A Denver man accused of killing his wife can use more than $500,000 received from her life insurance policy to pay for his defense, despite arguments that the money should go to the guardian of their two children.
Robert Wayne Feldman, 53, was charged with first-degree murder in February last year for the March 2015 death of his 44-year-old wife Stacy, who was found dead in the shower of their Denver home.
On Monday, Feldman fired his public defender and rehired his private attorney after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last month that he could use the funds he collected from Stacy’s policy, KDVR reported.
Feldman agreed to pay David Kaplan’s law firm $550,000 to defend him, using funds from Stacy’s $751,000 life insurance policy, soon after he was charged, according to KDVR.
Robert Feldman, (left), who is accused of killing his wife Stacy, (right), can use more than $500,000 received from her life insurance policy to pay for his defense despite arguments the money should go to the guardian of their two children.
Feldman has rehired a private lawyer to defend him after a protracted legal battle which saw a Supreme Court rule that he can use proceeds from his wife’s insurance policy to pay for it
However, her family later sued in Probate Court, using Colorado’s slayer statute, which is intended to prevent murderers from profiting off their crimes, usually through a movie or book deal.
Denver’s Probate Court later found in favor of the family and ruled that the funds should not be given to Feldman and that the money should instead go to their two young children who are in the custody of a legal guardian.
KDVR reported that Kaplan later withdrew from the case, which was taken up by a public defender on Feldman’s behalf.
He then appealed to the decision to the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled Stacy’s family had acted too late in preventing Feldman from using the money.
KDVR reported that Feldman has now rehired the same law firm and he is due to be arraigned in October ahead of his murder trial which is scheduled to begin in April 2020.
A criminal defense attorney not connected to the case told KDVR that the law firm had acted correctly in accepting the funds because the Probate Court had no jurisdiction to freeze accounts.
Feldman, (left), is seen walking with his lawyer David Kaplan, (right), who he had originally hired when he was first charged with her murder in February 2015
Prosecutors claim that Feldman strangled Stacy in the shower, then staged her death as a fall, hours after she confronted him about having an affair
Defense attorney Dan Recht told KVDR: ‘The Probate Court, according to the Supreme Court, can’t freeze the money already given to a third party.
‘Let’s say the killer takes the proceeds of an insurance policy and buys a car. [The] car dealership doesn’t know anything is wrong, they haven’t done anything wrong.
‘They just received money and gave somebody a car. Well, should they have to give the money back if he’s (Feldman) found guilty of murder? Arguably not,’ Recht said.
Prosecutors claim that Feldman strangled Stacy in the shower, then staged her death as a fall, hours after she confronted him about having an affair.
On March 1 2015, Feldman, a meat products wholesaler, called 911 in a panic, stating that his wife was unresponsive in the shower.
Stacy, who worked for the non-profit PSC Partners Seeking a Cure, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Feldman was vague about what position he’d found the body in. Firefighters who were the first at the scene said that he was acting ‘odd’ and ‘over dramatic’, according to an affidavit obtained by Dailymail.com last year.
It was reported that Stacy Feldman discovered her husband was having an affair with a woman he met on Tinder and confronted him about it before her death
Feldman, 53, worked as a meat products wholesaler, while his wife Stacy, 44, worked for a non-profit. They are seen together with their two children in a family photo
Feldman’s story was that Stacy had consumed marijuana edibles and smoked pot at a party the night before, which is legal in Colorado.
Feldman claimed that Stacy had consumed marijuana edibles and smoked pot at a party the night before, which is legal in Colorado.
He said she wasn’t feeling well when he’d left that morning around 8am to take the kids to school at a Jewish temple, and he didn’t see her again until he found her dead at 3pm.
The medical examiner found no signs of THC in Stacy’s system, proving she hadn’t smoked pot. But the autopsy could not prove her death was a homicide – the cause and manner of death were undetermined.
Cops got an anonymous letter on March 24 saying that Stacy had been expected to pick up the couple’s children at noon the day she’d died – contradicting Feldman’s story.
Then, on June 11, a woman contacted the local Crime Stoppers hotline with crucial information.
She revealed that in February, she met Feldman through the dating app Tinder.
The woman said that later Feldman had visited her house for dinner, and they had sex.
The pair had plans to spend time together one weekend, but she didn’t hear from him. When she called him, he said he couldn’t meet up – he was ‘blowing her off’, she believed.
She later found an email address for Stacy and contacted her on the morning of March 1 to ask if Feldman was really divorced. Phone records show that Stacy responded immediately, calling the woman at 8. 52 am the same day.
Stacy told the woman that Feldman had cheated on her before and said that she was ‘done with him’, the woman recalled. Hours later, Stacy was dead.
Police dug deeper into the case, reviewing the tapes of the 911 call.
A detective trained in techniques for reviewing suspicious 911 calls, noted that while Feldman said he was performing CPR, there were no changes to his breathing during the call.
The detective and prosecutors called in a forensic expert who is nationally known as an authority in strangulation deaths.
The expert reviewed all of the crime scene and autopsy photos, as well as the reports from the initial autopsy.
In December of 2017, the expert delivered his full report, that Stacy was killed by strangulation or suffocation. The manner of death was homicide.