AP News, January 4th, 2008
A 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 sent her flowers two days before his spouse 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.
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 prosecutor'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, and Lucien Chalfen, spokesman for District Attorney Janet DiFiore, would not comment Friday about the released evidence.
The statements came when Perez-Olivo was interviewed by police 11 days after the shooting, the documents indicate.
Perez-Olivo told police that he also had other "small" affairs and that his wife didn't know of the affair with the Georgia woman. The man said that he told the mistress he would never leave his wife and that the affair ended a year and a half before the shooting.
The man's lawyer, Robert Buckley, insisted Friday that the couple were happily married and said affairs should have no bearing on the case.
Perez-Olivo is also quoted as boasting about being able to arrange to have a former client he implicated in the attack tortured and killed inside prison. He also said he had money stashed outside the country and failed to report income on his tax returns.
Perez-Olivo was disbarred three months before the shooting for refusing to return unearned funds to clients.
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.
