When the police arrived at the scene of the crime, they found the body of a man beaten to death. The body had multiple blows and injuries, in addition to a gunshot wound to the head. Furthermore, the house was completely in disarray, as if someone had broken in to steal. Or so it seemed. But something didn't add up and the agents began an arduous investigation.
One of the first people to be questioned was the victim's wife, Mary Ellen, whose attitude aroused certain suspicions when she tried to flirt with one of the investigators in charge. What widow would do something like that? Over time it was discovered that only the so-called green widows, those who kill or conspire to do so out of pure greed, use such grotesque tricks.
Mary Ellen Gurnick (maiden name) was born on September 3, 1947 in the Californian county of Northridge, where her striking personality and beauty swept wherever she went. This is how Barbara Favilla, a childhood friend of our protagonist, remembers it: “When we went out and met up with boys, they always noticed Mary Ellen.”
Among her admirers was her neighbor, Robert 'Bob' Samuels, two years her junior, too shy to approach her, or even ask her out on a date. He always saw Mary Ellen as an impossible love. In fact, Robert never confessed his feelings to her. He would do it many years later.
While Mary Ellen married her first husband and had a daughter, Nicole, young Robert was successful in Hollywood as a camera operator for such important films as The Color Purple, Heaven Can Wait and Lethal Weapon 2. Until, in 1980, destiny crossed their paths, Robert dared to ask Mary Ellen on a date who, recently divorced, readily accepted.
Within six months, Bob and Mary Ellen married, moved to suburban Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, and Nicole moved in with them. Robert loved the little girl so much that he treated her as if she were his daughter. However, problems began due to the lifestyle that Mary Ellen intended to lead.
Fights over the family finances were a constant, so Robert thought about setting up a Subway franchise, the famous sandwich shop, and putting his wife in charge. He believed that this would help his wife become aware of the importance of money and not spend too much. He was wrong.
In October 1986, Mary Ellen decided to leave Robert. When the cameraman got home she found a note in the kitchen that said: “Our marriage had become stale, things just weren't working. “I hope we can be friends, but I can’t live with you.”
Robert's first reaction to get his wife back was to reach an agreement: he would give her $30,000 and contribute $1,5000 a month to cover living expenses. In addition, she would continue running the sandwich shop and would pay for the apartment where he would live with Nicole.
This solution only served to lead Mary Ellen to the good life: she bought expensive clothes and went out drinking every night to flirt with other men. Her greed reached such a point that she discovered that Robert was worth more dead than alive. His death would initially bring him half a million dollars. Although, in reality, it was about much more.
With this information, Mary Ellen looked for a hitman to kill her husband. And who better than her daughter Nicole's boyfriend, a well-known 27-year-old drug dealer named Jim Bernstein. The plan was to execute Robert in his own home, although staging an alleged robbery.
Thus, on December 8, 1988, Jim broke into Robert's house armed, starting a strong dispute with the cameraman. During the fight, Jim beat him to death and finished him off with a shotgun blast to the head. Before leaving, the hitman searched the house to simulate a robbery and left. Coincidentally, the next day, Mary Ellen and Nicole found Robert's lifeless body. The woman claimed that they had stopped by to leave the dog.
According to the first investigations, the murder pointed to a possible assault and robbery. But the evidence found at the scene did not fit with a raid. The agents thought that someone close had orchestrated the cameraman's murder.
Mary Ellen entered the police station, dressed in a low-cut dress and flirting with the police officers; an attitude that surprised the researchers. Above all, when she “at one point, she put her hand on the bald head of one of the detectives and talked about how much she liked bald boys,” explained prosecutor Jan Maurizi. Despite her suspicious merry widow attitude, the agents had no evidence against her.
A few days after the murder, Mary Ellen put the sandwich shop up for sale and filed a lawsuit to collect the money from her still-husband's life insurance policy. She and Robert had not yet divorced, so Mary Ellen inherited half a million dollars in insurance and real estate.
From that moment on, the widow began to have luxurious habits and spend money freely: she bought fur coats, lingerie and expensive clothes, she gave a $50,000 white Porsche to her new boyfriend Dean Groover and planned to move to Cancun and buy a $180,000 apartment.
Five months after the crime, the police received an anonymous tip pointing to Mary Ellen and Jim. When they were taken to the police station, a conversation foreshadowed a fatal outcome. “He's going to arrest one or both of us here, now, tonight for the murder. He says he knows one hundred percent that you and I did it,” Jim told Mary Ellen.
Despite the hitman's warning, no one confessed to the crime and the investigators were also unable to defeat the suspects. After the pertinent interrogation, the hitman and widow were released.
However, four weeks later, Jim's body turned up on a remote mountain road in Ventura County. He had been beaten and strangled, and the body was in an advanced state of decomposition.
After identifying the body, the police realized the coincidence and began a new round of interrogations. The testimony of his boss was key. “I'm going to tell the police what I know,” were the words Jim used in his last conversation. Additionally, a $1,500 check issued by Mary Ellen to two men, Paul Gaul and Darrell Ray Edwards, led investigators to the executors of the order.
“When we went to get him, he realized it was all over. He admitted to his involvement,” Sheriff Tom Odle said of Paul Gaul. The next to be arrested was Mary Ellen, whose house was exhaustively searched.
One of the pieces of evidence that revealed the motive for her husband's murder was a photograph. It showed Mary Ellen, completely naked, rolling around in a pile of bills. The image, taken by her boyfriend after collecting the life insurance money, was one of the key pieces during the trial, held in April 1994, for the murders of Robert Samuels and Jim Bernstein.
During the hearing, the prosecutor stressed to the jury the importance of the aforementioned imprint: “A picture is worth a thousand words, and this was probably worth more than 10,000 words. “Here the jury could look at this woman sitting at the council table and then look at the photograph of this cold-blooded killer.”
From that moment on, the press and prosecutors dubbed Mary Ellen the Green Widow for the way she squandered her wealthy husband's money and orchestrated his murder. For Detective George Daley, a green widow “is the same as a black widow, in that she eats her partner when she is no longer useful to him.”
On the other hand, the statement of the hitmen Paul Gaul and Darrell Ray Edwards pointing directly to the accused, led the prosecution to describe her as a “cold”, “calculating” and “money hungry” person.
The jurors even used derogatory labels toward the widow such as “selfish” or “evil.” She was a “very cunning predator,” who claimed to be an abused woman to justify her crimes.
That “bunch of lies,” as one of the jurors put it, led Mary Ellen to be sentenced to death for two first-degree murders. “It clearly demonstrated that the defendant planned the murders for a long time and had the ability to convince others to do her dirty work... The defendant involved many people, including her own teenage daughter and her daughter's friends,” said Judge Michael R. Hoff at the subsequent hearing to ratify the sentence. It was September 1994.
For their part, the hitmen were found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison. With the verdict on Mary Ellen, the widow became one of twenty women on California's death row. At 76 years old, the Green Widow is waiting to set a date for her execution.
