People v. Rudd
| Decision Date | 03 September 2020 |
| Docket Number | No. 1-18-2037,1-18-2037 |
| Citation | 2020 IL App (1st) 182037,447 Ill.Dec. 522,174 N.E.3d 539 |
| Parties | The PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Donnie RUDD, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | United States Appellate Court of Illinois |
Timothy M. Grace, of Gottreich Grace & Thompson, of Chicago, for appellant.
Kimberly M. Foxx, State's Attorney, of Chicago (Alan J. Spellberg, Jon J. Walters, and Paul E. Wojcicki, Assistant State's Attorneys, of counsel), for the People.
¶ 1 In 2018, defendant, Donnie Rudd, was convicted of murder in connection with the 1973 death of his wife, Noreen Kumeta Rudd. He was sentenced to 75 to 150 years in prison. On appeal, defendant argues that the trial court erred in allowing the State to admit evidence that he was the beneficiary of several life insurance policies that Noreen obtained through her employment. He also challenges the trial court's ruling denying his motion to suppress his statements to police, arguing that he did not waive his sixth amendment right to counsel prior to the questioning. Finally, he contends that the trial court erred in denying his motion for a mistrial after the prosecutor referenced a notorious and factually similar murder case when questioning a witness. For the following reasons, we reject defendant's contentions and affirm the circuit court's judgment.1
¶ 4 Defendant and Noreen began dating in the spring of 1973. Noreen, who was 19 years old, worked as a librarian for Quaker Oats in Barrington, Illinois. Defendant, then 31, also worked for Quaker Oats, as a patent attorney. After a brief courtship, they were married on August 18, 1973.
¶ 5 Noreen died less than a month later, on September 14, 1973. That evening at 11:30, Officer Christopher Bish of the Barrington Hills Police Department responded to a reported single-vehicle accident on Route 63 (now Route 68) near Bateman Road in Cook County. At the time, Route 63 was a two-lane road with no streetlights. The area was desolate and sparsely populated. The conditions that night were clear, dark, and dry. When Bish arrived, he saw defendant's car on a grassy area off the shoulder of Route 63, resting against bushes, small trees, and a barbed-wire fence. Bish noted a straight line of tire marks in the grass, measuring 165 feet, from the spot where defendant's car left the road to where it came to rest. Bish observed only minor damage, consisting of scratches, to the front of the vehicle and passenger door.
¶ 6 When Bish arrived, defendant was sitting in the passenger seat, and Noreen was lying across the front seats with her head in defendant's lap. Bish observed blood on the passenger door and side of the passenger seat. He did not see any blood on the ground outside the vehicle. Bish and another officer removed Noreen from the car and performed CPR. While doing so, Bish noted that Noreen's head was bleeding profusely and felt soft and "spongy." She had no other visible injuries, and Bish did not see any grass or dirt on her clothing. Defendant was uninjured.
¶ 7 Noreen was taken by ambulance to a hospital in neighboring Kane County, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. The emergency room physician, Dr. Jae Han, noted an avulsion of Noreen's scalp (meaning a tearing
of the skin from the skull) and a fractured cervical spine. At trial, Dr. Han could not recall how he arrived at the latter diagnosis, but he testified that he would not have ordered an X-ray on a dead body.
¶ 8 Defendant told Bish that he was driving on Route 63 when another car entered his lane. He said that he honked his horn and switched on his bright lights before driving off the road when the other car continued toward him. As he did so, defendant said, the passenger door of his car opened and Noreen was ejected. Defendant identified an area behind his car where he said there was a rock with Noreen's hair and blood on it, but Bish did not find any such rock. Defendant told Bish that, after someone arrived but did not render aid, he carried Noreen back to the car.
¶ 9 In October 1973, the Kane County coroner convened a coroner's inquest, empaneling a jury to hear evidence and determine the cause and manner of Noreen's death. Defendant and Bish were the only witnesses who testified. Bish described the scene and surrounding events in the manner recounted above. Defendant testified that he and Noreen were returning home when a car entered their lane. As the car continued in their direction even after he honked his horn, defendant drove off the road and onto the shoulder. Defendant testified that, as he did so, the passenger door "came open and [Noreen] started to go out the door." He testified that he "reached and grabbed" for Noreen as his car hit some "light brush." He testified that, after impact, he "was apparently out for a portion of * * * time" and his legs "were pinned by the door and the door was pinned by some fencing." After someone arrived and opened the door, defendant testified, he "got out of the car and brought [Noreen] back to the car and tried to help her."
¶ 10 No autopsy was conducted. Instead, the coroner informed the jury (presumably based on Dr. Han's report) that "the immediate cause of death was due to [a] fracture of [the] cervical spine, as the consequence of trauma." The verdict of the coroner's inquest was that Noreen died "from a fracture of the cervical spine
suffered when she was thrown from a car driven by her husband when it left the road." Her death was ruled accidental.
¶ 12 That is where things stood until 2012, when Detective Richard Sperando of the Arlington Heights Police Department took a fresh look at the case. In February 2013, Sperando obtained a court order to exhume Noreen's body. An autopsy revealed that Noreen died of craniocerebral injuries
due to blunt force trauma and found no evidence of injury to her cervical spine.
¶ 13 In December 2013, Sperando interviewed defendant in Texas, where he then resided. Defendant denied killing Noreen but admitted to collecting a substantial sum of life insurance proceeds after her death. He stated that Noreen's $100,000 accidental death policy was "customary back then" and that "just about everybody" at Quaker Oats had one. He denied knowing, however, that he was the beneficiary of Noreen's policy before her death.
¶ 15 In January 2016, a grand jury indicted defendant for Noreen's murder. Before trial, defendant moved to suppress his December 2013 statements. He argued that adversary judicial proceedings had commenced at the time of the interview, triggering his sixth amendment right to counsel, because police had filed a complaint to obtain a warrant for his arrest, and because prosecutors had exercised significant involvement in the investigation and the filing of the complaint.
¶ 16 At a hearing on the motion, Sperando testified that, in September 2012, he reopened an investigation into the unsolved 1991 murder of Lauretta Tabak-Bodtke. Defendant was the victim's lawyer at the time of her death and the only suspect in her murder. Information in that case file revealed the then-official details of Noreen's death and that defendant had been the beneficiary of her life insurance policies. Sperando spoke with a Barrington Hills police sergeant to see if that department was interested in opening an investigation into Noreen's death. The sergeant informed Sperando that his department lacked the resources to do so. Because Barrington Hills and Arlington Heights are both located in Cook County, Sperando proceeded with the investigation himself.
¶ 17 In December 2012, Sperando began interviewing various witnesses. He also contacted the state's attorney's office (SAO) for assistance in obtaining a grand jury subpoena for documents related to Noreen's life insurance policies. Sperando prepared the paperwork for the subpoena and submitted it to the SAO. An assistant state's attorney (ASA) presented the subpoena to the grand jury. The subpoena directed the recipient to send responsive documents directly to Sperando.
¶ 18 In January 2013, Sperando contacted ASA Thomas Biesty of the SAO's cold-case unit. Sperando told ASA Biesty that he wanted to obtain an order to exhume Noreen's body for the purpose of conducting an autopsy. Using a template provided by ASA Biesty, Sperando prepared a petition for an exhumation order. ASA Biesty filed the petition in February 2013, and he and Sperando appeared before a circuit court judge, who signed the order. Sperando then made arrangements for the exhumation and autopsy. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Hilary McElligot, a forensic pathologist under contract with the Kane County coroner's office. No member of the SAO was present for the exhumation or autopsy. After learning the results of the autopsy, Sperando asked ASA Biesty to approve a murder charge against defendant. ASA Biesty declined to file charges at that time and told Sperando to continue the investigation.
¶ 19 In the spring of 2013, ASAs Marcia McCarthy and David Coleman (who later prosecuted the case at trial) began to assist Sperando with the investigation. In March 2013, ASA Coleman obtained a second grand jury subpoena for documents related to Noreen's life insurance policies. Like the first subpoena, this one also directed the recipient to send responsive documents directly to Sperando. In May 2013, ASA McCarthy retained Dr. Mary Case, the chief medical examiner of St. Louis County, Missouri, to review Dr. McElligot's autopsy results and other relevant documents and render a second opinion on the cause and manner of Noreen's death. (Prosecutors later sought a third opinion from Dr. Stephen Cina, then the chief medical examiner of Cook County.)
¶ 20 In June 2013, ASAs McCarthy and Coleman asked Sperando to obtain documents from the Illinois Department of Transportation...
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