Betrayed by Her Divorce Lawyer: The Resolution of a 2013 Ohio Cold Case

Betrayed by Her Divorce Lawyer: The Resolution of a 2013 Ohio Cold Case

We start with an arrest in one of Cleveland’s more high profile unsolved murders. For 12 years, the friends and family of Aliza Sherman have been wondering, agonizing, really, over who stabbed the 53-year-old nurse to death in broad daylight. Tonight, prosecutors say they have answers. At 3:54 p.m.

 On Palm Sunday, March 24th, 2013, Aliza Sherman sent a text to her divorce attorney. Leaving now, we’ll be there by 4:30. He had left the building over an hour ago. She did not know that. She parked her car in downtown Cleveland, gathered her divorce papers the way he had asked, and stood on the sidewalk outside the locked office building at 55 Erie View Plaza.

It was a Sunday. The city was quiet. The building was empty. She had no reason to feel afraid of the person she was waiting for. He was her attorney. He was the man she was paying to guide her through the final stretch of the worst years of her life. What she could not have known, standing on that sidewalk with her papers in her hand, was that she had not been invited to a meeting.

 She had been delivered to a location. The [snorts] man who built the trap was not inside that building. He was somewhere nearby, watching the clock, waiting for her to be exactly where he had put her. This is what the next hour looked like, and this is what it took 12 years, one cold case unit, and a family that refused to stop asking to finally prove.

Before the timestamps and the phone records and the surveillance footage, there was a life that deserves more than a paragraph. Aliza Sherman was 53 years old, a fertility nurse at the Cleveland Clinic. She spent her working hours helping other people become parents. That was not incidental to who she was.

 It was the shape of her. Her daughter Jennifer described her as someone who did everything to lift other people up without ever expecting anything in return. To her four children, she was the fixed point, the one who showed up, the one who stayed. She was also a woman who had spent years trying to leave a marriage that had become something she was afraid of.

The divorce proceedings had grown hostile in ways that were specific and documented. By early 2012, she had a deadbolt installed on her own bedroom door, not the front door, her bedroom door. Inside her own home, she had locked herself into a single room to sleep. In January 2012, she wrote herself an email. People do this when they need a record, when they sense that something might happen, and they want evidence that they saw it coming. The words were exact.

“I’m really afraid he is going to have me killed.” She named a fear. She documented it, and she kept moving forward because what she had on the other side of that fear was a plan. Her divorce trial was scheduled for the last week of March 2013. Four days after Palm Sunday, her case would go before a judge.

 The deadbolt, the email, the years of documented conflict, all of it was almost behind her. She did not know that the danger she had written down was not the only danger she faced. She did not know that a different threat had been building from inside the legal process she was depending on to set her free. Aliza’s path to Gregory Moore was not a choice she made freely.

 Her original attorney’s license had been suspended mid-case. The file transferred to Moore, a senior associate at the same firm. From the start, the relationship was strained. She told friends he was disorganized, unavailable. He missed meetings. He didn’t return calls. He filed multiple continuances, each one pushing the trial date further back, each one adding months to a situation Aliza was desperate to exit.

 She tried to leave him. With the trial close and her finances already stretched by the divorce itself, no other attorney would take the case. She had no option but to stay. What she did not know, what she had no way of knowing, was that the delays were not incompetence. They were a method. In 2012, Gregory Moore had called in bomb threats to courthouses on days he was scheduled to appear for other cases.

Multiple times. When he was unprepared for court, he manufactured a crisis to buy himself more time. He had been investigated for it. The pattern was known to people inside the legal system. It was not known to Aliza Sherman. By March 2013, her trial was days away. It was complex. The discovery was substantial.

Prosecutors would later argue that Moore, facing a case he was not ready to try, arrived at a calculation. A bomb threat postponed a trial. Removing the person requesting the trial ended it. The bomb threats had a ceiling. This did not. He texted her at 2:31 p.m. using *67 to block his number. He asked her to come to the office, “Bring the divorce papers.

 Come around 4:30 to prepare for trial.” She agreed. She texted Jennifer to let her know where she was going. A friend offered to go with her. She said no. At 3:54 p.m., she sent the text, “Leaving now, we’ll be there by 4:30.” Moore replied almost immediately, “Take time, closer to 5:00.” She had already left. “I left. We’ll wait.

 Call me when you get there.” She arrived. She waited on the sidewalk outside the locked building. Keycard data would later show Moore had not been inside for over an hour before he asked her to meet him. Phone records would place him elsewhere. He had sent her to a building he knew would be locked on a day he knew it would be empty, at a time he knew she would stand still on a sidewalk in downtown Cleveland with no one around her.

The 67, the stalled text, the Sunday. None of it was coincidence. The surveillance camera that captured what followed was distant. What it returned was a figure in a hood, indistinct, present for a moment, then gone. Investigators would spend years trying to pull an identity from the shape of it. Some

time between 4:30 and 5:00 p.m., Aliza Sherman was attacked on that sidewalk. She was stabbed 11 times. Her purse was not taken. Her jewelry was not taken. Her car sat untouched where she had parked it. This was not a robbery. This was an act of targeted violence, engineered for this location, on this day, against this specific person. A passerby found her and called for help.

One witness heard what she said before the paramedics arrived. “I’m dying.” She was transported to MetroHealth Medical Center. At 6:14 p.m., Aliza Sherman was pronounced dead. Investigators believe Moore disabled his phone in the window around the attack to prevent location tracking. At 7:30 p.m.

, more than 2 hours after the attack, well after police had sealed the area around the front of the building, he re-entered 55 Erie View Plaza through a side dock entrance, a back door, away from the crime scene tape, away from the officers. At 7:32 p.m., he reconnected his phone. At 7:32 p.m., he called Aliza’s number. At 7:33 p.m., he called again.

 At 7:43 p.m., a third call, then texts, a digital record assembled with deliberate care, constructed to read as a confused and concerned attorney who had been waiting and couldn’t understand why his client hadn’t shown up. When police interviewed him that night, he told them he had been in his office the entire time, waiting, worried.

The day after the murder, an employee at the firm deleted a voicemail Aliza had left on the call box from the afternoon she died. An attempt was made to cancel the mobile hotspot connected to Moore’s account, and weeks later, it was Moore who filed the formal notice of his client’s death with the court, the document that officially dismissed the divorce case.

That filing was the outcome. The case Aliza had spent years trying to bring to trial, the legal process she had endured every delay and every continuance to reach, was terminated. Her death had accomplished permanently what a bomb threat could only accomplish temporarily. Investigators looked at Moore from the beginning.

 The inconsistencies were visible. The timeline did not hold. But an inconsistent story is not evidence. There was no murder weapon. The figure on the surveillance footage was unidentifiable. No forensic connection placed him at the scene. In 2017, he was charged for the courthouse bomb threats. He served 6 months. He lost his law license.

For the murder of Aliza Sherman, he remained free. The case went quiet in the way cold cases do, not all at once, gradually. A lead runs out. A detective moves to a new assignment. The file passes to someone who reads it fresh and finds the same walls in the same places. The community absorbs the shock, then the grief, and then a silence fills in around the wound without healing it.

If cases like this are the reason you come to this channel, the ones that took too long, where a family waited and did not stop, make it permanent. Hit subscribe. Turn the notification on. We do this every week. And what comes next in this story is the moment the Sherman family had been waiting 12 years to reach.

Jennifer Sherman started the Aliza Sherman Fund to support other victims of violence. The family held annual vigils. They gave interviews. They kept the name Aliza Sherman in public circulation for 12 years, which is not a small thing. It is exhausting, deliberate work. It is the act of refusing to let a case become a statistic, refusing to let the silence mean acceptance.

In 2021, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation accepted the file into its cold case unit. Investigators spent thousands of hours re-examining every element of the original evidence, every phone record, every keycard log, every timestamp in the digital trail Moore had constructed before and after the attack.

Cold case investigators work differently from the ones who catch the first call. They have distance from the noise that surrounds a fresh homicide. They look for the thing that should be there and isn’t. They look for the thing that is there and shouldn’t be. The picture that emerged from that re-examination, prosecutors would allege, pointed in one direction.

It had always pointed in one direction. What had changed was the ability to prove it. In the spring of 2025, a Cuyahoga County Grand Jury received the accumulated evidence and returned a secret indictment. The secrecy was procedural necessity. Moore had been living in Austin, Texas for years. If the indictment became public before the arrest, he had a window to run.

 That window had to be closed before he knew it existed. On May 2nd, 2025, US Marshals knocked on a door in Austin. Gregory Moore, now 51 years old, was taken into custody. 12 years, 1 month, and 8 days after Aliza Sherman died on a sidewalk in downtown Cleveland. The man who had been the central figure in the investigation from its first hours was in handcuffs.

The charges: aggravated murder, multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, conspiracy. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley addressed the press. He said the evidence paints the unmistakable picture that Gregory Moore orchestrated and participated in the brutal murder of Aliza Sherman. Jennifer said the news was bittersweet.

Her uncle told a reporter he was in shock. “After 12 years,” he said, “you stop expecting the call to come.” He was glad and the memories were painful. Relief and grief arriving at the same moment. The way they always do when a family has lived inside an open wound this long. At Moore’s arraignment, Jennifer Sherman stood in that courtroom and faced him.

She had been a young woman when her mother was killed. She had spent the years since building a fund in her mother’s name, showing up at vigils, giving interviews to journalists who might keep the case alive for one more news cycle. She had done the work of keeping her mother’s name from disappearing and now she was in a room with the man charged with making that disappearance happen and she spoke directly to him.

She said, “If a person is capable of such calculated violence against someone he had a professional obligation to defend, one must ask what else he is capable of.” She called him reckless, unpredictable, capable of taking extreme measures to fulfill his evil agenda. And then she said the line that will stay with anyone who reads it, “My mother deserved better.

This community deserves better and justice demands better.” Aliza Sherman drove to a building to meet her attorney. She brought her paperwork. She stood on a sidewalk and waited. She had no reason to fear the person she was waiting for. He was the one she called when she needed help.

 He was the person the legal system had placed between her and the resolution she had been fighting toward for years. She trusted that arrangement. That trust was the mechanism of her death. And her daughter stood in a courtroom 12 years later and said it out loud in front of the man charged with exploiting it in the clearest language she could find.

As of early 2026, Gregory Moore is awaiting trial. The date has been set for September 14th, 2026. Both sides are working through what prosecutors describe as voluminous discovery. A case file built and accumulated over more than a decade of investigation. He is being held on a multi-million dollar bond.

 His defense has already begun its work. Motions have been filed to suppress evidence and his attorneys have pointed to something that will sit at the center of whatever happens in that courtroom in September. DNA recovered from a watch found at the scene. They claim it belongs to an unknown male, not Moore, someone unidentified. That detail is either the foundation of a reasonable doubt argument or it is the last wall built by a man who has spent 12 years constructing walls between himself and accountability.

Which one it turns out to be will be decided by a jury. What is not in question is this: Aliza Sherman had named her fear in writing. She had locked her bedroom door. She had endured two years of continuances and delays and a lawyer who wasn’t ready. She had made it to four days from the end of it.

 She was almost through the door. The person charged with stopping her was the person whose job was to open it. That is what this case is. Not a stranger, not the danger she documented, the person she called, the person she paid, the person who knew her schedule, her location, and the exact reason she would not question a request to come downtown on a Sunday afternoon with her paperwork.

The trial begins in September. We will be here when it does. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.