A former Baltimore Police sergeant was sentenced to life without parole for the first-degree murder of Gina Nueslein more than three decades ago.

James A. Kulbicki, 68, appeared at the court hearing Tuesday in front of Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge Keith Truffer via Zoom because of an illness, according to Nueslein’s family members who were in attendance.

In October, Kulbicki was found guilty of the death of Nueslein, the culmination of more than 30 years of the case winding through the court system. Kulbicki had been found guilty of the same crime in two other trials in 1993 and 1995 that were overturned after legal appeals.

Victor Gearhart, Gina Nueslein’s uncle and godfather, attended all of Kulbicki’s trials and hearings throughout the years. Gearhart was a Baltimore Police lieutenant for almost 35 years. Kulbicki replaced him as a sergeant on the midnight shift in the Northwest District in 1992.

“This was a major punch in the gut because this showed that kind of a cop he wasn’t,” said Gearhart, the former first vice president of the Baltimore police union. “Cops don’t commit homicides. We take our oaths seriously. I knew it was going to be tough because, at the time, people would never believe a policeman could do something like this. Of course, we know now, there is enough around the country, you know they can do it.”

John P. Cox, deputy state’s attorney in the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office, declined to comment.

After Kulbicki’s first conviction in 1993, Maryland’s appeals court ordered a new trial after ruling that the judge hadn’t allowed his defense team to rebut key testimony. Two years later, a jury found him guilty again after deliberating for less than three hours.

Kulbicki secured a third trial after his attorneys successfully argued that the 1995 case relied heavily on a since-debunked form of bullet analysis and testimony from a ballistics examiner who lied about his education. However, the outcome in the latest trial was the same — guilty.

Jurors in October also found Kulbicki guilty of using a handgun in the commission of a felony, for which he received a 20-year prison sentence to run concurrently with the life sentence.

Prosecutors said Kulbicki began a yearslong affair with Nueslein when she was 19 and got her pregnant. Investigators said he killed her on Jan. 9, 1993, to avoid paying child support for their son. She was 22.

Nueslein was found dead in Gunpowder Falls State Park. Gearhart said he accompanied his niece to fill out paperwork for her child support suit in the 1990s. He said Kulbicki planned to challenge it in court.

“I was there when we went to the Circuit Court for her to get the blood test and for him to get the blood test,” Gearhart said. “They had a person who worked on them and she was saying that he was the first person to ask to go before a judge. It was like 99.9 percent that was him. They said, ‘Are you sure about this? Because everybody loses, and you especially lose before a judge.’ He didn’t care. He wanted his day a court.”

That court appearance was scheduled three days after she was murdered, Gearhart recalls.

She left for her job at Royal Farms in the afternoon of Jan. 9 but never arrived. Barbara Clay testified that she saw a man in his 30s in a pickup truck pulling up to the park as she was leaving that afternoon, and later identified him as Kulbicki.

Nueslein was shot in the back of the head, causing an “evulsion,” or a tearing so forceful that it pushed pieces of bone out of her body, according to the autopsy. Investigators found a bullet fragment in her head and “metallic fragments” in Kulbicki’s Ford pickup truck, according to court testimony.

Police also found skull fragments that matched Nueslein’s DNA in the truck, which detectives said smelled like it had been cleaned. In addition, a denim jacket police found in Kulbicki’s closet had Nueslein’s blood on the sleeve, according to court testimony.

Natalie Finegar, an attorney for Kulbicki, could not be reached for comment.

Mary Peitersen, who is the aunt of Nueslein and the wife of Gearhart, said the sentence offers some relief but no closure. Nueslein’s parents, Geraldine and Joseph, who died in 2022 and 2019, respectively, never recovered from the murder, according to Peitersen.

“It’s not over,” Peitersen said about the case. “He will continue to file motions and appeals until he stops breathing. If you look at the court record, this has been going on for 30-plus years.

“For my sister-in-law, this was a torture for her. Every time he filed a new motion of some sort, she had visions he was going to come out and go after her.”

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