Josh Mankiewicz

Rob Lamone was sitting in the office when Jonathan Hearn entered through the open garage door. Hearn told the court that when Rob Lamone saw him, he came out of the office to meet him.

What must Rob Lamone have been thinking in that moment? A stranger standing in his railroad shop on a Sunday afternoon, wearing an old man mask. And that voice... Did it sound familiar? Did Rob know who he was talking to? We will never know. Just as we may never know what those two men said to each other in those final seconds.

According to Jonathan Hearn, Rob turned his back on the masked man and walked to the kitchenette area in the rear of the shop. He opened the fridge and grabbed a Gatorade. Hearn said he intended to shoot Rob then. but the silencer on his gun was wedged in the corner of his backpack. and he could not get the gun out of the bag.

Hearn said he walked to the office and ransacked it. He also took a laptop in hopes of making investigators think Rob's death was the result of a robbery and that maybe Rob was collateral damage. As he was headed for the door, Hearn said an unsettling thought suddenly popped into his head. What if Rob Lamone was not dead?

As soon as he could, Hearn said, he found a place to change out of the clothes he'd been wearing and strip the adhesive flashing from his motorcycle.

Hearn told the court that by the time he got to the Four Corners intersection at Kramers Junction, his motorcycle was running on fumes. He had to stop for gas. Of course, the prosecutor knew that part of the story well. He had it on video. and played it for the jury.

Jonathan Hearn said he hadn't taken his cell phone on that trip to Tehachapi because he didn't want investigators looking at the GPS tracking feature and learning where he'd gone. According to Hearn, he called Sabrina as soon as he got home.

Everything was about to change. That might very well have been the truest thing Jonathan Hearn has ever said. As the trial entered its third week, its focus changed as well. This would be Sabrina Limon's turn to take the stand. For the better part of three weeks, defense attorney Richard Terry sat beside Sabrina Limon and listened to the prosecution's case. It had been brutal.

Photos of his client hugging her now dead husband. Intimate details about their marriage. Hours of cringeworthy phone conversations between Sabrina and her lover.

I love you back. All of it topped off by Jonathan Hearn's assertion that she had been his partner in crime.

Terry saw it this way. Jonathan was at the rail yard. Jonathan had his hand on the gun. Jonathan's gun. Jonathan admits being the murderer. And there's absolutely nothing on the wiretaps where Sabrina admits to knowing about or taking part in Jonathan's plan to kill her husband. So then, how does Jonathan get the deal? And Sabrina is looking at maybe life in prison.

The way attorney Terry saw it, Sabrina Limon was a victim of circumstance. A high school dropout who'd married young. A people pleaser who went with the flow. And when her husband suggested sex with other couples, well, she'd always been a team player.

In other words, it was fun to have this open marriage, but it was also nice to have somebody who was totally devoted to you and not dating anybody else. Right. In many ways, Richard Terry's defense began with his cross-examination of those who had turned on Sabrina, like Jason and Kelly Bernatine.

And when your husband, Jason, was present... He got them to admit that, yes, they too had had sex with Rob and Sabrina. Here's how Terry's cross-examination of Kelly Bernatine went.

When cross-examining Jonathan Hearn, Richard Terry questioned his religious sincerity.

Was all that religiosity intended to fool Sabrina into thinking of him as more virtuous than her husband?

Though Jonathan testified he and Sabrina had emailed with each other about their plan to kill Rob, Richard Terry questioned why investigators had found no evidence of that. After all, they'd recovered his internet searches on arsenic poisoning and on railroad death benefit payouts.

After calling several of her family members to vouch for Sabrina's good character, Richard Terry then made a bold but risky move. The defense attorney's gamble was that given the chance to compare Sabrina's story with Jonathan's, at least one juror might find Sabrina's version more credible. more sympathetic, so he called his client to the stand.

Yes.

Yes. As the years passed, Sabrina said she felt less special to the man she'd married.