Among documents police released yesterday regarding their interviews with Linda Stein's assistant, Natavia Lowery, was a handwritten note in which Lowery confessed that she hit her employer over the head "six or seven times" with a cane on October 31, the day Stein was discovered dead in a pool of blood. Which makes the fact that Lowery pleaded not guilty to the murder of Linda Stein yesterday kind of confusing. Still more confusing, however, is the other story that Lowery told the police, in which a masked man wearing all black burst into the apartment brandishing a hammer had attacked Stein, telling Lowery, “You’ll be the last one to see her alive." Lowery's lawyer, without explicitly saying he bought the masked-man story, claims his client (who is also seven weeks pregnant) is innocent; he says her confession was coerced. "She was locked in an interrogation room for 12 hours, deprived of her telephone and BlackBerry," he told the AP. "She had to make something up to get out of that room." Soooo … why not just stick with the ninja story?

Details of Shifting Story Emerge in Fifth Avenue Death [NYT]
Related: Death of a Broker [NYM]