Judge instructs jury to consider defendant’s flight

Kim Smith

Wednesday, April 25, 2001 | 10:24 a.m.

After sitting in the jury box for nine weeks and listening to more than 100 witnesses, jurors in the Margaret Rudin trial this morning began hearing closing arguments.

The morning started off with District Judge Joseph Bonaventure reading dozens of instructions to the jurors that are intended to guide them through the process of determining Rudin's guilt or innocence.

Among the instructions is one about flight. Over the defense's strenuous objections, jurors learned that Rudin's two years on the lam can be construed as "consciousness of guilt."

Defense attorney John Momot argued against the inclusion of the instruction in both a brief and orally. He noted that Rudin stayed in Las Vegas for more than two years after Ronald Rudin's remains were found near Lake Mohave in January 1995.

The attorney also pointed out that when Rudin was questioned by Phoenix police in August 1998 -- more than a year after she was indicted -- the officer could find no warrant in the National Crime Information Computer.

Bonaventure sided with the state on the issue, however. The judge said that after Rudin's arrest in Revere, Mass., in November 1999 she told an officer she had learned of the April 1997 indictment despite her attorney's failure to tell her of it and she had fled.

In addition, wigs, false identification and books on how to obtain second citizenships were also found in her Massachusetts home, the judge said.

The defense did win a couple of victories Tuesday, however.

Bonaventure ruled that the prosecutors will not be able to remind jurors about the existence of a gas receipt belonging to Rudin's alleged accomplice.

Prosecutors believe Yehuda Sharon altered the receipt in an attempt to disprove the state's theory he drove Ronald Rudin's remains to Nelson's Landing and burned them.

The gas receipt shows a trip to Barstow, Calif., in December 1994. Prosecutors Gary Guymon and Chris Owens say the trip really took place in December 1996.

The receipt remains in evidence, but Bonaventure ruled that it is a collateral issue having little to do with Rudin herself and cannot be discussed during closing arguments.

The prosecutors were also hurt Tuesday when an antique dealer testified he never sold a middleman a trunk despite the middleman's insistence he bought from a dealer the trunk in which Ronald Rudin's remains were found.

Donald Schaupeter also insisted he never told a district attorney's investigator he might have sold the trunk to Bruce Honabach. And, when called to the stand, investigator Ray Stefan could not back up his memory of his conversations with Schaupeter with a tape recording of the events. He either didn't tape record them or the tape recorder broke.

Prosecutors allege Rudin shot her husband in the head four times as he slept on Dec. 18, 1994. They further believe she decapitated him, placed his remains in a trunk and set them on fire.

The motive, they say, was an $11 million estate and revenge for an affair he was having with an IRS agent.

Defense attorneys contend Ronald Rudin wasn't shot in his bedroom and his remains were not cremated at Nelson's Landing. They believed that if they could disprove those portions of the state's theory they will have instilled enough reasonable doubt in the jurors' minds to get their client acquitted.