Opinion ID: 2382857
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 20

Heading: William and Herbert Engel

Text: The murder committed by William and Herbert Engel is, for us, the most difficult because that case bears striking similarities to the subject case. William and Herbert Engel are brothers who were tried capitally for the murder of William's ex-wife. The facts and background of this case are familiar to the Court because it participated in earlier bail-release applications, see State v. Engel, 99 N.J. 453, 493 A. 2d 1217 (1985), and has reviewed defendants' petitions for certification from the convictions of non-capital murder. 130 N.J. 393, 614 A. 2d 616 (1991). William procured his ex-wife's murder with the assistance of his brother, Herbert, apparently because of jealousy and an obsession with his ex-wife. William delegated to Herbert the task of hiring a contract killer, much like McKinnon in Marshall's case, one month before the murder, and had told a private investigator the year before that he wanted to get rid of his ex-wife. Herbert pressured an employee, McFadden, into agreeing to commit the murder-for-hire of his ex-sister-in-law by plying him with liquor and promising him money. The murder was committed in a warehouse owned by William Engel. Engel lured his ex-wife to the warehouse on the false pretext that they were going shopping for birthday and Christmas gifts for their five-year-old daughter. Once inside, Engel pretended that the warehouse lights were not working when he escorted her past the bathroom door where McFadden waited, ready to strangle her. William stood over his ex-wife and watched, smoking a cigarette, while McFadden strangled her to death. At one point during the four-minute ordeal, William called her a bitch. The two men then loaded her body into a waiting car, and, as planned, McFadden and a cohort, Pee Wee Wright, transported it to South Carolina where it was burned beyond recognition. (Herbert later ordered McFadden to execute the person who had helped dispose of the body because he feared that the executioner would tell the police of the murder.) William Engel's deception continued after the murder, when he twice telephoned his ex-wife's house and reported first to her grandfather and then to her daughter that the victim had not arrived to meet him as planned. He told her mother that she had never arrived at their first meeting. Like Marshall, William Engel was a well-educated, successful businessman, who had a good reputation in the community, was involved in charitable work, and had no prior criminal record. Unlike Marshall, however, William Engel's murder of his ex-wife lacked a pecuniary motive: he killed solely out of a jealous anger towards his ex-wife. The jury spared the brothers' lives, finding the presence of mitigating factors c(5)(a) (mental/emotional disturbance) and c(5)(e) (duress), in addition to c(5)(f) (no prior criminal record) and c(5)(h) (any other factor). The jury found that those mitigating factors outweighed the sole aggravating factor, c(4)(e) (hired a killer). The trial court sentenced the brothers to life imprisonment with a thirty-year period of parole ineligibility. The Public Defender suggests that one factor that may have saved the two brothers was the testimony of their elderly father, who told the jury of his own experiences in Austria during World War I and how his own father had been killed in a concentration camp. Defense counsel managed to suggest to the jury that Herbert felt beholden to William for his job. Overall, the criminal culpability of William Engel seems no different from that of Robert Marshall. The two husbands came from the same economic stratum. The victims were not strikingly dissimilar. The shattering impact on the families was the same. The ultimate question concerns whether the fact that a jury spared the Engel brothers requires the invalidation of Robert Marshall's death sentence. We do not believe that statutory disproportionality ever contemplated that two New Jersey juries must reach identical verdicts even in closely-similar circumstances. Our search should be for some impermissible or invidious factor or pattern that has been broken. That the Engel brothers were spared their lives does not establish a pattern of life-sentencing for such killings. We do not sense that some invidious factor tainted Marshall's sentencing process. The remaining spousal murders are distinguishable. Both Walter Williams and Darrell Collins escaped death when a jury found that they had not killed for pecuniary gain. John Dreher was thought by the prosecutor not to have met the criteria for a c(4)(c) aggravating factor. 2. Contract killers (principals). This is another category of similar cases that we must consider. Because the Engel brothers were essentially contract principals, we need not discuss their cases further. We agree that there are no striking factual dissimilarities between their case and Robert Marshall's, other than the fact that William Engel did not murder his wife for money. One cannot say with any degree of confidence that there is a significant difference in blameworthiness in either situation. We now address the remaining contract principals and then discuss the hitmen and the principals associated with their cases.