Correctional guards found Neulander, 82, unresponsive in a prison infirmary unit on Wednesday, April 17, according to NBCPhiladelphia.com and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The state Department of Corrections website lists him as “deceased,” but prison officials have not disclosed the cause of death.
Neulander, the founding rabbi of Congregation M’kor Shalom of Cherry Hill, a Reform Jewish congregation, had been serving a life sentence since his 2002 conviction.
The rabbi, a Trinity College graduate from Hartford, Connecticut, paid two men $30,000 in 1994 to murder his wife, Carol Neulander, the mother of the couple’s three children. Hitmen in Cherry Hill, where Carol lived with her husband, bludgeoned her to death with a lead pipe.
During the murder trial, one of the hitmen claimed that Neulander wanted his wife dead so that he could have an affair with Philadelphia radio personality Elaine Soncini. Sonici apologized on TV, calling her two-year affair with the rabbi a mistake and stating that it filled a gap after her husband died.
Matt Schatz, a former Cherry Hill resident, turned the case into a true-crime musical, “A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill.”
