Sex, Lies, and Hit Men!
Jeffrey Stern was a wealthy personal injury lawyer who drove a Maserati. His wife, Yvonne, was a stunning carpool mom who loved Fendi dresses and Hermès handbags. Together they were the envy of their exclusive Bellaire neighborhood. Then came three bungled attempts on her life, the revelation that Jeffrey had taken a mistress, and the bombshell that investigators had accused the lovers of plotting to kill Yvonne.
Jo says: Many years ago Jeffrey Stern was a neighbor and friend and based on things Jeffrey told me at that time - I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out he was involved in the attempts on his wife’s life...... Very sad. (April 19th, 2012 at 12:21am)
(Page 4 of 4)
According to Michelle, Flores said he wanted $15,000 up front and $25,000 after the job was complete. She took the offer to Jeffrey, who agreed. A few days later, Jeffrey called Michelle and told her to send Flores to the Meritage’s parking garage to wait for his wife.
Yvonne said that after she was shot, she slumped over and played dead so the gunman wouldn’t shoot her again. At the hospital, she told detectives that the shooter looked like their flooring subcontractor. But when the man came up with an airtight alibi, the detectives returned to the hospital, told Jeffrey they were out of suspects, and asked him again if he was having an affair with a woman who might want to kill Yvonne. According to the police report, Jeffrey raised his hands in the air and muttered, “Here we go again!” Then he turned pale and his speech became incoherent. When he leaned over in his chair as if he were having a stroke, nurses signaled a code blue, and he was rushed to the emergency room.
Was Jeffrey overwhelmed by the idea that an unknown assassin was still out there, going after his wife? Did he finally, for the first time, suspect that the killer was his own mistress and that he had made a terrible mistake not telling the police about her? Or did he realize that the police were zeroing in on him?
His friends, who roll their eyes at the suggestion that Jeffrey was possibly overcome with guilt, tell stories about how, after leaving the hospital, he was so determined to solve the mystery of the shootings that he went to the synagogue, which is just around the corner from the Meritage, to see if its surveillance cameras had captured any video of the shooter as he left the parking garage. They talk about Jeffrey weeping uncontrollably, worried that he hadn’t done enough for Yvonne.
For her part, Michelle claims that the only emotion Jeffrey displayed was fear that he was about to be arrested. She wrote in her letter that he asked her to meet him in various shopping center parking lots he had scouted out that didn’t have surveillance cameras. He arrived in cars he had borrowed from a friend’s auto dealership because he didn’t want the police following him. He told her to get rid of anything that investigators could link back to him. He wanted her to give him back a Green Bay Packers jersey he had left at her town house. He told her to change her phone and throw away her SIM card, to hide the gifts and money he had given her in a safe-deposit box that wasn’t in her name, and to have one of her friends pose as her lesbian lover, which he said would confuse the police in case they were investigating her.
And that was just the start of her problems, Michelle said. She was constantly being pestered by Adam Gutierrez, who was demanding money to maintain his silence. She also was having to deal with Flores, who, she claimed, had asked her to bring him a piece of Yvonne’s clothing so he could put it on his Santa Muerte shrine and pray to finish the job.
By then, however, it seemed improbable that any hit man could get close to Yvonne. When she came home after eight days at the hospital, there were off-duty police officers with her day and night. So that she wouldn’t have to leave her house, her friends set up a dinner rotation, bringing meals each day. Only a couple of friends were too terrified to participate, thinking a gunman might still be lurking in the bushes.
Finally, in early June, Michelle met again with Richard Gutierrez, who had been telling her he had found a new hit man who was ready to go to work. She had no inkling that detectives had cornered Gutierrez and gotten his confession. But because they still needed to prove Michelle was involved, they put a wire on him. At the meeting, Michelle said that she first wanted the new hit man to kill Gutierrez’s brother. The onetime easygoing office manager was sounding like a ruthless criminal. She told Gutierrez she was sorry his brother had to be killed, but she just couldn’t deal with him any longer. And then, she said, the new hit man could go after “the bitch.”
When detectives arrived at Michelle’s office to arrest her, they also arrested Jeffrey for unlawfully carrying a weapon after he told them he had a handgun strapped to his right leg and another in his briefcase. (He explained, to no avail, that his concealed-handgun license hadn’t arrived in the mail but that he carried the weapons anyway to protect his family.) During the few hours he was detained at the city jail, he made a collect call to Yvonne, who had already been told by the detectives what had happened. “How could you do this to your family?” she shouted before throwing down the phone.
During her Aspen summer, Yvonne paid several visits to a therapist who was renowned in the resort town for her ability to sort through domestic issues. “I found myself telling the therapist, over and over, how Jeffrey was such a good, generous, loving father and how, in the thirty years I’d been with him, he had treated me with the utmost loyalty and respect, nothing but tender, loving care,” she told me. The therapist asked her to take a legal pad and make a list of pros and cons about Jeffrey. The list of pros was so long that Yvonne decided to return to Houston. Perhaps to symbolize their new start, Jeffrey got rid of his Maserati.
Nevertheless, as they put their marriage back together, Jeffrey and Yvonne knew that prosecutors were putting together a criminal case against him. At one point, Yvonne went to visit assistant district attorney Kari Allen. “I told her that she was making a mistake and destroying a good, happy family in the process,” she said. “I told her, ‘I’m the victim here. I’m the one who was shot in the stomach, and if I don’t believe Jeffrey had anything to do with the shootings, then why should anyone else?’ ”
Allen was unmoved. On the last weekend in January 2011, the Sterns celebrated their son’s bar mitzvah. At the synagogue, Jeffrey and Yvonne held hands. Then at the Hotel ZaZa, in the Museum District, where they had arranged for a James Bond–themed party, they stood and cheered along with 250 guests as their son was raised up from beneath the ballroom floor inside a red Ferrari, accompanied by two “Bond girls” in skintight gold dresses. The following Monday morning, Jeffrey’s grand jury indictment was made public, and Jeffrey turned himself in with Yvonne at his side.
Today, most of the trials of the would-be hit men are over. Richard Gutierrez pleaded guilty and was sent away for 15 years. Nhut Nguyen got 45 for his role in the plot. Adam Gutierrez disappeared and was never questioned by police, and Damian Flores’s trial ended in a hung jury, in part because his attorney, Sam Cammack, argued that Michelle never spoke about Flores during her initial police confession. (The reason, Michelle later said, was that he told her he would kill her if she mentioned his name. Allen said she will retry Flores after Jeffrey’s trial.) As for James Lowery, he got a 15-year sentence after having his probation revoked on his aggravated assault charge, and according to John LaGrappe, a well-known Houston lawyer who’s representing him, negotiations are under way to work out a plea deal on Lowery’s solicitation of capital murder charge. LaGrappe says that Lowery plans to testify that he saw Jeffrey standing behind Michelle during a meeting in the parking lot of a restaurant where he was allowed to see the money that he would receive for a successful hit.
Michelle is also ready to testify against her former lover, who she now says has betrayed her. “I am so ashamed and angry at myself for allowing [Jeffrey] to tell me what to do and not having my own wits to say, ‘No,’ and turn my back on him,” she wrote. To support those statements, Allen will most likely produce phone records showing numerous calls between Jeffrey and Michelle during the time period in which the shootings took place and present financial records showing that Jeffrey gave Michelle large chunks of cash. One of Michelle’s friends may also testify that she saw Jeffrey give Michelle a check for $50,000 after the May 2010 shooting and say, “If someone is going to shoot a person, they should do it right so the person would die.”
But Jeffrey’s attorneys will argue that Lowery is lying about seeing him with Michelle in hopes of getting a lighter sentence. They will point out that aside from Michelle’s confession there is not one iota of evidence linking Jeffrey to the shootings. And they will easily explain away his phone calls and secret payments to Michelle as the actions of a man having an affair, not a man plotting a murder. And then they will go after Michelle. “She was slick,” Paul Nugent told me. “She fooled everyone: her sister, her mother, her closest friends, and Jeffrey Stern. And then, when the police finally caught her, she had her story ready that Jeffrey was behind the whole thing. Her story just doesn’t make sense, and you would have to wonder if a person who has sought and hired multiple hit men to kill an innocent mother and perhaps her two young children has psychological issues.”
In truth, there are some people who know Jeffrey who still wonder why, if he was truly concerned about Yvonne’s safety, he didn’t tell police about his affair with Michelle so that they could quietly investigate her. “In my heart of hearts, I can’t imagine Jeffrey ever doing anything to injure the mother of his children, and I absolutely can’t imagine him putting his children in harm’s way,” said Dory Gordon, a realtor who’s married to one of Jeffrey’s former partners. (In the ceremony, Yvonne was a bridesmaid and Jeffrey was the best man.) “But, you know, you hear stories all the time that there’s no sure thing in life. You sometimes have to ask, ‘Do I really know this person?’ ” After a long silence, tears filled her eyes. “Only Jeffrey knows what happened,” she finally said.
Yvonne, however, just shook her head when I asked her if she had even the tiniest of doubts. “Today, because of all we’ve been through, our marriage is stronger than it’s ever been,” she said. “It’s full of love, it’s full of honesty, and it’s full of forgiveness. I made a decision to forgive my husband for his affair, and how dare anyone criticize me for that. How dare anyone criticize me for wanting to keep our family together.”
By then the restaurant had emptied. There was no one around to look at Yvonne. She leaned in and touched me lightly on the arm. “You know, I used to wonder why I survived those shootings, and now I know,” she said. “It was so that I could have a voice in this matter and help my husband get through this, because nobody really knows him like I do.” 
My Library
