Did Claudine Longet Get Away with Murder? How Singer Andy Williams Impacted the Trial

In the early 1970s, when beautiful, doe-eyed French singer Claudine Longet began a relationship with the handsome Olympic ski champion Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, the couple soon became the darlings of the Aspen social set.

Longet had recently divorced famed crooner Andy Williams, while Sabich was one of the exclusive ski town’s most eligible bachelors.

In 1972, Sabich invited Longet and her three children to move in to his Aspen chalet. But relations between the couple soon became strained. Friends of Sabich noted that Longet could be demanding and tempestuous. It was reported that she once tossed a wine glass at Sabich at a nightclub because she felt he wasn’t paying her enough attention.

By 1976, the relationship was on the rocks. There were rumors of jealousy and drug abuse. As true-crime journalist Dawna Kaufmann, author of From Crime Scene to Courtroom, tells A&E Crime + Investigation, “Word was that in early March, Spider told Claudine the relationship wasn’t working anymore and said she had to go. He gave her three weeks to find another place to live. But three weeks later, he was dead.”

On March 21, 1976, after a day of drinking at an Aspen bar, Longet came home and shot Sabich once in the stomach with an imitation WWII Luger pistol. Sabich died on the way to the hospital, with Longet riding in the ambulance beside him.

Longet was arrested and charged with reckless manslaughter. She claimed the shooting was an accident that occurred while Sabich was in the bathroom and she was asking him to show her how the gun worked.

Prosecutors thought otherwise. They contended that the position of his deceased body—and the distance from which the shot was fired—contradicted her account.

The public was also skeptical of Longet’s account, especially after police found the singer’s diary. The 225-page journal was described by those who read it as "explosive."

“There was jealousy in the relationship,” legal analyst Anne Bremner tells A&E Crime + Investigation, “competition in terms of their celebrity and a lot of turmoil.”

But in the first of a series of blunders by the Aspen PD, the diary was obtained without a search warrant, and therefore ruled inadmissible as evidence under the Fourth Amendment.

“That was a big deal, to have that evidence omitted from the trial due to the police’s inability to follow constitutional procedural rules,” Bremner says.

The diary wasn’t the only piece of evidence excluded. Blood and urine samples, taken from Longet on the day of the shooting, showed traces of alcohol. But these were also obtained without a warrant, and ruled inadmissible.

Finally, the murder weapon had been wrapped in a towel and stored in the glove compartment of a police officer’s car for several days. Since the gun was improperly stored, the defense was able to claim evidence tampering.

“It's hard to believe they let folks who were not experts in the case handle the weapon,” Bremner says. “So then, you basically don't trust the process by which the gun was examined and then brought before the jury—or the conclusions from any ballistics expert.”

The prosecution’s determination that Longet had behaved recklessly came primarily from Aspen Detective David Garms’s testimony. He claimed that Longet had told him after the shooting, “I raised the gun and playfully went ‘boom, boom,’ and it went off.”

The prosecution also tried to establish that Longet was reckless by nature. But that strategy backfired when Williams, called to testify against his ex-wife, staunchly defended her character.

“Claudine had Andy escorting her to court and back every day,” Bremner says. “She looked little and cute and vulnerable. And when a jury sees that kind of support, they have to think about whether she would have intentionally shot this person and apparently, they didn't think so.”

Kaufmann concurs. “Andy Williams carried a lot of influence,” she says. “With him by [Longet’s] side, there was tremendous sympathy for her. You couldn’t prove this as premeditation.”

On January 14, 1977, after a trial that lasted four days, she was convicted of the lesser charge of misdemeanor negligent homicide. She received what many thought was a lenient sentence: two years on probation and 30 days in jail, to begin on a date of her choosing.

Many in the tight-knit Aspen community thought Longet had gotten away with murder. “Recklessness means you know there's a risk, but you do it anyway,” Bremner says. “Negligence means you're not careful. Claudine was reckless. She knew there was a risk of death, but she did it anyway.”

The Sabich family later filed a civil lawsuit against Longet for $1.3 million. It was settled out of court, with the singer agreeing to never speak publicly about Sabich or his death. Longet subsequently married Ronald Austin, one of her defense attorneys, and dropped out of the public eye. She died on May 14, 2026, at the age of 84.

The Longet case took place well before the existence of social media and 24-hour cable news,

Robert Thompson, professor of TV and popular culture at Syracuse University, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that had the trial taken place today, “Every detail would have been publicly covered, analyzed and agonized over for many more hours than were available for the broadcast networks in the mid ‘70s. It's logical to speculate that all this added scrutiny would have forced, at the very least, a more severe sentence.”

From a criminal standpoint, Bremner also feels confident that the results might’ve been a lot different in the 21st century. “We didn't have the forensics that we have today; we didn't even have DNA back then,” she observes. “I think they would have a tighter case on the ballistics and she'd be convicted on the greater offense of reckless homicide.”

Bremner believes that a contemporary jury might not find Longet as sympathetic: “I think people would look at her and say, she got mad at him, they had some issues in their relationship, and she shot him in the heat of passion. People can buy that today; maybe they couldn't buy it in 1976, in Aspen.”