On Yom Kippur, Linda Stein was in her apartment roasting chickens for her elderly father. "Unknown to her,” neighbor Jerry Miller told The Observer, “I think her maid had stored a basket in the broiler. She put her chickens in the oven, turned it on, of course, and all of a sudden she had a fire.”

So Stein rushed down to see Ms. Miller, who happens to be a broker for the chic Sothby’s International Realty–Stein’s old firm. “She said, ‘Jerry, can I bring my food down? My chickens!’ And I said, ‘Of course!’ … She said, ‘Oh my god, everything happens, I don’t understand it.’”

When Stein came down, she brought her housekeeper and her assistant, Natavia Lowery–the woman in custody this morning after implicating herself in Stein’s brutal murder. “She had a nice smile, she was an attractive black girl. She seemed very nice,” Ms. Miller said.

“She was in my apartment for an hour or more, when I think about it, I go: ‘Oh my god, I had a murderer.’”

Follow Max Abelson via RSS.