Is on the precipice. Did you kill your wife, jody . I did not hurt jody. What happened on the cliffs edge . Hello and welcome to dateline extra. Ill craig melvin. When police got word someone fell off a cliff, they werent surprised. They couldnt guess to take almost 20 years to find out what really happened to a woman out on an evening hike with her husband. Heres Chris Jansing. Every couple has it. A shared song, a favorite movie. Or maybe a special place. Steven says for him and his wife jody this was it. Two rocks forming a lovers chair on the edge of a cliff. That was our spot. Wed bring a couple of lawn chairs, a cooler. And shed bring her work from graduate school. They had been escaping to this magical place for years, ever since they were newlywednesday in a starter apartment in new jersey. Up here, the air was fresh and the views seemed limitless. It sort of framed by trees that you could look down to the right and see the view of George Washington bridge. What they couldnt se
couple of feet of the base of the building. and that didn t happen in the case of jody scharf. her body landed 50 feet out from the top of the cliff and 30 feet to the north. she had to have been propelled from that point. jody had to have been thrown 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. of the head and chest injuries are not consistent with someone that tumbles down the cliff face. dr. marian 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
even so, marian 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 videotaped interview shows him recalling the dark past for the first time to police. she got coffee thrown at her by him. now in court, he had even more to tell about his
actually he said he was not married. and she remembered something strange stephen said to her on the beach over that labor day weekend. he was under a lot of stress and the stress would be resolved by the end of september. two weeks later jody scharf 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 in perhaps the most chilling testimony of the prosecution s case, she told the jury when she heard her friend was gone she immediately remembered something jody said just weeks earlier. she said that during this conversation that 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,