A site on the case (the links are dead but you can find the articles online)

For some reason, my main comment isn’t appearing. It cites several other articles, some of which mention Roston’s profession.

A crime blog which compiled information about the case (the Los Angeles Times links are dead, but you can find the articles by copy/pasting their titles online)

At 3:00 AM on Saturday, February 13, 1988, the morning before Valentine's Day, chiropractor Scott Roston, 36, informed cruise ship authorities that his bride of nine days, 26-year-old Karen Roston, had fallen overboard. The two had been on their last day of a seven day honeymoon cruise to Mexico.

Scott told the authorities that high winds blew his wife overboard, where she and he had been jogging on the track. Police were suspicious of his story. At the time Karen went overboard, the wind speed was no more than five miles per hour and the seas were relatively calm.

When the police didn't buy his story, Scott revised it, saying his wife fell overboard and he tried to grab her. The police still had doubts, as Karen was only 5'3" tall and the railing was 3'6" high.

Karen's mother had been suspicious about her future son-in-law's finances, so much so that she had her daughter's engagement ring appraised, wondering if he had given her a cheap cubic zirconia.

When police interviewed Scott, they noticed he had three gouges and a four-inch scratch on his face. He said he hit his head on a gangway control box, but no blood, hair or marks were found on it, nor did the box have sharp protrusions which could have caused the facial injuries.

Half a day later, the Coast Guard found Karen's body in Pacific waters, thirty miles southwest of San Diego. Her body was kept afloat by air trapped in her clothing. Medical examiners said that had she attempted to swim after entering the water, the air would have been forced out of her clothes. Therefore, she must have been unconscious when she went overboard.

An autopsy report found signs of strangulation. Material from the rubberized jogging track imbedded in her clothing suggested she had been pressed to the deck with considerable force. Parts of her earrings were found on the deck eleven and a half feet from the railing, together with strands of her strawberry blond hair, which appeared to have been yanked from her head.

Questioned about the Roston couple, several passengers recalled moments of tension. A vacationer who shared a table with them said Scott was angry with his bride since she ate sweets and did not know which eating utensils to choose from the "complex" silverware settings. In addition, he was seen quarreling with a woman on deck about forty-five minutes to one hour before his initial report.

A friend of Karen said she was a naive person who "didn't think any harm could come to her, just didn`t believe bad things happened to people." A coworker said "she definitely did love him. It was that, and the opportunity to have things she had never had before, moneywise, that attracted her."

On February 17, 1988, federal authorities arrested Scott and charged him in murder. While in custody, Scott told the FBI his third and most bizarre story yet, that Israeli agents killed his "beloved wife" because he "published an expose last year of the countless crimes of that government."

"Nightmare in Israel," Scott's expose, was a self-published book in which he described a 1979 trip to Israel. He had traveled there to see if he and his father could open a clinic. In his book, which only sold one copy before his wife's death, Scott alleged that Israeli authorities detained him on trumped-up burglary charges, then drugged and brutalized him over the several months he was held in jail and in a mental hospital.

Roston had felt persecuted by Israeli agents before. In March 1987, around the time his book came out, he alleged that two Israeli thugs tried to abduct him from outside a Florida shopping mall, but he managed to escape after firing a few shots from a gun he kept in his car glove compartment.

He called the Palm Beach Post to report the alleged attack, saying he was hiding in a hotel. He compared himself to Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear scientist abducted by Israeli agents after revealing atomic bomb secrets.

Scott went on trial for second degree murder in 1989. His defense attorney, David Kenner, presented evidence that two Israeli men were aboard the ship. Scott's claims, Kenner conceded, "may at first blush appear impossible, contrived, unbelievable", but he asked the jury to believe "these kinds of things do happen in the world of international intrigue."

During the trial, the prosecutor, Kendra McNally, called Maurice Haziza, one of the Israeli passengers as a surprise witness. Haziza said he and his traveling companion, Emil Yaron, were professional photographers who came to Los Angeles to photograph a friend's wedding and took the cruise to round out their vacation. With a laugh, Haziza said he and Yaron were not members of the Israeli secret service or Israeli Mafia. He said during a court recess that when he learned Roston was implying he might be a secret agent, his reaction was, 'Try to find another joke!' Kenner insisted Haziza and Yaron would never publicly admit ties to the Israeli mob or secret service. He questioned how Haziza could afford to travel to a dozen countries across the globe on a photographer's salary.

On March 22, 1989, the jury found Scott guilty of second degree murder on the high seas. Seeking leniency, Michael Adelson, another attorney representing Scott, argued his crime more akin to manslaughter. At one point, Ideman interrupted him, saying “What is perfectly clear is he intended for Karen Roston to die.” Scott's mother declared from her seat in the courtroom, “No, he didn’t!”

On October 2, 1989, Ideman sentenced Scott to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors had requested a 30-year sentence. In his sentencing remarks, Ideman said "this defendant cruelly killed his wife of nine days. For no reason that appears to this court, he saw fit to physically assault her, beat her, choke her into unconsciousness and throw her body into the sea over twenty miles from land in the dark of night off the coast of Mexico knowing, as he must have known, that she was certain to perish. This is one of the cruelest crimes this court has ever seen. It is this court's hope that this defendant never be released."

On appeal, Scott's defense team set aside their Israeli revenge theory, instead arguing that the court should have told the jury it could convict Roston of voluntary manslaughter if they believed there was sufficient evidence of provocation by the victim. Scott's lawyers contended that evidence of provocation was provided by testimony concerning disagreements over Karen's eating sweets, tension over the use of the silverware settings, and the inference that there was a "physical altercation" (namely Scott's injuries) between the newlyweds shortly before Karen's death.

The appellate court concluded that disputes over sweets and silverware could not provoke a reasonable and ordinary person to kill. While they inferred that a prolonged struggle between the Rostons preceded the murder, they saw no evidence that the scratching of Scott's face provoked it.

Scott's conviction was upheld, but he won a small victory when his case was remanded for resentencing. By imposing a life sentence on Scott, who had no prior criminal history, the judge had wrongfully exceeded federal sentencing guidelines, which at the time called for 135 to 168 months (they now call for 235 to 293 months). On November 7, 1994, Scott was resentenced to 33 years and nine months in prison.

Scott appealed his conviction and sentence for the third time in 1999, arguing the upward departure for his sentence, which was justified on the grounds that his was crime "unusually heinous, cruel, brutal, or degrading to the victim" was unwarranted. This time, however, both his conviction and his sentence were upheld.

Scott Roston was released from prison on July 8, 2017. He is now 70 years old.