for BigTrial.net
On Jan. 26, 2018, the chaplain at the Hudson County Jail called the third wife of Dr. James Kauffman, to let her know that her husband had just committed suicide.
Kauffman, originally arrested on a gun charge, was being held without bail at the Hudson County Jail in Kearny, N.J. for the alleged murder of his second wife, April Kauffman, a crime that the government alleged was a contract hit.
The doctor, officials said, had been found face-down in his cell after carrying out what the Press of Atlantic City described as a "carefully planned" suicide by hanging himself with a twisted bed sheet.
But not everybody was buying it.
Andrew Glick, the outlaw Pagan biker and drug dealer turned lead prosecution witness, believed that Kauffman had faked his death and was alive somewhere else in the country under the witness protection program.
After Kauffman's body was cremated, Carole Weintraub, Kauffman's third wife, and former high school sweetheart, wound up with an urn, but she wondered whose ashes were in it. The six-page suicide note that Kauffman left behind only added to the mystery.