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PHOTOS courtesy: DATELINE NBC
But he didn’t use it and instead “went to Plan B,” he says of what had been a nearly 20-year-old cold case.
Although the former Army major and member of the Special Forces brought the hammer, “he didn’t use it,” Detective James Lynam tells correspondent Chris Jansing, in a segment titled “Over the Edge.”
“So he went to Plan B,” the investigator says.
Lynam provides the latest twist in a remarkable murder tale laid out in the program, which also features an interview with Scharf himself.
“He did not react like someone who just lost his wife should have reacted,” says the veteran investigator, who interviewed the widower two days after Jody Ann Scharf’s body was found.
“He told us they had an open marriage, they were seein’ different people,” Lynam says. “He actually said he had been with, like, 50 to 60 women,” and that his wife was OK with it.
But they had quarrels and, according to Scharf, went to the lookout to discuss a reconciliation. He said he was going to fetch a bottle of wine and a blanket when she fell — a version Lynam says he wasn’t buying.
The evidence?
“You have your wine, cheese, crackers, opener — claw hammer,” the veteran investigator says. “If red flags are goin’ up, they reach the top of the pole at that point…. I thought that might’ve been Plan A. He didn’t use it, so he went to Plan B.
“He told us he fixed a drawer in his kitchen with the hammer and he just forgot to put it back in the garage. He put it in the bag with the picnic items…. It was convenient.”
That the case was cracked and her husband convicted of killing Jody Ann Scharf are amazing outcomes in themselves. Veteran investigators and prosecutors say such crimes are the toughest to solve when there are no witnesses: “He/she slipped” most times is often a sufficient alibi.
But, in Scharf’s case, the circumstantial and forensic evidence was considered so overwhelming that an entire panel of grand jurors — in a move even veteran prosecutors and judges couldn’t recall ever seeing — handed up the murder indictment against him exactly two years ago this week (SEE: A case oddity).
Jody Ann Scharf
And although he made sure not to reach a presumption before Scharf’s trial, Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Wayne Mello told CLIFFVIEW PILOT at the time that, between “the insurance angle and the divorce, you can see the picture that is developing here.”
Mello later applauded jurors who convicted Scharf of murder, after 2 1/2 days of deliberations, for their “intelligence and character.”
The case might never have been solved if not for the insistence by Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli, when he took office in May 2002, that a special unit of investigators be assembled to put down unsolved crimes. What Lynam was unable to bring home, Molinelli’s detectives — under now-retired Chief Michael Mordaga — were.
All of 16 cold cases reopened have been solved by the unit, including the past few years under Chief Stephen Cucciniello. And although it privately brings great pride to Molinelli, who wasn’t interviewed for the program, he speaks of the convictions more as potential sources of closure for the victims’ loved ones and the justice system than as “wins” for law enforcement.
“We took it as far as we could go,” Lynam says on the program. “The cause of death had been listed as ‘undetermined,’ so officially it wasn’t a homicide.”
This time, however, investigators brought in celebrity coroner Michael Baden. The case took on an entirely new look.
Baden testified that his forensic examination — including the fact that Jody Ann Scharf landed exactly 52 feet out and 30 feet north from the top of the cliff — clearly pointed to her husband pushing or throwing her 120 feet to her death from the Rockefeller Lookout in Englewood Cliffs on Sept. 20, 1992.
Scharf, who remarried five years ago and now has another child, continues to protest his innocence in an interview with Jansing on tonight’s program.
“I did not kill Jody,” he says, his voice breaking. “I did not… 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.”
Scharf says he was reconciling with her and was taking her to a Manhattan comedy club that Sunday night when they took a detour to the lookout and staked out a ledge overlooking the Bronx.
The ledge was “their place,” a familiar spot to those from the area from which you can see the George Washington Bridge to the south. They’d been there awhile, and the sun had already set, Scharf says, when his wife tried to get up, slipped and fell from the cliff.
His last glimpse of Jody, he says, was her “just standing up and, y’know, and, and, stumbling forward.”
“I didn’t know how bad things were. But I was stunned,” he tells Jansing. “I got down on my stomach, I stuck my head over the … and I just yelled, ‘Jody, Jody, talk to me.’ I just yelled down there.”
Scharf said he flagged down a motorist who took him to the Palisades Parkway Police barracks in Alpine.
Scharf recalls breaking the news later that night to their 10-year-old son, Jonathan, and how both he and the boy cried.
The segment also includes interviews with those close to the case who have supported Scharf, as well as those who said the dogged work of the prosecutor’s detectives finally allowed the slain woman to rest in peace.
As Mello told jurors, Scharf “did not want a divorce, he didn’t want a custody fight, and he didn’t want to split assets with Jody,” Jansing says. Then there’s the life insurance policy her husband took out on her months earlier, one that eventually paid him $73,000, she notes.
The segment then rehashes the trial, including their son testifying of how Scharf beat his mother in front of him. Also interviewed is a friend of Jody’s, who said the dead woman predicted her fate, as well as a woman he was having an affair with saying Scharf told her “he was under a lot of stress, and the stress would be resolved by the end of September.”
Eventually, the segment moves toward a questioning of the conviction.
Those interviewed include three of the jurors who convicted Scharf, one of whom contradicts herself.
“There wasn’t enough evidence, for me,” the unidentified juror says at first. Moments later, she points to the “resolved by the end of September” statement Terry Scofield made on the stand.
“Once I heard that,” the juror says, “that was something that pushed me toward what we decided in the end. It was that statement.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE: A Superior Court jury in Hackensack rendered its guilty verdict after fewer than three days of deliberations, without requesting much in the way of review of testimony or evidence. Scharf didn’t testify in his own defense, nor was a plea bargain struck with prosecutors. Whether the “Dateline NBC” segment is used by either side should there be an appeal remains, for now, an open question. Scharf still has to be sentenced.)
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