The Millionaire's Wife

by Cathy Scott

On a rainy morning in the fall of 1990, a gunman, in broad daylight, caught up with George Kogan as George walked home from a Manhattan Upper East Side market. The shooter pumped three slugs into his back. Seven hours later, George was dead.

From the start, the prime suspect was the estranged wife of George Kogan, because, in part, George had $4 million worth of insurance on his life, and Barbara was the beneficiary. Yet, it would take nearly two decades to solve the murder. George, who had turned 49 the month before the killing, was gunned down as he approached the lobby doors of his East 69th Street apartment building, where he lived with his young girlfriend.

Manuel Martinez, an attorney with a small law practice who mostly handled eviction cases, once represented Barbara and eventually was charged and convicted of hiring a hit man to kill Barbara’s husband. It 's a love triangle and a hit-for-hire, and the story fascinated me.

It's also a sad story, because, in the end, everyone lost, including George's two sons, who were in college at the time of the murder, and who lost their father to murder and, ultimately, their mother to prison.

Nineteen years long years after the death of her husband, Barbara Susan Kogan was indicted for the murder of her husband, but not until she had spent every penny of the insurance payout, the last of which went toward her defense.

I’ve spent the last year piecing together this book. It’s titled THE MILLIONAIRE'S WIFE: The True Story of a Real Estate Tycoon, his Beautiful Young Mistress, and a Marriage that Ended in Murder. And while it is my eighth book, it is one of the toughest I’ve ever written.

True crime books, my friend and colleague Kathryn Casey recently reminded me, are not easy to write. As a journalist, I’ve been trained to chase the story, go to the scene, find sources, get documents, land interviews--anything and everything to flesh out the story. True crime books take real perseverance, especially in cases that are about to go to trial and when those on either side of the case are skittish about talking.

I was scheduled to interview Barbara, with her attorney, before her arrest. But, soon after, a warrant for her arrest was issued and her attorney instead arranged for her surrender. It was disappointing, and, while difficult, I love a challenge, plus I was lucky.

After I went on a radio show and talked about the case and after posting or two an article updating the case on Women in Crime Ink, family members on both sides of the case contacted me. I also was able to speak several times with the deputy district attorney as well as three defense attorneys. And a generous reporter who had covered the crime 19 years early shared with me what he recalled. And a doorman at George’s building, where George had been killed nearly two decades earlier, was particularly helpful and walked me through the crime scene. Several people at the courthouse were helpful as well, as were a couple of NYPD police officers. And E.W. Count, a crime writer in New York City, on two occasions became my eyes and ears in a Manhattan courtroom.

For the research part of books, I approach them in the same way I do news stories--digging for clues, links, and, especially, documentation and confirmations via paperwork and those I interview. For every book, I invariably contact mortuary personnel and verify college degrees with universities; this case was no different. Thank goodness the records were fairly easy to find, despite the passage of time. Fact-checking our own stories is part of the deal.

For newspaper and magazine articles, I got into Lexis-Nexis to pull up the original articles and, at the same time, stumbled on some relevant federal court documents. Early on, writer/author Sue Russell pulled a couple of articles from Lexis-Nexis for me. After that, I did pay-as-you-go searches (a great service for research). The one thing, however, I could not find was George Kogan’s obituary. I knew there had to be one, and, ultimately, getting creative with search words (“slaying” instead of “murder” worked in this case), I found it. It was a real prize, because it was loaded with the detail I had been looking for--when and where George was buried, who officiated, who attended, and who did not.

When it came to police and court records, that got tricky. As soon as Barbara appeared in court, I filed a Freedom of Information Act form; it was ignored. So, with the help of attorneys, a defendant’s family members and a journalism student working on a class paper (and whose professor was friends with the defense), I was able to get the complete court files, trial transcripts, copies of depositions, a transcript of a surveillance telephone conversation, statements from witnesses from the scene of the crime, a list of witnesses and evidence, and a roster of jurors.

Then, the reading began. I pored through documents. It became a matter of learning who the characters and players were--and there were lots. Because two defendants were charged three years apart, it made the story more complicated. So I tried to boil it down and tell the story chronologically, as it had unfolded.

Deciding where to start a book is always a challenge. With The Murder of Biggie Smalls (a k a Notorious B.I.G., I began with Biggie, at age 15, sitting in a Brooklyn police precinct, crying for his mother after an officer detained Biggie and a friend for questioning to see if they were witnesses to a murder in a Bed-Stuy neighborhood. To me, that scene at the precinct spoke volumes about Biggie, whose real name was Christopher Wallace. He was not the street thug, like Tupac Shakur, who came of age on the mean streets of the Jungle housing project in Oakland, Californai. Biggie, conversely, was a mama’s boy, and his mother was a school teacher who sent Biggie to Jamaica every year to spend the summer with his grandfather, an ocean away from Brooklyn.

In Murder of a Mafia Daughter, after I went to victim Susan Berman’s Beverly Hills home, in Benedict Canyon, and met a neighbor who’d been the one to alert police that something was awry next door, I began the book with the neighbor awakening to Susan’s dogs running loose, on Christmas Eve morning, in his front yard.

With the Kogan case,  after traveling to New York City several times, the way the killer stalked George as he made his way home from a neighborhood market became a vivid picture to me, and I began the book with the morning he died.

I love the cover of this book, because it captures the feel of that fateful morning. So, it is with pride and pleasure that I give you, the reader, a sneak peek at the cover of The Millionaire’s Wife, released here, on Women in Crime Ink. When the book comes out later this year, I’ll give you a heads up.

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Crimes and Misdemeanors -- and Murder

by Cathy Scott

Journalists by nature are nosy -- and we're chameleons, fading into the background as we observe the happenings around us. I've been to more homicide scenes than I care to count. But once there, I'm all about the details. So, as I've put together a book this past year about the Barbara Kogan case (scheduled for publication in spring 2011), I've been all about the details.


On a rainy October morning in 1990, Kogan's husband George was gunned down by an unknown assailant. From the start, Barbara was a suspect. For nearly two decades, she adamantly denied any involvement. Now 67 years old, she has admitted to playing a part in hiring a hit man to shoot three slugs into George Kogan's back. She said, through her attorney, that she didn't want to put her two sons through the stress of a lengthy trial. She is about to be moved from the Riker's Island jail to a New York prison upstate to serve out a 12-to-36-year sentence.

But the first criminal case I was involved in -- and the reason I became a crime reporter -- wasn't a murder. It was a misdemeanor crime against two friends, my sister and me. As a teenager, I regularly followed crime stories in the local newspaper, and I always was interested in TV news reports, although during that era growing up in San Diego County, there wasn't much crime to speak of.

I lived in La Mesa, a suburb east of San Diego known as the "Jewel of the Hills" with its near-perfect weather and safe neighborhoods, which still have walkable, tree-lined streets. It was a quiet, middle-class, crime-free 'burb -- and a nice place to raise children.

And so it was shocking on one spring night in that same neighborhood when I became a victim along with my sister and two of our friends. And while we were the ones victimized, it was so absurd to us at the time that we laughed -- mostly out of embarrassment.

It happened as we jogged in preparation for a 30-mile benefit walk for hunger -- plus my sister and I were getting swimsuit-ready for Spring Break in Palm Springs. So we took a week-night run as we had dozens of times before. We never felt at risk -- until that night.

We started our run from a cul-de-sac at the end of our block. About two blocks later, a man sitting in a dark-colored Volkswagen Bug stepped out of his car just as we jogged by. The four of us were chatting it up as usual, but it creeped us out enough that we stepped up our pace.

Our route took us a few blocks before turning right, running a few more long blocks, and turning right again to make for a run of a few miles. The last stretch was past a church, then up a hill toward home.

But halfway up the hill, the same man we'd seen blocks earlier stepped out of the darkness and under the light of a street lamp. He was naked from the waist down, with his trousers around his ankles.

It was startling. but we moved so quickly that the man was as shocked as we were. He started running too, away from us, stumbling because his pants were still wrapped around his ankles. He hobbled away while we crossed the street and ran to the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Harris, to call the police. One of my friends, in the meantime, screamed at the top of her lungs, so much so that my sister afterward described it as "screaming and waving her arms hysterically, a la Blanche in Bonnie and Clyde."

It was no exaggeration. And perhaps that was what we all wanted to do that night -- scream -- but didn't. Instead, we giggled. Before that, as a group, we had felt pretty fearless.

When police arrived, two officers asked us direct questions about what we saw, where the man was standing when he dropped his pants, and a good description of the suspect and his car. Then we all went to our respective homes. Within 30 minutes, an officer called and said they had located a suspect and his car. As it turned out, the man lived around the corner from us -- which creeped us out even more -- and his VW was parked in his driveway.

Police needed the four of us to meet them on the street in front of the man's house. So we drove there. Sure enough, standing with the officers was the same man who had earlier exposed himself to us. The man was arrested, and later we were summoned to court for a trial. Outside the courtroom with our mothers, we met the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case. He informed us that the suspect had just pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of lewd conduct.

Thus ended my first involvement with a criminal case. I've been fascinated with criminal law ever since, not as a victim but as a journalist and author. I wouldn't write about that night until many years later; it was hardly a crime worthy of a news story. But for four young women, it was a pivotal moment in time. It stripped away our sense of safety and security in the neighborhood where we'd grown up.

When I eventually became a crime reporter, my habit was to write about the underdog. And for many of their families, what we as reporters put on paper is the last time their loved ones will be written about, so I've always felt it's important to do right by them.

That has been my goal with the George Kogan murder, to tell it like it is and get to the bottom of the story. In a murder-for-hire homicide like his, which has been anything but open-and-shut, sometimes it's tough getting to those crucial details. But in the end, dogged determination usually gets us the facts, documents and interviews we need. 

George Kogan's family, as well as his estranged wife Barbara, the accused and now convicted, should expect nothing less -- the good, the bad and the ugly. Joseph Pulitzer once wrote that journalism is "a noble profession" he'd spent his life doing. While not all would agree with him 100 percent, it's our responsibility, as writers and journalists, to get the story right. George Kogan, shot in the back in broad daylight in October 1990, deserves as much.

Photo of Barbara Kogan courtesy of the New York Post.

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Sources and Citizen Journalists

by Cathy Scott   

I recently received an e-mail from a Columbia School of Journalism student working on a project about the Barbara Kogan case out of Manhattan on New York City's Upper East Side. As cases go, the more I dig into this one, the more intriguing it becomes. At first glance, it looked like a slam dunk for the prosecution, that Barbara had conspired with her former attorney to hire a hit man to knock off Barbara’s soon-to-be ex-husband, George, all for the insurance money. After all, once Barbara and George were divorced, Barbara would no longer be the beneficiary. 

In May 2008, the attorney, Manuel Martinez (below center), was convicted of hiring the hit man. The prosecution was looking good in the murder-for-hire case. But by the time Barbara was indicted six months later, it was nearly 19 years after the shooting death of George Kogan (below leftmost) in October 1990. Then, a judge tossed out the murder charge and Barbara, deemed a flight risk by the judge, remains jailed in Rikers Island awaiting a murder-related charge to be refiled by the district attorney's office. 

But sometimes things are less simple than they seem. Over time, I’ve learned that the Kogan investigation is anything but a cut-and-dry killing. It’s a circumstantial evidence case -- no smoking gun, no eye-witnesses to the conspiracy, no hard evidence -- that makes it a much tougher case for the prosecution. Clearly, Barbara was a disgruntled wife whose husband had left her to move in with his new mistress(below far right). And George was wealthy. So that very well could have been a motive. But with or without insurance money, given the length -- around 25 years -- of the Kogans’ marriage, Barbara was going to end up with a large sum of money, one way or the other. 

Talking with the student about the case, one he was well versed in, reminded me of how important credible sources are to journalists and authors -- especially when it comes to true crime. I’m in the midst of writing a book about the case for St. Martin’s Press (due out next year), so I'm mired in it. The student was interviewing people surrounding the Kogan murder and running into the same stumbling blocks all writers do at all levels, when we go snooping around. Sources are so important that they’re protected in many states and federally with shield laws so that they're not easily revealed.

It’s even more important today, with the advent of citizen journalists releasing information with rapid-fire speed on social media sites, to be extra careful in our dissemination of information as we uncover it. Like it or not, we're held to a higher standard than ever before.

It’s our job as writers to get the facts straight. Besides analyzing the case and scouring scores of legal documents, we have an ethical requirement to interview sometimes hundreds of people, even knocking on doors to reach them, to balance out the story, tell both sides and, hopefully, get it right.

And that’s my point: the importance of getting it right. I tried to instill in students, when I taught journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, how important it is to check and double-check the facts. It doesn't matter whether it's a short newspaper story, large magazine piece or lengthy nonfiction book. We owe at least that much to the people we write about.

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Accused Killers Catch a Break

by Cathy Scott

Two murder cases with women as the accused killers have taken similar -- and unusual -- turns. Each was instantly labeled the “Black Widow.” And both women stood to gain millions should their husbands die.

In the first case, San Juan and Manhattan socialite Barbara Kogan was indicted late last year for the 1990 murder of her millionaire husband George. She stood accused of convincing her attorney to hire a hitman to kill George. Kogan’s estranged husband, with whom she was in the middle of a nasty divorce, was shot to death in broad daylight while George was walking from a neighborhood market to his live-in girlfriend’s high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Joel Seidemann, the Manhattan assistant district attorney who has been on the case for nearly two decades, is expected to refile a fresh charge against Kogan by the end of this year. During Kogan's arraignment in November 2008, Seidemann described the suspect as "a very angry woman."

"But when that anger became so overwhelming," he told the judge, "she decided to litigate the divorce through the bullets of a gun."

The second defendant is Margaret Rudin, charged and convicted of killing her husband, wealthy real estate investor Ronald Rudin, then driving the body to a remote area on the shore of Lake Mojave 45 miles outside of Las Vegas, stuffing him inside an antique truck and setting it on fire.

The commonalities with the two women, both of whom are now 65 years old, are many. Rudin, who was convicted of murder, has been granted a new trial. Rudin’s conviction was overturned in December 2008 by Clark County District Court Judge Sally Loehrer, who ruled that Rudin, who has spent the last nine years in a Nevada state prison, had “ineffective counsel” during her first trial.

And Barbara Kogan, accused of second-degree murder in the contract killing of her estranged husband, has had the charge dismissed on a technicality. In July, State Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus ruled that because another grand jury had failed to indict Kogan in the 1990s, prosecutors needed judicial permission to empanel a new grand jury that handed down the indictment against Kogan last year. The prosecution, he said, failed to get that permission.

Both women are expected to be in their respective courtrooms on opposite ends of the country sometime next year. Rudin’s first trial, which was much publicized and lasted 10 weeks, was one of Las Vegas's highest profile murder cases. For Kogan, “48 Hours” and “Dateline” have already made arrangements to be in the courtroom for the trial, which is expected to last eight weeks.

While prosecutors in both crimes claim greed as the motive, in the Kogan case, the only evidence against her is circumstantial at best -- unless, by trial time, the prosecution comes up with more.

As for Rudin, it's mostly circumstantial as well, with hard evidence against her shaky. Her husband was missing in 1994, his car found at a strip club. Later, a boy and his father, out fishing together, discovered the burnt trunk and body near the shore of Lake Mojave on the Nevada side of the water. A gun, said to be the murder weapon, found months later in the lake, was not registered to Rudin or her husband, so that connection was never made, just conjectured.

After Rudin was granted a new trial, her new attorney, Christopher Oram, told reporters, "Obviously, we're very happy with the judge's ruling and look forward to going to trial.”

Kogan’s new counsel, high-profile criminal defense lawyer Barry Levin, said he’s looking forward to going to trial as well. “I intend to represent her zealously. I think she will be acquitted,” Levin said.

It all will unfold in their respective courtrooms. For the prosecution, both cases at this juncture appear to be uphill battles. But you never know what might happen as both sides sides duke it out in court.

Photo of Barbara Kogan in court (top) courtesy of the New York Daily News and photo of Margaret Rudin courtesy of TruTV.

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INTRODUCING CATHY SCOTT & SHERYL McCOLLUM

Women in Crime Ink is pleased to introduce two new regular contributors: True Crime Author Cathy Scott and Crime Analyst Sheryl McCollum.

Cathy Scott is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist who's received more than a dozen awards from news organizations in California and Nevada. Her work—which has appeared in The New York Times, Reuters, George magazine, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, The New York Times Magazine, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Las Vegas Sun—has taken her to Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Panama. Dividing her time between San Diego and Las Vegas, Cathy also writes fulltime for Best Friends Animal Society's magazine and Web site. She is a member of the Authors Guild and the Society of Professional Journalists' national Speakers Bureau. She has served as the Nevada chairwoman of the Society of Professional Journalist’s Sunshine Committee, which works to keep government records open to the public. At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Cathy was an adjunct journalism instructor for five years, a position she gave up to stay on the Gulf Coast for nearly four months to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Cathy is perhaps best known as the author of seven nonfiction books, including the Los Angeles Times best-seller The Killing of Tupac Shakur as well as the critically acclaimed The Murder of Biggie Smalls. Her other crime titles include Death in the Desert: The Ted Binion Homicide Case and Murder of a Mafia Daughter: The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Berman. Cathy's latest, The Rough Guide to True Crime, is being released August 31. She is currently finishing the case of Barbara Kogan, a Manhattan millionaire's widow who was indicted late last year for the contract murder of her husband nearly two decades ago. The book is scheduled for release by St. Martin’s Press True Crime Library in spring 2010.

Cathy has appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, Oxygen network’s “Snapped,” the Discovery Channel, CourtTV, CNN, MTV, Uncovered TV, Talk Books, and National Public Radio.

Women in Crime Ink is also welcoming Atlanta-based Sheryl McCollum, renowned crime analyst and college professor. She is the Director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute. Under Sheryl's direction, the Institute has been responsible for helping renew interest in cases that were deemed unsolvable. Sheryl has been involved in a number of notable investigations, including the disappearances of Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy, and Amber Hagerman, as well as historical cases such as the Atlanta Child Murders and the Moore's Ford Bridge Lynching.

Sheryl is also the Director of a Metro Atlanta Cold Case Crime Analysis Squad. During the 1996 Olympic Games, Sheryl was Coordinator for the Crisis Response Team, which planned and trained for four years and responded to the Centennial Olympic Park Bombing, providing victim services through the criminal trial seven years later. In the wake of 9/11, Sheryl was Director of the Georgia team that was sent to the Pentagon in Washington, DC (aftermath at left). She is a POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) Certified Instructor, a Hostage Negotiator, a Crime Scene Technician, and a First Responder. Holding two Master’s Degrees, one in Policing and one in Criminal Justice, Sheryl is also a college professor, teaching Criminal Investigation, Crime Scene, and Forensics.

You can watch her as a regular guest expert on Nancy Grace. Sheryl has also been featured on Fox and Friends and CNN. Most recently, she is co-host of the new program "Fugitive Fridays" on the The Levi Page Show.

Read Sheryl's first piece for Women in Crime Ink on Thursday. And you can expect Cathy's first post a week from tomorrow, on July 23rd.

Please join us in welcoming our newest contributors!

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