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After the couple separated, Leadbeater said, Mohammed Abequa moved
to a motel room in Nashville, Tenn. He drifted from Nashville to
Jordan and back again. "He called her every night,"
Leadbeater said. One night, following one of Abequa’s telephone
calls, Nina confided to her friend that she was afraid her husband
would kill her. She told her friend that she feared she’d become
another Nicole Simpson.
On July 3, 1994, Abequa did just that. According to a confession he
later gave to Jordanian authorities, Abequa went to the apartment in
Parsippany, N.J.
He had called his ex-wife a few days earlier, Nancy Feinberg,
Nina’s friend and divorce lawyer remembered, saying that he missed
the kids and wanted to see them.
“I’ll never understand why,” Feinberg said recently, “but
she said okay.”
To be sure, Nina was concerned. At one point during their bitter
divorce battle, she had even considered “going underground,”
Feinberg said, finding some safe place to hide until Mohammed Abequa
simply went away. But things had seemed reasonably calm during the
previous couple of months. At least there hadn’t been any
overt threats in a while.
Nina, her friends believe, felt she had an obligation to her
children. Whatever her experience with Mohammed Abequa, Nina seemed to
feel at some level that they needed to remain in touch with their
father. And so, she put her concerns aside, and allowed Abequa to come
visit the tiny two-bedroom apartment just off Route 46 in Parsippany.
It was a comfortable little place, a sanctuary of sorts, adorned with
smiling pictures of Sami and Lisa in their best clothes. Their toys
and their Disney books were scattered across the floor.
In all the years since the slaying, the children have never spoken
much about that visit. Did Abequa bring them gifts? Did their Daddy
play with them on the floor? Details -- pleasant or horrible --vanish
after time. It’s a kindness of nature, and one that is especially
bestowed on children.
Eventually, Nina scooted the children off to bed.
Abequa would later say that he killed his wife in a jealous rage.
But if the pair argued after the children were asleep, they did it
quietly. The walls of Nina’s apartment were paper-thin. On an
average day, you can almost hear the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese being
poured into a T-Fal pot in the kitchen of the next apartment. When the
upstairs neighbor snores, the pictures hung on the walls of the
downstairs apartment rattle. And yet, no one heard a sound coming out
of Nina’s apartment that evening.
No shouted threats. No pleas for mercy. No crying children.
Authorities would later say that there was a struggle, that Nina
tried to fight back as her ex-husband wrapped an electrical cord
around her neck and tightened it until she collapsed, dead on the
bedroom floor. Abequa then grabbed a plastic bag from Nina’s
well-kept kitchen, wrapped her body in it, and then stuffed it under
the bed.
No one heard him straighten the place up, or rouse the sleeping
children from their beds. No one heard him slip out the front door or
start up his car.
It would be three more days before anyone discovered the crime. A
neighbor, worried because she had not seen Nina in days, dropped by
the apartment and found her dead.
By that point, Abequa, and the two children were already in Jordan.
He had taken a circuitous route, perhaps to shake off anyone who might
possibly be trailing him, first rushing back to Memphis, then catching
a flight from there to New York, from New York to London, and
ultimately back to Amman.
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| Morris County Courthouse |
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