Defendant contends that the court improperly allowed the prosecution to adduce testimony, and otherwise refer to evidence, that defendant was violent, and that he choked his wife to the point of unconsciousness in late 1983. It is this inappropriate and distracting inference which the Molineux ruling and its progeny aim to bar. The court said (at 603, 721 N.Y.S.2d 593, 744 N.E.2d 128): Reliability is the sum of the circumstances surrounding the making of the statement that render the declarant worthy of belief. Defendant falsely attributed to Dr. Baran the opinion that the victim was depressed and might have committed suicide. This is exactly the same man that I knew 35 years ago, she told ABC News. We hold that the reliability of this evidence, initially a question for the court to resolve, is amply supported by this record. Tarasoff v. Regents of Univ. Defendant also argues that although this contested hearsay information, emanating from the victim, was admitted purportedly as legitimate background evidence, there is no background exception to the hearsay rule, and, beyond that, this background information was highly prejudicial, and, therefore, the trial justice should have precluded it. 14, 551 P.2d 334). Conviction of former Minot surgeon Dalsass and later to Det. However, the court, while prohibiting publication of its specific factual contents to the jury, did allow the jury to know that the letter warned the victim of the danger defendant posed to her. While no one other than the victim and defendant was present to observe what transpired in the marital dwelling on the morning of July 7, the inference from the foregoing circumstantial facts is most compelling, if not irresistible, that they had a hostile confrontation that weekend about the future of their marriage, its serious problems, and how each would deal with them. To the contrary, it was her professional opinion, based on three years of treating the deceased once or twice weekly, that she was not suicidal. https://t.co/ZGewROXCaQ pic.twitter.com/qwTytMjU2s. Most important, if there existed any lingering ambiguity about whether defense counsel had or had not registered a cognizable objection on October 11, defense counsel himself resolved it on October 16 when he said no objection at the moment the People actually offered the exhibits. Contemporaneously with these expressions of despair and bewilderment, he promptly had sexual relations on his first date with a nurse in the very room he and his victim had rented for the 1985 summer in the Hamptons, less than a month after she vanished. One can reasonably infer that he knew she would not suddenly return and appear at his bedside. Later on July 14, at a meeting at Det. at 293, 61 N.E. During a parole hearing in December 2020, two decades after he was jailed and 35 years after Gail disappeared, Bierenbaum finally admitted he murdered his wife. He can hardly claim with any credibility that an interlude of that nature and length slipped his mind when he spoke to the police and others on the first day, or, indeed, at least four times during the first week, following his wife's unexplained disappearance. Apart from the fact that defendant's alternate theories of his victim's demise have no evidentiary support, the existing evidence itself also refutes them. Bierenbaum, an experienced pilot who had been convicted on circumstantial evidence, was serving his 20 years-to-life prison sentence when he made the chilling confession during a December 2020 parole board hearing. Bierenbaum, now 66, convicted of the murder in 2000 under circumstantial evidence, had continually denied any involvement in her death, told a parole hearing in The trial record also makes it clear-notwithstanding the victim occasionally vacillated about terminating her marriage-this couple was on the verge of divorce in July 1985. They argue that when certain established facts are juxtaposed with other proven circumstances, defendant's multiple contradictions and omissions are patently incriminating. Corrections is thankful to the Tribes for caring for these lands since time immemorial and honors its ongoing connection to these communities past, present and future. Furthermore, were we to reach the merits of the videotape's admissibility, we would reject the defense argument that its contents are based on pure speculation and thus were improperly placed before the jury. Dalsass expressed frustration over defendant's lack of cooperation and his delays in returning phone calls and providing the police with information to aid their search efforts. At that point and with no expressed hesitation or apparent lack of confidence, he told his paramour to remain in bed through the night in the marital apartment, because he doubt[ed] it was his wife. Defendant contends: 1) that the trial justice improperly allowed the People to adduce opinion testimony that he was able, as a trained surgical resident, to dismember the victim's body within ten minutes, and also capable of packing it into a flight bag, whether or not the body had been disarticulated; and 2) that the court improperly permitted the jury to watch a videotaped demonstration depicting how a pilot can, without any assistance, load a 110 pound body, so packaged, onto a Cessna 172 airplane, fly it over the ocean, and discard it overboard. He told several people that, just before his wife left the apartment for the last time, they argued. Prosecutors who convicted Bierenbaum were stunned by his admission to the parole board, particularly because the confession mirrored the states theory of the crime in 1999, when Bierenbaum was charged with second-degree murder. In fact, defendant even misstated to Det. Surgeon Who Murdered Wife Confesses To Killing Instead, he falsely told both detectives, on a total of at least three occasions, that he stayed in his Manhattan apartment all day until 5:30 P.M., emphasizing to Dalsass that he was positive that he left [his apartment] at 5:30 [P.M.]. He also changed his claim that on July 7 he had spoken to the doorman who, he had originally maintained, said he saw the victim leave the building Sunday shortly after 11:00 A.M.