Diner99
2024-04-20 17:07:43 UTC
Fred Neulander, the former senior rabbi of a Cherry Hill, New Jersey synagogue who promised to pay $30,000 for two hitmen to kill his wife so he could pursue an affair with a local radio personality, has died.
Neulander was found nonresponsive by correctional police officers Wednesday in an infirmary unit where he’d been housed in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, according to a statement released Friday afternoon by the New Jersey Department of Corrections.
Staff immediately administered CPR and applied an automated external defibrillator, then transported Neulander by Trenton EMS to Capital Health Regional Medical Center.
State officials were notified of his death at 6:13 p.m. on Wednesday. No cause of death has been given.
Neulander, 82, had been in the Trenton prison since 2002 when he was sentenced to life behind bars after a conviction on murder charges. An initial trial ended in a hung jury.
Neulander’s death comes 30 years after Carol Neulander, 52, the mother of Neulander’s three children, was bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe in the couple’s home in 1994. The scene was staged to look like a robbery but nearly nothing in the house had been disturbed, a detail that investigators found suspicious at the time. Neulander was talking on the phone to her adult daughter, Rebecca Neulander Rockoff, when the assailants entered the family’s home.
The case stunned the Philadelphia region and gradually morphed into a grisly piece of popular culture after the trial became a fixture on cable television, inspired multiple true-crime docudramas and, in 2022, a true-crime musical, A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill. The production, written by playwright Matt Schatz and described by the Los Angeles Times as “charming albeit troubling,” was protested by officials at the Neulanders’ former congregation and the Neulanders’ children before a brief run at a Los Angeles theater.
At Neulander’s trial, Len Jenoff, a former Collingswood resident, testified that he and an accomplice, a troubled man named Paul Michael Daniels, were hired to kill Carol Neulander. The Neulanders’ marriage had interfered with an affair the rabbi was having with Elaine Soncini, who had been on the air at WPEN-FM.
Soncini, who met Neulander when he officiated at the 1992 funeral of her husband, Ken Garland, testified for the prosecution at both of the rabbi’s trials, in 2001 and 2002.
[Correction: the radio station was WPEN-AM, not FM.]
https://www.inquirer.com/news/rabbi-fred-neulander-convicted-murderer-dead-nj-prison-20240419.html
Neulander was found nonresponsive by correctional police officers Wednesday in an infirmary unit where he’d been housed in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, according to a statement released Friday afternoon by the New Jersey Department of Corrections.
Staff immediately administered CPR and applied an automated external defibrillator, then transported Neulander by Trenton EMS to Capital Health Regional Medical Center.
State officials were notified of his death at 6:13 p.m. on Wednesday. No cause of death has been given.
Neulander, 82, had been in the Trenton prison since 2002 when he was sentenced to life behind bars after a conviction on murder charges. An initial trial ended in a hung jury.
Neulander’s death comes 30 years after Carol Neulander, 52, the mother of Neulander’s three children, was bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe in the couple’s home in 1994. The scene was staged to look like a robbery but nearly nothing in the house had been disturbed, a detail that investigators found suspicious at the time. Neulander was talking on the phone to her adult daughter, Rebecca Neulander Rockoff, when the assailants entered the family’s home.
The case stunned the Philadelphia region and gradually morphed into a grisly piece of popular culture after the trial became a fixture on cable television, inspired multiple true-crime docudramas and, in 2022, a true-crime musical, A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill. The production, written by playwright Matt Schatz and described by the Los Angeles Times as “charming albeit troubling,” was protested by officials at the Neulanders’ former congregation and the Neulanders’ children before a brief run at a Los Angeles theater.
At Neulander’s trial, Len Jenoff, a former Collingswood resident, testified that he and an accomplice, a troubled man named Paul Michael Daniels, were hired to kill Carol Neulander. The Neulanders’ marriage had interfered with an affair the rabbi was having with Elaine Soncini, who had been on the air at WPEN-FM.
Soncini, who met Neulander when he officiated at the 1992 funeral of her husband, Ken Garland, testified for the prosecution at both of the rabbi’s trials, in 2001 and 2002.
[Correction: the radio station was WPEN-AM, not FM.]
https://www.inquirer.com/news/rabbi-fred-neulander-convicted-murderer-dead-nj-prison-20240419.html