palisades cliffs to take in the view. but a short while later jody fell over the edge and questions about what really happened that night began to mount. here s chris jansing. it was the worst night of his life, and now stephen scharf, in the early morning hours of september 21st, 1992, had to tell his 10-year-old son, jonathan, his mother was dead. i said come on, jonathan, we need to take a walk. and i told him. and he immediately burst into tears. and i cried. i cried like a baby. i wasn t ashamed. he remembers his distraught son s reaction but little else from those dark hours. were you sleeping? were you eating? drinking. you were drinking. i lost my wife. my son lost his mom. there was plenty of sympathy among family and friends to be sure. for the man newly widowed with a
memories fade, evidence is lost, witnesses die. but time can also put evidence 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 marshaled 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 blood, no hair, no tissue. then there was the husband himself, cool and collected in
a person falls off the cliff, usually they re going to go south or they re going to go right down. she should have been right down where i grot off the ropes. that s where she should have been. someone else was scratching his head about that night for different reasons. it had to do with stephen s behavior while the search was under way. officer walter sirry was surprised stephen was willing to leave the lookout as rescuers were still looking for jody. did he give any indication i don t want to leave, my wife could still be alive down there? no. none at all. sirry says he couldn t believe how willingly stephen scharf got into his patrol car. i tell you, if it was my wife, girlfriend, whoever, they would have had to pry me away from that scene if i was still at the top of the cliffs. but he willingly got into your patrol car. without a word said. stranger still was how calm the husband seemed. when the officer heard stephen describe how his wife had fallen, he made a men
his wife had died in a freak accident, off a cliff of all 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 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.
woman s body had also hit that ledge or any part of the cliffs. nothing. no blood, no hair, no clothing, no fibers. no skin. by that point officer walter sirry had arrived up at the lookout. since there was nothing the husband could do to help 2349 rescue, siree was told to get him out of the way and drove him back to police headquarters. on the way steven recounted the awful moment when his wife disappeared. we were walking and she said for me to go back to the car and get the blanket and she slipped and i didn t see her anymore. as sirry and the man arrived at the station rescuer chiofi had made it to the base of the cliff, more than 100 feet below the top. he expected to find a wounded woman there, but he didn t. i m saying she s not here. at the first point i said maybe this is a hoax, maybe she never really went off the cliff. he and another rescuer began to walk along the base, pointing