Jan 4, 2008 7:00 pm US/Eastern
Perez-Olivo Admits Affair With Another Woman
Mistress' Birthday Was Same Day As Wife's Murder
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (CBS/AP) ―
-
-
Carlos Perez-Olivo mug shot, taken after he was charged in his wife's 2006 murder.
CBS
The neighbor of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton who is accused of murdering his wife admitted to police he had a 10-year affair with another woman and had sent her flowers two days before his wife was shot.
According to court papers released Friday, disbarred lawyer Carlos Perez-Olivo also told investigators that the day of his wife's killing, Nov. 18, 2006, was the other woman's birthday.
The 59-year-old Perez-Olivo, who lives in Chappaqua on the same cul-de-sac as the Clintons, was arrested in December in what a prosecutor called a chilling "execution" of his wife, Peggy, more than a year earlier.
He has pleaded not guilty and is being held on $1 million bail. The papers filed by the district attorney's office were released after a brief session in Westchester County Court. Perez-Olivo, his hands cuffed behind him, did not speak.
He contends his 55-year-old wife was killed by an assailant who forced their car off a dark road near Chappaqua and shot her in the head and him in the abdomen. He has suggested the killer was perhaps hired by a dissatisfied client.
Prosecutors have never commented on a motive for the killing, and Lucien Chalfen, spokesman for District Attorney Janet DiFiore, would not comment Friday about the released evidence. DiFiore has said that no one else is being investigated in the case.
The statements came when Perez-Olivo was interviewed by police 11 days after the shooting, the documents indicate.
Perez-Olivo told police he also had other "small" affairs and his wife didn't know of the long affair with the woman he identified as Ileana Poole of Georgia. He said the affair had ended a year and a half before the shooting but that he had sent her flowers two days before her Nov. 18 birthday and the shooting.
A call to the number believed to be Poole's home was answered by a young man who identified himself as her son and said he did not know how to reach her.
He also admitted he "made a hell of a lot more money than I said on my taxes" and asked detectives "to be discreet" about the affair.
Perez-Olivo had been disbarred three months before the shooting for refusing to return unearned funds to clients.
Perez-Olivo's lawyer, Robert Buckley, insisted Friday that the couple was happily married and said affairs should have no bearing on the case.
Perez-Olivo has tried to collect more than half a million dollars in life insurance proceeds, but the insurance companies held back because he was a suspect in the killing. Responding to the idea that he killed his wife for the money, he recently said, "She was worth more to me than anything in the world."
At the time of the killing, a Clinton spokesman said the couple were "saddened" at their neighbor's death. The shooting had no apparent effect on security at the Clinton home.
Stay with wcbstv.com and CBS 2 for the latest in this developing story.
(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
Click to enlarge
Stumble It!
Comments