It reveals what doctor behind wife’s killing had to say
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – A television reporter’s book about the April Kauffman murder that rocked the local area contains extensive detail about the man behind the murder.
Annie McCormick, a reporter for 6ABC Action News in Philadelphia, will be in Ocean City Saturday to sign copies of her book, “The Doctor, The Hitman, and the Motorcycle Gang,” from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Sun Rose Words and Music at 756 Asbury Ave.
Kauffman was found murdered at her home at 2 Woodstock Drive in Linwood on May 10, 2012. At the time, Dr. James Kauffman told emergency responders he discovered his 47-year-old wife dead in a bedroom of their house. The case languished for roughly five years before it was revived by then-new Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon G. Tyner, although Kauffman’s daughter, Kim Pack, always suspected her stepfather was responsible.
It turned out her death was part of a killing-for-hire scheme orchestrated by the doctor. The case would see the suicide death of the doctor, an overdose death of the killer, and a motorcycle gang member from Upper Township sent to prison in 2018 with a 55-year sentence upheld by the state Superior Court Appellate Division this past April.
Here is how McCormick puts it on her website (anniemccormick.com): “A prominent New Jersey doctor and members of a notorious outlaw motorcycle gang transform the doctor’s office into a drug ring pumping thousands of highly addictive opioid pain pills onto the streets in exchange for cash. Everything was going smoothly until one person discovered their plan: the doctor’s wife. When she threatened to divorce him, the doctor’s unholy alliance with his partners in crime turned deadly and the doctor hired a hitman to kill her.”
McCormick, a southern New Jersey native who graduated from Moorestown High School, is an award-winning journalist who has been a reporter for 6ABC Action News since 2012, spending much of that time covering crime in the region.
She got to the station about four months after April Kauffman was murdered, but she remembers hearing about the killing the day it happened because she was in the area visiting her parents. It was on the one-year anniversary of Kauffman’s death that she did a story about the then-unsolved crime and met the victim’s daughter.
She kept in touch with Pack. That link and how she “eventually started to hear a lot of crazy, crazy, crazy rumors” kept her interested in the case. She said she was and wasn’t surprised it took so many years before there was an arrest in the case. Although she expected a local department would want to solve the crime quickly to put the community at ease, she also heard there may be federal investigators involved, a factor that could take the case out of local hands.
“I heard very early on that drug trafficking was part of this,” McCormick said, which made her realize there may have been a bigger case going on behind the scenes.
Although it took a number of years, things started to unfold quickly after the FBI raided the doctor’s office and there was a standoff with Dr. Kauffman, who brandished a gun.
Every year on the anniversary of April Kauffman’s death, McCormick would put in a request to do an on-camera interview with the prosecutor “and every year they said no.” When Tyner got into office, he granted her request. He surprised McCormick by telling her they were going to request a DNA sample from Dr. Kauffman. Tyner had talked about putting more resources into cold cases in Atlantic County, but that tidbit about the DNA caught her attention.
“I felt that once that starts, the train is going to leave the station,” she said. A few weeks later, after arguments in court over whether the doctor had to give the sample, that’s when the standoff happened. “From there it kept going and going and going.”
McCormick said she has been a huge fan of true crime books since high school. When she got into journalism, she wanted to write her own. When she was a reporter in the Lancaster, Pa., area, there was a case she considered for a book, “but it just didn’t feel right.”
With the Kauffman murder case, “things just kept falling into my lap. There were connections, I cared about the case, it clicked a lot of boxes.” About a year and a half after the murder, she got it in her head it could be a book, but it wasn’t until 2017 “that I decided I’m definitely doing this.”
She realized writing a book could be daunting, the opposite of doing a news story on television when she only gets 90 seconds. Trying to boil information down to that format is its own challenge, but with the murder story there was so much she could use to “paint the bigger picture” of what was happening. She could include the details.
She liked the “idea of having every single part of a story I’ve been covering off and on for five years … in one spot, soup to nuts.”
The book will include a lot of details most people don’t know about it. A big reason why is “because Jim Kauffman never lived to go to trial.” She said the case the FBI and Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office built was against the doctor. They were also building the case against Ferdinand “Freddy” Augello, the Pagan motorcycle gang member who would later be convicted, but “what you saw in the Fred Augello trial is nothing, it’s like a tenth of the entire investigation.”
“A lot of people didn’t get to hear about Jim talk about the day April was found. In my book, you get to hear the accounts that were all from the police officers and detectives who responded,” McCormick said. “As you progress through the book, you get to hear what Jim Kauffman is saying happened that day, which contradicts everything that he told authorities on May 10, 2012.”
“You hear a lot from Jim Kauffman, who is someone that no one heard from throughout the entire process. He never did an interview. He never testified in court,” the author said. “You really hear Jim Kauffman talking a lot in this book, which I think a lot of readers will find interesting.”
An excerpt of the book is on McCormick’s website and readers can meet her in person and have copies of her book signed on Saturday.
