was very afraid of it. reporter: yet was stephen violent enough to kill his wife? an unlikely but powerful witness was about to testify against stephen scharf. i m here for my mother. reporter: his own son took the stand against him, now a businessman, jonathan scharf painted his father as an angry, violent man who terrorized his mother. did you see that abuse? i did. reporter: jonathan scharf said he realized his father had likely killed his mother only after that arrest in 2008. this videotaped interview shows him recalling the dark past for the first time to police. she got coffee thrown at her by him. reporter: now in court, he had even more to tell about his childhood. like the afternoon he sat cowering in the backseat of a car watching his mother suffer. my mom was driving and my dad
there wasn t enough evidence for me. that s what it was. reporter: others were thinking guilty. it was several things. it was no one thing that had made up my mind. reporter: the jurors went back and forth over the evidence. and here s what they came to believe. that jody was likely drunk and that her husband knew it and if that was the case, why would he let her get so close to the edge of a cliff. as the husband knowing that your wife was drinking would you bring her there? reporter: the jurors deliberated three days before deciding whether stephen scharf should be found guilty or not guilty of a single count of murder. on the charge of murder of jody ann scharf your verdict is guilty. reporter: guilty. later jurors said what united them was the testimony of jody s friend telling them that jody was terrified of her husband.
reporter: and one reason the prosecutor couldn t prove murder had to do with sloppy police work the defense attorney said suggesting it had been like keystone cops on the palisades that fatal night. you never photographed the body before you moved it, did you? no, sir. why didn t they take photographs? they destroyed the crime scene area. reporter: they didn t even bother to question potential eyewitnesses, he said, instead, they cleared visitors from the lookout. there might have been someone who saw something or heard something. there might have been. there s a possibility that might have happened. reporter: and if police were so suspicious of his client two nights later, the defense said, why didn t they videotape their interview with him? that way jurors could have judged stephen scharf s supposedly odd demeanor for themselves. why didn t you? he wasn t in custody. i don t know.
the jury is about to decide the fate of stephen scharf. here s chris jansing with the conclusion of our story. 18 years after a night that ended in his wife s death off a cliff, stephen scharf stood accused of murder by the state of new jersey. and through it all, one thing he wants you to know is this, he would never have laid a hand on his beloved jody. never. stephen, did you kill your wife, jody? i did not hurt jody. i did not. did you throw her off i did not. i did not. i didn t hurt jody. i didn t push her. i didn t cause her to get hurt. i didn t kill my wife. reporter: we talked to
of someone who, frankly, is furious about this divorce. no one person ever indicated that my client was furious over this divorce. they had talked about divorce for years. maybe she was, you know, saying one thing and not following through. reporter: though it is true stephen scharf did not want a divorce, he says he wanted to give the marriage another chance. and as for that former girlfriend, terry schofield, she recounted stephen s mysterious statement just before jody s death. just give me to the end of september and everything will be okay. the stress will be a lot of the stress will be gone. reporter: the defense attorney says that was stephen s clumsy way of trying to dump his girlfriends and speaking of which he added, those other women did not bother jody at all. she was seeing other people herself. the person on the bottom half