28-Jun-18 – Highly experienced medical experts, charging as much as $400 per hour for their opinions, have looked at the same evidence in the trial of former Chicago attorney Donnie Rudd and come to very different conclusions.

Rudd is accused of murdering his wife, Noreen Rudd, in 1973. On a remote stretch of unlit highway near Barrington Hills, at around 11:30 at night, Rudd says an oncoming car in his lane forced him off the road. Before their car came to rest, according to Donnie, Noreen was ejected from the vehicle and hit her head on a rock.

Dr. Jae Han, the attending physician at the hospital where Noreen was taken, determined she died of a broken neck. There was no autopsy. There may or may not have been x-rays. When called to the stand on Wednesday to testify, Han could remember little about the night the 19-year-old was dead on arrival at a hospital where he worked part-time.

Decades later, police in nearby Arlington Heights came up with another possibility, that Donnie killed Noreen by striking her in the head with a heavy object and staging the death to look like a traffic accident. The motive, they said, were life insurance policies that paid Donnie more than $100,000.

On February 6, 2013, Noreen’s casket was dug up, pried open, and a forensic pathologist hired by Kane County did a carefully-documented three-and-a-half-hour autopsy that appeared to support the new theory. According to Dr. Hilary McElligott, who conducted the autopsy, there is a 3.3-inch cut on the left side of Noreen’s head and a smaller cut on the right side.

McElligott says she found no evidence of a broken neck and there were no other injuries. The head injuries are what killed Noreen, she said, inflicted with multiple blows and not from being ejected from a vehicle. In her opinion, it was not an accident, but homicide.

On Thursday, Dr. Mary Case (left), chief medical examiner for St. Louis County and three other counties in Missouri, a board-certified forensic pathologist, told the court she studied the autopsy records and agreed with McGilligott that Noreen was killed by blunt force trauma and not in a traffic accident.

As images of the autopsy displayed on a big screen TV in front of the jury, Case described the procedure in detail.

After Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Maria McCarthy rested her case at about noon on Thursday, Dr. Robert Hurwitz (right) took the stand to dispute the findings of her experts. The diagnostic radiologist and retired United States Navy lieutenant commander said he studied the autopsy records for 50 hours and determined the cuts to Noreen’s head would not have killed her.

The smaller cut, he said, would have required three stitches. The larger cut would have bled and “looked dreadful” but would not have been fatal.

The bruises on the brain would not be of consequence. What concerned Hurwitz is the autopsy records did not show if the medulla, a part of the brainstem that controls involuntary functions, was examined. Because he saw evidence of cranial cervical disruption – or using less technical words, internal decapitation.

Noreen was 19-years-old and, says Hurwitz, teen-agers and younger children are at greater risk for the tendons connecting the head to the spine to separate. The medulla would be crushed. Breathing would have stopped. Pupils would be dilated and unresponsive to light. Death would be immediate.

One of the more common ways this happens, said Hurwitz, is for the victim to be ejected from an automobile.

The trial will continue Friday and, likely, on Monday, according to Circuit Court Judge Marc Martin.