The murder case of millionaire business tycoon George H. Kogan is depicted in great detail in the show ‘Scorned: Love Kills: Manhattan Murder Mystery’ on Investigation Discovery. This case has been portrayed in a number of true crime dramas and re-enactments in the past. George Kogan was shot three times in the back by an unidentified assailant on a morning in the fall of 1990 as he was returning from going grocery shopping to the apartment that he shared with his girlfriend. The scandal rocked the entire country and dragged on for close to twenty years before it finally reached its tragic resolution.
At the end of the investigation, it was discovered that Barbara Kogan, the estranged wife of the millionaire, had paid her divorce lawyer to arrange for the assassination of George. Mary-Louise Hawkins, who was George’s girlfriend at the time, remained out of the public eye until a few years ago, despite the chaos and uproar that the case caused. Shall we investigate her a little further, shall we?
Who Is This Mary-Louise Hawkins Person Anyway?
Mary-Louise Hawkins, who was 28 years old at the time of the tragic incident, was hired by the Kogans in the year 1988 to work as a media publicist for their new, upscale antique store in New York City called Kogan & Company. The store was located on East 76th Street. After relocating to the city in 1987, they immediately went ahead and opened the shop. George sold the controlling rights to the Ramada San Juan Hotel and Casino a year before moving to New York. He had purchased the hotel and casino in Puerto Rico in 1981 and had managed it for a period of five years.
George was the younger son of a wealthy owner of a chain of successful department stores. His father had amassed a lot of wealth. He spent his childhood in Puerto Rico before making the move to the Big Apple in the 1960s to attend the NYU Stern School of Business. He is a native Puerto Rican. While he was attending school in Manhattan, he became engaged to and married Barbara Fiegel, who was attending Barnard College at the time. Even after getting married, the couple went on to have two children: Scott and William Kogan. After starting out their married life in Puerto Rico, which was a fertile ground for George’s business ventures, the couple moved to New York City in 1987 to purchase an opulent condominium in the Olympic Towers, which is located at 641 Fifth Avenue.
However, things were not going swimmingly in their married life at all. Throughout his childhood, George struggled with issues related to his self-esteem. According to Mary, “His (George’s) mother showered attention on his older brother, who was more attractive.” He disclosed to me that his mother often criticized him for being overweight and unmotivated. According to Mary, the same treatment was meted out to him by his wife, Barbara. According to Mary, Barbara called him “fat” and said that “he disgusted her.” Barbara was reportedly his wife. She claimed that he was in a loveless marriage, that he had a lonely and miserable life, and that he spent his time wandering around alone on the streets binge eating.
Mary further asserted that Barbara did not let him into the bedroom and that he slept in a different room because Barbara did not want him there. George was left all by himself and unable to escape his troubled marriage after their grown sons left the household. All of this appeared to push him towards his young media publicist, whose straightforward lifestyle reportedly appealed to him more than his own. Mary asserted that Barbara used to spend the annual sum of $100,000 of George’s money on a variety of luxury items, as well as visits to a beauty therapist and a hairstylist on a daily basis. On the other hand, the millionaire, who was 49 years old, was head over heels in love with Mary.
Mary related that George had a habit of accompanying her on her commute to work, visiting her apartment with her favorite coffee cake, and venting to her about how miserable his life was. Following a marriage that lasted more than 25 years, George served Barbara with divorce papers in the beginning of 1989, before moving into Mary’s humble one-room apartment on East 69th Street. According to the reports, Barbara paid her divorce lawyer, Manuel Martinez, $40,000 (or $100,000, according to some reports), to have her husband murdered because she was blinded by jealousy and hatred, as well as greed for insurance money to the tune of over $4 million. In addition, Barbara paid Martinez to get her husband killed.
On the morning of October 23, 1990, a person who has not been identified opened fire on George Kogan outside of Mary’s apartment using hollow-point bullets from a.44-caliber handgun. George, who was on his deathbed, pleaded with the doorman to go and get Mary. During a phone interview with the New York Post, Hawkins recalled, “The doorman banged on my front door and said, ‘Come quickly, there’s been an accident.’” “There was blood splattered all over. I was afraid that he had been hurt in some kind of incident. However, there were three holes in his back where the bullets had entered. When she said that, I completely lost it.
Who Is Mary-Louise Hawkins and Where Is She Now?
The death of George ushered in an era of profound transformation for Mary-Louise Hawkins. She moved to Europe in 1993, less than three years after the murder, in order to escape the wrath of Barbara and her minions and to get away from the cameras that were trained on her face. She embarked on a new chapter in her life over the course of the subsequent two decades, getting married and relocating to Europe. Mary, on the other hand, spent a lot of time in Manhattan, where she met with prosecutors and testified in front of several grand juries. In the end, she was an asset in bringing the case against Martinez, who was responsible for George’s death. Because of how determined she was, it took her nearly two decades before she was finally able to see Barbara behind bars.
Barbara was taken into custody in the year 2008 and found guilty in the year 2010. Because of this, Mary was furious when she learned that Barbara would be released from prison on parole on October 19, 2020, after having served a total of 12 years behind bars. Mary detailed the harassment that Barbara had directed toward her in a letter that she submitted to the parole board as part of her victim impact statement. Mary wrote that “She managed to obtain my parents’ unlisted telephone number and occasionally dialed them in the middle of the night in order to catch them off guard in order to remind them yet again that she wanted the money and valuables she thought George had left behind.” She did this in order to “remind them yet again that she wanted the money and valuables she thought George had left behind.”
When her picture from the Brown University yearbook was discovered to have been leaked, it was published on the front pages of virtually all of the tabloids in New York City. Not only Barbara, but Mary also claimed that she was harassed by the media as a result. Within a few short weeks of the homicide, her mailbox was inundated with hate mail, including threats of rape from random inmates and interview requests from a number of talk show hosts. The world around her was falling apart, and she even considered ending her own life as a result of the trauma. Mary made the decision to run away to Europe not only to get away from the spotlight and unwanted attention, but also because she feared for her safety.
Mary reported that she was subjected to persecution even while in Europe. In her letter to the board, Mary made additional allegations, one of which was that Barbara or her hired goons had on occasion made threatening and hateful comments over phone calls. In spite of this, the parole board decided against Mary’s appeal, and in the year 2020, Barbara was released from her sentence. Mary agreed to speak to the media on the condition that none of her personal details, including her current name, details about her family, or the country she and her family currently reside in, would be revealed. As a result, it is reasonable to assume that her current whereabouts are unknown.
Note from the Editor: Due to the fact that Mary-Louise Hawkins does not want her current name or photograph to be made public, we have refrained from publishing those specific details.
