The murder was carried out with cold-blooded efficiency. April Kauffman was asleep in the bedroom she no longer shared with her husband in their stately two‑story home on Woodstock Drive in Linwood, New Jersey, an upper‑middle‑class neighborhood just outside of Atlantic City. It was a little after five a.m. on May 10, 2012. Her husband, Dr. James Kauffman, was downstairs getting ready to leave for work. He was an endocrinologist with a lucrative practice in a busy office less than a fifteen-minute drive from their home.
The doctor, as he did almost every morning, would stop at a Wawa, a local convenience store, on his way to work. The store was a few blocks from their house. The security camera in place at the Wawa would capture him that morning entering and leaving the store.
This, investigators would later determine, was just a few minutes after he had handed the hit man a gun and pointed to his wife’s upstairs bedroom.
“She’s up there,” he said.
Several hours later a handyman who worked for the Kauffmans would discover April’s body sprawled on the floor next to her bed. She had been shot twice. One bullet had shattered her elbow. The other had ripped through her side, slicing through a lung, her heart and her other lung. A medical examiner would speculate that she struggled out of bed after being shot, then collapsed on the floor. She had bled to death internally, he said, estimating that at least two liters of blood had poured from her wounds.
The hit man was later identified as Francis “Frank” Mulholland. He was a junkie and, it would turn out, he was ill suited for the job. But he had been offered $10,000 to commit the murder. That was enough to satisfy his habit for several months. He was driven to the home that morning by Joseph “Irish” Mulholland. They shared the same last name, but were not related. Joe Mulholland said he dropped Frank off near the house in the dark that morning and told him he would be waiting for him a few blocks away. He was driving a white Silverado pickup truck.
Joe Mulholland would later describe himself as a reluctant getaway driver.
Reluctant and also guilt ridden.
Although it would be nearly five years before law enforcement would put the case together, there were rumors, hints and whispers from day one. James Kauffman wanted his wife dead. He had talked to more than a few people about this. There was word in the Atlantic County underworld, particularly in the underworld populated by outlaw biker gangs, that there was a doctor willing to pay to have his wife killed.
Murder, the good doctor had decided, was cheaper than divorce.
At the time, the Kauffmans were a celebrity couple in Atlantic County. He was a dapper, wealthy physician who spoke at symposiums and who railed against the dietary habits and sedentary lifestyle of patients battling diabetes. This was the bulk of his practice. Described by some as charismatic and by others as arrogant, the doctor was hands‑on both in practicing medicine and in a lifestyle that was luxurious and indulgent. He was an enthusiastic gun collector. He had an array of rifles and handguns that he kept under lock and key in his home. He spent time skeet shooting and on firing ranges. He was also a motorcycle enthusiast. In addition to his home in Linwood, he kept a vacation home in Arizona for getaways. April was his second wife. For those who liked to converse in stereotypes, she was the shiksa blond bombshell who had swept the much older doctor off his feet. She was forty‑seven at the time she was killed. He was sixty‑two.
They had been married for ten years. It was her third marriage. Her second husband had also been a doctor. Their divorce had been somewhat tumultuous. April had a grown daughter, Kim Pack, from her first marriage. Pack would later provide investigators with key pieces of information. From day one, she was suspicious if not convinced that James Kauffman had had something to do with her mother’s death.
April Kauffman had created a life for herself that few would have expected given her background. She had had what a friend would later describe as a “somewhat unsettled childhood,” raised by her grandmother and separated from four siblings that her mother had placed in foster care. She emerged as someone who was constantly looking for validation and, more important, for love. That search would continue as an adult. She owned and operated a beauty salon and had an interest in a restaurant‑catering business. April was vivacious and outgoing, with flowing blond hair and a flirtatious manner; her upbeat personality was often a mask that hid insecurity and self‑doubt.
At the time of her death, she had a weekly radio show in Atlantic County and had become a strong advocate for the rights of military veterans. “She was part princess, part bulldog,” said an associate who worked with her on veterans’ issues. That work brought her into contact with elected officials and government and military leaders in the area. Among other things, every Thanksgiving she would host a dinner at her home for recruits from the US Coast Guard station in nearby Cape May, young men and women who were unable to be with their families. She was offering a home away from home during the holiday.…
In her last radio appearance, she described herself in terms that would prove to be a fitting epitaph. “I don’t like training wheels,” she said. “That’s why . . . I drive a Corvette. I drive a motorcycle. I’m a full‑throttle person.”
On that same radio show, she also offered this eerie commentary: “I feel like I’m on borrowed time. And now if I was to be taken out, I’m telling you going up to see our Creator, I know I raised my daughter right with right American values. . . .She’s moral. She’s a good person, a hard worker, a patriotic person.”
April Kauffman was well‑liked and highly regarded in business, social and political circles around South Jersey, and her murder sent shock waves through those communities for various reasons, some of them unspoken.
“She was a do‑gooder,” said one person familiar with the events that unfolded. “But she had a voracious sexual appetite. The doctor thought he was a swinger, but his wife, she was major‑league.”
The sexual lifestyle of April and James Kauffman would hang over the murder investigation. In fact, there are those who believe one of the reasons the case went cold for so long was pressure from powerful individuals to keep details about April’s sexual partners—some of whom moved in the upper circles of government, politics and business—from becoming public. April kept a diary. But after she was murdered, it disappeared.
Its content might have provided answers to what happened to her and why. Among other things, it might have shown how much she knew about her husband’s involvement in a pill mill ring linked to an outlaw motorcycle gang. Medical records from Dr. Kauffman’s office would show that he was writing prescriptions for oxycodone for members and associates of the Pagans, a motorcycle gang that dominated the biker underworld in the Philadelphia–South Jersey region. In fact, there are those who would describe the Pagans as one of the toughest and most violent gangs on the East Coast. Several years earlier the Pagans had waged war against the Hells Angels, who attempted but failed to move into Pagan territory in Philadelphia and New Jersey.
Dr. Kauffman liked to identify with the bikers, although he had little in common with most of them. “People like us,” he would say while discussing the biker world with a member of the club. The club member would nod, but would later shake his head.
“He didn’t have a fuckin’ clue what we were about,” the biker said.
Jim Kauffman liked to portray himself as a tough guy. He would refer to his experience with an elite Green Beret Army unit and to his two tours of duty in Vietnam. He would sometimes show up in Army fatigues and a beret while supporting his wife’s veterans’ advocacy programs. He occasionally filled in on or cohosted her radio show. His military background, friends would say, was one of the things that drew April to the older man she would eventually marry. Part of his story was detailed in a paper written by April’s daughter, Kim, when she was a college student. The assignment was to interview a military veteran. The interview took place shortly after April and Jim had married. He told a detailed story about how his unit had come under a vicious attack by the Vietcong and about how he had been one of the few to survive, licking water off leaves as he struggled to make his way out of the jungle.
None of it was true.
He had never been in the military.
He had never been in the military. About a year before she was killed, April discovered the lie.
About a year before she was killed, April discovered the lie. Those who knew her said it was one of the reasons she wanted a divorce. Authorities also would claim it was one of the reasons she was murdered. A law enforcement affidavit written five years after the homicide included the claim that about a year before she was killed “April became aware that Doctor Kauffman had never served in the Armed Forces and was not a veteran in any capacity. It is known that April was devastated by this revelation and it is believed that she threatened to use this info to produce a beneficial divorce from him.”
Authorities would also claim that she was threatening to expose his involvement in the pill mill operation. But there is little to support that allegation or that she even knew about the oxycodone ring.
The pill mill, in fact, was only a small piece of the doctor’s criminal activity.
Federal authorities had linked him and another local doctor, along with the representative of a pharmaceutical company, to a massive insurance‑fraud scheme that involved prescribing compound‑cream prescriptions for pain management. The Compound cream, scams based on which have played out throughout the country, have been described as the “snake oil of the twenty‑first century” by an insurance watchdog group. Like the pill mill operation and the opioid crisis it helped fuel, fraudulent scripts for unneeded creams to treat nonexistent pain was another example of Dr. James Kauffman trading his medical ethics—first do no harm—for dollars.
He also was targeted in a separate insurance‑fraud scheme involving unnecessary blood tests. He would prescribe a test and, investigators later alleged, he would receive a kickback from the lab that conducted the procedure and billed the patient’s insurance company. Both the compound‑cream and blood‑test scams generated tens of thousands of dollars in illegal income for the doctor, authorities now believe. This was in addition to his legitimate income from what has been described as a thriving and highly regarded medical practice, fees he was paid for speaking engagements at pharmaceutical conventions and, of course, the cash he made in the pill mill operation.
Money, it appears, was more important than the practice of medicine for Dr. James Kauffman. Or, perhaps, it was that he viewed the practice of medicine as a conduit for cash. So when he balked at granting April a divorce, telling friends and associates there was no way he was going to give her “half of his empire,” she launched a counterattack.
She was burning up his credit cards, several of which were close to maxing out. Thousands had been spent on furnishing a home they shared in Tucson, Arizona, and now she was planning a $60,000 kitchen renovation for the home in Linwood. The credit card bills that arrived each month were her way of pressuring her husband into letting her go. She hoped he would come to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to divorce her.
He decided it would be even cheaper to have her killed.
Dr. Kauffman’s net worth at the time was an estimated $4.6 million, according to authorities. The doctor believed April would be in line for half of that in a divorce settlement. So he put out word in the biker underworld that he was willing to pay to have her killed. The price varied depending on whom he was talking with, but the range was between $10,000 and $50,000. Even at the high end, the doc considered it a bargain.
