Shortly after midnight, on April 30, 1997, Lower Merion Police Officer James Driscoll, responded to a 911 call from Craig Rabinowitz, at 526 Winding Way, in Merion Park. When Driscoll arrived there at 12:29 A.M., he saw in the bathtub, the naked body of Stefanie Rabinowitz, Craig Rabinowitz’s wife.
Actually, Stefanie Rabinowitz was mostly naked, but not completely naked.
As the Inquirer reported on May 6, 1997, she was still wearing her wedding band on her left ring finger, a gold-colored watch on her left wrist, a gold-colored bracelet with stones on her right wrist, and a plain gold-colored bracelet on her left wrist.
On May 1, the Inquirer published Stefanie’s obituary. There was no mention of any foul play.
However, the very next day, then Assistant D.A., Bruce Castor, announced that she had been strangled and that the case was being investigated as a homicide.
At that point, Stefanie Rabinowitz’s murder became, and continued to be, Philadelphia’s biggest news story of the year.
As if finding a young, attractive, successful (she was a litigator for the law firm of Fineman and Bach), naked and strangled woman in her own bathtub wasn’t enough to set off a media frenzy – there were so many more shoes to be dropped – including but not limited to:
- Craig Rabinowitz’s relationship with stripper, Shannon Reinert, aka Summer
- The $1,500,000 life insurance policy on Stefanie, that had been underwritten just a few weeks before her death
- The revelation that Craig’s latex glove business was nothing more than another one of his fantasies
- The enormous debt he had accumlated, and his written plan to payoff that debt with the proceeds of the life insurance.
Rabinowitz professed his innocence for months after the killing. And others close to him bought his story – for a while. On May 7, 1997 the Inquirer ran an article about how Stefanie’s parents, “had joined with other relatives in promising to help their son-in-law, accused of her murder, get freed on bail.”
But by May 13, after it had been revealed that among other things, Craig had pawned pieces of Stefanie’s jewelry three days after her death – her parents, Anne and Louis Newman had hired their own lawyer. And now the Newmans were saying that they had made no decision as to whether or not they were going to help Craig post bail.
One week later, the Newmans made their decision – not to provide any more financial support for their son-in-law.
Despite what appeared to be a preponderance of evidence pointing to Rabinowitz’s guilt, his legal team, comprised of Frank DeSimone and Jeffrey Miller, soldiered on through the summer months.
On July 22, Rabinowitz pleaded “not guilty” at his formal arraignment hearing.
By August, the D.A. had also charged him with fraud. And then for the better part of the month, the prosecution and defense quibbled over whether Rabinowitz would be tried for murder and fraud at the same tiime, versus two separate trials, as the defense would have preferred.
On September 9, Rabinowitz’s lawyers succeded in convincing Judge Samuel Salus to bring in jurors from Western Pennsylvania, rather using local jurors who might be biased because of all the media coverage the case had drawn.
On September 22, Desimone and Miller asked Salus to throw the case out because the prosecutor had called attention to testimony Rabinowitz had given in a 1993 prostitution case, under a grant of immunity. Salus didn’t buy it.
The trial date was set with opening arguments scheduled for October 30, in Norristown.
And then, in a court room packed with people waiting to witness the beginning of a murder trial, Craig Rabinowitz pleaded guilty.
AP wrote that Rabinowitz decided to come clean after three dead loved ones _ his wife, father-in-law and father _ came to him in a dream, put their hands on my hand and said, `Craig, it’s time for you to do what’s right.’
Rabinowitz was sentenced to life in prison without parole. After his “non-trial,” he was moved to the State Correctional Institute at Houtzdale, PA – his current residence.
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