Kolman opens up in ‘Dateline’ interview
Former Nunez’ lover still believes acquitted dentist killed husband
KINGSTON >> “I had a real life and I had a fantasy life.”
Those were the words Linda Kolman used to describe the life she led for 11 months as the wife of one man and the lover of another.
Kolman revealed the intimate details of her affair with Kingston dentist Gilberto Nunez and the price she says she continues to pay for that decision in an interview with “Dateline NBC” correspondent Andrea Canning for an episode entitled “The Good Husband.”
The segment aired Friday eve-
ning.
She cried when asked if she felt guilt over the death of her husband, Thomas Kolman, saying “every minute of every day.”
And she apologized to the parents of her late husband for the affair that she says she believes led to the death of her husband, saying “I’m really sorry and ... I understand why they hate me. I totally understand it. I live with those feelings about myself every day.
Kolman, 44, was found dead in his car in the parking lot of Planet Fitness, in the town of Ulster, on Nov. 29, 2011. More than four years after Kolman’s death, police charged Nunez with murder, claiming the dentist poisoned Kolman with midazolam, a dental sedative, because he wanted Linda Kolman to himself.
In June, a jury acquitted Nunez of second degree murder for Kolman’s death.
In mid-September, Nunez appeared on a “48 Hours” episode on CBS in which he declared his innocence in Kolman’s death and suggested police might have tried to frame him by deleting dozens of text messages between the two men.
But Linda Kolman said she remains convinced that the man she once loved is a “master manipulator” who killed her husband of more than a decade because she wouldn’t leave her marriage.
“The man I see now has a cold dead heart who doesn’t care about anyone but himself,” she said to Canning.
In the two hour-long episode, Linda Kolman offered details of the love triangle she created, as the show laid out for viewers the circumstances surrounding Kolman’s death using photos, video, and other evidence presented to jurors at trial, as well as interviews with detectives who investigated Kolman’s death, Kolman’s parents, daughter, exwife, and jurors who sat on the trial.
Linda Kolman said she first met Nunez in 2009 at their children’s kindergarten orientation and said the two quickly became friends and, then, lovers.
Laughing, she said she didn’t find Nunez particularly handsome, but said “he had a way about him. He had a very smooth, I want to say almost sexy way about him.”
“His personality was sucking me in,” she said.
The two would often meet at their children’s activities, she said, and she and her husband eventually became friends with Nunez.
She said she and Nunez took their relationship beyond friendship when she went to his Washington Avenue office for dental work. As she sat in the chair, she said, Nunez kissed her — passionately — and it “blew me away.”
“That fact that this dentist, this smart guy, this, you know, smooth guy who seems to have everything, would even want to kiss me or choose me, like I just don’t think of myself as someone ... why would he be interested in me?”
She said that, after that incident, the two began carrying on a sexual affair during her lunch hour and that, although she still loved her husband, she found herself falling in love with Nunez, too.
“I loved them both,” she said.
Kolman told Canning, as she had testified in court, that by the end of 2011, she realized the affair was “stupid and foolish and ridiculous and I didn’t want to do it anymore” and decided to break it off with Nunez to focus on repairing her marriage. But, she said, she told Nunez she was leaving her husband for him because she was afraid Nunez would kill himself.
“I was stringing him along,” she said. “We were playing his game so he wouldn’t kill himself over the holidays. It was just a dirty, stupid game.”
Still, Kolman said, when police first approached her with their suspicions about Nunez, she refused to believe them. But as investigators began to lay out their case for her, she came to believe that Nunez, the man she once loved, did take away the man she described as the love of her life.
“He is a master manipulator, he lives to manipulate,” she said. “I was glad to see him exposed for being what he truly was,” she said calling him a “sociopath.”
Nunez declined to be interviewed for the Dateline episode, Canning said.