may call them mistakes, sir. i did the best i could in 1992 documenting what i had observed with mrs. scharf. the medical examiner was helpful to the defense in one critical way, though. she determined that jody had been drunk the night she fell off the cliffs. jody had a blood alcohol level of .12. that was over the legal limit. would be equivalent to approximately four average sized