The Neighbors in Fox Run

Putting people to sleep was Dr. Carl Coppolino's specialty, and it paid well. In 1962, the 30-year-old anesthesiologist, with his wife Carmela, also a physician, built a $34,000 home at 35 Wallace Road in Fox Run, an upper-middle-class development in east-central New Jersey. As the Coppolinos' house was going up, another was rising diagonally across the street. The builders of 50 Wallace Road were Colonel William Farber, then 50, a bemedaled World War II veteran who had retired after 21 years in the artillery, and his wife Marjorie, 47.

Marge Farber, once divorced, had an eye-catching schoolgirl figure. Her husband tended to interest himself in puttering around his lawn and rhododendrons; Marge, who seemed restless, took lessons in riding, golf, interior decorating. The Coppolinos and the Farbers naturally got to know each other. Recalls Marge: "We just met like neighbors do in a town, on the street. Carm and I were really good friends." So were Marge and Carl.

Up the Street. In early 1963, pleading heart trouble, Carl resigned from his post at a hospital in Red Bank, N.J., teamed with Carmela to write a book, The Billion-Dollar Hangover, a report on alcoholism. Time evidently lay heavy on Coppolino's hands. His wife would leave the house in their blue Chevrolet every morning for her job in a Nutley laboratory. Coppolino, according to the watchful neighbors, would stroll out to his mailbox and then up the street to visit Marge Farber, whose husband had gone to work in a Manhattan insurance office. Then, on July 30, 1963, Farber died. The death certificate was signed by Carmela, who listed the cause as coronary thrombosis.

Afterward, Marge told everybody, the Coppolinos were a tower of strength. The trio started attending church together. An amateur artist, Marge began painting Carl's portrait. Neighbors began joking about "Dr. Strangelove" and friend, but the widow assured a neighbor that she thought of Carl "like my son." Early last year Marge decided to move to Florida, bought land adjacent to the Gulf Coast resort of Sarasota-and told acquaintances that she had induced her friends to head South with her. In April 1965, the Coppolinos settled in a white stucco home on fashion able Longboat Key off Sarasota. Marge later moved into a house next door.

Surprise Bride. On Aug. 28, Carmela Coppolino died. Again the cause was listed as a heart attack. The death certificate was signed by Juliette Karow, a Sarasota physician, who said that Carl told her when she arrived that Carm had suffered chest pains the previous day. The listed beneficiary of $65,000 worth of insurance on his wife, Carl, 30 days after her death, applied for a license to marry--but not, as it turned out, Good Neighbor Marge. On Oct. 7 Coppolino wed handsome Mary Gibson, 38, whom he had met at his bridge lessons, and who was rumored to have won a $250,000 divorce settlement. Carl vacated the house next to Marge's and moved into Mary's far more elegant villa, where he continued work on a new book, Welcome to the Coronary Club.

An informer suggested that Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer look into "something odd" about Carmela's death. According to Boyer, the tipster was Marge Farber. Suspicion focused on succinylcholine chloride, a muscle relaxant commonly used by anesthesiologists. The drug is injected into patients to depress breathing temporarily during some operations, but an overdose can kill within ten minutes--and traces of the compound disappear from the body almost immediately.

Thus for Dr. Malcolm Gilman, chief medical examiner of New Jersey's Monmouth County, where Carmela formerly lived, began seven months of painstaking detective work. Gilman imported six rabbits to his farm, injected them with lethal doses of succinylcholine chloride, buried them (one with embalming fluid), and a month later disinterred the bodies. Sure enough, he reported, autopsies revealed telltale traces of the drug's components, though not of the compound itself. As a result, Gilman had Carmela's body exhumed and a four-month analysis performed on vital organs. Said Gilman: "What we found was enough to make us exhume Colonel Farber's body."

Cracked Cricoid. Fortnight ago, dug up from Arlington National Cemetery, the colonel's corpse was also autopsied, with equally startling results: the cricoid cartilage, a ring around the larynx below the Adam's apple, had been cracked in two places. The doctors' conclusion: "strangulation."

Last week a New Jersey grand jury returned an indictment accusing Coppolino of having "feloniously murdered" Farber. Police believe that Carmela was pressured or duped into signing the death certificate. Days later, a grand jury in Sarasota handed down an indictment charging that Carmela had died from a "premeditated" act by Carl. Receiving reporters in her dinette, Marge insisted: "I loved my husband, not Carl."

As the onetime winter home of the Ringling Bros, troupe, Sarasota is accustomed to circuses. Not so Fox Run, where one resident last week repeated in horrified tones the oldest caveat of modern living: "You never know who your neighbors are."

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