On December 9, 1988, Mary Ellen Samuels and her teenage daughter Nicole let themselves into a home in Northridge, Los Angeles to drop off the family dog. They found 40-year-old Robert Samuels in the hallway. Half-naked. Shot once through a pillow at close range.
Police arrived to find no signs of forced entry. Nothing had been taken. Not even the wallet sitting in plain sight. Bob Samuels was an accomplished Hollywood cameraman with credits on Beverly Hills Cop 2, Short Circuit, and The Color Purple. He had no known enemies.
This was an execution.
A Marriage Built to Break
Robert “Bob” Samuels had been infatuated with Mary Ellen Guernick since they were teenagers in Santa Ana, California. They had grown up as neighbors. She was two years older, popular, nicknamed Betty Boop. He was quieter, a budding photographer who kept his feelings to himself. After high school they lost touch entirely.
They reconnected in 1979. He finally asked her out. Six months later, they were married. Bob formally adopted her daughter Nicole and raised her as his own.
The cracks appeared quickly. Bob worked long hours and lived modestly. Mary Ellen wanted travel, designer clothes, expensive jewelry, and shopping sprees with no ceiling. He bought her a Subway sandwich franchise to keep her occupied and bring in extra income. She ran it badly and kept spending. The arguments became a fixture.
On October 2, 1986, Bob came home from a film shoot to find a five-page letter on the kitchen counter and an empty house. ‘No matter what happens or what you think of me now or later,’ she wrote, ‘I will still always care for you. We just can’t live together.’
He begged her to hold off on the divorce. She agreed to a trial separation instead. For two years, he gave her $1,500 a month in spousal support and shared custody of their schnauzer. Then he hired a lawyer and filed documents seeking to cut those payments to under $1,200. He also wanted to finalize the divorce and reclaim the sandwich shop.
Mary Ellen had done the arithmetic. As a divorcee, she stood to receive roughly $30,000. As his widow, she would inherit everything.
The Execution
The autopsy on Robert Samuels confirmed he had been struck with a blunt object before the shot was fired. He was likely unconscious when a 16-gauge shotgun was pressed against his head through the pillow. The medical examiner placed his time of death at 12 to 24 hours before his body was discovered.
Detectives brought Mary Ellen in for questioning. She arrived at the station wearing a low-cut shirt. Her demeanor was described by investigators not as distraught but as flirtatious. At one point she told a detective she found bald men attractive and rubbed his head.
Gunshot residue tests came back negative for both Mary Ellen and Nicole. She agreed to a polygraph and passed it. With no physical evidence and no confirmed motive, police had no choice but to release her.
Within two weeks of burying her husband, Mary Ellen Samuels was in Las Vegas.
Half a Million Dollars
The inheritance moved quickly. Mary Ellen and Nicole moved into Bob’s Northridge home. She took his car, cashed $6,000 in unclaimed payroll checks, sold the Subway franchise for $70,000, refinanced the house for $160,000, and collected more than $240,000 from his life insurance policies. In total: over half a million dollars.
She spent it faster than some people earn it. Fur coats. Designer clothes. Custom-made outfits from a boutique called Trashy Lingerie. Stretch limousines for bar-hopping nights. Private cocaine parties with hired male strippers. Four months after the murder, she threw herself a lavish birthday party at the Knollwood Country Club. She bought a new boyfriend a Porsche in cash. She purchased a condo in Cancun.
She also reportedly trained a parrot to curse at the lead investigator whenever he came to her door.
Prosecutors would later put it simply. Robert Samuels was worth more to her dead than alive.
The Informant
On May 1, 1989, five months after the murder, police received an anonymous call. The informant said Mary Ellen had approached him about killing her husband and he had refused. He told them to look into a man named James “Jim” Bernstein. Then he signed off with a poem, a code so detectives could identify him if he called again: ‘A rose is a rose, but the nose always knows.’
James Bernstein was 27 years old. By day, he clerked at an electronics store. By night, he dealt narcotics and carried a business card that listed his occupation simply as ‘Specialist.’ He was also engaged to Nicole. The day after Bob’s body was found, Bernstein had taken out a $25,000 life insurance policy naming Nicole as sole beneficiary.
When detectives dug into Mary Ellen’s social circle, they found she had been shopping for a hitman openly for months. She had approached multiple people. When one refused, she moved to the next. Her friends had dismissed it as the drunk ranting of a woman going through a divorce. Nobody called the police.
According to investigators’ reconstruction, Mary Ellen paid Bernstein to arrange the killing. Bernstein, unwilling to do it himself, subcontracted the job to a man named Mike Silva. Silva pulled the trigger.
A Hit on the Hitman
On July 23, 1989, a body was found in a remote embankment off a mountain road in Ventura County, 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The remains had been there for weeks. The California heat had mummified them.
Identifying the body required a technique rarely attempted at the time. A mummified hand was removed. One finger was rehydrated in a laboratory until the skin was supple enough to yield a print. The fingerprint matched an arrest file.
The body belonged to James Bernstein.
Investigators found a phone card in his apartment that LAPD had missed during an earlier search. The card had been used to call both Mary Ellen and Mike Silva in the days surrounding Bob’s death. One call to Silva had been placed just 30 minutes before Mary Ellen dialed 911 to report her husband’s body.
Bernstein’s boss told police that in the weeks before he vanished, Jim had been terrified. He confided he was involved in Bob’s death and wanted to confess. His last words to his boss: ‘I’m just gonna go to the police and tell them what I know.’
He never got the chance. The investigation was now a double murder inquiry, with Mary Ellen at the center of both.
Anne Hambly Talks
A second number on the phone card led to Anne Hambly, Mary Ellen’s closest friend. A check for $1,500, signed by Mary Ellen, had cleared through Hambly’s account. In Hambly’s shed, detectives found a bag containing Bernstein’s clothes and personal belongings.
Offered full immunity, Hambly told police everything. Mary Ellen had grown convinced that Bernstein was about to crack and confess. She asked Hambly to help find someone to silence him. In exchange, she would write off a $2,500 debt Hambly owed her.
Hambly’s boyfriend, Paul Gaul, agreed to do it for $5,000. He enlisted a friend named Darrell Edwards. On the night of the murder, the two men spent the day drinking, 30 to 40 beers each by Gaul’s later account. They convinced Bernstein to join them on what they described as a drug rip-off road trip. They drove him out to an isolated dirt road, and Edwards wrapped an arm around his neck from the back seat.
Bernstein fought hard. He broke free, opened the car door, and ran. The two men chased him down, tackled him, and strangled him. It took five minutes. They dumped his body down the embankment and drove home.
Anne Hambly called Mary Ellen in Cancun with a coded message. It was safe to return.
The Trial
Mary Ellen Samuels was arrested on January 26, 1990, two years and seven weeks after her husband’s murder. She was charged with two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances: multiple murder and murder for financial gain.
By the time the case went to trial in Van Nuys in April 1994, the prosecution’s position had weakened in one critical respect. Mike Silva, the man who had actually shot Robert Samuels, was already dead. He had killed his girlfriend and then himself before charges could be filed. The man who hired him was also dead. All prosecutors had were the testimonies of two self-confessed killers who had accepted plea deals, and a best friend who had traded her statement for immunity.
They opened their case with an enlarged photograph taken in a Cancun hotel room: Mary Ellen Samuels lying on a bed, covered in $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills. The image, they told the jury, said everything about motive.
The defense alleged Bob had been an abusive husband and a child molester. Nicole took the stand against her own lawyer’s advice and testified to this on her mother’s behalf. Mary Ellen testified in her own defense, winking at spectators in the gallery and insisting her spending had been modest. She told the court money was no motive.
Prosecutors methodically dismantled the claim. She had defaulted on the mortgage. She had left debts unpaid at the sandwich shop. Her husband’s grave had no headstone. His sister paid for it. Every dollar of the half-million-dollar inheritance had been spent within a year, while the grave went unmarked.
The Verdict
On July 1, 1994, the jury returned guilty verdicts on two counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy, and solicitation. Leaving the courtroom, jurors described Mary Ellen Samuels as cold, selfish, uncaring, and evil. The judge sentenced her to death three weeks later, calling the evidence against her overwhelming, extensive, vivid, and compelling. She became the fifth woman in California history to receive a death sentence.
Paul Gaul and Darrell Edwards were each sentenced to 15 years to life. Nicole was never charged, though prosecutors described her as an unindicted co-conspirator.
In November 2019, Mary Ellen’s death sentence was overturned on appeal after a court found that excessive bad-character evidence had been admitted at trial. As of 2023, she was 75 years old and still incarcerated. Her fate remains unresolved.
Robert Samuels was 40 years old. He had worked on The Color Purple and Beverly Hills Cop 2. He had adopted a daughter who was not his own. He had spent two years reading self-help books about saving his marriage, hoping to reconcile with a woman who had already begun looking for someone to kill him.
