Robert Marshall's Wife Was Murdered Almost By Mistake
Roberta Glass True Crime Report
Roberta Glass
3.3 • 626 Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2021
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Roberta takes a look at the 2003 advocacy documentary for Marshall's innocence entitled "Fatal Mistakes". The film was made by students at the Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. The documentary contains what was at the time Marshall's first interview in 18 years.
The Roberta Glass True Crime Report is produced by Ati Abdo MacDonald.
Many thanks to Natalie Donna of the Dystopian Deep Dives podcast and YouTube channel for making the video for this episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Shortly after midnight, on September 7, 1984, 44-year-old insurance salesman, Robert Marshall and his wife Maria were headed home on the Garden State Parkway after an evening of dining and gambling in Atlantic City. |
| 0:19.0 | Maria pushed off her white strap back heels and earrings and lay across her husband's lap, |
| 0:26.3 | letting the Cadillac's gentle vibrations lull her to sleep. |
| 0:30.4 | They were ten minutes from their home in Tom's River when Robert Marshall felt an unsteadiness in the car. |
| 0:40.5 | He pulled into the Oyster Creek picnic area to check out the car's tire. As he was inspecting the wheel, he was knocked unconscious. |
| 0:48.9 | He woke up to find his wife dead in the passenger seat, shot twice in the back. Robert Marshall did not get to enjoy |
| 0:57.7 | the sympathy of the public for long. Once a pillar of the community, active in the town's |
| 1:04.4 | United Way campaign, he was now the prime suspect in his wife's murder. Marshall denied being unfaithful to his wife when questioned by the police. |
| 1:15.5 | However, his 14-month affair with assistant high school principal's Saran Krushauer was soon |
| 1:22.4 | exposed. It wasn't just the affair that put him in law enforcement's crosshairs. |
| 1:41.4 | Robert Marshall had taken out $1.5 million in life insurance on Maria Marshall's life in the year before the murder, while letting his own policies lapse. |
| 1:51.8 | Marshall was also deeply in debt to the tune of $168,000. However, it was his office phone records that finally sealed his fate. Dozens of calls from his office phone to a hardware store |
| 1:59.3 | in Louisiana. When New Jersey detectives took a trip down to |
| 2:04.0 | Louisiana to be greeted by a middle-aged and very nervous hardware store clerk Robert Cumber, |
| 2:11.7 | Cumber denied knowledge of the murder plot on Maria Marshall. He did disclose that he had met Marshall at a party in New Jersey four months prior to |
| 2:21.5 | Maria's murder. |
| 2:22.9 | Cumber also told the officers that Marshall was looking for an investigator and that he |
| 2:28.6 | had connected him with Billy Wayne McKinnon. |
| 2:32.6 | Now, Billy Wayne McKinnon took a plea deal and testified against |
| 2:37.2 | Marshall in exchange for a very lenient sentence of 14 months in prison. He said that in the |
| 2:44.1 | months leading up to the murder, he had received $5,000 in money orders in the mail from Marshall and had met with Robert Marshall three |
| 2:54.7 | times prior to the murder in Atlantic City. McKinnon testified that he had agreed to murder his |
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