Dr. Charles Friedgood, paroled wife killer, is dead at age 99

Dr. Charles E. Friedgood, a wealthy Long Island, New York, surgeon imprisoned for murdering his ailing wife in 1975, has died in Florida more than a decade after he was declared terminally ill with cancer and was released from prison. He was 99.

His death, on May 19, 2018, was confirmed this week by his daughter Esther Zaretsky. It had not been reported previously by his family.

Though he admitted that he injected his wife, Sophie Friedgood, 48, with a painkiller, Friedgood insisted that he had not intended to kill her. She had suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and had become an invalid.

Friedgood was convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors proved to a jury that he had deliberately given his wife an overdose at the family’s 18-room home in Great Neck, New York, where they had reared their six children.

Her cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but the police grew suspicious after Friedgood had signed the death certificate himself and rushed the body out of state for immediate burial, in accordance with Jewish religious custom.

Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he had intended to fly to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Sophie Friedgood and with whom he had fathered two children. Friedgood had begun his affair with her in the late 1960s.

When released from prison in December 2007, he was 89 and the oldest inmate in New York state’s correctional system, having served 31 years of his 25 years-to-life sentence.

His requests for parole had been rejected multiple times before, including in October 2007, when a parole panel concluded that he was likely to break the law again.

But counsel for both the state Division of Parole and the Board of Parole disagreed with that conclusion, and the matter was turned over to another parole panel. A month later, it voted 2-1 in Friedgood’s favor.

The panel weighed what it called a “horrendous” crime that could not be “excused, explained or forgotten” against the inmate’s advanced age, his medical condition and his positive prison record, which included saving the lives of a guard who was having a heart attack and an inmate who was choking.

Concurring in the decision, Commissioner Thomas P. Grant wrote, referring to Friedgood: “During your interview, you repeatedly cited your status as a senior citizen. It is important to recognize that your actions deprived your wife of the ability to enjoy such status.”

Chris Ortloff, the dissenting commissioner, argued at the time that Friedgood’s release “so deprecates the seriousness of his offenses, the murder of his wife and subsequent grand larceny of hundreds of thousands of dollars from her estate, as to undermine respect for the law.”

Ortloff said Friedgood had used his state medical license to assume responsibility for his wife’s care and to obtain the five injections of Demerol that killed her.

Though Friedgood survived for 11 years despite a diagnosis of terminal cancer, he “presented little if any threat to the community” because of his medical condition, Grant said in a phone interview this week.

Allowed to live with a sister in Florida, where a daughter also lives, Friedgood was residing in the West Palm Beach area at the time of his death.

Charles Edward Friedgood was born Oct. 3, 1918, in Toledo, Ohio. His father, Henry, an immigrant from what was then Palestine, was a menswear salesman. His mother, Evelyn (Rubenstine) Friedgood, was born in Germany.

He studied at the University of Michigan Medical School, was said to have graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit and then began what was described as a checkered medical career.

He was wed briefly to Geraldine Davidson, a wealthy woman from Detroit, then married Sophie Davidowitz, who also was from a well-to-do family. She suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and became an invalid.

Testimony from his children helped convict him, but his daughter Zaretsky served as his lawyer before the Parole Board.

“Did he do it?” she asked rhetorically in an interview. “That I don’t know. But he served his sentence. Under New York law, he’s entitled to be paroled.”

Friedgood’s brother-inlaw, Sidney Klemow, demurred. “I knew he was guilty the minute it happened,” he told The New York Times in 2007.

Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

Friedgood came closest to expressing remorse for his wife’s death in his final appearance before the Parole Board, on Nov. 6, 2007.

“I can’t even at this time believe that I would do such a stupid thing, and it’s lust for another woman, greed for money,” he said, according to the minutes. “I can assure you I’d never repeat such a crime.”

He added, “What you are seeing today is an 89-yearold man that is altogether different than he was 35 years ago.”

He continued: “What good is it doing the government to have me here in the prison? I feel that I am rehabilitated with remorse and the realization of what I did was wrong.”

Earlier, in an extensive interview with The Times at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Sullivan County, New York, he was pressed on what he was expressing remorse for.

“That I didn’t take better care of her and that I should have watched and been more diligent with the injections,” he replied.

Was he glad she was dead?

“Not glad, but I felt, you know, sometimes I used to say when a person was in terminal malignancy and suffering, sometimes it’s better you die and you not suffer so much.”

He was asked how he reconciled that sentiment with what he had told the Parole Board earlier, that he had done it and was sorry.

“Well, you try; you have to try,” he replied. “You want to get out of here. You don’t want to die in prison. So you try to appeal to their mercy and forgiveness.”

What difference would it make if he died in prison? he was asked.

“Well, I want to be buried where my parents are buried,” Friedgood replied. “We have a family plot in Detroit. In prison, they put you in potter’s field.”

He was buried in South Florida National Cemetery in Lake Worth, Florida.