My Dentist’s Murder Trial (original) (raw)

After Dr. Gilberto Nunez was charged with murder, patients began deserting him.Illustration by Adrian Tomine

“My dentist was recently indicted for murder.” It sounds like a droll line that you’d use at a dinner party, but in my case it’s true. On October 15, 2015, Dr. Gilberto Nunez, whose patient I had been for many years, was indicted for killing his friend Thomas Kolman, of Saugerties, New York, by getting him “to ingest a substance that caused his death.” There were also two forgery counts: allegedly, Nunez had been posing as a C.I.A. agent. He’d apparently told people that he was authorized to implant tracking devices in patients’ teeth. It wasn’t the kind of news you wanted to hear about your family dentist.

Kolman’s death occurred before dawn on November 29, 2011, in the parking lot of a Planet Fitness gym in Ulster, fifteen minutes south of Saugerties. Kolman, who was forty-four, often stopped at the gym on his way to work. Later that morning, after he failed to show up at the office, his wife, Linda, found his body in the driver’s seat of his car. Four years afterward, Nunez was charged with murder.

According to the prosecutors, Nunez, who is fifty, was having an affair with Linda Kolman. He impersonated a C.I.A. officer as part of a scheme to prod her to abandon her husband. When she ended the affair, Nunez threatened suicide. Eventually, the suicidal impulse turned homicidal. On the morning of Thomas’s death, Nunez met him at the gym. Security-camera footage apparently showed their cars sitting next to each other for twenty-eight minutes, then Nunez’s car pulling away. Midazolam, a sedative used only by doctors and dentists, was found in Thomas’s body, and vials of the drug were discovered in Nunez’s office. A Wikipedia search for midazolam was logged on his computer.

I’d resigned myself to looking for a new dentist, but in April, 2016, I broke a tooth and needed urgent attention. By then, Nunez, having spent forty-one days in the county jail, was out on bail, and I called for an appointment. It wasn’t hard to get one. His office, in Kingston, which neighbors Ulster, was subdued. His son, who worked at the reception desk, looked depressed. So did his office manager, who had assured me with touching (but surely misplaced) loyalty that Dr. Nunez was innocent.

I hadn’t given much thought to the social protocols of the situation, but when Nunez beckoned me into the examining room I mumbled, “I’m sorry for your troubles.” He nodded gravely and said, “Thank you for your support.” That’s not quite what I meant, I thought, but before I could say anything more the hygienist was tilting me back in the chair.

After the procedure, I asked Nunez if we could discuss the case, and to my surprise he enthusiastically agreed. Speaking in accented English—Nunez was born in the Dominican Republic—he told me his version of the story. When he went on trial, a few weeks later, almost every detail of his account was corroborated.

He had become friendly with the Kolmans in 2010. Thomas was a physical therapist, Linda a hospital administrator. Money troubles and stress had taken a toll on the couple: an earlier marriage had left Thomas with hefty divorce payments, and Linda’s daughter (also from an earlier marriage) had health problems. Linda and Thomas had a son, and he was having difficulties at school. Nunez, who was then separating from his wife, became Linda’s confidant as they waited for their boys to finish lessons at a local karate school. He also became friendly with Thomas, but in December, 2010, he and Linda began an affair. Soon Nunez was in love, and wanted Linda to tell Thomas what was going on. Linda wasn’t ready to end her marriage.

Nunez told me that he became so frustrated by the secrecy that he dreamed up “a horrible idea.” In July, 2011, he bought a disposable phone and, posing as a woman named Samantha, sent Thomas a series of texts designed to “steer him toward the knowledge that his wife was having an affair with the dentist.” Thomas confronted Linda, who confessed. She then confronted Nunez. He denied sending the texts and, doubling down on the lie, accused Thomas of sending them to himself. Shortly afterward, he left a message on Thomas’s phone, full of tearful protestations of love for both of them, along with histrionic farewells to the world. Thomas called emergency services, which sent someone to check on Nunez, who told the officer that he’d had “a moment of weakness” but was now O.K.

However, he still hadn’t admitted sending the Samantha texts, and, when he heard that Thomas might hire a detective to investigate, he committed a final act of lunacy. Telling the Kolmans that he knew a C.I.A. computer expert who could determine the origin of the texts, he offered his office I.T. guy five hundred dollars to pose as the expert and meet with the Kolmans. The plan called for the I.T. guy to flash a phony C.I.A. badge. Nunez showed me on his computer where he had bought the badge: a Web site selling novelty I.D.s. (Several of the I.D.s featured photographs of Rowan Atkinson, making his Mr. Bean face.)

The details are disputed after this point, but all sides acknowledge that the I.T. guy never met with the Kolmans. Instead, Nunez went to Thomas’s office himself, dropped to his knees, admitted that he’d sent the texts, and begged for forgiveness.

One would think that all this drama would have cooled relations between the Kolmans and Nunez. But Thomas, though still hoping to save his marriage, accepted the affair. Stranger still, he and Nunez became closer, texting each other dozens of times a day. Sometimes the three went out together. Other times, Thomas babysat while Nunez and Linda went out. On Thanksgiving, Nunez attended the Kolman family’s gathering, where the two men talked about opening a business together. Two days later, the three took their children to an Olive Garden. On Monday, November 28th, Nunez and Linda had an early dinner together before returning to their respective homes. Later, Thomas and Nunez texted each other—bro this, bro that—as they watched the Giants game on TV. A few hours later, Thomas was dead.

Nunez’s account diverges radically from the prosecution’s here. Nunez told me that he went to bed halfway through the game and didn’t learn of Thomas’s death until late the next morning. The prosecution’s suggestion was that he was waiting for Thomas outside the gym with a cup of poisoned coffee. Linda, the prosecutors claimed, had definitively broken off the affair during the dinner before the Giants game, devastating Nunez. This wasn’t true, Nunez assured me, adding that evidence at the trial would confirm that Linda had retained her ardor for him. Though two midazolam vials were found in his office—part of an emergency kit to calm someone having a seizure—they were unopened. As for the alleged footage of his car outside the gym, the camera was too distant for a viewer to make out anything but the glare of headlights. Someone had met Thomas outside Planet Fitness, Nunez agreed, but it wasn’t him.

“These people have ruined my life,” he said. He anticipated more than a million dollars in legal fees. Patients were deserting him. His good name had been tarnished. Nevertheless, he was confident of being acquitted, and he had the full support of his new wife, a singer named Yameil, whom he had married in 2014.

To the extent that I knew Dr. Nunez, I thought of him as reserved but friendly. I knew that he did free dentistry for a women’s shelter, and for the Boys and Girls Club. My wife—also a patient—had heard that he picked up elderly patients at home and drove them back after their appointments. From such details, I’d constructed an image of impeccable chivalrousness, with a touch of the immigrant’s stoic melancholy. Clearly, I’d missed something. Even if he was not the cold-blooded murderer that the indictment purported him to be, he had done very peculiar things.

There was one significant detail in his account that I hadn’t heard before: Thomas’s body was found reclined far back in his seat, with his belt and pants undone and his zipper down. “They will try to say I was having a gay affair with him,” Nunez predicted. “But we have a different explanation. You will see.”

“Ladies and gentlemen—_obsession!_” So began the opening statement of Maryellen Albanese, the prosecutor. The trial, which was held in the old county courthouse in Kingston, began in May, 2016. Albanese was clad in navy blue, her strikingly pale face framed by a sharp-angled black bob. She was going to need a theatrical flourish or two, given the difficulties of her case. It was purely circumstantial, she warned the jury: no eyewitnesses, no fingerprints, no DNA. But she had bountiful evidence pertaining to character, motive, and method. Later, she made an unnerving analogy: each detail was “like a strand in a rope,” and each strand made “the rope stronger.”

“We’re paying you to dance and be fun, not to drink and mope.”

I liked Nunez, and wanted to believe that he was innocent, but I expected to be persuaded otherwise. Murder charges aren’t brought lightly, and troubling matters had arisen in pre-trial hearings. Nunez had told me about sending the fake Samantha texts but hadn’t conveyed their scale: he’d sent nearly a thousand in two days. He’d also neglected to mention another act of fakery: posing as his own mother, he sent Linda an e-mail urging her not to end the affair.

The first strand in Albanese’s rope was the discovery of midazolam in Thomas’s system. Like most of the other strands, it had weaknesses. Barely enough of the drug was found for even a therapeutic dose, which merely causes patients to fall into light sedation. For the dose in Kolman’s body to be lethal, it would have had to be used in conjunction with something else.

As it happened, Thomas Kolman was in poor health. He weighed two hundred and thirty pounds; he had an enlarged heart, an enlarged liver, and a history of hypertension, depression, anxiety, migraines, and insomnia. He also had sleep apnea, which can stop a person breathing for periods during sleep. Midazolam is generally safe for apnea sufferers, but patients must be monitored. Nunez knew about his friend’s apnea: in an interview with detectives, recorded on video a few days after Kolman’s death, he volunteered the information, and noted how serious the condition was. By all appearances, Nunez was just trying to be helpful. But the disclosure later became a crucial piece of the case against him. According to Albanese, he had exploited his victim’s condition, counting on the apnea to finish off what the midazolam began.

It was a clever, almost Holmesian solution to the problem of the low concentration of the drug. But in order to convict him a jury would have to believe that Nunez was shrewd enough to devise the plan, ruthless enough to see it through, and rash enough to take the risk that it might fail. (There was no guarantee that Kolman wouldn’t wake up and wonder what was in his coffee.)

The next strand in Albanese’s rope was the series of “bad acts” that Nunez had committed before the murder. But the deluge of Samantha texts aimed at breaking up the Kolmans’ marriage was counterbalanced by the bromance between Gilberto and Thomas that had blossomed in its wake. The e-mail in which Nunez had impersonated his mother—a rambling message explaining why it was God’s plan for Linda to be with Gilberto—was more weird than malicious. In the courtroom, the aborted meeting with the “C.I.A. expert” also came across as more bumbling than sinister.

More important was the testimony of Linda Kolman. The courtroom was packed when she took the stand. Dressed in a matronly gray blazer, she gave a remarkably dignified performance, if also a disastrous one.

A recording of the 911 call that she’d made on discovering Thomas’s body had been played. The shock in her voice—“No, no, no, no!”—had brought the reality of Thomas’s death into the courtroom, and quashed any idea in my mind that she might have been involved. (I’d been harboring thoughts of a life-insurance plot, à la “Double Indemnity.”) Linda had turned against her lover with a vengeance. She had even launched a wrongful-death suit against him. Admittedly, this gave her a strong financial incentive to help convict him of murder. Whatever her motives, she seemed determined to portray him as a killer.

Given that documentation of their affair consisted largely of love notes, there were structural problems inherent in her new, hostile role. But she played it with gusto. At one point, she attempted to paint Nunez’s generosity as a dark character defect. Various testimony had established that Nunez not only lavished jewelry and clothes on her and paid her credit-card bills but also gave Thomas money for his divorce payments and offered to send him back to school. Not the most obvious indication of homicidal tendencies, but Linda was undaunted. “Gil was all about money,” she declared, with startling venom. “He was the one always pushing money on people. Always insisted on paying for everything. Every time I saw him, he would give me money.” It was hard to summon the outrage that she seemed to be expecting.

Albanese questioned Linda about another, earlier instance in which Nunez had faked a C.I.A. scenario. The episode, which was the basis of one of the forgery charges against him, involved more Samantha texts: in this case, they were sent to Linda, and insinuated that Thomas was cheating on her. Linda had been disconcerted to receive them. As in the other incident, Nunez offered to investigate. In January, 2011, outside a Holiday Inn, he handed her a letter purporting to be from a C.I.A. agent. It said, in part:

Sometimes we as human beings believe that we know a person’s character and behavior very well just because we have cohabitated with that person for many years but we all can make mistakes in life. And as research has proven, people fall out of love all the time and they stay in a relationship for numerous reasons except for love.

Sincerely, Agent 753246910213.

Linda attested that she thought the letter sounded “like a two-year-old wrote it.” But Albanese’s murder case required that the letter be used to illustrate Nunez’s manipulative character, and, on further questioning, Linda stated that she came to see it as a genuine C.I.A. document.

By this point in her testimony, a few jurors had their hands over their faces, presumably to stifle laughter. Indeed, the essential silliness of this aspect of the case was later confirmed by another prosecution witness, Frankie Vargas, a fellow-inmate of Nunez’s at the county jail. Vargas reported that Nunez had bought the fake C.I.A. I.D.s for the purpose of “spicing up his sexual life.” We’d learned, by then, that Nunez had acquired the I.D.s a year before he met the Kolmans. With Vargas’s revelation, along with some sheepish admissions that Nunez made to me, it became clear that the forgeries—for which Nunez faced serious additional prison time—had originated as props for erotic role-playing games. (The character he’d constructed, Special Agent Dr. G., was a dental James Bond, licensed to implant tracking devices for the C.I.A.) The detail about the handover at the Holiday Inn suddenly made sense.

The love triangle gave Albanese stronger material to work with. The tendency of all three players to turn every fleeting emotion into a text or an e-mail created a mountain of evidence from which selective narratives could be constructed. Much of Albanese’s questioning was geared toward establishing Linda as a married woman swept off her feet but gradually coming to her senses.

This had some basis in reality: Linda was clearly torn. In her eleven-month anniversary card to Nunez—they celebrated every month—she wrote, “Nobody knows the beautiful heights of our journey, but we do.” Yet she was also sending regular signals of wanting to end things. Sometimes Nunez responded patiently: “I will be in love with you forever and will wait for as long as you want.” Sometimes he sent torrents of amorous drivel: “If I lose you, I will lose everything I believe to be true, everything I hope, wish, dream and pray for.” Occasionally, he sent a message that sounded arguably more ominous: “I am not leaving you, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

On November 12, 2011, Linda and Thomas went with their kids to spend the weekend at the Mohegan Sun Casino, in Connecticut. She realized that she still loved her husband and that, as she testified, “what I had been doing with the defendant was extremely selfish.”

The trip was portrayed as a milestone in the narrative of marital repair. A series of tender e-mails between the Kolmans two weeks later—the day before Thomas died—seems to support this. In them, Linda talks about wanting to break off with Nunez but being afraid of how he’ll react: “I told him we have to talk, so he has been begging and pleading for me not to leave him.”

The prosecution presented this message as a sign that Nunez sensed that his affair was doomed, and was agitated about it. But, as Evan Lipton, his defense attorney, icily revealed, what Linda was telling Thomas wasn’t what she was telling Nunez. Throughout the Mohegan Sun trip, she was sending Nunez messages along the lines of “I love you. I miss holding your hand and that soft spot and scar on your face. Muah, muah, muah.” Nunez, however, wasn’t encouraging her to abandon Thomas. “Mi amor, don’t do anything, please,” he wrote. Pressed to explain this tepid response, he replied, “You said to me that you don’t want to make any decisions until after the holidays. I am going by what you said you want.” In the face of such evidence, the dangerously obsessed lover portrayed by the prosecution began to seem more levelheaded.

The messages between Nunez and Linda continued flowing through these final days of supposed reconciliation between the Kolmans. On the twenty-first, Nunez texted Linda, “Your kisses today, I can still feel them. OMG.” Linda replied, “That good, huh?” The defense asked Linda to read her texts aloud, and she seemed genuinely surprised by her words. You could hear the puzzled resignation of someone forced to reappraise her version of reality.

Even in the hours before Linda learned that Thomas was dead, she was amiably communicating with Nunez, complaining about her period—not a customary post-breakup topic. Nunez wrote back, “I am loving you from here and muah, muah, muah, if that helps.” She replied, “It does.”

“My parents will come to church again if you switch to rosé.”

It was hard to tell whose narrative the jurors accepted. They often seemed to be in a state of stunned amazement. Occasionally, I’d see some of them looking pensively at Nunez, this font of bizarre surprises, gazing at his sombre, impassive face, as if by staring they might unlock its secrets. It was a face that, without its usual animating smile, could seem heavy and brooding, especially when he wore a pale suit that looked too tight across his broad shoulders. He was in a courtroom filled with white faces, and he’d told me he believed that race was a factor in the attempt to pin Kolman’s death on him. He claimed that during his arrest an Ulster cop had called him a “spic.” (The police denied this.)

The last big strand in Albanese’s rope was the video evidence supposedly proving that Nunez’s car, a white Nissan Pathfinder, was outside the gym that morning, which Nunez had consistently denied.

A forensic video analyst, Grant Fredericks, was questioned on the stand. He was an expert in headlight-spread-pattern analysis, a technique premised on the fact that car lights develop distinct characteristics over time.

The route from Nunez’s apartment to Planet Fitness partly follows the commercial strip of Albany Avenue. Surveillance footage from this route was shown to the jury. Starting at 4:35 A.M., a white Nissan Pathfinder heading in the direction of Planet Fitness passed a series of businesses: Citgo, Quick Check, Valvoline, U-Haul, Hammer Electronics. The vehicle’s fog lights were on, and they had an unusual pattern: one light struck the ground much closer than the other. Nunez’s Pathfinder had a similar pattern, caused by a fault in the mounting.

A minute and a half later, a motion-activated camera at Kohl’s, which is next door to Planet Fitness, captured an unidentifiable vehicle pulling into the gym’s parking lot. Only its lights are visible in the darkness—but at one point the front of the vehicle faces the camera, and one of its lights shares the same defect as the lights on Nunez’s Pathfinder. Fifteen minutes later, Thomas Kolman’s car pulls in next to it. While the cars remain parked side by side, you can’t tell if any doors are opening or closing. When the car with the off-kilter beams pulls away, twenty-eight minutes later, you can see that it is a pale S.U.V. of some kind. A minute and a half later, a white Nissan Pathfinder with a defective fog light appears again on Albany Avenue.

Lipton challenged the reliability of Fredericks’s methods, but even if he had proved the techniques to be deficient there was the incontestable evidence of the white Pathfinder travelling on Albany Avenue at intervals that synchronized uncomfortably well with the appearance and disappearance of the squint-eyed vehicle in the parking lot. It was hard to believe that they weren’t the same vehicle, and that the vehicle wasn’t Nunez’s.

Contrary to Nunez’s prediction, Albanese never suggested that he and Thomas Kolman were lovers. Her witnesses initially downplayed the fact that Kolman was found in a reclined position, with open pants. “Trying to get comfortable” was the phrase that two of them used. But the prosecution’s story shifted after the defense got a crucial piece of evidence, previously excluded, admitted into the courtroom.

E-mails from a hookup Web site called benaughty.com had been found on Kolman’s phone. One of them had been sent at 1:31 A.M., only a few hours before Kolman arrived outside Planet Fitness. It was just a profile update from the company, but it ushered in a new realm of conjecture about the circumstances of Kolman’s death. Apparently, there is a lively subculture of hookups at twenty-four-hour gyms.

The judge, Donald Williams, who had maintained a stubborn decorum while the indecorous saga unfolded before him, had been reluctant to permit any mention of these e-mails, which could “impugn the character of the victim.” But he relented when the defense argued that the prosecution had emphasized its thoroughness yet had never investigated this lead. This was what Nunez had meant about his team having found a “different explanation” for Kolman’s dishevelled state: a hookup.

The suggestion of an assignation didn’t explain away the presence of a car just like Nunez’s on Albany Avenue, but it did offer a reason to discount it as a coincidence. A curious decision by the police reinforced this. They’d sent Kolman’s underwear, which was stained, for forensic analysis, but before it could be tested for touch DNA or saliva they asked the lab to return it. No explanation was recorded, raising the question of whether there were areas that the police preferred not to explore.

Once the benaughty.com e-mails were introduced, the prosecution proposed an entirely new explanation for the reclined seat and the opened fly: Nunez had staged the body to make it look as though a sexual encounter had occurred. The implication was that Nunez had hoped that the police, upon finding a dead overweight man with unzipped pants, would assume that sex had caused a fatal arrhythmia, and not investigate further.

Albanese, through her line of questioning, was essentially proposing a baroque theory: after giving Kolman a cup of spiked coffee and waiting for him to pass out, Nunez donned rubber gloves, entered Kolman’s car, staged the body to suggest a hookup, removed every trace of his own DNA from the vehicle (while being careful not to remove the DNA of Thomas, Linda, and their son), and waited for Thomas’s sleep apnea to render an otherwise harmless dose of midazolam lethal. All this in twenty-eight minutes.

I found the theory hard to embrace, and apparently Albanese did, too. When I mentioned it to her, after the trial, she disputed ever having proposed it. In an e-mail, I asked her if she had a new theory, and she wrote back, “I am puzzled at what you refer to as ‘the original theory that Nunez deliberately staged Thomas Kolman’s body to make it look as though a sexual encounter took place.’ The first and only time I’ve heard of such a theory is from you.” But the official court transcript of her summation could not be clearer: “I submit it was in that time frame the defendant reclined Thomas Kolman back and staged his body to suggest some sort of sexual encounter.” Without this conjecture, one is left with the possibility of a real sexual encounter to explain Kolman’s reclined position and stained underwear, which raises the question of why there was no investigation of his activities on benaughty.com.

The trial lasted three weeks. The jury retired for deliberations on a Monday in June. Downtime in the courthouse was like a surreally awkward cocktail party, with enforced mingling among the victim’s family, the wife who cheated on him, and the man accused of murdering him, while the occasional chained convict came clanking through like Marley’s ghost. I hung around, making my own deliberations. Were any of the strands in Albanese’s rope viable?

The police hadn’t tracked down any supply of midazolam besides Nunez’s emergency kit, which was restocked annually. Albanese’s solution had been to suggest that Nunez had been stockpiling expired vials for years. (It would have taken five years to accumulate the amount found in Kolman’s system.) But why would Nunez stockpile midazolam? Just in case he needed to murder someone with sleep apnea?

The surveillance videos made a stronger case, but not a conclusive one. There was also testimony alleging that Nunez had done devious things with phones: switching SIM cards on his own phone, and deleting sixty-two texts from Kolman’s, in order to hide evidence of having lured Kolman to the gym. But the last twenty texts were recovered, and they contained no mention of a rendezvous. The alleged _SIM_-card scheme, as described by the police’s forensic expert, was complex to the point of incomprehensibility.

This was the crux of the prosecutor’s problem: Albanese’s narrative required Nunez to be both fiendishly cunning and a complete klutz. Cunning enough to use SIM cards to mask his phone activities, but not to suspect that his car might be tracked by the cameras that line any busy commercial highway. Cunning enough to devise the sleep-apnea plot, but not to realize that an autopsy would routinely be performed on any forty-four-year-old found dead for no obvious reason. Cunning enough to remove his DNA from a murder scene, but not to wipe from his computer the purchase of a fake C.I.A. badge or a search for “midazolam.” Behavior can be inconsistent, but intelligence tends not to fluctuate wildly.

After only six hours of deliberations, the jury reached a verdict. Returning to the courtroom, I found myself questioning my judgment. I’d grown skeptical of the prosecution’s case, but others I’d spoken to were more convinced by it. Had I been beguiled by Nunez’s stoic calm? A minor piece of testimony came back to me: Linda’s daughter recalling an incident in which she’d wanted her ears pierced. Nunez had done the job in his car, with Linda present, using an anesthetic from his medical kit. I pondered this image of Nunez performing medical procedures in a car.

The jury filed in, and the foreman gave the verdicts. Not guilty of murder. Guilty on both forged-instrument charges.

Gasps, tears, dropped jaws. Linda, who was in the courtroom, shouted, “Psychotic! Sociopath! Lying sack of shit!” Relatives escorted her out. (I asked, through an intermediary, to interview her, but she declined.) Nunez went back to his office, where he had patients to see. He’d been going to work every day after court.

“First the open floor plan, now this.”

The trial left many mysteries unresolved. The defense pathologist had stated that Kolman had died of a heart attack—that is, that there had been no murder. But that didn’t answer the question of how midazolam had entered Kolman’s system. Linda had been questioned and ruled out as a murder suspect, but that didn’t exclude the possibility of a more benign reason for supplying her insomniac husband with a sedative. The police checked the dispensary at the hospital where Linda worked, but she—or Thomas—could have bought midazolam online. The authorities never searched the Kolmans’ home and computers.

During the trial, the local medical examiner—who’d disposed of the contents of Thomas’s stomach before the timing of the ingestion could be determined—testified that Kolman’s exposure to midazolam could have been ongoing for “up to several weeks.” It is possible that Kolman was secretly self-medicating. He was certainly buying at least one drug online, testosterone, and having it sent to a private P.O. box. Detectives determined that, before Kolman’s death, the P.O. box had been closed, but they never investigated its history.

One would think that such avenues would have been explored, if only to protect the case from expected challenges. During deliberations, the jurors asked to review the testimony of a scientist who had reported that Thomas’s underwear had not been tested for Midazolam. It seems likely that the presence of so many overlooked leads swayed the jury against a murder conviction.

You can’t fault the police for looking hard at Nunez. What’s troubling is their insistence on making the facts tell a murder story, however uncertain the motive and however unlikely the supposed method. After the verdict, I met with Holley Carnright, the Ulster County D.A. who originally opened the case. When I expressed my doubts about Nunez’s guilt, he suggested that I watch a “Silence of the Lambs” sequel in which Hannibal Lecter doses his victim with a midazolam-like substance and then feeds the man his own brains. Carnright was being flippant—I think—but the suggestion seemed to offer insight into the creakiness of the prosecution’s own plotting. It’s hard to resist the thought that a collective tunnel vision took hold during the four-year investigation. “Ladies and gentlemen—_obsession!_”

And yet something happened to Thomas Kolman. He didn’t simply pull up outside Planet Fitness and have a heart attack. He met somebody there.

It occurred to me that Nunez might have brought a woman to Kolman in the parking lot. He’d set Thomas up with dates on a few occasions, after the affair became open. When I put this to Nunez, he denied it, and I believed him. After the trial, I watched the full eight-hour police interrogation tape. It is a study in dignified resistance to sustained pressure, and it cleared any doubts in my mind about his fundamental honesty. But I remain haunted by the image of the white Pathfinder heading toward the gym.

During the proceedings, not much was said directly about Thomas Kolman. Forensic presentations reduced him to muscles, hair, vitreous fluids. We heard a recording of the call that he had made to report Nunez’s suicide threat; he sounded concerned and compassionate. The medications he was taking suggested a beleaguered state of mind. His willingness to wait out his wife’s affair implied an uncommon capacity for forgiveness. From his strangely enduring friendship with Nunez, one could infer a gentle nature and, perhaps, a vulnerable loneliness.

One night, I drove to Planet Fitness, which is in a mall overlooking a highway. Raw rock-cuts show where the parking lot was gouged out of a hillside. From the spot where Kolman parked, you can see the security camera on the corner of the Kohl’s building. Across the highway, there is a view of mountains.

Thomas De Quincey, in his essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” writes of “a deep syncope” at the moment of Duncan’s death. A syncope is a hidden rift or omission. The story of Thomas Kolman has its own syncope: the twenty-eight minutes he spent with someone in the darkness. Whoever it was must have some idea of how he died. One hopes that this figure will one day step out of the shadows.

The microscopic examination of Nunez’s life generated two further charges, which went to trial this past fall. One involved an insurance payout on a building he owned that had burned down. Prosecutors alleged that a small part of the claim—less than five per cent—was fraudulent. There was no suggestion of arson, and the insurance company did not contest the general claim. The other charge was for falsely filling out an application for a pistol permit. Nunez vehemently denied both charges; needless to say, the arguments on either side were floridly complicated. He was found guilty on both charges. The judge revoked his bail and remanded him to the Ulster County jail, to await sentencing.

I visited him there in December. He sat behind the thick glass of the interview room in orange scrubs, looking surprisingly buoyant. Yameil, his wife, had been present throughout the trial, and the prospect of being reunited with his family was keeping him resilient. He spoke well of the corrections officers, and of the state agencies involved in his case. The only rancor he showed was toward the local police and the prosecutor. In his view, their decision to press ahead with the lesser charges after losing the murder case was vindictive.

He’d backed away from racism as the explanation, but he did speak of “cultural prejudice.” He assured me that melodramatic romantic behavior that seemed freakish in Ulster County—the flood of texts, the assumed identities—would not have raised an eyebrow in the Dominican Republic. For a while, he had been optimistic about rebuilding his dental practice. Many of his patients continued seeing him throughout the trial (including two of the courthouse judges). But now, with four felony convictions, he was unlikely to salvage the business. And there was still a possibility of serious time behind bars.

Sentencing took place on February 7th. The courtroom was crowded. Nunez was brought in cuffed and shackled.

His convictions comprised twelve separate counts, and Albanese asked the judge for the maximum sentence on each, to run consecutively, wherever permissible. Judge Williams bristled. When was the last time, he asked incredulously, that she had requested consecutive time for nonviolent, low-level felonies, or a maximum sentence for a fraud involving some eight thousand dollars? “You want your pound of flesh,” he said, seemingly rebuking her attempt to secure a murder sentence by other means.

After a break, Williams returned to the bench. Noting that the law prohibited him from giving any consideration to the murder case, he said that the remaining offenses, in isolation, would never even appear in a felony court—they’d be plea-bargained in a village court. He held up a thick file: a hundred and thirty letters in support of Nunez.

But then Williams’s expression changed. He turned to Nunez and began excoriating him as a lying manipulator—a man “devoid of any shame,” with “no chance of rehabilitation.” It was a transformation worthy of a Victorian melodrama. The most uncomfortable aspect of it, for me, was that the quality in Nunez that repelled the judge was the very quality that had inclined me toward him: his unflappable calm. His steadfast refusal to cave in during the eight-hour police interrogation, which I’d seen as evidence of innocence, was portrayed by the judge as plainly sinister: what “frightened this court was how eerily calm you were.” To my ear, Williams was suggesting that Nunez had indeed killed Kolman, and was pathologically impervious to guilt. If so, Williams was surely not disregarding the murder trial.

I don’t have limitless confidence in my own judgment. I may be wrong about thinking of Nunez as fundamentally harmless. I certainly misjudged the judge. Before the break, he’d chided Albanese for asking him to be “the moral police.” He’d seemed tough but not Draconian, and uninterested in punishing things that go on between consenting adults. But he condemned Nunez precisely as an adulterer—a man “consumed by an illicit affair, willing to do absolutely anything, anything at all, to promote his prurient interests.”

Williams gave Nunez two and a third to seven years in prison. It wasn’t the stiffest sentence he could have passed, so perhaps the moral outrage was only for show. Yet, despite his “pound of flesh” remark, there was little mercy.

Nunez appeared to be in shock. I remembered something he’d said in the county jail, when his victory in the murder case was still fresh: “I am going to be out of here at some point. When, I don’t know, but one thing I know for sure is that what these people wanted to do to me, which was to put me in prison for life, they can’t anymore.” This was still true—and I wanted to remind him of it. But the guards were leading him away. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the jurors asked to review a lab report; they asked to review the testimony of the scientist who was questioned on the lab report.