Joyce Cohen: 24-year-old Joyce Cohen went from rags to riches when she met and married Miami construction millionaire Stan Cohen in 1981. Together, the couple lived lavishly in an exclusive Coconut Grove mansion, went skiing at their Steamboat Springs ranch, and partied all night long at Stan's Miami nightclub.

But Joyce's party came to an abrupt end on March 7, 1986, when she frantically called 911 claiming that Stan had been murdered by three intruders that had broken into their mansion. To cops, the story seemed plausible.

At the time, Miami was plagued with home invasion robberies and, like many Miami real estate developers in the 1980s, there were rumors that Stan was involved with some shady characters. But when a convicted felon already serving jail time came forward with information that Joyce had hired him and his friends to do Stan in, cops swept in and arrested her.

At trial, prosecutors painted Joyce as a gold-digging murderess who killed Stan after he had threatened divorce. Faced with losing the luxurious life-style she had grown accustomed to, Joyce had plotted her husband's murder with three men she had met on the Miami club scene.

The jury found her guilty of murder but was unable to reach a unanimous decision at her sentencing. With the jury deadlocked, the judge sentenced her to 25 years to life. Joyce will be eligible for parole in 2014.

Jail informant's credibility on trial

By Daniel de Vise - The Miami Herald

Stanley Cohen: A Miami Fairy Tale Gone Wrong

By Matt Meltzer - MiamiBeach411.com

February 19, 2008

It started out like any good Miami love story: Boy meets girl. Girl is half boy’s age. Boy has money. Girl is attractive. Boy dumps older fiancée for girl. Girl gets hooked on cocaine. Boy cheats on girl. And while such a tale is rather nondescript in the shallowness that is love on Biscayne Bay, it typically does not end in a high profile trial complete with celebrities, hitmen, and crooked cops. But this was the story of poor Stanley Cohen and the cast of characters that may or may not have done him in.

STRIKING IT RICH AT THE RIGHT TIME

Stanley Cohen moved to Miami from Long Island as a small child, and by the mid-sixties was running his own self-monogrammed construction company, SAC construction. His timing was impeccable, as just as his company was getting off the ground, the South Florida population boom began, and within a short amount of time he was a very wealthy man. With this wealth came multiple divorces, and eventually he found himself single in 1974.

Enter Joyce Lemay, a young single mother who had just moved to Miami that year and was working as a secretary at SAC. Joyce had grown up in and out of foster homes as a child, and married and had children very young. She was all of 24 years old, and the 40 year-old Cohen was smitten when he walked in to see her working in his office. So much so that he dumped his current fiancée and married young Joyce on December 5, 1974.

FAIRY TALE GONE BAD

But, as was expected, the South Florida fairy tale did not last long. As young women thrust into the high-end lifestyle of rich, older men tend to do, Joyce began to become slightly more appreciative of the finer things in life. She vacationed around the world with her husband, and sometimes without. She partied until all hours in clubs like the Champagne Room, and, since it was Miami in the 1980’s, she dabbled in cocaine. About once every 15 minutes.

Their lifestyle was that of any of the privileged down here at the time: Lots of drugs, lots of parties and endless conspicuous consumption. During the marriage, Joyce had gone to interior design school and she spared no expense in furnishing the couple’s Coconut Grove mansion. He bought a 650-acre ranch in Steamboat Springs, Colo., so they would have a place to ski. In Steamboat as well, Joyce was the constant party girl, becoming friends with the city’s elite including country star Tanya Tucker.

But as Joyce’s partying raged on, her marriage declined. She became perpetually unhappy and soon Stanley turned to an ex-girlfriend for love. While this enraged Joyce, she wanted out of the marriage for a variety of reasons, telling several friends that she just wished there was a way Stanley could end up dead. You see, Joyce had gotten used to her fast-lane lifestyle and did not particularly feel like going back to the welfare-line-and-clerical-jobs existence she had suffered through before 1974. And if she divorced him, well, she got nothing.

JOYCE GETS HER WISH

Around 5 a.m. on the morning of March 7, 1986, Joyce Cohen called 911 screaming about her husband having been shot. Paramedics arrived at their Coconut Grove home, finding three bullets in Cohen’s head and a fourth having grazed his scalp. Joyce said she had seen two men creeping around the house near the time of the murder. Strangely, her burglar alarm had been shut off and her guard dog had been locked in a back room with Mrs. Cohen. Investigators were slightly suspicious.

Joyce was taken to Miami police headquarters for questioning about the incident. When asked about the couple’s sex life, she realized she was then a suspect and got a lawyer. She returned to her home and kicked all the crime scene investigators out, forcing them to go back and get a search warrant. This bought her about eight hours.

While outside, police found a .38-caliber revolver sitting in some plants, wiped clean of prints and sporting some pieces of tissue in the trigger mechanism. Once they finally got inside the house, police found a tissue in the garbage which had mucus membrane and gun powder on it. Again, signs were beginning to point to Joyce.

Her story had more holes in it that her late husband’s head. She had called 911 after 5, but one witness claimed to have heard gunshots around 3. Because Joyce had kept police waiting outside her home, they were unable to accurately find the time of death. Joyce had powder residue on her hands, and more powder on the tissue she had used. And, while she claimed that the break-in had been some sort of robbery, nothing was overturned or missing. Odd, since the couple kept large amounts of cocaine and cash lying around the house.

JAILHOUSE SNITCH

The police still did not feel they had enough evidence to arrest Joyce Cohen. But a few days after Stanley Cohen’s murder, Broward police arrested a man name Frank Zuccarello for a series of home invasions in Dade and Broward counties. Zuccarello was the head of a large gang of home invaders, and was the first to be arrested. Desperate to avoid a long prison term, he started to sing.

In addition to providing information about a couple of other murders, Zuccarello told police that Joyce Cohen had hired him and two other men to kill Stanley. She had met them repeatedly, he told police, giving them a layout to the house, Stanley’s gun, and her assurance that the alarm and guard dog would be neutralized during the “invasion.” For their troubles they were to receive about $150,000 worth of cocaine.

THE BAD GUYS GET CAUGHT

With the testimony of the home invasion leader and the other physical evidence, police finally felt they had enough to charge Joyce Cohen. They flew to Chesapeake, Va., where she was living in a trailer park with her new husband, and arrested her for her late husband’s murder. Despite her now meager lifestyle (Stanley’s children had successfully gotten an injunction against Joyce getting any money, which had only amounted to $2 million anyway) she still maintained the services of famed Miami defense attorney Alan Ross.

Zuccarello’s alleged accomplices, Thomas Joslin and Anthony Caracciolo, were not as quick to admit as their cohort. Both men insisted they had nothing to do with the murder, but investigators continued to try and squeeze information out of them. Eventually, facing guaranteed long prison terms for the home invasions they too had been charged with, the men reluctantly pled no contest to the second degree murder charges. Caracciolo received 40 years in prison (since he was the alleged trigger man) and Joslin got 30.

But the men maintained their innocence.

After two and a half years of working on the case, Joyce Cohen’s murder trial began in October of 1989. Witness after witness came to the stand, friends, business associated, and even Tanya Tucker, telling of how Joyce had been hooked on cocaine and wanted out of her marriage. But the most damning was the testimony of home-invader-turned-star-witness Frank Zuccarello.

He told the jury of meeting with Joyce Cohen, of planning to commit the murder, of going into the house with Joslin and Caracciolo and watching the latter man pull the trigger. He said that the woman had wanted her husband dead, and he and his men had made it happen.

Six weeks after the trial began, Joyce Cohen was found guilty of first-degree murder and received life in prison.

CONVICTED BY A LIAR

But, as always seems to be the case in the South Florida criminal justice system, the story hardly stops there. In 1993, a couple of things happened that cast serious doubt on the official story of the murder of Stanley Cohen.

First, a book titled “In the Fast Lane, a True Storey of Murder in Miami” came out, written by attorney Carol Soret Cope. In it, she revealed that star-witness Zuccarello failed three separate lie detector tests during his interrogation about the Cohen murder, and changed his story several times. First he had been in the room, then he had been outside, then he had been creeping up the stairs. His story was in perpetual flux, and new doubts were arising in the case.

As a follow-up, WPLG reporter Gail Bright found out in an off-the record interview with lead detective Jon Spear that he felt that Joslin and Caracciolo might not be guilty. Essentially, he said police knew Joyce had committed the crime but didn’t have enough evidence to convict her. The only way they could bring her in was in conjunction with Zuccarello’s story, which was, as the book had implicated, far from credible.

Because polygraphs are not admissible in court, neither Zuccarello’s failing exams or the two hitmen’s inconclusive ones were allowed in. But in a 1998 Miami New Times article, extensive interviews with Spear, Joslin and Caracciolo indicate that police may have helped Zuccarello along in order to get the real villain, Joyce Cohen.

NEW TRIALS ABOUND

Alan Ross, of course, is also insisting that his client should get a new trial. Even though throwing out Zuccarello’s testimony would be most beneficial to the two hitmen, it may also open things up for Joyce. Dade County criminologist Gopinath Rao said the amount of powder residue on Joyce’s hands was consistent with someone who was near a gun being fired, but not necessarily that of someone who fired the gun herself. This of course, means that if there were not hitmen in the room, and she didn’t shoot Stanley, then she must be innocent. Or such is the logic of a defense attorney.

As it stands today, everybody is trying to get a new deal, but nobody has walked outside of a correctional facility. Everyone, that is, except Frank Zuccarello, who took a plea bargain and may have sent at least two “innocent” men to prison. While everyone else associated with the home-invasion gang has done their time by now, Joslin and Caracciolo still sit behind bars. As does Joyce Cohen, the unfortunate underside of a Miami fairy tale gone horribly, horribly predictable.

Revisiting a Case of Murder

In 1989, a woman was convicted in her husband's slaying. Now a TV reporter breaks her 5-year silence, tells of fabricated evidence

By Mike Clary - Los Angeles Times

December 8, 1998

MIAMI — On the night he was murdered, barrel-chested millionaire Stanley Cohen went to bed as usual--nude and alone.

His glamorous young wife, Joyce, stayed up late. After 11 years of marriage, the couple's relationship had hit the shoals. Both were having affairs. They had not slept together for two years.

In a downstairs bedroom of their bluff-top Coconut Grove home, Joyce said, she was sorting through clothing for a garage sale when she heard a loud banging noise.

Following her startled Doberman pinscher, Mischief, Joyce said, she ran into the hallway just in time to see two shadowy figures bolt from the house.

Upstairs, 52-year-old Stanley was dead, four bullet holes in the back of his head. As blood spread onto the designer sheets, Joyce grabbed a towel and pressed it to the gaping wounds. And then, she said, she summoned police.

In Miami, the slaying caused an immediate sensation. Stanley was a well-known and prosperous builder. When not playing host to local powerbrokers at Buccione's, a chic restaurant they owned, the Cohens might be jetting off in their private Sabreliner 60 to their mountain ranch in Steamboat Springs, Colo.

Joyce, 16 years younger than her husband, was an immediate suspect. Friends told police she wanted a divorce but feared losing her moneyed lifestyle. And police found it strange that the alarm system had been turned off, that Stanley had been shot with his own gun and that no neighbors reported hearing Mischief bark.

Despite their suspicions, police did not charge Joyce with the March 1986 killing until 2 1/2 years later, after Frank Zuccarello, 25, a jailed member of a home-invasion robbery gang, came forward to tell police that he and two accomplices had been hired by Joyce to kill her husband.

"She's a killer," prosecutor John Kastrenakes told jurors at the close of a 3 1/2-week trial. "Do not feel sorry for her because she's a woman. She's a cold, calculating murderess who put on a good show for everyone."

The jury agreed. Found guilty of first-degree murder, Joyce was sentenced in November 1989 to life behind bars.

And the state's maximum security prison for women is where she has remained--with scant hope of early release until five months ago, when a local television reporter stepped forward to reveal a secret that she had kept for five years. In a sworn statement, Gail Bright said that the lead detective in the case told her--off the record--that Zuccarello was coached to lie about his involvement in the slaying.

In her statement, Bright recalled her 1993 conversation with Miami police Det. Jon Spear: "And he said, 'We believed all along that Joyce killed her husband . . . but we didn't have the evidence to back that up.'

"And I said, 'Well, are you telling me that those three guys were not there? Is that what you're telling me?'

"And he said, 'That's right. They weren't there.' "

For five years, Bright said, she has been tormented by the knowledge that police may have framed Joyce. But she kept quiet out of fear that she would lose her police sources--and possibly her job.

Joyce's attorney, Alan S. Ross, immediately filed a motion to have her 1989 conviction overturned, citing evidence he says was "invented and fabricated" by the Miami police.

Now Miami ponders two questions: Will Joyce Cohen get a new trial? And how could a newswoman have stifled such explosive information?

Two First Met at Construction Site

Stanley Cohen was a burly, hard-driving kid from Miami who went to the University of Florida in Gainesville, earned a civil engineering degree and the nickname Crusher, married his college sweetheart and came home to make a fortune building schools, shopping centers and a courthouse.

After his third divorce, Stanley was enjoying the single scene. And then one day he spotted dark-eyed Joyce Lemay McDillon, working as a secretary on a construction project.

At 24, Joyce had come to Miami with her son to escape a failed marriage. Despite her hardscrabble background, she had a stylish vivacity that complemented her exotic good looks. And Stanley was smitten.

The Cohens were married in Las Vegas in December 1974. Over the next few years, Joyce took up the life of wealthy society wife with ease and, according to friends, Stan delighted in financing it. After buying a landmark coral rock home for his new family, Stan adopted Joyce's 5-year-old son, paid for her to study interior decorating and seemed only too happy as his wife prowled Miami in her white Jaguar for expensive furnishings, jewelry and gourmet foods.

As the 1980s dawned, the Cohens' circle had expanded to include not only the trendy clubs sprouting up in Coconut Grove but also spots in Steamboat Springs, where Stan bought a 600-acre retreat he called Wolf Run Ranch. The Cohens visited there frequently--to ski in the winter, just relax in the summer or entertain friends.

The '80s also ushered in the age of cocaine. In the social swirl that kept the Cohens running between Miami and Colorado, their drug use was increasing, friends reported, and so too was discontent.

Weeks before her husband was killed, Joyce met Tanya Tucker at a party, and the country music star ended up spending the night at Wolf Run. According to a 46-page sworn statement by Tucker, the two women drank champagne, tooted a little coke and Joyce bared her soul.

Tucker said Joyce complained that she was "miserable" in her marriage and expressed her belief that her husband had gotten a girlfriend pregnant. "Bottom line," Tucker told police, "she was extremely unhappy. Not just sad--it didn't seem like it was something that was going to go away."

Children Suspected Wife Was Killer

When Stanley turned up dead, police were not the only ones who immediately suspected his wife. His two children from a previous marriage--Gary Cohen, a Miami lawyer, and Gerri Cohen Helfman, a well-known local television anchor--also believed their stepmother was guilty.

After five months went by without police making an arrest, the children filed a civil suit that accused Joyce of either killing or conspiring to kill their father. They asked for $5 million in damages.

Joyce called a press conference to announce the results of a polygraph test that she said proved her innocence. Then she counter-sued the children for slander. She asked for $11 million.

Both suits were dismissed.

In the meantime, after seeing a TV report on the murder, Zuccarello summoned detectives to his jail cell in neighboring Broward County, where he was being held on burglary charges.

Over several months, and in scores of meetings, Zuccarello outlined for detectives a shadowy scenario in which he and two confederates--Anthony Caracciolo, the alleged triggerman, and Tommy Lamberti, the son of reputed Gambino crime family mobster Louis "Donald Duck" Lamberti--were hired by Joyce to kill her husband in exchange for $100,000 of her inheritance.

During his conversations with police, Zuccarello was rewarded for his cooperation by being checked out of jail about 60 times for police-escorted trips to see the Miami Dolphins, to see his girlfriend and to get his hair cut at his favorite salon.

In November 1988, 2 1/2 years after someone put a gun to the back of Stanley's head as he slept, his widow was charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and possession of a firearm during commission of a felony. When arrested, Joyce was living in a Chesapeake, Va., trailer park run by her new boyfriend. Before Stanley's insurance company got around to paying his heirs, Joyce had already been charged. She never got a dime.

Prosecution Plan Starts Unraveling

Even before jury selection began in the fall of 1989, the state's plan to use the three alleged killers as prosecution witness showed signs of unraveling.

Lamberti's lawyer, Edward O'Donnell, asked to withdraw from the case, telling the judge that his client admitted to him that he planned to lie about being involved in the murder in exchange for a 10-year reduction of the 22-year robbery sentence he was serving. Like Caracciolo, O'Donnell said, Lamberti was prepared to plead guilty to second-degree murder while insisting he had never met Joyce or been to her house.

Marsha Lyons, a former federal prosecutor, was named to replace O'Donnell as Lamberti's counsel. But she too had problems with her client's plans to commit perjury, and she eventually withdrew as well. "It was a very troubling case," Lyons said. "Knowing that two lawyers had come to the same conclusion should have been troubling to the prosecution too."

Prosecutors feared Lamberti and Caracciolo would not back Zuccarello's story. They never took the stand. But Zuccarello did.

From the witness stand, Zuccarello said that on the morning of the murder, Joyce let the trio into the house, quieted the dog, handed them a gun and said, "Hurry up, get it over with." Zuccarello said that he stood by the door while Caracciolo went upstairs and executed Stanley.

Ross cross-examined the star witness vigorously, pointing out inconsistencies in his statements and descriptions of the alleged meeting in which Joyce supposedly gave the men a map to the house and a down payment on their fee.

But Zuccarello was not the prosecution's whole case. They had the murder weapon, Stanley's .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, found in the bushes near the house. It was clean of fingerprints, but stuck to the revolver were tiny pieces of tissue consistent with a tissue containing gun powder residue recovered from Joyce's bathroom.

Ross implored jurors not to find his client guilty simply because she used cocaine and cheated on her husband. "Brand her with a scarlet A," said Ross, "but don't convict her of murder because she had a moment of infidelity."

The jury was out for just eight hours. As the clerk read out the verdict--guilty on all three counts--Ross sighed and slumped in his chair. Joyce remained dry-eyed. She was fingerprinted and led from the courtroom.

Outside, Ross faced reporters. "As a criminal defense lawyer, you always know if your client did it. I've always known. All these years, through all these cases, I've always known. I'm in the best position to know. But even I, this time, still don't know if she did it."

Key Case Figures Are Interviewed

Joyce was four years into her life sentence in 1993 when Bright, after reading a book about the murder, decided to revisit the case. In the Broward Correctional Institution, Bright taped an interview in which Joyce, through tears, insisted on her innocence.

In another prison, Bright interviewed Lamberti, who repeated what he had told the court in 1990 when he and Caracciolo pleaded no contest to second-degree murder charges and were each sentenced to 40 years. "I assure you that I am the wrong man in this courtroom," Lamberti said. "I am just taking this plea because it is in my best interests. I don't care what they think, I am innocent."

And then Bright interviewed Spear, the dapper, 20-year detective who, after Joyce's conviction, was praised in a Miami Herald editorial for "piec[ing] the case together, detail by painstaking detail, tracking down each hit man in turn, and the woman who hired them."

After an on-camera chat in his office, Spear walked the reporter outside the Miami police headquarters, where Bright said the detective let slip his belief that Joyce had really pulled the trigger and that Zuccarello and his two pals were not there.

Asked how Zuccarello could have testified to something about which he had no knowledge, Bright said, the police officer reportedly replied: "It's simple. You walk into a jail cell . . . , the file's on the table, you go to the bathroom for 30 minutes, they familiarize. They know the routine."

Bright's cameraman, Mario Hernandez, swore that he also heard the detective suggest the three alleged hitmen were not involved in the slaying. But he could not corroborate the remark about leaving the case file on the table.

In the same conversation, Bright said, Spear went on to caution her about reporting his admission. "He said, 'But if you ever tell anybody that, I'll deny it.' "

Spear called later in the day, Bright said, and pleaded with her: "We've been friends for a long time. Don't put that on the air."

Bright said she was stunned by what she had heard, and she and Hernandez debated for months about what to do. She said that she considered Spear, a longtime police source, a friend whom she was reluctant to put in a jam. Eventually, Bright said, she and Hernandez decided that "as journalists, it was not our obligation to come forward with information like that, and to just leave it be."

Bright, 44, said her decision to keep quiet was torture. "I went back and forth . . . and every time I would start to think I was going to come forward, I chickened out."

Finally, Bright testified, she was swayed by a series of events that began earlier this year with a pleading letter from Joyce, saying "something to the effect that, 'I'm locked up in this prison. I didn't kill my husband. These three people weren't there. There has to be something that jogs your memory about the investigation that you did. If there's anything at all, please help me.'

"And, of course, that just made the agony that I was already going through worse."

Bright, who has not responded to several interview requests, said in her July statement that she was conflicted by what she viewed as her ethical imperative as a journalist and her duty to disclose information that could mean an innocent person was wrongly convicted. "As a journalist I shouldn't do it, but as a human being, I mean, if I get killed in a car wreck tomorrow, and maybe this is true . . . then I felt that somebody should know about it."

Bright said she talked to WPLG-TV Station Manager John Garwood and then to one of the prosecutors in the case, David Waksman, who was also a personal friend. Garwood, she said, cautioned her to think about the consequences disclosure could have on her job as a police reporter and in making her potentially liable for criminal prosecution on withholding evidence charges. But Waksman urged her to tell he truth, she said.

The ability to grant off-the-record status to sources is occasionally necessary to gather information, most journalists agree. And the reporter's promise of confidentiality is a bond recognized in Florida, as in many states, as a privilege protected by law.

Retired Detective Denies Scheme

Ross, Joyce's attorney, has asked the Miami-Dade state attorney to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations that the police suborned perjury and/or obstructed justice in mounting their case against his client. But, he said, "I would be shocked if steps were taken to prosecute someone for wrongdoing."

Assistant state Atty. Paul Mendelson said that Spear, now retired, "denies what Gail Bright says he said." He added, "It could have been a misunderstanding."

Spear has not responded to a request for an interview. But after he talked to Spear, Lt. John Campbell, supervisor of the Miami homicide division, said the retired detective admitted to "intermittent doubts" about Zuccarello's truthfulness. "Everybody agrees [Zuccarello] could have been lying," Campbell said, adding that Spear "flatly denies" leaving the case file on the table for Zuccarello to review.

Stanley's 39-year-old daughter dismissed Bright's statement as false. "I don't know what her motivations are," Helfman said.

In the state's response to the defendant's motion to vacate her conviction, Mendelson said he would argue that even without Zuccarello's testimony, the jury was presented with enough physical evidence to find Joyce guilty.

Zuccarello was never charged in connection with Stanley's murder. In exchange for his testimony, he was sentenced to seven years for robbery, served 25 months and was out on parole before he testified in 1989.

Lamberti and Caracciolo remain behind bars.

And Joyce, now 48, is still in Florida's toughest women's prison. Ross declined to make his client available for an interview. But he described Joyce as "anxious, very hopeful" over the prospects of having her conviction set aside.

A hearing on the motion is expected to be held in circuit court before the end of the year.

*

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.

Murder in Miami: Stan and Joyce Cohen

By David Krajicek

A Deadly Sin

The eyes that stare out from the Florida prison mug shot are unmistakably those of Joyce Lemay Cohen.

Once as pretty as a fashion model, she has retained some of her attractive features—umber-colored eyes, lush lips and noble cheekbones.

But her hair is shorn, and she has gone gray—something she would never have tolerated in the lavish life she once led.

But after 15 years in prison, any remaining glimmer of glamour went dull long ago for Cohen.

She is 55 years old now. Her life is reduced to the simple regimen of incarceration at Broward Correctional Institution, the women's prison in Fort Lauderdale.

She is inmate No. 161701, one of 611 women prisoners.

Greed got her there.

At age 24 she married a rich older man, Stanley Cohen, who introduced Joyce—his fourth wife—to a jet-set way of life.

They lived in an historic mansion overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami's ritzy Coconut Grove section. They drove Jaguars and flew in their own jet. They vacationed in one adult sandbox after another—the Bahamas, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Las Vegas and Cancun, Mexico.

Stan Cohen bought a spread near Steamboat Springs, Colo., for winter pleasure.

Mrs. Cohen became accustomed to the fine things in life—designer clothing, satin sheets, servants.

She enjoyed her husband's wealth. She enjoyed his "Miami Vice" lifestyle. She enjoyed his social status.

But over time the marriage began to lose its sheen. She was doing too much cocaine. He was fooling around on her.

The couple began spending more time apart—she in Colorado partying, he in Miami running his construction and real estate development business.

One day, after 11 years of marriage, Joyce Cohen stared out at the Rocky Mountain peaks and got a lump in throat. She had reached the conclusion that she wanted the man's possessions—all of them, not half. But she did not want the man.

Murder Mystery

A hysterical Joyce Cohen telephoned 911 in Miami at 5:25 a.m. on March 7, 1986, to report that her husband had been shot in their Coconut Grove home.

Police found Stanley Cohen, 52, naked and dead in bed, with gunshot wounds to the head.

When Joyce calmed down, she managed to report that Stan had been upstairs asleep while she was up late, busy with a charity project in a downstairs room. The couple's pet Doberman pinscher napped at her feet.

She said she was suddenly startled by a loud noise—a gunshot. She crept toward the sound and glimpsed two men running out of the house.

The mansion was filled with fine furnishings, and the intruders might have found stashes of cocaine and cash had they bothered to look.

But nothing was missing. The crime was not a robbery.

If Joyce's story was true and accurate, someone had entered the house for the express purpose of putting a bullet in the head of Stanley Cohen.

Someone clearly wanted him dead.

But who?

Self-Made Man

Stanley Cohen was the eldest of four children of a New York City furrier. He grew up on Long Island, but his family moved to Florida in 1948, when Stanley was 14. He graduated from Miami High School in 1951, then earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Florida.

He married young, and the couple soon had two children, Gary and Gerri.

Cohen took a junior management job with a construction firm. He was a fast learner, and he struck out on his own in 1963, when the ambitious man was not yet 30 years old.

He called it SAC Construction Co., after Stanley Alan Cohen.

The population of Florida doubled from 5 million to 10 million between 1960 and 1980. The Miami area gradually was transformed into a bustling and hip ethnic polyglot from its former reputation as a Jewish retiree's last stop en route to the hereafter.

Cohen's firm, based in Miami, was positioned to capitalize on the construction needs of that population boom.

SAC specialized in commercial construction—strip malls, medical facilities, government buildings, warehouses.

Cohen juggled many building projects at a time, but he managed to keep a discriminating eye on all of them. He visited his numerous job sites regularly—relentlessly, as his employees and subcontractors might have put it.

He also began to branch out from construction into its companion enterprise, real estate development. Over the years he built a business with scores of employees and dozens of projects across the State of Florida.

Not coincidentally, along the way he got rich.

A New Love

Cohen raced through three wives in less than a decade while growing his business.

He wasn't a handsome man in the traditional sense.

He was husky, balding and well short of 6 feet. He had a broad smile that did not quite compensate for oversized facial features.

But Stanley Cohen could be a commanding presence in any crowd. Like most self-made men, he was confident and engaging.

Cohen enjoyed the company of women, and he was never without a steady companion or two, whether he was between marriages or not.

His heavy wallet had plenty of sex appeal, even if Stanley didn't.

He was engaged to a woman who would have been his fourth wife when Joyce Lemay came into his life.

Cohen didn't have to look far to find her. A separated single mother who was new to Miami, she was working as a secretary at SAC Construction.

Cohen came to work one day and there she was.

He introduced her to his circle of close friends at a French restaurant in Miami one night in the fall of 1974. She was 16 years younger than Cohen, who had just turned 40.

Meeting Joyce forced Stan Cohen had to reorder his romantic life. He informed his fiancée that the engagement was off.

A few weeks later, on Dec. 5, 1974, he married Joyce Lemay in an extravagant affair at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas.

Illinois Roots

This sort of opulence was new to Joyce.

She had been born poor in Carpentersville, Ill., a city of 30,000 at the northwest edge of Chicago's vast suburban halo, an hour's drive from the Loop.

Her father, Bonnie Lemay, was an American Indian, and her mother, Eileen Wojtanek, was of Polish extraction.

It was not a Currier-and-Ives childhood, according to a profile by Carol Soret Cope in her book about the Cohen murder, "In the Fast Lane."

Lemay beat his wife, and the couple had persistent financial problems, perhaps because both husband and wife had drinking problems and could not keep steady jobs.

Before Joyce reached school age, the family moved south so that Bonnie Lemay could find work as a sharecropper. But life got no sweeter for the family.

Tired of abuse, Eileen split, taking Joyce with her. For several years the woman bounced from one bad relationship—and bottle—to another.

She spent time in orphanages, foster care and youth homes. Joyce would later say that she suffered sexual and physical abuse as a child.

In 1964, an aunt in Carpentersville was contacted by Illinois state authorities after Joyce, at age 13, had been booted from a foster family for stealing.

The aunt, Bea Wojtanek, took her in and raised her until age 17, when she married a local teenager, George McDillon.

They had a son, Shawn, nine months later.

George worked as a drywall installer, Joyce as a secretary. They bought a small house but struggled to make the mortgage payments—in part because Joyce had expensive taste. (According to author Cope, she once spent $165—the equivalent of roughly $1,000 in 2006—on peacock feathers to decorate the living room.)

After five years of an up-and-down marriage, Joyce compelled her young husband to move the family to Florida to find a better life. He arranged to go to work as a drywaller in Coral Springs, north of Miami-Fort Lauderdale.

The McDillons moved there in 1973, but George returned to Carpentersville alone less than a year later.

His wife wanted more out of life than he was able to supply.

Fabulous Life

It's no surprise that Joyce caught the boss's famously wandering eye at SAC Construction.

She was young, pretty and petite, at just 5 feet tall. Her raven hair and ochre eyes gave Joyce an exotic appeal. And she was ambitious and well-spoken, despite modest education.

Her marriage to Cohen—just 10 days after her divorce from McDillon was official—gave Joyce the good life she desired.

Author Cope wrote that Joyce and her son made a triumphant return to Carpentersville not long after the Vegas nuptials. She showed up in a shiny new luxury car and reported that she had lassoed a Jewish millionaire.

Cohen gave Joyce a fabulous life.

Their social connections were centered around the Miami Ski Club and Stan's tight circle of college fraternity brothers. Joyce became a featured model in one of the year's most important social events, the ski club's annual fashion gala. Stanley paid Joyce's way through interior design school and referred clients from his building firm.

But Joyce was too busy shopping to work much.

She furnished their new Coconut Grove mansion like a showplace, and she kept abreast of the latest designer clothing styles. When she wasn't shopping, she was planning their bimonthly vacation trips to the continent's finest sandy or snowy resorts.

Author Cope said Stanley Cohen once joked to his stepson, "Your mother's going to shop me to death."

For skiing, the couple favored laid back Steamboat Springs, Colo., where blue jeans were more plentiful than furs.

Stan bought a 650-acre spread there that he called Wolf Run Ranch, then constructed an elaborate cedar-sided cabin on the property. To get back and forth to the mountains he bought his own plane—first a prop-driven Cessna, then a much faster small jet.

The couple invested Stan's money in whatever struck their fancy—land, shopping centers, restaurants and resorts.

Their Steamboat Springs home was completed about the time that their marriage reached the seven-year itch phase. Joyce began spending longer stretches alone in Colorado, where she developed her own circle of friends, including—briefly—country singer Tanya Tucker.

Act III

In the movies, life is a three-act play.

The happy-ending narrative couldn't be simpler: You're up, you're down, and then you're up again. Think "Rocky" or "It's a Wonderful Life."

But Joyce Cohen was born down. Stan Cohen's wealth brought her up. Inevitably, the third act of her life would find her hellbound.

There could be no happy ending.

Their story was as old as infidelity itself.

First the couple's sex life went south. Then Joyce learned that Stanley had rekindled an affair with an old flame. They argued frequently, and each threatened to leave the other.

But Stan warned Joyce that she would leave the marriage the same way she entered it—with nothing.

Joyce could not fathom the idea of returning to her former life. After a decade of living in high style, she was mortified at the thought of having to worry about such financial minutiae as car payments, appliance purchases and clothing boutique tabs.

Joyce mused to a friend that she wished Stanley were dead. She made an oblique reference to finding a hit man to solve her problem. They both laughed, and the friend assumed she was kidding.

Maybe, maybe not.

Meanwhile, South Florida in the early '80s was in its "Miami Vice" phase. Reckless cocaine cowboys were turning the city into one of the country's murder capitals.

Nearly every adult with a spare Ben Franklin in his billfold was dabbling in the drug, and that certainly included the Cohens and their clique.

Stanley was said to be a regular tooter—three or four times a week. There even were whispers that he and his jet were involved in cocaine smuggling.

Joyce, for her part, went around with a permanent cocaine-powder mustache.

She tooted up with her friends in the Rocky Mountains, including Tanya Tucker, as the singer later would acknowledge to police. When she was in Miami, Joyce often tucked Stanley into bed early, then went out on late-night excursions to her club of choice, the Champagne Room, a disco where cocaine was as easy to find as a swizzle stick.

Her son Shawn, whom Cohen had adopted, developed a drug problem of his own and was packed away to a military-style boarding school in Colorado that specialized in instilling a sense of self-control in youngsters.

Joyce could have used a semester or two there. Clearly, she was careering out of control.

The Investigation

The probe into Stanley Cohen's murder got off to a rocky start.

Less than an hour after the investigation had begun at the Cohen home, Joyce ordered police to vacate the premises. Cops and prosecutors were forced to get a search warrant, which delayed the gumshoes until late that afternoon.

The next morning's Miami Herald carried a story of the Cohen homicide under the headline "Prominent Builder Murdered in Home; Wife Keeps Police Outside for More Than Eight Hours."

Prosecutor David Waksman told reporters, "This is the first time I've been asked to prepare a search warrant because the widow would not allow the police to come into her house to conduct a crime scene search."

Joyce's peculiar behavior made her the prime suspect, of course. But the case was not destined for quick and easy resolution.

Stanley Cohen had been killed with four .38-caliber gunshots to his head. One grazed his scalp, two entered from the left side and one from the right.

Police found the murder weapon that afternoon in a stand of ferns in the Cohens' yard. It was Stanley's own Smith & Wesson revolver.

Joyce Cohen explained that Stanley had handled the gun at about midnight on the night he was killed when she heard a noise and asked him to investigate. She said he searched the house and yard but found nothing.

Joyce surmised that he left the gun on his nightstand, and the two "shadowy figures" she saw in the house used it to kill him.

But inside the house they found a facial tissue that contained both gunpowder residue and Joyce's nose mucous.

There were other problems in her account.

An ear witness said he heard four gunshots at 3 a.m., even though Joyce did not report the shooting until nearly 2 hours later. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at 3 a.m.

Waiting for a Call

Joyce Cohen hired Alan Ross, a marquee name among Florida defense attorneys. He immediately arranged for his client to take a lie detector test. The first was inconclusive. But a second indicated that she was not lying when she said she was not involved in her husband's murder.

Police shrugged off the results.

"We're not baffled," one deadpan police official told reporters.

Neither were Stanley Cohen's children from his first marriage, Gary Cohen, a lawyer, and Gerri Helfman, a TV reporter who would go on to become a widely recognized news anchor in South Florida.

Five days after the murder, they filed a $5 million wrongful death lawsuit against Joyce. The stepchildren also began legal maneuvers to block her from getting any part of Stanley's estate, which would prove to be worth just $2 million due to a heavy personal and business debt load.

Joyce responded with an $11 million slander suit against them.

But the investigation seemed to grind to a halt. Days, weeks and months passed without criminal charges being filed against Joyce or anyone else.

Every so often, impatient reporters would demand to know why police were unable to pin the crime on the prime suspect.

Jon Spear, the lead detective, firmly believed that Joyce was responsible. But neither he nor prosecutors wanted to risk losing the case to a jury by rushing forward with charges that were not provable.

They waited for the usual break: a silver-bullet phone call.

It finally came from Frank Zuccarello, a member of a busy home-invasion gang that worked mansions in the Sunshine State.

Zuccarello had been arrested for robbery just four days after the Cohen murder. He was facing a long prison stretch, and that was motivation enough for him to step forward.

He told police that Cohen had hired him and two others from his robbery gang, Thomas Joslin and Anthony Caracciolo, to kill her husband.

She provided the gun and a sketch of the house to guide the killers to Stanley's bed. On the night of the murder, she turned off the alarm system, locked up the pet Doberman and left a sliding door open to allow them access, Zuccarello said.

He added the killers were paid with $100,000 worth of cocaine.

For a month, authorities worked on Joslin and Caracciolo, trying to get them to implicate Cohen. They refused to talk and were eventually charged with murder in September 1988.

The Trial

Joyce Cohen was finally arrested and charged with her husband's murder two months later, on Nov. 2, 1988, two and a half years after the murder.

By then her lifestyle had undergone a transformation.

She was living at a trailer park in Chesapeake, Va., with her new boyfriend, Robert Dietrich, whom she met in Steamboat months after the murder.

Her trial in the fall of 1989 began with testimony from the first cop on the murder scene, Officer Catherine Carter. She testified that a dazed and spacey Joyce Cohen sat on the floor of her living room and said, "I shouldn't have done it."

Another early witness described a foreboding conversation he had with Joyce more than a year before Stanley was murdered.

Frank Wheatley, a former supervisor with Cohen's construction company, said he snorted cocaine with Joyce and had frank discussions with her about the state of their marriage.

"She mentioned to me that Stan was becoming rather boring to her," Wheatley said. "She told me that she would like to get divorced but that she was afraid no judge would give her anything...(she said) she wished she knew somebody she could have kill him — or have the nerve to do it herself."

Joyce Cohen was complaining to just about everyone she knew about her marriage.

She became friends with Tanya Tucker, the country singer, after they met at a bar in Steamboat.

Tucker stayed the night at the Cohen residence. The women used cocaine, and Joyce once again opened up about Stanley.

Detective Spear interviewed Tucker, and a 46-page transcript of the conversation became part of the case record.

"She seemed kind of a pain-wracked person," Tucker told Spear. "Bottom line, she was extremely unhappy....She liked the money. That's the only thing she liked."

Another Steamboat friend, Kathy Moser, said Joyce Cohen was "extremely unhappy and agitated" that Stanley was fooling around with an old girlfriend, Carol Hughes, and the paramour mounted the stand to acknowledge that she and Cohen were intimate.

Defense Attorney Ross gamely tried to discredit one prosecution witness after another, but he was swimming upstream against a torrent of damning testimony, including the apparent delay in reporting the shooting and the gunpowder residue on found on a tissue.

Prosecutors said the killers apparently carelessly dropped the murder weapon while fleeing. They said Cohen picked it with a tissue and threw it in the ferns in yard before police arrived. She blew her nose in the same tissue.

Guilty As Charged

Frank Zuccarello, the star witness, probably sealed her fate.

"She wanted her husband dead," he said. "The murder was supposed to look like a botched burglary."

He was lucid and believable as he described the planning meeting with Joyce Cohen at a North Miami Beach 7-Eleven parking lot and gave an exacting account of how the job went down, with the woman waiting on the ground floor while Caracciolo went upstairs and killed her husband.

Defense Attorney Ross accused the "conniving" Zuccarello, of make up the story in exchange for a lenient five-year prison sentence, which he had completed even before his testimony.

But the jurors obviously believed him. After hearing three weeks of testimony, they took less than a day to convict Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen of first-degree murder.

The jury recommended against execution, and Judge Fredricka Smith imposed a life sentence, plus 15 years for conspiracy.

Smith told Cohen, "You committed the crime for financial gain, and you did it in a cold, calculating manner."

Joyce Cohen has been unsuccessful in a series of appeals, and she ultimately lost any claim to Stanley's estate.

Her son, Shawn, did receive a $106,000 inheritance. But he quickly blew it on drugs. A few years ago, the Miami Herald found him living in a cardboard box in a city park.

"I'm stuck in a rut," he said.

Crime Epic

In 1991, five full years after they were implicated in the case, Anthony Caracciolo and Thomas Joslin finally agreed to a plea bargain.

They pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and were promised sentences that would allow them the possibility of parole.

Caracciolo, the alleged triggerman, got 40 years and Joslin 30. Joslin is scheduled to be released on parole on Dec. 26 this year, 2006, and Caracciolo on Jan. 14, 2010.

Meanwhile, a Miami TV reporter came forward in 1998 to say that Jon Spear, the lead Cohen investigator, told her confidentially in 1993 that he believed Joyce Cohen had acted alone in shooting her husband. He said he believed Zuccarello made up the contract-killing story to get out of prison.

The reporter, Gail Bright, said she revealed the information after five years because she was overwhelmed by guilt that two wrongfully convicted men were rotting in prison.

Supporters of Caracciolo collected statements from two other law enforcers and a polygraph operator who also questioned Zuccarello's reliability.

But Zuccarello, who now lives in the Tampa area, has stood by his account.

A federal judge granted a hearing in the case last summer. Joyce Cohen reportedly is eager to have Zuccarello discounted because—more than anything else—his testimony led to her indictment and conviction.

So far, the key figures in the South Florida crime epic remain behind bars.

Resources

In the Fast Lane: A True Story of Murder in Miami, by Carol Soret Cope, Simon & Schuster, 1993

"Prominent Builder Murder in Home; Wife Keeps Police Outside for More Than Eight Hours," by Marc Fisher and Arnold Markowitz, Miami Herald, March 8, 1986

"Prisoner Charged in Cohen Case, by Lynne Duke and Joan Fleischman, Miami Herald, Sept. 17, 1987

"Witnesses Tie Widow to Hit Job; Joyce Cohen's Attorney Brands Accusations 'Nonsense,'" by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, May 3, 1988

"Two Years After Husband's Killing, Joyce Cohen Still a Suspect," by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, May 5, 1988

"Widow Charged in Cohen Killing; Arrest Comes 2 Years After Builder's Murder," by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, Oct. 25, 1988

"Joyce Cohen's Life on Main St.; Boyfriend: Murder Allegation Left Her 'Living in Shadow,'" by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, Oct. 29, 1988

"My Marriage Is a Mess, Cohen Told Singer," by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, May 25, 1989

"Cohen a Plotter or Scapegoat? Jury to Decide," by Joan Fleischman, Miami Herald, Oct. 20, 1989

"Cohen Let Killers in the House, Robber Says," by Joan Fleischman, Miami Herald, Oct. 27, 1989

"Cohen Guilty in Killing of Husband; 'This Was Not a Neat, Tidy Case,'" by Patrick May, Miami Herald, Nov. 17, 1989

"Cohen Gets Life As Emotions Flare In, Out of Court," by Richard Wallace, Miami Herald, Nov. 22, 1989

"Slain Millionaire's Stepson Homeless in Bayfront Park," Miami Herald, Nov. 20, 1997

"TV Reporter: Prosecution Witness in Murder Case Lied," by Rachel La Corte, Associated Press, Dec. 9, 1998

"The Imperfect Murder," by Arthur Jay Harris, Miami New Times, Dec. 17, 1998

"Hit-man Conviction in Doubt; Story of Home Invader Unraveling in 1986 Slaying of Stanley Cohen," by Daniel de Vise and Wanda J. DeMarzo, Miami Herald, Jan. 19, 2003

"A Rare Hearing Is OK'd in Murder," by Wanda J. DeMarzo, Miami Herald, May 20, 2005

CrimeLibrary.com

I. BACKGROUND

A. Judicial Proceedings

Appellant Joyce Cohen has been indicted for the first degree murder of her husband, Stanley Alan Cohen. Her murder trial began on October 10, 1989, in the Circuit Court for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, in and for Dade County, Florida.

In anticipation of her trial, Cohen filed a motion on March 13, 1989, for subpoenas seeking testimony and records from various federal agents and agencies with regards to Frank Diaz, a fugitive from justice who was, at one time, considered to be a suspect in her husband's murder. On March 31, 1989, the federal government filed motions in state court both to quash the subpoenas and to request a protective order. In response to the federal government's motions, the state court issued an order directing the federal government to produce on or before June 12, 1989, all records covered by the subpoenas for an in-camera review.

The facts as discussed in this section are limited to those facts that appear to have been presented to the district court. Discussion of the new evidence that has been developed will be presented infra at 1455, where we explain why a remand is necessary

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