A Deadly Sin
The eyes that stare out from the Florida prison mug shot are unmistakably those of Joyce Lemay Cohen.
Once as pretty as a fashion model, she has retained some of her attractive featuresumber-colored eyes, lush lips and noble cheekbones.
But her hair is shorn, and she has gone graysomething she would never have tolerated in the lavish life she once led.
But after 15 years in prison, any remaining glimmer of glamour went dull long ago for Cohen.
She is 55 years old now. Her life is reduced to the simple regimen of incarceration at Broward Correctional Institution, the women’s prison in Fort Lauderdale.
She is inmate No. 161701, one of 611 women prisoners.
Greed got her there.
At age 24 she married a rich older man, Stanley Cohen, who introduced Joycehis fourth wifeto a jet-set way of life.
They lived in an historic mansion overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami’s ritzy Coconut Grove section. They drove Jaguars and flew in their own jet. They vacationed in one adult sandbox after anotherthe Bahamas, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Las Vegas and Cancun, Mexico.
Stan Cohen bought a spread near Steamboat Springs, Colo., for winter pleasure.
Mrs. Cohen became accustomed to the fine things in lifedesigner clothing, satin sheets, servants.
She enjoyed her husband’s wealth. She enjoyed his “Miami Vice” lifestyle. She enjoyed his social status.
But over time the marriage began to lose its sheen. She was doing too much cocaine. He was fooling around on her.
The couple began spending more time apartshe in Colorado partying, he in Miami running his construction and real estate development business.
One day, after 11 years of marriage, Joyce Cohen stared out at the Rocky Mountain peaks and got a lump in throat. She had reached the conclusion that she wanted the man’s possessionsall of them, not half. But she did not want the man.
A hysterical Joyce Cohen telephoned 911 in Miami at 5:25 a.m. on March 7, 1986, to report that her husband had been shot in their Coconut Grove home.
Police found Stanley Cohen, 52, naked and dead in bed, with gunshot wounds to the head.
When Joyce calmed down, she managed to report that Stan had been upstairs asleep while she was up late, busy with a charity project in a downstairs room. The couple’s pet Doberman pinscher napped at her feet.
She said she was suddenly startled by a loud noisea gunshot. She crept toward the sound and glimpsed two men running out of the house.
The mansion was filled with fine furnishings, and the intruders might have found stashes of cocaine and cash had they bothered to look.
But nothing was missing. The crime was not a robbery.
If Joyce’s story was true and accurate, someone had entered the house for the express purpose of putting a bullet in the head of Stanley Cohen.
Someone clearly wanted him dead.
But who?
Stanley Cohen was the eldest of four children of a New York City furrier. He grew up on Long Island, but his family moved to Florida in 1948, when Stanley was 14. He graduated from Miami High School in 1951, then earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Florida.
He married young, and the couple soon had two children, Gary and Gerri.
Cohen took a junior management job with a construction firm. He was a fast learner, and he struck out on his own in 1963, when the ambitious man was not yet 30 years old.
He called it SAC Construction Co., after Stanley Alan Cohen.
The population of Florida doubled from 5 million to 10 million between 1960 and 1980. The Miami area gradually was transformed into a bustling and hip ethnic polyglot from its former reputation as a Jewish retiree’s last stop en route to the hereafter.
Cohen’s firm, based in Miami, was positioned to capitalize on the construction needs of that population boom.
SAC specialized in commercial constructionstrip malls, medical facilities, government buildings, warehouses.
Cohen juggled many building projects at a time, but he managed to keep a discriminating eye on all of them. He visited his numerous job sites regularlyrelentlessly, as his employees and subcontractors might have put it.
He also began to branch out from construction into its companion enterprise, real estate development. Over the years he built a business with scores of employees and dozens of projects across the State of Florida.
Not coincidentally, along the way he got rich.
Cohen raced through three wives in less than a decade while growing his business.
He wasn’t a handsome man in the traditional sense.
He was husky, balding and well short of 6 feet. He had a broad smile that did not quite compensate for oversized facial features.
But Stanley Cohen could be a commanding presence in any crowd. Like most self-made men, he was confident and engaging.
Cohen enjoyed the company of women, and he was never without a steady companion or two, whether he was between marriages or not.
His heavy wallet had plenty of sex appeal, even if Stanley didn’t.
He was engaged to a woman who would have been his fourth wife when Joyce Lemay came into his life.
Cohen didn’t have to look far to find her. A separated single mother who was new to Miami, she was working as a secretary at SAC Construction.
Cohen came to work one day and there she was.
He introduced her to his circle of close friends at a French restaurant in Miami one night in the fall of 1974. She was 16 years younger than Cohen, who had just turned 40.
Meeting Joyce forced Stan Cohen had to reorder his romantic life. He informed his fiancée that the engagement was off.
A few weeks later, on Dec. 5, 1974, he married Joyce Lemay in an extravagant affair at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas.
This sort of opulence was new to Joyce.
She had been born poor in Carpentersville, Ill., a city of 30,000 at the northwest edge of Chicago’s vast suburban halo, an hour’s drive from the Loop.
Her father, Bonnie Lemay, was an American Indian, and her mother, Eileen Wojtanek, was of Polish extraction.
It was not a Currier-and-Ives childhood, according to a profile by Carol Soret Cope in her book about the Cohen murder, “In the Fast Lane.”
Lemay beat his wife, and the couple had persistent financial problems, perhaps because both husband and wife had drinking problems and could not keep steady jobs.
Before Joyce reached school age, the family moved south so that Bonnie Lemay could find work as a sharecropper. But life got no sweeter for the family.
Tired of abuse, Eileen split, taking Joyce with her. For several years the woman bounced from one bad relationshipand bottleto another.
She spent time in orphanages, foster care and youth homes. Joyce would later say that she suffered sexual and physical abuse as a child.
In 1964, an aunt in Carpentersville was contacted by Illinois state authorities after Joyce, at age 13, had been booted from a foster family for stealing.
The aunt, Bea Wojtanek, took her in and raised her until age 17, when she married a local teenager, George McDillon.
They had a son, Shawn, nine months later.
George worked as a drywall installer, Joyce as a secretary. They bought a small house but struggled to make the mortgage paymentsin part because Joyce had expensive taste. (According to author Cope, she once spent $165the equivalent of roughly $1,000 in 2006on peacock feathers to decorate the living room.)
After five years of an up-and-down marriage, Joyce compelled her young husband to move the family to Florida to find a better life. He arranged to go to work as a drywaller in Coral Springs, north of Miami-Fort Lauderdale.
The McDillons moved there in 1973, but George returned to Carpentersville alone less than a year later.
His wife wanted more out of life than he was able to supply.
It’s no surprise that Joyce caught the boss’s famously wandering eye at SAC Construction.
She was young, pretty and petite, at just 5 feet tall. Her raven hair and ochre eyes gave Joyce an exotic appeal. And she was ambitious and well-spoken, despite modest education.
Her marriage to Cohenjust 10 days after her divorce from McDillon was officialgave Joyce the good life she desired.
Author Cope wrote that Joyce and her son made a triumphant return to Carpentersville not long after the Vegas nuptials. She showed up in a shiny new luxury car and reported that she had lassoed a Jewish millionaire.
Cohen gave Joyce a fabulous life.
Their social connections were centered around the Miami Ski Club and Stan’s tight circle of college fraternity brothers. Joyce became a featured model in one of the year’s most important social events, the ski club’s annual fashion gala. Stanley paid Joyce’s way through interior design school and referred clients from his building firm.
But Joyce was too busy shopping to work much.
She furnished their new Coconut Grove mansion like a showplace, and she kept abreast of the latest designer clothing styles. When she wasn’t shopping, she was planning their bimonthly vacation trips to the continent’s finest sandy or snowy resorts.
Author Cope said Stanley Cohen once joked to his stepson, “Your mother’s going to shop me to death.”
For skiing, the couple favored laid back Steamboat Springs, Colo., where blue jeans were more plentiful than furs.
Stan bought a 650-acre spread there that he called Wolf Run Ranch, then constructed an elaborate cedar-sided cabin on the property. To get back and forth to the mountains he bought his own planefirst a prop-driven Cessna, then a much faster small jet.
The couple invested Stan’s money in whatever struck their fancyland, shopping centers, restaurants and resorts.
Their Steamboat Springs home was completed about the time that their marriage reached the seven-year itch phase. Joyce began spending longer stretches alone in Colorado, where she developed her own circle of friends, includingbrieflycountry singer Tanya Tucker.
In the movies, life is a three-act play.
The happy-ending narrative couldn’t be simpler: You’re up, you’re down, and then you’re up again. Think “Rocky” or “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
But Joyce Cohen was born down. Stan Cohen’s wealth brought her up. Inevitably, the third act of her life would find her hellbound.
There could be no happy ending.
Their story was as old as infidelity itself.
First the couple’s sex life went south. Then Joyce learned that Stanley had rekindled an affair with an old flame. They argued frequently, and each threatened to leave the other.
But Stan warned Joyce that she would leave the marriage the same way she entered itwith nothing.
Joyce could not fathom the idea of returning to her former life. After a decade of living in high style, she was mortified at the thought of having to worry about such financial minutiae as car payments, appliance purchases and clothing boutique tabs.
Joyce mused to a friend that she wished Stanley were dead. She made an oblique reference to finding a hit man to solve her problem. They both laughed, and the friend assumed she was kidding.
Maybe, maybe not.
Meanwhile, South Florida in the early ’80s was in its “Miami Vice” phase. Reckless cocaine cowboys were turning the city into one of the country’s murder capitals.
Nearly every adult with a spare Ben Franklin in his billfold was dabbling in the drug, and that certainly included the Cohens and their clique.
Stanley was said to be a regular tooterthree or four times a week. There even were whispers that he and his jet were involved in cocaine smuggling.
Joyce, for her part, went around with a permanent cocaine-powder mustache.
She tooted up with her friends in the Rocky Mountains, including Tanya Tucker, as the singer later would acknowledge to police. When she was in Miami, Joyce often tucked Stanley into bed early, then went out on late-night excursions to her club of choice, the Champagne Room, a disco where cocaine was as easy to find as a swizzle stick.
Her son Shawn, whom Cohen had adopted, developed a drug problem of his own and was packed away to a military-style boarding school in Colorado that specialized in instilling a sense of self-control in youngsters.
Joyce could have used a semester or two there. Clearly, she was careering out of control.
The probe into Stanley Cohen’s murder got off to a rocky start.
Less than an hour after the investigation had begun at the Cohen home, Joyce ordered police to vacate the premises. Cops and prosecutors were forced to get a search warrant, which delayed the gumshoes until late that afternoon.
The next morning’s Miami Herald carried a story of the Cohen homicide under the headline “Prominent Builder Murdered in Home; Wife Keeps Police Outside for More Than Eight Hours.”
Prosecutor David Waksman told reporters, “This is the first time I’ve been asked to prepare a search warrant because the widow would not allow the police to come into her house to conduct a crime scene search.”
Joyce’s peculiar behavior made her the prime suspect, of course. But the case was not destined for quick and easy resolution.
Stanley Cohen had been killed with four .38-caliber gunshots to his head. One grazed his scalp, two entered from the left side and one from the right.
Police found the murder weapon that afternoon in a stand of ferns in the Cohens’ yard. It was Stanley’s own Smith & Wesson revolver.
Joyce Cohen explained that Stanley had handled the gun at about midnight on the night he was killed when she heard a noise and asked him to investigate. She said he searched the house and yard but found nothing.
Joyce surmised that he left the gun on his nightstand, and the two “shadowy figures” she saw in the house used it to kill him.
But inside the house they found a facial tissue that contained both gunpowder residue and Joyce’s nose mucous.
There were other problems in her account.
An ear witness said he heard four gunshots at 3 a.m., even though Joyce did not report the shooting until nearly 2 ½ hours later. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at 3 a.m.
Joyce Cohen hired Alan Ross, a marquee name among Florida defense attorneys. He immediately arranged for his client to take a lie detector test. The first was inconclusive. But a second indicated that she was not lying when she said she was not involved in her husband’s murder.
Police shrugged off the results.
“We’re not baffled,” one deadpan police official told reporters.
Neither were Stanley Cohen’s children from his first marriage, Gary Cohen, a lawyer, and Gerri Helfman, a TV reporter who would go on to become a widely recognized news anchor in South Florida.
Five days after the murder, they filed a $5 million wrongful death lawsuit against Joyce. The stepchildren also began legal maneuvers to block her from getting any part of Stanley’s estate, which would prove to be worth just $2 million due to a heavy personal and business debt load.
Joyce responded with an $11 million slander suit against them.
But the investigation seemed to grind to a halt. Days, weeks and months passed without criminal charges being filed against Joyce or anyone else.
Every so often, impatient reporters would demand to know why police were unable to pin the crime on the prime suspect.
Jon Spear, the lead detective, firmly believed that Joyce was responsible. But neither he nor prosecutors wanted to risk losing the case to a jury by rushing forward with charges that were not provable.
They waited for the usual break: a silver-bullet phone call.
It finally came from Frank Zuccarello, a member of a busy home-invasion gang that worked mansions in the Sunshine State.
Zuccarello had been arrested for robbery just four days after the Cohen murder. He was facing a long prison stretch, and that was motivation enough for him to step forward.
He told police that Cohen had hired him and two others from his robbery gang, Thomas Joslin and Anthony Caracciolo, to kill her husband.
She provided the gun and a sketch of the house to guide the killers to Stanley’s bed. On the night of the murder, she turned off the alarm system, locked up the pet Doberman and left a sliding door open to allow them access, Zuccarello said.
He added the killers were paid with $100,000 worth of cocaine.
For a month, authorities worked on Joslin and Caracciolo, trying to get them to implicate Cohen. They refused to talk and were eventually charged with murder in September 1988.
Joyce Cohen was finally arrested and charged with her husband’s murder two months later, on Nov. 2, 1988, two and a half years after the murder.
By then her lifestyle had undergone a transformation.
She was living at a trailer park in Chesapeake, Va., with her new boyfriend, Robert Dietrich, whom she met in Steamboat months after the murder.
Her trial in the fall of 1989 began with testimony from the first cop on the murder scene, Officer Catherine Carter. She testified that a dazed and spacey Joyce Cohen sat on the floor of her living room and said, “I shouldn’t have done it.”
Another early witness described a foreboding conversation he had with Joyce more than a year before Stanley was murdered.
Frank Wheatley, a former supervisor with Cohen’s construction company, said he snorted cocaine with Joyce and had frank discussions with her about the state of their marriage.
“She mentioned to me that Stan was becoming rather boring to her,” Wheatley said. “She told me that she would like to get divorced but that she was afraid no judge would give her anything…(she said) she wished she knew somebody she could have kill him or have the nerve to do it herself.”
Joyce Cohen was complaining to just about everyone she knew about her marriage.
She became friends with Tanya Tucker, the country singer, after they met at a bar in Steamboat.
Tucker stayed the night at the Cohen residence. The women used cocaine, and Joyce once again opened up about Stanley.
Detective Spear interviewed Tucker, and a 46-page transcript of the conversation became part of the case record.
“She seemed kind of a pain-wracked person,” Tucker told Spear. “Bottom line, she was extremely unhappy…. She liked the money. That’s the only thing she liked.”
Another Steamboat friend, Kathy Moser, said Joyce Cohen was “extremely unhappy and agitated” that Stanley was fooling around with an old girlfriend, Carol Hughes, and the paramour mounted the stand to acknowledge that she and Cohen were intimate.
Defense Attorney Ross gamely tried to discredit one prosecution witness after another, but he was swimming upstream against a torrent of damning testimony, including the apparent delay in reporting the shooting and the gunpowder residue on found on a tissue.
Prosecutors said the killers apparently carelessly dropped the murder weapon while fleeing. They said Cohen picked it with a tissue and threw it in the ferns in yard before police arrived. She blew her nose in the same tissue.
Frank Zuccarello, the star witness, probably sealed her fate.
“She wanted her husband dead,” he said. “The murder was supposed to look like a botched burglary.”
He was lucid and believable as he described the planning meeting with Joyce Cohen at a North Miami Beach 7-Eleven parking lot and gave an exacting account of how the job went down, with the woman waiting on the ground floor while Caracciolo went upstairs and killed her husband.
Defense Attorney Ross accused the “conniving” Zuccarello, of make up the story in exchange for a lenient five-year prison sentence, which he had completed even before his testimony.
But the jurors obviously believed him. After hearing three weeks of testimony, they took less than a day to convict Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen of first-degree murder.
The jury recommended against execution, and Judge Fredricka Smith imposed a life sentence, plus 15 years for conspiracy.
Smith told Cohen, “You committed the crime for financial gain, and you did it in a cold, calculating manner.”
Joyce Cohen has been unsuccessful in a series of appeals, and she ultimately lost any claim to Stanley’s estate.
Her son, Shawn, did receive a $106,000 inheritance. But he quickly blew it on drugs. A few years ago, the Miami Herald found him living in a cardboard box in a city park.
“I’m stuck in a rut,” he said.
In 1991, five full years after they were implicated in the case, Anthony Caracciolo and Thomas Joslin finally agreed to a plea bargain.
They pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and were promised sentences that would allow them the possibility of parole.
Caracciolo, the alleged triggerman, got 40 years and Joslin 30. Joslin is scheduled to be released on parole on Dec. 26 this year, 2006, and Caracciolo on Jan. 14, 2010.
Meanwhile, a Miami TV reporter came forward in 1998 to say that Jon Spear, the lead Cohen investigator, told her confidentially in 1993 that he believed Joyce Cohen had acted alone in shooting her husband. He said he believed Zuccarello made up the contract-killing story to get out of prison.
The reporter, Gail Bright, said she revealed the information after five years because she was overwhelmed by guilt that two wrongfully convicted men were rotting in prison.
Supporters of Caracciolo collected statements from two other law enforcers and a polygraph operator who also questioned Zuccarello’s reliability.
But Zuccarello, who now lives in the Tampa area, has stood by his account.
A federal judge granted a hearing in the case last summer. Joyce Cohen reportedly is eager to have Zuccarello discounted becausemore than anything elsehis testimony led to her indictment and conviction.
So far, the key figures in the South Florida crime epic remain behind bars.
In the Fast Lane: A True Story of Murder in Miami, by Carol Soret Cope, Simon & Schuster, 1993
“Prominent Builder Murder in Home; Wife Keeps Police Outside for More Than Eight Hours,” by Marc Fisher and Arnold Markowitz, Miami Herald, March 8, 1986
“Prisoner Charged in Cohen Case, by Lynne Duke and Joan Fleischman, Miami Herald, Sept. 17, 1987
“Witnesses Tie Widow to Hit Job; Joyce Cohen’s Attorney Brands Accusations ‘Nonsense,’” by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, May 3, 1988
“Two Years After Husband’s Killing, Joyce Cohen Still a Suspect,” by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, May 5, 1988
“Widow Charged in Cohen Killing; Arrest Comes 2 ½ Years After Builder’s Murder,” by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, Oct. 25, 1988
“Joyce Cohen’s Life on Main St.; Boyfriend: Murder Allegation Left Her ‘Living in Shadow,’” by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, Oct. 29, 1988
“My Marriage Is a Mess, Cohen Told Singer,” by Christine Evans, Miami Herald, May 25, 1989
“Cohen a Plotter or Scapegoat? Jury to Decide,” by Joan Fleischman, Miami Herald, Oct. 20, 1989
“Cohen Let Killers in the House, Robber Says,” by Joan Fleischman, Miami Herald, Oct. 27, 1989
“Cohen Guilty in Killing of Husband; ‘This Was Not a Neat, Tidy Case,’” by Patrick May, Miami Herald, Nov. 17, 1989
“Cohen Gets Life As Emotions Flare In, Out of Court,” by Richard Wallace, Miami Herald, Nov. 22, 1989
“Slain Millionaire’s Stepson Homeless in Bayfront Park,” Miami Herald, Nov. 20, 1997
“TV Reporter: Prosecution Witness in Murder Case Lied,” by Rachel La Corte, Associated Press, Dec. 9, 1998
“The Imperfect Murder,” by Arthur Jay Harris, Miami New Times, Dec. 17, 1998
“Hit-man Conviction in Doubt; Story of Home Invader Unraveling in 1986 Slaying of Stanley Cohen,” b
“A Rare Hearing Is OK’d in Murder,” by Wanda J. DeMarzo, Miami Herald, May 20, 2005