The Adventures of Melanie Cain

Melodrama of love and death

Melanie Cain graduated from high school five years ago in Naperville, 111., and set out to make her fortune as a fashion model. Soon she found a place with Manhattan's prestigious Ford Model Agency. She began going around with a celebrated race-track figure named Howard ("Buddy") Jacobson. He set her up as the head of her own modeling agency, named My Fair Lady. Her picture began appearing in the pages of Vogue and McCall's, even on the cover of Redbook, and soon she was earning more than $100,000 a year. "She was nice, considering the money she made, never stuck up," recalls one of the models who worked for her.

Melanie Cain went out looking for a new apartment one day last week, then returned to the penthouse she was sharing with her new lover, John Tupper, 34, a divorced restaurateur. When she found no one there, Buddy Jacobson she said later, she assumed that Tupper was out jogging. But when she found his jogging shoes, she began to worry. She went down the hall to the apartment of Buddy Jacobson, whom she had abandoned to move in with Tupper several weeks ago. Jacobson refused to let her in, but she was able to see that his apartment was in disarray, with bloodstains on the carpet. Returning to Tupper's apartment, she telephoned the police and reported that he was missing.

That same day, a yellow Cadillac skidded to a stop alongside an empty lot in The Bronx. Two men jumped out, dragging a six-foot-long wooden crate. After dousing it with gasoline they ignited it, jumped back into the car and drove off. A witness who had noted the Cadillac's license number immediately called the police. The crate contained the charred corpse of John Tupper, beaten, shot several times and repeatedly stabbed. When police spotted the Cadillac, they found Jacobson at the wheel. The next day, they charged him with murder.

Jacobson, a shaggy and hot-tempered man of 48, had once been one of the country's leading horse trainers. His cousin, Patrice Jacobs, is the wife of Financier Louis Wolfson and co-owner of Triple Crown Winner Affirmed. Jacobson got into a variety of troubles, however, and in 1970 New York's State Racing Commission suspended him for five years for fraud, misrepresentation, and mishandling of funds. Jacobson remained an entrepreneur of sorts, though, and he owned the seven-story building where Tupper lived. He rented out apartments to models and stewardesses, keeping a penthouse with swimming pool for himself.

Jacobson's business ventures ran into difficulties, and he began to borrow heavily from friends. His romance with Cain started to sour. When she left, he was enraged. He pleaded with her to come back and apologized for past difficulties. When that failed, according to one report, he offered Tupper $100,000 to give her up. It was to get away from him that she was out apartment hunting on the day Tupper disappeared. Said she: "We were going to move out of that building. I wanted to get as far away from that crumb as I possibly could. But I guess we delayed our departure too long."

A simple triangle, settled in the classic way? Perhaps. But there was one other odd fact. The day before John Tupper died, a model named Cheryl Corey, 20, went out on a date with her boyfriend, Scott Shepard. As they later stood on the balcony of his 17th floor apartment, four blocks from Jacobson's building, the railing gave way. The fall killed her and left him with two broken legs and internal injuries. What was odd was that Cheryl Corey worked for the My Fair Lady agency and until recently lived in the same apartment building as Melanie Cain and her friends. What were the police to make of that?

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