Official Charged With Murder And Extradited To California

Official Lois Goodman being extradited from NYC to California.

ARREST OF TENNIS OFFICIAL AT THE U.S. OPEN

A 70-year-old U.S. Open tennis referee accused of smashing a coffee cup over her 80-year-old husband's head and stabbing him with one of the shattered pieces was apparently having an affair. A search warrant affidavit has revealed police found numerous emails and notes between Lois Goodman and a man as they searched her Los Angeles home days after the death of her husband. The revelation comes just two days after police swooped on Goodman in a New York City hotel as she prepared for the U.S. Open. She was taken away wearing her competition tracksuit. The elderly mother of three has now be extradited back to Los Angeles, where she will face trial. As she quietly left a Manhattan court on Thursday, she was still wearing her referee uniform.

She had told detective she arrived home and found a trail of blood leading upstairs to a broken mug covered in blood. She followed the blood to her bedroom, where she found her husband not breathing, according to the affidavit. She then called 911.

Before he could be cremated, investigators intercepted the body and found multiple lacerations on the right side of his head, three cuts on his right ear and a blunt force trauma not consistent with a fall, the Daily News reported.

Investigators also deemed the large stain of blood near the stairs suggested he had suffered an injury and stayed there for some time, court documents said.

Blood was also found on the kitchen floor, inside a linen closet and by a garage, and mug pieces were found in his scalp, sources told the Daily News. When she was questioned for a second time, Goodman said the body looked as if it had been positioned by an intruder. Despite these conflicting accounts and suggestions of an affair, Goodman has protested her innocence. She has returned to Los Angeles and is expected to be arraigned on Monday.

'I don’t know what happened,' Goodman told the New York Post from Rikers Island. 'It's a shock. This happened four months ago.' 'She's anxious to defend herself' in California, her New York lawyer, Guy Oksenhendler, said.

Goodman is well known in tennis circles and was preparing to serve as a referee at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships tournament, a district attorney's office spokeswoman, Jane Robison, said. She has refereed at the U.S. and Australian Opens for years, according to the Los Angeles Times. Goodman has umpired with some of the world's top tennis players since the 1970s, including matches featuring Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova.

In a 1994 interview with the L.A. Times, she said: 'It's exciting. This is my favorite sport and I'm out there rubbing shoulders with the best players. There's no real way to describe it.'