Episode 171: Spray Tan Murder Trial

    In November 2007, Adam Kaufman, a prominent Florida real estate salesman, woke to find his wife Lina, 33, draped by the neck, dead, over a magazine rack by the toilet in the couple’s ritzy waterfront home. There was suspicious bruising on Lina’s neck, although the marriage was apparently untroubled.  A year-and-a-half later, the Miami-Dade County medical examiner ruled Lina’s death a homicide by mechanical strangulation, and Adam was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The defense argued that a spray tan Lina got the day before may have caused her to pass out and slump over that magazine rack, where she was strangled to death by gravity. Adam Kaufman was acquitted; experts concluded that his wife’s death, although unusual, was most likely caused by a preexisting heart condition. This episode contains testimony from Farrah Corenblum, who had a relationship with Adam after Lina’s death; Melissa Fedowitz and Rina Azulay, Lina’s close friends; Rachel Kaufman, the wife of Adam’s twin brother, Seth, and defense attorney Bill Matthewman, who objects that the prosecution is trying to portray Adam as “a rich Jew who didn’t grieve enough.”