The 911 call lasted just over two minutes, but in that brief window, a single scream unraveled everything. Jenna had told the dispatcher her mother fell in the shower, but when she put the phone down to check, she screamed, “There’s blood everywhere. ” She hadn’t even seen her mother yet. The blood was already pooling in the bedroom, while Leslie London was still lying in the shower upstairs.
For a moment, no one questioned what happened. Leslie was 61, suffered from vertigo, and had a family history of the condition. A slip in the shower seemed tragic but believable. The medical examiner ruled her death an accident, and her family buried her.
But one of Leslie’s closest friends, Terry, couldn’t shake the image of what she saw when she helped clean the mansion. There was blood on the walls, on the furniture, and soaked deep into the bedroom carpet. Why would there be blood in the bedroom if Leslie fell in the shower? Terry had worked as a nurse in the clinic run by Leslie’s husband, Robert Nulander, an obstetrician who had delivered half the town’s children.
He was respected, admired, and above suspicion. But days before her death, Leslie had called Terry to say she and Robert were planning to divorce. She wanted to meet and talk about it in person. They never got the chance.
For a month, Terry stayed quiet. Then she remembered her book club. Months earlier, the group read a novel about a man who murdered his wife. One of the women in the club, Mary, was the county’s former chief medical examiner.
When Terry finally reached out to her, Mary originally dismissed the idea as unlikely. She still told Terry to call the police, just in case. Terry did, and the detectives listened far more intently than she expected. They didn’t tell her why, but an anonymous letter had landed on the DA’s desk claiming Robert wasn’t the man everyone believed, and that Leslie was trying to leave him.
The letter couldn’t be traced, but Terry’s story matched it perfectly. Still, nothing could be done. The medical examiner’s report still said accident, and months passed. Then Robert made his first phone call to Terry since Leslie’s death.
It was nothing substantial, just an apology for being out of touch. But it stirred Terry’s doubts all over again. She went back to Mary, who agreed to look at the case file under one condition. She would issue a formal report as a professional.
When Mary opened the file, she was stunned. Leslie’s injuries were far from a simple fall. She had five separate scalp lacerations, facial wounds, and a bruise around her eye. In Mary’s decades of service, she’d seen that combination only in car crashes, falls from great heights, or serious beatings.
The blood spatter on the walls, bed, and nightstand pointed to something violent. Mary concluded without hesitation that Leslie had been murdered. The district attorney agreed and launched a formal investigation. Now the cracks began to widen.
Leslie was scheduled to sign a lease on a rental property the very day she died. She had been corresponding with a younger man named Nevin, who told detectives the two were just friends, but Robert found out and was furious. Friends revealed Robert had cheated multiple times, and Leslie knew it. Financially, Robert was in ruin.
A lawsuit from an insurer claimed he pushed unnecessary procedures at his clinic, leading to a judgment of over a million dollars in overpayments. His patients were ordered to find new doctors, the clinic closed, and he took a hospital job that paid far less. Then, just before Leslie died, he lost that job too. Seven months after Leslie’s death, detectives walked through the mansion again.
The house had been sold, but the new owners hadn’t moved in yet. To their surprise, blood traces were still visible in the bedroom and bathroom. The bed’s headboard had dried spatter. The pillows had been propped up on the day of the death, hiding it.
But the sheets were clean. Not a single drop. Robert claimed he dragged Leslie from the shower into the bedroom to perform CPR. He was a doctor with more than three decades of experience, yet he made the basic mistake of moving someone with a severe head injury.
His own daughter screamed at him to stop. On the 911 recording, you can hear her yelling. She knew. Even she knew.
When detectives questioned Robert, he stuck to his story. His lawyers argued the blood in the bedroom came from his bloody shirt when he pulled it off, or from EMTs glancing off their gloves. But the forensic evidence didn’t fit. The blood was everywhere except the bed, and the housekeeper said the sheets on the bed that day were not the sheets she’d put down the day before.
The prosecution’s theory was that Robert killed Leslie hours before the staged shower fall. He attacked her in the bedroom, struck her repeatedly in the head, then dragged her to the shower and slammed her head against the stone ledge. He turned on the water, left her there, drove to a lake to dump the weapon and his clothes, then came home to wake his daughter and discover the body. But Robert made a mistake.
He needed the blood in the bedroom to be explained by dragging Leslie out of the shower for CPR. Yet the 911 call and Jenna’s own scream confirmed the blood was already there before Robert ever entered the bathroom. The timeline destroyed his story. In June 2014, Robert Nulander was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
He was released on $100,000 bail. His children and several of Leslie’s relatives stood by him, insisting he was innocent. The trial lasted nearly a year, and the jury couldn’t find him guilty on the evidence presented. But his daughter Jenna’s testimony hurt more than it helped.
She told the court she’d seen blood in the bedroom before her father pulled Leslie from the shower, contradicting her own earlier statements. She claimed she’d helped with CPR and seen her father toss a bloody shirt aside, but the shirt was never found. The prosecution argued she couldn’t accept the truth of her father’s guilt. The jury agreed.
Robert was convicted and sentenced to 20 years to life. But the case wasn’t over. Robert’s new attorney, known for defending mob boss John Gotti, discovered a juror had violated the rules, discussing the case with family and friends. About 7,000 messages were uncovered, including one from her father that read, “Make sure he’s guilty.
” The conviction was thrown out in 2018, and Robert was freed on $1 million bail while waiting for a new trial. When the second trial opened in 2022, the prosecution had two stunning pieces of evidence. The first came from the headboard. A lab found a tiny fragment of fatty tissue from Leslie’s scalp embedded in it, ten years after the fact.
There was no way that piece of her ended up there if she fell in the shower. But if she was struck while lying on the bed, it made perfect sense. The second evidence had been sitting in plain sight all along. Next to the blood-spattered water bottles on the nightstand sat Robert’s coffee mug, completely clean.
Not a single drop of blood touched it. That meant the mug wasn’t there when the blood hit the surface. It supported the timeline that Robert killed Leslie before he ever poured that coffee, then placed the mug there later to stage his innocence. The motive, this time, was clearer.
Robert was financially destroyed. Under New York divorce law, Leslie would be entitled to roughly half the value of the house and other assets. He was unemployed, and the house was his only major asset. He couldn’t afford to lose it.
Jealousy and money were powerful enough reasons. This time, the jury was convinced in just a few hours. Robert Nulander was found guilty again and sentenced to 20 years to life. He used his final statement to plead for the chance to die near his family, but the judge didn’t move.
His appeal was denied in 2024, leaving little hope left. The identity of the anonymous letter writer remains a mystery to this day. Neither side ever discovered who sent it, the one that first pushed investigators to question the accident. Another mystery missing.
Another question unanswered. But for the rest of the world, the story is over. Two juries believed Robert Nulander was a killer.
And even with two convictions, some still believe he was innocent.
