CHICAGO _ Donnie Rudd, the former northwest suburban lawyer and school board member, has been found guilty of killing his second wife 45 years ago.
Rudd, now 76, was convicted Monday of first-degree murder after a weeklong trial in Cook County and about three hours of jury deliberations.
Prosecutors said Rudd staged Noreen Kumeta Rudd's death to look like a car accident and that authorities at the time believed him because he had the credentials of an upstanding citizen.
But after getting away with the crime for more than four decades, Rudd is now likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. Having been out of jail on a $400,000 cash bond, Rudd was expected to be retaken into custody Monday. He showed no reaction when the verdict was announced.
In closing arguments earlier Monday, prosecutors said Rudd chose a dark and secluded road in Barrington Hills to stage the crash that September evening in 1973.
"The defendant made it look like an accident, and he fooled a lot people," Assistant State's Attorney Maria McCarthy told jurors just before they began deliberating the case.
Attorneys for Rudd _ who was charged in 2015 with staging the crash more than 40 years earlier, and less a month after marrying Kumeta Rudd _ contended that the state's case was based on suppositions, untruthful testimony and witnesses who lacked credibility.
"There's no real evidence in this case," Tim Grace, one of Rudd's defense attorneys, said in closing arguments Monday, adding the state "massaged, manipulated and manufactured evidence."
Defense attorneys sought to poke holes in the testimony of prosecution witnesses such as Christopher Bish, who was a rookie Barrington Hills cop when he responded to the crash scene and said the case always haunted him. Rudd's attorneys pointed out that Bish never acted on any suspicions he might have had that the death was not accidental.
Rudd's lawyers also addressed testimony of Rudd's former stepdaughter Lori Hart, who said Rudd was her mother Dianne's boyfriend and lived with her and her family before he suddenly announced one day that he was marrying Noreen the next day. Hart also testified that Rudd almost immediately returned to her mother after Noreen's death.
Hart and her sister later published a book about Rudd called "Living with the Devil."
"It's outrageous to convict anyone on the testimony of someone trying to make a buck on a book," defense attorney Tim Grace said.
As for Rudd having left his girlfriend to marry the 19-year-old Noreen, Grace said: "I'm not asking you to like a guy who cheats on his girlfriend, but that doesn't mean he committed murder."
Jurors began deliberation early Monday afternoon. A couple hours in, they asked to review a video of police and prosecutors questioning Rudd in Texas in 2013 about his second wife's death. In that interview, Rudd answered many questions by saying he could not recall, including whether he had struck his wife in the head before her death. He made no confession about her death during the interrogation.
Prosecutors called three pathologists _ one of whom autopsied Noreen Rudd after she was exhumed in 2013 _ who all said they believed she died from being struck by a blunt object in the head. All said the injuries were inconsistent with being thrown from a car, as Rudd said happened to his wife when he was found cradling her in a field in Barrington Hills.
Defense attorneys called their medical expert to say he believe Noreen Rudd died of "internal decapitation," closely aligning with the finding of the emergency room doctor at Sherman Hospital in Elgin who saw Noreen Rudd when she was taken there after the crash.
But prosecutors sought to undermine the credibility of the defense's medical expert, pointing out he never performed an autopsy. "He took $20,000 to offer an opinion on something he knows nothing about," McCarthy said.
Police took another look at the case after reviewing the 1991 unsolved murder of Loretta Tabak-Bodtke in her Arlington Heights home.
Tabak-Bodtke was a legal client of Rudd's and had threatened to report him to the state's attorney disciplinary board over a financial dispute. Rudd was later disbarred amid several complaints by clients that he engaged in unethical practices.
