Carlos Perez-Olivo: Disbarment, Murder Conviction, and Appeal

Carlos Perez-Olivo is a disbarred New York criminal defense attorney who was convicted of murdering his wife, Peggy Hall Perez-Olivo, on a dark stretch of Route 100 in Millwood, Westchester County, on November 18, 2006. He shot her once in the back of the head as they drove home to Chappaqua, then told police a hired hit man had ambushed the car. A jury rejected that account in October 2008 and convicted him of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, and he is serving 25 years to life.¹ The couple lived three doors from Bill and Hillary Clinton, which drew national coverage to what would otherwise have been a Westchester homicide.²

The Night of the Shooting

Peggy Hall Perez-Olivo was 55, a teaching assistant, and the mother of the couple’s three adult children. She and Carlos had been married about 30 years. On the night of November 18, 2006, they were driving home from Manhattan. Sometime after 11 p.m., on Route 100 in Millwood, Peggy was shot in the back of the head while sitting in the rear of the family’s Mitsubishi Montero. Carlos also had a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He drove her to Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, where she died two days later.³

When he called 911, Perez-Olivo said a hit man hired by a disgruntled former client had cut off their SUV, jumped into the backseat, and opened fire during a struggle. He described an older, boxy dark sedan resembling a Toyota, and an attacker in a baseball cap and jeans.³ Police released a sketch based on that description, but the story frayed almost immediately. Route 100 was not the couple’s normal route home; Perez-Olivo said they had detoured to look for a gas station. Officers publicly called his account “unusual sounding.”⁴

How the Case Was Built Against Him

Investigators spent 13 months assembling forensic and circumstantial evidence before arresting Perez-Olivo. Divers pulled a pre–World War II Walther PPK .32-caliber handgun from Echo Lake, near the scene. A firearms expert matched it to the bullet that killed Peggy. The gun tied back to Carlos through a prior Chappaqua rental: the landlord’s nephew had found the pistol while cleaning the property and returned it to him months before the shooting.³ A witness, Mark Gazzola, testified that he had seen the distinctive pistol inside Carlos’ home five months before the murder.⁵

Police also found a small white garbage bag in the pocket of Perez-Olivo’s overcoat with a high concentration of gunpowder residue inside, and recovered a shell casing from the backseat of the Mitsubishi.⁵

Motive was the other half of the case. Peggy held life insurance policies totaling close to $900,000, with Carlos as the named beneficiary. The family’s bank account was down to roughly $300 at the time of the killing.³ Investigators also confirmed a decade-long affair with a woman named Ileana Santana Poole, whom he had met in Puerto Rico in 1996 and continued seeing after she married and moved to suburban Atlanta. Two days before the murder, he sent her a birthday bouquet through a flower delivery service.⁶

Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore announced the arrest on December 20, 2007. Perez-Olivo was charged with second-degree murder and held on $1 million bail. DiFiore called the killing a “full blooded execution.”⁷

Disbarment Three Months Before the Killing

Perez-Olivo was admitted to the New York bar on December 1, 1980, and practiced as a criminal trial lawyer for about 25 years with offices in Manhattan and Queens.⁸ He received an admonishment in 1998 for failing to account for legal fees, failing to refund unearned fees, and failing to cooperate with successor counsel, and in November 2000 he forfeited his license to practice in Puerto Rico while facing similar charges.⁹

On August 3, 2006, the Appellate Division formally disbarred him. The Departmental Disciplinary Committee had brought 28 charges from his representation of multiple clients; a Referee sustained 14 and recommended disbarment, and a Hearing Panel agreed. The most serious finding was that he had intentionally converted client bail money for personal use, including refusing to return $10,000 of a $15,000 bail refund to a client’s family despite a signed handwritten agreement to do so. He was ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution.⁹ The court noted that lawyers who intentionally convert client funds are “virtually always disbarred” and that Perez-Olivo had never acknowledged the impropriety of his conduct.⁸ Peggy was killed three months later, and the prosecution would place the disbarment at the center of its motive theory.

Trial, Verdict, and Sentence

The trial began on September 12, 2008, in Westchester County Court before Judge Barbara Zambelli. Prosecutor Perry Perrone told jurors that Perez-Olivo’s life was “spinning out of control” after the disbarment and that he had killed his wife to collect on her life insurance, calling the shooting “a cold-blooded, well-planned execution” and arguing that “all investigative roads led to one person and one person only.”¹⁰⁴ The prosecution presented Ileana Poole’s testimony, the gun’s provenance, the financial evidence, and the inconsistencies in the carjacking account. It characterized his abdominal wound as self-inflicted.¹¹

Defense attorney Robert Buckley, with Richard Portale handling forensic evidence, argued the shooting was a targeted attack by someone from Perez-Olivo’s past criminal practice and tried to present scientific proof that Carlos could not have fired the shot.¹² The couple’s three adult children testified for their father, telling the jury he was devastated by Peggy’s death and that the marriage was a happy one.³

On October 3, 2008, the jury convicted him of second-degree murder and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon.¹⁰ On December 2, 2008, Judge Zambelli imposed the maximum sentence of 25 years to life, calling him “a master of deceit who contrived a diabolical plan” and pointing to his attempt to blame a fictitious carjacker.¹

The Appeal

Perez-Olivo appealed to the Appellate Division, Second Department, arguing the evidence was legally insufficient, that the trial court had wrongly admitted evidence of his financial condition and disbarment, that his statements to police should have been suppressed, that the prosecution’s summation deprived him of a fair trial, and that a pretrial evidentiary ruling was improper.¹³

On April 22, 2015, the court affirmed the conviction and rejected every argument. It found the evidence legally sufficient, held that the financial and insurance evidence was properly admitted as relevant to motive, and ruled that the suppression claim was “unpreserved for appellate review” because Perez-Olivo had never moved to suppress the statements or objected at trial. The court also found no merit in the prosecutorial misconduct claim or in the arguments Perez-Olivo raised in a pro se supplemental brief.¹³

He remains incarcerated on the 25-years-to-life sentence. The case was later chronicled in an NBC Dateline episode, “A Long, Dark Stretch of Road,”⁵ and in Kevin F. McMurray’s 2010 true crime book One Dark Night.¹⁴

1
NBC New York. Clintons’ Neighbor To Be Sentenced for Murder
2
NBC News. Disbarred Lawyer Convicted of Murdering Wife
3
LoHud. Chappaqua Murder – Carlos Perez-Olivo
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ABC 7 NY. Disbarred Lawyer Charged in Wife’s Murder
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Musixmatch Podcasts. Dateline NBC – A Long, Dark Stretch of Road
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New York Post. The Killer’s Beau-Quet
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ABC 7 NY. Disbarred Attorney Charged in Wife’s Murder
8
Findlaw. Matter of Perez-Olivo
9
New York Courts. Matter of Perez-Olivo
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ABA Journal. Jury Says Ex-NY Lawyer Murdered Wife
11
ABC 7 NY. Clinton Neighbor Sentenced for Murder
12
Portale Randazzo LLP. Richard A. Portale
13
New York Courts. People v Perez-Olivo, 2015 NY Slip Op 03386
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Amazon. One Dark Night by Kevin F. McMurray