critical day and our life, in our marriage. it was a day like any other day? yes. he was the plan. husband and wife or drive into manhattan and go to a comedy club, a light hearted night on the town. but they made a detour here, to the palisades, to their spot. stephen remembers pulling up to this scenic lookout, sitting in the car with jody and sharing the wine cooler. there were other people they are sitting in the cars and we walked up over to the spot where the binoculars were and walked up to this sort of open view. he says they then took a well worn path to those rocks. he said they sat there at as the night while around them holding her as he sat directly in front of him. at some point, something goes terribly wrong? yes. he says he stood up intending to go back to the car to get wine and a blanket.
the location of jody s body seemed off, way off. she was like 30 to 40 feet away, from us to the north, of a person falls off the clip they re going to go south, or they re going to go right down, should ve been right down where i got off the ropes. that s where she should ve been. someone else subscribe ching s head about that night for different reasons. it had to do with steven s behavior, while the search was underway. officer walter surrey was surprised, stephen was willing to leave the look out, 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? he says he couldn t believe, how willingly stephen sharp got into his patrol car. i tell you if it was my wife, or girlfriend, whoever they
but why would stephen have killed his wife? the biggest reason, the prosecutor argued, was that stephen did not want to divorce. he did not want to custody fight. and he didn t want to split assets with jody. and there was yet another motive for stephen, said the prosecutor. a potential payout. usa a life insurance company. an insurance representative testified about a 500,000 dollar policy taken out against jody scharf months before his death. payable to a primary beneficiary. can you tell us the policy owner? stephen f scharf. jody scharf was simply worth more dead than alive. her friend, marianne, testified jody feared stephen might be something violent if she pushed for that divorce. even so, marion said, jody was determined to get away from her husband. she was going to have divorce papers served on stephen, and she was very afraid of it. 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. 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. jonathan scharf said he realized his father had likely killed his mother only after that arrest in 2008. this video tape interview shows henry calling the dark past for the first time to police. she got coffee thrown out her a lot. now in court, he had even more to tell about his childhood. like the afternoon he sat cowering in the back seat of a car watching his mother suffer. my mom was driving in my dad just hitting her with the
if treacherous spot, to recommit to each other, stephen said. to kiss and make up. the spot where they went is not a spot where you would go to reconcile with anybody. detectives were not buying the story for another reason. they had found something suspicious inside scharf s car. a bag filled with items you d expect for a romantic picnic, and one you would not, a hammer. you have your wine, cheese, crackers, opener, claw hammer. i mean, red flags are going up. they reached the pole at that point. did you think it might be a murder weapon? yeah i thought it might have been plan a. he didn t use it, so he went to plan b. which he believed, was to push or throw jody off that cliff. so detectives asked stephen scharf the obvious. what was the hammer doing in that picnic bag? he told us he fixed the draw in his kitchen, with the hammer, and he forgot to put it back in