After sitting through two painful trials for the man accused of shooting his daughter in the head and killing her, Joe Nueslein was relieved.
"I just thank God this is all over with," he said that November evening in 1995 when former Baltimore police Sgt. James A. Kulbicki was convicted of first-degree murder for the second time. "And that I'll never have to go through that again."
He couldn't have been more wrong.
The Nueslein family found themselves back in court last year as a new team of defense attorneys challenged just about every piece of evidence that tied Kulbicki to the killing of Gina Nueslein, 22, a convenience-store clerk with whom the married man had an affair and a child.
The judge's decision not to grant Kulbicki a third trial has brought a new wave of relief for the Nueslein family. But as they marked the 15th anniversary of her death this month, they also expressed frustration that the continued appeals have forced them to repeatedly remember the worst parts of her death.
"The thing that people don't realize is that every time we go back to court and hear about it, it feels like it was yesterday," said Jennifer Getz, her younger sister. "It's not that we don't think about her. We do - every day. But we don't think about the violence of it. That's the part that's hard. That's not fair to us."
Gina Marie Nueslein lived at home with her parents, Joe and Geraldine Nueslein, her two sisters and her young son in Baltimore's Belair-Edison neighborhood.
She was a night owl who liked to stay up late, playing cards with her sister, talking on the phone with friends and watching Judge Joseph Wapner settle disputes on The People's Court.
Asked what his daughter had imagined for herself in life, Joe Nueslein recently said, "If I had to guess, I'd say she wanted to get married, have children and be a housewife."
Gina Nueslein worked the overnight shift as a waitress at a Horn & Horn Restaurant - where she met Kulbicki when she was 16 - and later took a job as a cashier at a Royal Farms store about a half-mile from home.
Her family made no secret of their disdain for Kulbicki - an arrogant cop, they say, who was 14 years her senior.
Kulbicki testified at his first trial in 1993 that he and Gina Nueslein began dating in 1989 when she was 19 years old. Her family says their relationship had run much longer - five or six years - and that the police officer told Gina that he was separated from his wife and living with his brother.
