The doctor who autopsied Noreen Rudd more than 40 years after her death testified Wednesday that the young bride died from multiple blows to the head with a blunt object _ not from car crash injuries, as her husband told police in 1973.
Rudd _ who died weeks after she got married and was buried in her wedding dress _ had no other wounds or abrasions on her body besides the multiple head injuries that caused her death, Dr. Hilary McElligott also said.
The forensic pathologist took the stand Wednesday during the trial of the man who was newly married to the 19-year-old Rudd at the time and who more than two years ago was charged with murder in her death.
Donnie Rudd, now 76, was cradling his wife in the front seat when police found their car in a field off Illinois Highway 68 in Barrington Hills on Sept. 14, 1973. He told police another car ran them off the road and that his wife was thrown from the car and struck her head on a rock.
Authorities decided to exhume Noreen Rudd's body while re-investigating the 1991 shooting death of an Arlington Heights woman who at the time was in a dispute with Donnie Rudd over legal help he provided her.
That probe yielded no arrests, but it prompted authorities to take another look at Noreen Rudd's death, eventually leading to charges of murder against Donnie Rudd. He was arrested in Texas, where he'd been living, in 2015. The following year he posted a $400,000 cash bond so he could be free while awaiting trial.
On Wednesday, the jury was shown gruesome photographs of Noreen Rudd taken after her body was exhumed from its grave at Dundee East Township Cemetery in 2013.
McElligott said the injuries she saw on Noreen Rudd were not consistent with being thrown from a car in a low-speed, low-impact accident or with hitting one's head on a rock.
She also contradicted Tuesday testimony from the emergency room doctor who saw Noreen Rudd at Sherman Hospital in Elgin immediately after the crash testified. He said he thought Rudd died of a broken neck, though he said no X-rays were taken because she was dead on arrival. No autopsy was performed at the time, either.
McElligott acknowledged under cross examination by Donnie Rudd's attorneys that she found no signs of defensive wounds on Noreen Rudd's body, no injuries on the interior of her brain and no foreign objects like metal or wooden splinters on her head.
Also testifying in the early stage of the trial, which opened Tuesday, was one of Donnie Rudd's former stepdaughters, Lori Hart.
In 1973, Rudd was living with Hart's mother, Dianne and her four children, including Lori.
Lori Hart testified that Rudd came home one day and abruptly announced that he was leaving the household because he planned the following day to marry Noreen, whom he'd met work at Quaker Oats in Barrington, where they both worked.
Noreen was dead within a month, and prosecutors say Donnie Rudd went back to Dianne Hart a short time later, marrying her the following year.
After his arrest, Lori Hart and her sister Cindy Mulligan, published a book about Rudd, called "Living with the Devil: A Family's Search for Truth in the Face of Deception, Infidelity and Murder."
