Case moves to jury
Rumboldt didn’t try to kill his wife, it was the other way around, defence lawyer argues
While the Crown says the evidence in Mark Rumboldt’s attempted murder trial points clearly and unequivocally to him having poisoned his wife, the defence says investigators failed to consider another scenario: that she poisoned him instead.
Prosecutor Scott Hurley and defence lawyer Jeff Brace presented their closing submissions to the jury Thursday afternoon, after nearly two weeks of testimony from paramedics, police officers, hospital staff, a forensic toxicologist and Rumboldt’s now-ex-wife. Brace chose not to call any evidence at trial, meaning Rumboldt did not take the stand.
Beginning his address, Hurley acknowledged one glaring hole in the case: a lack of forensic testing on two
half-empty glasses of wine in the Rumboldts’ home on Jan. 22, 2016, believed to have been poisoned with Ativan and sleeping pills by Rumboldt. It’s alleged Rumboldt then gave the wine to his wife, rendering her almost catatonic, according to emergency personnel.
Police were unsuccessful in getting a warrant to seize and test the wine, since they had allowed Rumboldt to stay alone in the home for three hours before asking him to leave and securing the residence as a crime scene.
“The absence of evidence is not evidence itself,” Hurley said. “The allegation is that the wine had drugs in it. The lack of evidence doesn’t mean there wasn’t, it just means we don’t have it.”
“The Crown’s evidence would be that at some point … Mr. Rumboldt made the decision to poison his wife with medication,” Hurley said. “The Crown’s theory is that Mr. Rumboldt tried to do this at home. To do so, he had to take his own medication to calm himself down. It backfires on him, though, because he collapses.”
At the hospital, Hurley argued, Rumboldt tried again, mixing the pills with water and giving them to his sedated wife, holding a facecloth to her mouth to prevent the solution from dribbling out.
Hurley pointed out the woman said she didn’t take any pills herself, and stressed the testimony of the toxicology expert, who said the combination of Ativan and zolpidem would likely have resulted in amnesia.
“Mr. Brace asked (the woman) on cross-examination, ‘If you can’t remember anything, how do you know you didn’t take the pills yourself?’ But look at the testimony of (the toxicologist): you’d have to have taken the pills in order to have memory loss,” Hurley said.
He asked the jury to question why the woman would have called 911 or asked Rumboldt during the call how many Ativan he had taken if she had been the one to give them to him in an effort to kill him.
Hurley questioned why, if the woman had been suicidal, she would take only some of the medication, then close the bottles and return them to the drawer. Though Rumboldt told emergency personnel his wife had taken the pills, he had not called 911, Hurley pointed out.
“At the hospital, he asked, ‘Why am I here, did she drug me?’ but he had already told police and paramedics he drank two flasks of rum and took Ativan to calm down. I would suggest he was trying to regain some control over the situation.
“We don’t know what’s in this man’s head,” Hurley later continued. “We don’t know what his mental state was at the time or what he was thinking.
“At the end of the day, if you see what I see, I ask you to convict Mr. Rumboldt.”
Rumboldt didn’t have a motive to kill his wife, Brace said, when it was his turn to address the jury, but his wife did have a motive to kill him. She had recently learned of an emotional affair he was having with another woman and the marriage was having trouble. The woman was rightly upset, Brace said, and had been going through her husband’s phone, checking his messages.
Brace pointed to the woman’s statement to police, in which she said her husband was a nice guy and wouldn’t ever try to hurt her. She testified that he was a romantic, and pouring her wine and drawing her a bath were things he regularly did.
“The Crown is trying to suggest that this is somehow a Whitney Houston move; that somehow Mark was going to drug her and let her die in the bath,” Brace said. “You’re being asked to assume that this was some calculated plan to draw her into some comfort and then poison her. But the alleged victim felt it was just Mark being Mark.”
Justice David Hurley will give his final instructions to the jury Friday morning, after which the jurors will be sequestered until they reach a verdict.