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She was a hard-partying, drug-using, club-going, shameless flirt who spent money like it was going out of style and beamed as she was photographed naked in a pile of cash — but a California mom long ago convicted of murder insists she’s no killer.
Mary Ellen Samuels — known for orchestrating the murders-for-hire of her ex-husband Robert and a hitman who allegedly helped do him in — says in newly filed court papers that her 1994 trial was “fundamentally unfair” because prosecutors slut-shamed her instead of presenting actual proof.
Now 78 and a great-grandmother, Samuels, who is serving life without parole in the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla, wants her sentence overturned.
“The prosecution focused on dehumanizing Ms. Samuels by weaponizing her sexual expression, social habits, and fundamental identity as a woman, rather than presenting evidence that bore on her guilt,” she said in a Jan. 20 California Federal Court filing.
The trial featured “lurid” letters from one of Samuels’ lovers, and witnesses who claimed she did cocaine with one of her children and splashed $800 on outfits from a store called Trashy Lingerie, court papers show.
Allegations even included testimony that Mary Ellen flirted with a cop at the crime scene, “nuzzled” up to him with her breasts, and rubbed his head while saying she “liked bald guys,” according to legal papers.
But the pièce de résistance for the prosecution was a single picture of a beaming Mary Ellen lying nude on a white bed, with her body covered by stacks of cash.
The $20,000 was part of the nearly $500,000 Mary Ellen received from Robert’s life insurance policy, money she spent with abandon on a condo in Cancun, a Porsche for her boyfriend, a 30-inch television; a car phone; two faux fur coats, and a $2,500 birthday party “to which she arrived in a limousine.”
The jury foreperson later admitted the photo, which helped Samuels earn the nickname the “Green Widow,” “did ‘more damage’ than any other evidence the prosecution introduced at trial.”
Authorities also had sexually explicit letters from one of Samuels’ boyfriends, Steven Breggia: “When you came into my room in a fur coat. I’ll never forget it when you peeled that coat back and I really saw your beautiful body for the first time. Your full breasts bursting from that lace teddy and your tiny waist.”
It shows “just how shocking, sexualizing, and incendiary” the prosecution’s strategy was, Samuels now contends.
The letters, written a year before Robert’s killing, had nothing to do with the case, said Mary Ellen, who has been the subject of several true crime documentaries over the years.
Mary Ellen and Robert Samuels had been married for about six years, with Robert, a Hollywood cameraman, adopting Mary Ellen’s teenage daughter Nicole before the pair split in 1986.
The couple had each been dating other people when Mary Ellen and Nicole “found” Robert, 40, dead from a gunshot wound to the head in December 1988, inside the living room of the Los Angeles home the family once shared.
Investigators hit a brick wall in the case until a tipster with a grudge years later claimed Mary Ellen had arranged the killing of Robert — along with the murder of another man, James Bernstein, who was allegedly ready to confess his role in Robert’s death.
His body was found strangled on the side of the road in Ventura County in 1989.
“The People’s theory was that Ms. Samuels and Mr. Bernstein had conspired to murder Mr. Samuels for insurance proceeds and, later, that Ms. Samuels had conspired with others to murder Mr. Bernstein to silence him regarding Mr. Samuels’s murder,” she said in the legal filing.
“Faced with a complete lack of forensic evidence,” prosecutors instead tried to “sex-shame Ms. Samuels into a conviction,” she said in court papers.
She was sentenced to death in September 1994, but after numerous appeals, the sentence was vacated and in March 2023, a Los Angeles judge resentenced Samuels to life without the possibility of parole.
Lawyers for Samuels didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
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