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     Even before the facts were known in detail, journalists as well as the police had decided that the case of Carolyn Warmus showed that Nature was up to her old trick of imitating Art. Within days of Warmus's indictment in February 1990 for the murder of her lover's wife, Betty Jeanne Solomon, a year before, the press labeled the prosecution a real-life "Fatal Attraction" case, identifying the defendant with the character played frighteningly by Glenn Close in the popular 1987 movie that happened to have been filmed in Westchester County, to the north of New York City, where Mrs. Solomon was killed. In the view of New York Times film critic Caryn James, it was "safe to guess that Glenn Close made Carolyn Warmus the celebrity she is today."
     The parallel that reporters drew between the murder of Betty Jeanne Solomon and the "Fatal Attraction" film was hard to resist, because the police and the prosecution shaped the image of blonde Carolyn Warmus as a woman obsessed with her former lover, Paul Solomon, who had wanted the freedom to move on to other infidelities. The police investigators released stories that Warmus had, since her college years, established a pattern of pursuing married or unavailable men.
     The daughter of a wealthy insurance executive, Warmus grew up in suburban Detroit and received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Michigan. Her classmates recalled that she took her dates with Paul Laven, a pre-med teaching assistant, so seriously that she became a convert to his religion, Judaism. When, however, Laven broke off the relationship and became engaged to another woman, Warmus undertook a relentless campaign to win him back. She called the couple and left long messages on their answering machine, annoyed their friends, and deluged them with notes. One message, left on the windshield of Laven's car, falsely claimed that Carolyn was pregnant and begged him to call her. Another, sent to Laven's fiancee and filled with misspellings to disguise Warmus's authorship, insisted that the woman stood no chance of competing with Carolyn's more voluptuous figure and newly-acquired tan. Finally, the couple were forced to obtain a restraining order against their persecutor in a Michigan court to ensure that she would not attempt to ruin their wedding.
     After her college graduation, Carolyn Warmus moved to New York City, where she earned a master's degree in education from Teacher's College at Columbia University and went on to serve as a substitute in school districts of Westchester County for teachers who were on maternity leaves. In the New York area the skein of romantic fixations that 

had begun back home in Michigan continued to lengthen. She hired a private detective, Vincent Parco, to trail a married New Jersey bartender whose affection for her had slackened. Together, she and Parco devised the idea of superimposing photographs of Warmus in sexy poses upon pictures of the bartender, apparently with the intention of mailing the resulting montages to his wife. Parco was just the man for such a deception, since he taught a Learning Annex course to aspiring snoops, entitled "How to Get Anything on Anybody." Inculcating the priceless lessons of his craft in classes held on the premises of Manhattan's swanky Birch Wathen School, Parco taught his students how to hide a video camera in a purse or a looseleaf notebook, and how to obtain unlisted telephone numbers by consulting reverse directories or examining registration records at the Board of Elections.
     The collaboration of Warmus with Parco was a blending of kindred spirits, because the young teacher was herself adept in fraud and forgery. She successfully carried off her first swindle after graduation from college, when she was working as a waitress at the Jukebox, a popular 1950s-style dance club in Royal Oak, Michigan. The club manager, Debbie Mullins, explained to a Newsday reporter how Warmus's scheme was accomplished:

Warmus was accused of running credit cards through an imprinting machine two or three times, using one imprint for the credit card customer and the others for customers who would pay in cash. Warmus . . . would then pocket the cash she collected rather than put it into the till. Federal agents were brought in to investigate, but they could not find enough evidence to bring charges against her.

New York, and she and her husband lived with their daughter Kristan (thirteen years old in 1987) in a condominium on South Central Avenue in Greenburgh. The marriage bond between the Solomons was apparently not very strong; Paul admits to having had two brief affairs before meeting Carolyn Warmus, and he suspected Betty Jeanne of carrying on a relationship of several years with her former boss.
     Some months after their first meeting, Carolyn Warmus and Paul Solomon embarked on an affair which featured sexual encounters in her apartment above the comedy club "Catch a Rising Star" on Manhattan's east side, as well as in hotel rooms and Warmus's car. Doing her best to keep the liaison a secret, Warmus took on the role of a friend of the whole Solomon family, showering Kristan with gifts and taking her on a skiing trip. It was on this excursion that Warmus confessed to the teenager a fear that Betty Jeanne Solomon did not like her very much. Kristan tried to persuade her to the contrary, but "deep down" she knew that Warmus's concern was well-founded. In August 1988, when Paul Solomon had briefly stopped seeing her, Warmus confided to a college friend, Ryan Attenson, of Southfield Michigan, that her relationship was not "progressing in a manner with which she was comfortable"; she spoke of her desire to engage a private investigator to prove to her errant lover that his wife was cheating on him.
     Shortly before midnight on Sunday evening, January 15, 1989, police in Greenburgh received a call from Paul Solomon, who had returned home to find his wife murdered. Betty Jeanne was lying on the living-room floor; she had been pistol-whipped about the head and had nine bullet wounds in her back and legs. None of the neighbors had heard the shots, there was no sign of forced entry, and the only indication of a struggle was a disconnected telephone; police photographed a black woolen glove near the corpse.
     At first, the investigation focused on Paul Solomon. After initially telling Greenburgh detectives that he had spent the evening bowling near his home, he admitted that he had stopped only briefly at the bowling alley and had spent the evening with Carolyn Warmus at the Holiday Inn in Yonkers, New York. After drinks in the motel's Treetops Lounge, followed by hamburgers, french fries and some oysters, the couple had repaired to Warmus's red Hyundai car, in which, as she later told the police, they performed a sex act; Carolyn specified in her statement that during their lovemaking she occupied the driver's seat. Witnesses came forward to confirm that they had seen Solomon at the bowling alley and later in Warmus's company at the Holiday Inn.
     After some months, police suspicions shifted from Solomon to Warmus. One of the reasons for heightened interest in Carolyn was evidence of her relentless pursuit of Paul Solomon after the murder. In 

June 1989, after Solomon broke off his relations with Warmus, she followed him to Puerto Rico, where he was vacationing with a new girlfriend, Barbara Ballor. Posing as a police officer, she called Ballor's family from the island, urging them to end the romance. An even more startling development in the investigation was receipt of a tip that in early January 1989, shortly before the murder, Carolyn had purchased from private-eye Vincent Parco a handgun equipped with a silencer.
     On February 2, 1989 Carolyn Warmus was indicted for second-degree murder and the possession of an unregistered firearm. Six months later, however, the indictment was dismissed by Judge John Carey, on the ground that the state had not disclosed to the grand jury the fact that Vincent Parco had been granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his agreement to testify about his sale of the pistol to Warmus. The prosecutors promptly obtained a fresh indictment, and the widely heralded "Fatal Attraction" trial of Carolyn Warmus opened on Thursday, February 14, 1991, in Westchester County Courthouse, where headmistress Jean S. Harris of Madeira School had been convicted of murdering Dr. Herman Tarnower a decade earlier. The prosecution team was headed by thirty-eight-year-old Assistant District Attorney James A. McCarty, and David L. Lewis defended Carolyn Warmus. Lewis was president of the New York Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a director of the National Association of Criminal Lawyers; he had acted as a trial lawyer for the former Panamanian dictator, General Manuel Noriega, and was accustomed to trying cases in the limelight. Judge John Carey presided; and a jury of eight women and four men was selected. The jurors scanned with understandable interest the features of the celebrated defendant, whose appearance was described by the Newsday reporter with a mixture of attentive observation and prurient imaginings:

Her thick blonde hair is cut in a neat, chin-length chop. Just enough makeup coats her milky-white skin to hide a large crop of freckles. It is easy to imagine her long legs, hidden by a modest black skirt, in the gym shorts and sneakers of her athletic, teenage years. But then the smile is oddly cut short by a hard blink of her eyes and a quick, convulsive grimace. It is a startling, spasmodic reaction, almost a nervous tic -- and it periodically breaks on the smooth planes of Carolyn Warmus's face. Her apparent confidence is gone for an instant, and in its place one sees a flash of the troubled history that has been so widely reported in the media since she was indicted a year ago.

reveal a clear picture of the killer of Betty Jeanne Solomon: the defendant, Carolyn Warmus." The proof would include testimony from private investigator Parco, who had sold Warmus a gun and silencer, as well as telephone company records of a call on the day of the slaying made from the defendant's apartment to a gunshop where she later bought bullets, using as false identification a driver's licence that she had stolen from a secretary in an office where Warmus worked in the summer of 1988. The Solomons' marriage had had its ups and downs over the years, McCarty admitted; both husband and wife were having affairs, but they were "not ready to call it quits." In the summer of 1988, after Solomon temporarily ended his relationship with Carolyn Warmus, she wrote him notes, gave his daughter Kristan extravagant gifts, and told her college friend Ryan Attenson that Paul Solomon was the perfect person for her. The only obstacle was Betty Jeanne Solomon, and the defendant had made it clear to Attenson that she would do anything to get her out of the picture so that she could take her place in the household.
     David L. Lewis responded for the defense by arguing that the case was not about the impropriety of Warmus's adulterous affair, and that her love for Paul Solomon did not demonstrate her guilt. There was no physical evidence, he emphasized, to show that Warmus was in the Solomons' home on the night of the killing. Charging that the prosecution was hampered by sloppy police work, Lewis strongly suggested that Paul Solomon and private detective Vincent Parco were responsible for the murder and for faking evidence to incriminate Carolyn Warmus. When the defense counsel took his seat at the end of his address, the jury was left to wonder how he would support his conspiracy allegations.
     Early in the prosecution's case, two Greenburgh police officers related their impressions of Paul Solomon's mental state when they questioned him at the murder scene. Patrol officer Michael Cotter described Paul as shaken: "He said he rolled her over and saw all the blood and started crying; he cried again when he looked at the blood on his hands." In cross-examining the two officers, David Lewis attacked the police for losing possible traces of evidence that might have pointed to other suspects. One of the trial reporters agreed, comparing the Greenburgh police to the Keystone Kops; Paul Solomon had been allowed to wash his hands, and the black glove that was pictured in a police photograph had subsequently vanished and could not be located at the time of the trial.
     Lewis had limited success in his efforts to weaken the testimony of Carolyn Warmus's friend Ryan Attenson, to whom she had spoken of the setback in her relationship with Paul Solomon in August 1988. In a telephone conversation, she had asserted that "with her money and Paul's family" (by which Attenson assumed she was referring to the 

Solomons' teenage daughter Kristan) "they would have a perfect life together." She said that she would take it upon herself to make sure that she ended up with her lover. Several months after the killing but before her arrest, Warmus had spoken to Attenson again; on this occasion she informed him that Solomon and she were going to end up together and that everything had been taken care of -- the other woman was no longer an obstacle. Under cross-examination, Attenson conceded that he did not remember Warmus's exact words but was relating the essence of what she had told him.
     Kristan Solomon held the courtroom spellbound with her account of Warmus's campaign to win her goodwill. Paul Solomon had introduced Kristan, an athlete who competed in several sports, to Warmus when he was coaching his daughter and her teammates during an after-school basketball practice. During the next few months she had chatted with Warmus in her classroom, seen her at basketball games, and gone to a Christmas show in Manhattan with her father, Warmus and another teacher. It was in early 1988, when she and her parents had gone out to dinner with Carolyn Warmus, that the defendant had offered to take her skiing during the winter break. Kristan also told the jury about the birthday gifts that she had received from the defendant. On the girl's fifteenth birthday in August 1988, when the prosecutors asserted that Solomon had temporarily broken off their affair, Warmus had unexpectedly arrived at the Solomons' condominium with two outfits and a bracelet for Kristan. "I was in shock," Kristan testified. "I was not frightened but hesitant, because I knew my Mom didn't enjoy her in the house, and I was worried there would be words." After Betty Jeanne's death, Warmus had left notes on the door of the Solomons' condominium but had not seen Kristan; however, two weeks before the girl's sixteenth birthday, she had arrived home to discover a pale blue Tiffany's box at her doorstep containing diamond stud-earrings and a note from Warmus signed, "Love always, Carolyn."
     Prosecution lawyers began their efforts to tie Warmus to the murder weapon with the testimony of a private investigator, James A. Russo, who swore that the defendant had consulted him a few months before the slaying to seek protection from a woman named "Jean or Betty Jean," who was trying to hurt her family. When Russo had suggested a bodyguard, Warmus had stated her preference for a "machine gun and silencer." On three earlier occasions in the late summer and early fall of 1988, Warmus had consulted Russo about other fears. During one of her interviews she had claimed that her father's jet had been sabotaged in Michigan and that a "woman was seen in the vicinity in the hangar"; during her next visit, Warmus had told Russo that the same woman had struck her sister's car in Washington in a hit-and-run. In his cross-examination, 

Lewis tried to discredit Russo by portraying him as a sleazy detective who would do anything for money. At his prodding, the witness recounted his recent work for a landlord who suspected a prostitution ring in his upper eastside apartment building; the witness said he had "gone undercover" and paid a prostitute $400 in exchange for sex.
     Dramatic evidence of the murder night was provided by an operator of the New York Telephone Company. Since a direct police emergency network was not established in Westchester County, customers who dialed 911 were answered by a private operator who then referred messages to the local police. Shortly before 7:12 on the night of the killing, the witness, Linda Viana Newcombe, had received a call from a screaming woman whose only decipherable words sounded like "trying to kill me." The call was quickly disconnected and the operator, now thoroughly rattled, had transposed the digits of the number of the telephone on which the incoming call had been made; because of this mistake she had reported the emergency to the Scarsdale police, who had then rerouted the message to the Greenburgh station. David Lewis attempted without success to have the witness specify whether the caller had said "'he' is trying to kill me" or "'she' is trying to kill me."
     On February 8, Paul Solomon, who had been granted immunity from prosecution, took the stand to tell the jury about his strained marriage of nineteen years, his feelings of guilt over the affair with Carolyn Warmus, and his actions on the murder night, culminating in the discovery of his wife's body. He had not had sex with Carolyn Warmus in the summer of 1988, but in the fall they had resumed relations despite his conflicting feelings. When they had met for drinks at the Holiday Inn in Yonkers, Paul told the jury, he had encouraged Warmus to seek her happiness elsewhere:

She said it was difficult finding good people to date. I said, "I'd be so happy to dance at your wedding and see you happy." She said, "What about your happiness, Paul? Don't you deserve to be happy?" And I said, "If anything happens to Betty Jeanne and me, I'd never get married anyway."

involvement. Solomon had asked her again later and she repeated her denial; he told the jury that he had "absolutely believed her." Prosecutor McCarty elicited Solomon's story of how Warmus had followed him and his new girlfriend to Puerto Rico eight months after the murder, even though he had never told her of his vacation plans. He had become so "frightened" when she appeared on the scene that he notified hotel security, called the Greenburgh police, and left that night.
     At the start of his cross-examination, Warmus's lawyer David Lewis held up a card that Solomon had given the defendant early in their affair. Its passionate terms contrasted with Warmus's banal messages about school and community events. The note read:

If you're smart you'll do one of two things. Turn away and never see me again and save yourself from the pain and hurt, or keep loving me and take the risk of you and I having something together forever.

     The day after the murder, Carolyn had called to tell Parco that some teacher had been "stabbed or bludgeoned eight or nine times"; the police had come to question her, and she had hidden the gun inside one of the posts of her brass bed. Parco offered to pick up the gun the next day, but Warmus had told him that the weapon was gone; she had thrown it off a parkway.
     Judge John Carey excluded as prejudicial any testimony relating to Warmus's engagement of Parco to aid her persecution of the New Jersey bartender, or any other evidence indicating that she had obsessively pursued men prior to her affair with Solomon. However, Parco admitted that he had become infatuated with his attractive client -- although he stoutly insisted that he had rejected her sexual advances. Parco also stated that in August 1989 Carolyn Warmus asked him to check out a license plate and a telephone number. The phone number belonged to a woman Solomon had started dating, while the license was for her father's car. During the summer of 1989 Warmus had denied any relationship with Paul Solomon and had told Parco she was out bowling with a "bunch of teachers" on the night of the murder.
     Defense attorney Lewis subjected Parco to a daylong cross-examination, eliciting admissions that as a private investigator he often used disguises and false names, and, in order to obtain information, engaged in deceptive practices known in the trade as "gags." In a surprising show of modesty, though, Parco refused to rate himself an expert in assuming an "acting role" in his undercover work.
     On March 5 a Newsday reporter, who regarded the prosecution's evidence to that point as flimsy, disclosed that Paul Solomon stood to gain $120,000, more than twice his annual salary, if a movie was made about the case. A week later the case took a turn in the prosecution's favor with the testimony of Patricia January, a nurse at the Bedford Road Elementary School in Pleasantville, New York, who swore that a week before the killing of Betty Jeanne Solomon, Warmus, after completing a telephone call from the school, had told her that she was "terrified" to live alone and had a gun. According to the nurse, Warmus had added that "of course" she would never kill anyone, and didn't have ammunition; she had also mentioned that the gun was "specially made" by a private detective. Defense attorney Lewis told Judge Carey that he was surprised by the testimony and obtained an adjournment. In two hours of cross-examination when the court reconvened, Lewis focused on why Patricia January had waited so long to tell authorities of her conversation. The nurse had two answers: She had thought it was common knowledge that Carolyn owned the gun and, besides, she had "wanted someone to open the door" for her to talk about the incident.

     After Patricia January was excused from the stand, the opposing legal teams girded themselves for the principal evidentiary battle of the trial, a clash between inconsistent telephone records for January 15, 1989, the day of the murder. A microfiche, obtained by the prosecution from the MCI telephone service that Warmus used, showed a call from her apartment at 3:02 p.m. to Ray's Sport Shop, where bullets were purchased later that afternoon. In response, David Lewis, bringing to the fore at last his principal evidence of a conspiracy to incriminate his client, offered a document that he claimed to be the original MCI bill received by Warmus for January 1989. This document, printed in an MCI bill format and bearing the company's logo, lacked the call to Ray's Sport Shop on January 15 but included a direct-dial call at 6:44 p.m. on the same day that brought the total telephone charge to the same figure shown in the MCI record. Lewis told the judge that the 6:44 call "made it all but impossible for [Warmus] to have been in Westchester at 7:15 to commit the murder." The prosecution mounted a devastating attack on the authenticity of the "bill" offered by the defense, showing that the MCI record it had introduced was consistent with the company's computer tapes and that the paper on which the defense version of the bill was prepared lacked a slogan that was imprinted on all MCI customer statements in January 1989. Ultimately Judge Carey permitted both versions of the disputed telephone bill to be submitted to the jury.
     In the days that followed, the prosecution completed its chain of evidence. Lisa Kattai, a secretary for a telecommunications company, identified Warmus as a temporary office employee who had worked with her in August 1988, when Kattai had noticed that her New York State driver's license was missing. According to Kattai, Warmus resembled the witness's photograph taken for her driver's license at a time that she had shorter, "frosted" blonde hair. It was the prosecution's theory that Warmus had posed as Kattai when she purchased ammunition at the gunshop on the afternoon before the murder. Subsequently, Detective Joseph Reich of the Westchester County Police testified that he had compared six shell casings found at the murder scene with a seventh picked up eleven months later in the Brooklyn machine shop of George Peters, who had admitted milling a silencer at Parco's request; all seven bullets had been fired from the same gun.
     The testimony for the defense began with trucker Anthony Gambino, who supported Lewis's conspiracy theory by stating that Parco had asked him to commit a murder in the summer of 1988; he had virtuously declined the request. Another witness implicating Parco in the crime was Joseph Lisella, who stated that from a stall in the men's room of a bowling alley where he had stopped between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. on January 15, 1989, he had heard two men exchange $20,000 and talk 

about having thrown a gun in the "deepest part of the river." He had not seen the men's faces, but they had called each other Vinnie and Paul, the first names of Parco and Solomon. The conspiracy theme was pursued with the testimony of Thomas A. Warmus, the defendant's father, who stated that Parco had tried to shake him down for a substantial sum of money in the summer of 1989; Mr. Warmus left the courtroom without having looked at his daughter. On April 10, the defense rested after Lewis had shown the jury a news videotape of Parco making threatening remarks about Gambino after the trucker's testimony.
     In the closing arguments, the prosecution claimed that it had established a persuasive chain of circumstantial evidence, while Lewis, pounding home his conspiracy theory, invoked the Salem witchcraft trials as a parallel to the unjust persecution of his client.
     The jurors deliberated for twelve days, a record in Westchester County, and ultimately deadlocked, with eight reportedly in favor of conviction and four holding out for acquittal; Judge Carey regretfully declared a mistrial. Interviews with the jury revealed that the minority of the jurors who favored acquittal were disturbed by the circumstantial nature of the evidence and could not believe that a woman could have brutally pistol-whipped Betty Jeanne as the murderer had done. All of the jurors agreed that the defense telephone bill was a fake, but the minority faction thought that the forgery might have been an act of desperation on the part of someone being framed for murder. One juror could not credit the possibility that Carolyn Warmus, given her inexperience with guns, could have hit a moving target with all nine bullets, even at close range.
     When the second trial began in January 1992 (after an unsuccessful attempt by the state to have Judge Carey replaced on the ground that he was biased in favor of Warmus), the prosecution trial team and strategy remained intact, but the defense had been thoroughly overhauled. Warmus had hired a new lawyer, William I. Aronwald, whose low-key style was in stark contrast with the theatrical and bellicose manner of the defendant's original counsel, David Lewis. It was Aronwald's intention to cast suspicion on Paul Solomon and Vincent Parco, as Lewis had done, but the "frame-up" theme would be subordinated to a broader plan to create reasonable doubt on a number of issues. Aronwald's less melodramatic approach was mandated by the first jury's obvious rejection of the principal evidence that Lewis had offered to show that the case against Warmus was pure fabrication. Even jurors who had held out for acquittal were persuaded that the telephone invoice introduced by the defense at the first trial was a fake and that two key defense witnesses, trucker Anthony Gambino and 

men's room eavesdropper Joseph Lisella, were not worthy of belief. After the first trial ended, the state indicted Warmus for forgery of the telephone bill; subsequently Judge Carey ruled that the prosecution could not introduce the alleged forgery into evidence at the second murder trial as proof of Warmus's consciousness of guilt, since she might have been unaware of the fabrication of the document.
     The prosecution case appeared to be following its expected course until March 4, when Westchester Assistant District Attorney James McCarty made a stunning announcement. He told the court that the black glove that had been photographed at the murder scene and later vanished had now been rediscovered. In January the prosecution had asked Paul Solomon to search again for evidence for the new trial, and he had delivered the glove, which he said he had found in a box in his bedroom closet. Forensic tests had turned up barely visible finger-shaped human bloodstains on top of the glove.
     Unprepared for this turn of events, defense counsel Aronwald accused prosecutor McCarty of "trial by ambush," and Judge Carey initially ruled the glove inadmissible. He, was, however, promptly induced to rethink his stand when McCarty told him that he had procured credit-card and store records revealing that on November 9, 1987 Carolyn Warmus had purchased a pair of gloves at Filene's Basement in Greenburgh matching the glove found in the Solomon residence. Faced with this offer of proof, Judge Carey ruled that the glove could be admitted if the prosecution was able to show that Warmus had bought gloves "having similar intrinsic characteristics" of color, material, size and style.
     The Filene's sales slip did not specify the color of the gloves purchased but permitted their identification as Shalimar Vanity Glove Inc.'s style 6781, a $10 one-size-fits-all wool glove manufactured by a Chinese state-owned cooperative. The Solomons' daughter, Kristan, testified that Warmus had worn black gloves, and a forensic expert, Dr. Peter DeForest, testified that, after comparing the fibers found in the victim's hand during the original murder investigation with the fibers of the glove, he had found the two sets to be "indistinguishable."
     Satisfied that sufficient evidence had been established to link the glove to the murder and to the defendant, Judge Carey ruled that it could be admitted, but excluded any reference to the tests revealing that spatters on the glove might be human blood. To the bafflement of observers, defense counsel Aronwald himself highlighted the evidence of the apparent bloodstains by contending that Solomon might have placed the stains on the glove recently in an attempt to incriminate Carolyn Warmus.

     The prosecution rested its case on May 5, and the defense, shuffling the order of its witnesses to meet the menace posed by the black glove, called to the stand William Bohus, president of Shalimar Vanity Glove Inc., the importer of the gloves identified in the Filene's sales slip as purchased by Warmus. Bohus testified that his company had sold some 36,000 pairs of the gloves since 1986, a quarter of which were black. Carolyn Warmus's stepmother, Nancy K. Dailey, also gave evidence intended to minimize the impact of the prosecution's newly rediscovered glove. She showed the jurors a black and gold ski suit, with its own matching black gloves, that she had bought for Carolyn long before the murder. Mrs. Dailey's testimony seemed to prove only that Carolyn Warmus might have owned more than one pair of black gloves, and the prosecution was quick to emphasize this fashion note. The ski suit was almost all black, prosecutor McCarty's assistant Douglas FrizMorris observed. Was black one of Ms. Warmus's favorite colors? . . . Might she not have liked the color so much that she had bought a second pair? . . . According to the New York Times reporter: "for a minute every eye shifted to the young woman at the defense table in the flowing black skirt and the black boots." Carolyn's stepmother stood firm, however; black, she maintained, was not among Carolyn's favorite shades. "She looks very good in bright colors."
     After the last echoes of the glove controversy died down, the balance of the defense's evidence seemed humdrum by comparison. A firearms expert, Jerold Steinberg, asserted that the silencer that machinist George Peters had supposedly made for Vincent Parco would not have functioned well enough for use in a shooting. Aronwald called a Bedford school secretary in a final effort to refute nurse January's belated recollection that, after finishing a conversation on the school's telephone, Carolyn Warmus had told the nurse that she had purchased a gun. The secretary described a telephone log in which teachers were asked to write down any private calls for later billing. There were no listings of any calls by Carolyn Warmus on the date of the conversation reported by nurse January. Aronwald suggested that this detail was a sufficient ground for the jurors to conclude that the nurse had made up the entire story.
     Since Warmus's questionable telephone bill could not be introduced in evidence, the defense was compelled to take a fresh approach to the disputed call from Warmus's apartment to the gun shop. Aronwald summoned to the stand a private investigator, who said that it was possible for someone to have "tapped" into Warmus's apartment line and made the call without her knowledge.
     In his closing argument on May 19, Aronwald argued that the victim, Betty Jeanne Solomon, was "unwanted baggage" to her husband 

Paul and that he, not Carolyn Warmus, had the motive and the opportunity to kill his wife to clear the way for a series of love affairs. Aronwald strongly urged the jury to reject the wondrously materializing woolen glove. This was the evidence, he argued, that the prosecution hoped would swing the second jury in its favor. It was no accident, in Aronwald's view, that Solomon claimed to have discovered in his apartment the glove that the police had photographed next to his dead wife's body in January 1989 and then had lost. That glove, he reminded the jurors, was tested at the time and did not appear to have blood on it just after the murder. It was no accident either that now, according to prosecution witnesses, the glove was bloodstained, for it was Mr. Solomon himself who had placed the blood there to try to link Carolyn Warmus to the murder scene.
     Replying for the state, Assistant District Attorney McCarty urged that there was too much evidence tying Carolyn Warmus to the shooting to be explained away. "These aren't a series of coincidences, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Sooner or later the picture should become clear to you: you can see Carolyn Warmus doing this." He argued that Paul Solomon had nothing to gain from the death of his wife and that only Warmus could have killed the woman she had come to view as an obstacle. Warmus's telephone bill showed that, on the day of the murder, she had called Solomon and talked to him for 55 minutes. During that call, she had learned that the Solomons' daughter was away for the weekend and that Betty Jeanne would be alone. When Solomon told her that he had accompanied his wife to a bar mitzvah the day before, it was brought home to Warmus once again that she was on the "bad side of a lovers' triangle." In the course of the conversation she had made plans to meet Solomon at 7:30 that night at the Holiday Inn, and thirty minutes after the conversation ended, her phone bill showed the call to the New Jersey gunshop. The police placed Mrs. Solomon's death at around 7:15 that night; the prosecutor reminded jurors that one witness at the Holiday Inn restaurant said that Solomon had arrived there at 7:30 and Warmus only later. In greeting Solomon, the prosecutor said, Carolyn had explained that she had been caught in traffic. "Traffic," McCarty repeated to the jurors with an expression of disbelief, "on a Sunday night?"
     After seven days of deliberations, the jury found Warmus guilty of second degree murder and illegal gun possession. Among the jurors, the black glove was the most frequently cited reason for the verdict. William Aronwald said: "I have no doubt in my mind that without the glove the prosecution would not have hoped anything better than a hung jury. It really derailed our defense." David Lewis, defense lawyer at the first trial, was not reluctant to second-guess his successor, suggesting that 

Aronwald might have been hurt by moving away from a strategy of claiming more centrally that Warmus had been framed by Solomon and Parco:

I think what we did in the first trial was to address the issue of a frame-up from the first meeting with the jury. That is, as far as I'm concerned, the major difference between the two trials.

     On March 15, 1993, Carolyn Warmus's attorney filed a motion for a new trial, claiming that two pieces of key evidence had been withheld by the prosecution. Aronwald asserted that the prosecution knew that Paul Solomon had been having an affair with another woman, Barbara Ballor, three months before his wife was killed, and not four months after the murder, as he had testified. Moreover, the defense counsel asserted, the prosecution had not disclosed to the jury the existence of 

a second glove, apparently found outside the Greenburgh apartment building; Aronwald contended that the prosecution had used the first glove to link Warmus to the slaying, but that the second would have acquitted her. Unimpressed with these arguments, Judge Carey denied a retrial.

* This article was published previously in Jonathan Goodman (ed.), The Modern Murder Yearbook 99-120 (London, Robinson, 1994).