By Chris Collins, The Fresno Bee, Calif.
May 19–She had no words. She shed no tears.
Larissa Schuster sat silently and stared straight forward as she was sentenced Friday. Behind her sat the people from her past — her old friends, her mother-in-law, her daughter. They looked on with solemn faces, wondering, they later told the court, why five years after Schuster murdered her husband she still could not conjure up an ounce of remorse.
“You have failed in your task to ruin my life, and you in turn have ruined yours,” Schuster’s 22-year-old daughter, Kristin, said in court. “In your quest to become a dominating power freak, you have become your own demon.”
Schuster, a 47-year-old former Clovis biochemist, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, finishing one of Fresno County’s most notable murder cases and signaling the end of a painful journey for Timothy Schuster’s friends and family members.
In July 2003, Timothy and Larissa Schuster were going through a bitter divorce after nearly 20 years of marriage. Larissa Schuster, who owned a research lab in Fresno, persuaded former lab employee James Fagone, then 21, to help her break into her estranged husband’s home in Clovis. Fagone said he thought the plan was to rob Timothy Schuster, but instead Larissa Schuster knocked out her husband with chloroform and later stuffed him in a barrel that she then filled with hydrochloric acid.
Fagone was convicted in December 2006 of first-degree murder for his role. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, despite pleas from jurors who said Fagone should receive a lenient sentence because Schuster masterminded the murder.
On the one-year anniversary of Fagone’s conviction, Schuster was found guilty of first-degree murder after a two-month trial in Los Angeles County. Her sentencing hearing was repeatedly delayed this year while her attorney, Roger Nuttall, sought to gather information that he said could lead to a new trial. On Friday, Superior Court Judge Wayne Ellison, who presided over both Fagone and Schuster’s trials, denied Nuttall’s motion for a new trial.
Ellison noted that Nuttall’s motion was just the beginning of what will surely be a long set of appeals. But, he said, “everyone in this courtroom and in this community knows what the truth is, regardless of the legal proceedings.”
It was the first time the judge had offered his opinion on Schuster’s guilt.
On the advice of her attorney, Schuster declined to make a statement. During the 21/2-hour sentencing hearing, she never turned around to look at the crowded courtroom audience behind her, even when those who spoke addressed her directly.
Her father, Charles Foreman, and a friend she made in jail, Renee Grate, were her only supporters in the courtroom. When Ellison announced Schuster’s punishment, Grate let out a loud cry and burst into tears.
Shirley Schuster, Timothy Schuster’s mother, flew from the Midwest along with Kristin to attend the hearing. She was one of the seven people who spoke in court.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive you for what you have done to my family,” Shirley Schuster told her daughter-in-law. “You will never know the endless sleepless nights this has caused just thinking about what Tim went through. Have you thought of the horrific time you put us through? I know that is the furthest thing from your thoughts.”
Kristin Schuster said she doubts she will ever be able to forgive her mother.
“God knows who you are and what you did,” she said. “I pray you are continually haunted at night by my father’s last moments struggling for his life.”
When Kristin Schuster was in high school, Larissa Schuster sent her to live with her grandparents in Missouri. Now a mother herself and a bride-to-be, Kristin Schuster told her mother that she longed for the days before Larissa Schuster became angry, greedy and violent — the mother “you used to be,” she said.
But her father’s death ended any hope of reconciliation, she said.
“This September when I will walk down the aisle, I will not have my father with me, and he will never know my son,” she said. “Maybe later in life I can learn to forgive you, but I doubt it. This is goodbye, not just for now, but forever. This is goodbye as your daughter.”
Fagone’s parents, Ralaine and Anthony, were also at the hearing. Ralaine Fagone told Schuster that she has struggled to forgive her for “engaging my son in your schemes.”
In the end, she said, she turned to her faith. “My teacher Jesus made it clear that in order to be forgiven, we have to forgive others,” Fagone said. “The grace I extend to you, you need not ask for it. I am giving it to you.”
After the hearing ended, the courtroom bailiffs helped lead Larissa Schuster to the door. Her wrist and waist shackles clinked as her family members and former friends looked on in silence.
Schuster walked out without looking back.
The reporter can be reached at [email protected] or (559)441-6412.
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