Opinion ID: 2382857
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 17

Heading: John Dreher

Text: Because the Appellate Division has reversed John Dreher's conviction and remanded his case for retrial, State v. Dreher, 251 N.J. Super. 300, 598 A. 2d 216 (1991), we repeat again our caveat that the facts below are as alleged by the State and here by Marshall. We evaluate the Dreher case on those assumptions. Dreher brutally murdered his wife in the basement of their home. His was an aggravated, cold-blooded murder. He contemplated the crime for months, attempting to obtain a gun two to three months before the murder. Like Marshall, he too had been having an extra-marital affair for two years before his wife's murder and had asked his paramour what she would think of him if he killed his wife. On the day of the murder, Dreher had asked his paramour to meet him at the family home at 7:30 a.m. for a confrontation with his wife. After his sons left for school, Dreher dragged his wife unwillingly into the basement, as she begged him not to hurt her. The murder was brutal. He tied her hands behind her back and tied a rope around her neck, which was then tied to a column in the basement. Dreher then ordered his paramour to bring him something sharp; she complied. As Dreher tightened the rope around his wife's neck with one hand, he stabbed her in the neck with the other. His paramour struck her on the head several times with a heavy tool and stabbed her in the back. The medical examiner determined that Dreher's wife had died of strangulation, and found that she had been stabbed eight times in the back and once in the throat. In his opinion, the back wounds were inflicted while she lay dying. Following the murder, Dreher tried to make the murder appear as if it had occurred during a robbery. He callously disposed of his wife's jewelry, and lacked remorse. In the prosecutor's view, however, despite all of its horror, the case lacked the c(4)(c) statutory aggravating factor that the defendant had intended to inflict torture on his wife beyond the pain of killing. The prosecutor thus declined to prosecute the case capitally. A jury found Dreher guilty of murder and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum parole-ineligibility term of thirty years. Significantly, a principal ground of defense both at trial and on appeal was that the perpetrator of this offense was not Dreher but the paramour. See State v. Dreher, supra, 251 N.J. Super. 300, 598 A. 2d 216.