JURY FINDS MAN GUILTY OF KILLING WIFE IN 1973, STAGING CAR CRASH
Jurors deliberated for less than three hours Monday before finding Donnie Rudd guilty of firstdegree murder for killing his newlywed wife 45 years ago then staging a car crash in Barrington Township to cover up the slaying.
The 76- year- old disbarred suburban attorney and former Schaumburg school board member had no visible reaction to the decision. He now faces a minimum of 14 years of prison when sentenced for the Sept. 14, 1973, killing of 19- year- old Noreen Kumeta. A judge revoked his bond, and he was taken into custody.
Kumeta’s sisters, Donna Haggerton and Karen Mezera, said after the verdict Monday that they began to believe Rudd played a role in her death about 25 years ago.
“We feel like our sister can finally rest in peace after 45 years,” Haggerton said. “She went to the grave with a terrible secret.”
Mezera said Rudd stayed in touch with her family for many years after her sister’s death, and he even attended her wedding. Most of that time, the sisters thought of him as a grieving widower.
“I’ve said many times I can’t even wrap my head around it,” Mezera said. “There was no reason to suspect anything.”
She thanked Stephanie Tabak — who has long suspected Rudd is connected to the unsolved 1991 murder of her mother, interior designer Loretta Tabak- Bodtke, in Arlington Heights — for her work leading to a re- examination of her sister’s death.
Defense attorney Tim Grace vowed to appeal.
“The state put together a circumstantial case,” he said. “I don’t think that there was enough evidence to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but you know what, this is the way the system works. And if 12 people, 12 citizens, come together and say that’s he’s guilty, I suppose we have to accept it. We don’t have to like it, but we have to accept it.”
Cook County prosecutors said Rudd married and murdered Kumeta to collect insurance money and improve the life he was living with another woman and her children.
While Rudd has admitted he was in a relationship with another woman when he married Kumeta, Grace said that doesn’t make him a murderer.