Jury finds man guilty of wife’s murder in 2011
SANFORD — A jury has convicted a Deltona man of murder for stabbing and slashing the neck of his estranged wife three years ago outside a sub shop near Interstate 4 a few hours after the two fought in their front yard.
Dwayne White, 44, must now return to court on Tuesday for the penalty phase of his trial.
Prosecutors will try to persuade the 12-member jury to recommend the death penalty. Defense attorneys will ask for life in prison.
It took the jury about two hours Thursday to convict White of murdering Sarah Rucker, 42, a hospital surgery technician from Deltona.
On Aug. 29, 2011, her body was found before dawn just outside a Miami Subs shop at I-4 and State Road 434.
According to prosecutors, Rucker and White had gotten into a fight in her front yard a few hours before.
White had yanked her cellphone from her hand and driven off.
Rucker was desperate to get it back, so she called him and persuaded him to meet her at the sandwich shop and return it.
But, according to Assistant State Attorney Stewart Stone, evidence suggests that once she arrived, White attacked her, got her facedown, pinned her to the ground with his knees and then reached around with a pocketknife and stabbed and slashed at her throat repeatedly until he opened a 6 inch long gash and severed her windpipe.
Medical Examiner Marie Herrmann testified Tuesday that the wound was the result of at least four knife blows.
She identified seven others on Rucker’s neck, face and chest.
Rucker also had deep knife wounds across the palms of both hands, something that Stone said showed White “was coming after her with a vengeance.”
White took the witness stand Thursday morning, telling jurors that he went to the now-defunct sandwich shop to return Rucker’s phone but that when he got there, he found her body.
He knelt down and called her name, he said, but got no response.
“Did you see a lot of blood?” asked Assistant Public Defender Tim Caudill. “I did,” White said. “Did you cut your wife’s throat that morning, sir?” Caudill asked. “No, I did not,” White said. He did not call for help, White said, because he panicked.
When questioned by Seminole and Volusia County authorities later that day, he told them that after he left the family home that morning, he went to the Orlando home where he was staying.
He did not tell them about discovering his wife’s body, White said, because, “I knew I’d be suspect. No. 1.”
A Seminole County fingerprint expert identified two bloody palm prints found about 18 inches from Rucker’s body as belonging to White’s left hand.
White told jurors that he likely left them after he knelt down to check on Rucker and then realized that she could not be saved. “I got blood on my hands,” he said. In his closing argument, Caudill told jurors that although White did get into a fight with his wife earlier that night, he left the scene, and there’s no evidence that he made “a decision to saw and saw and saw away at his wife’s throat until he killed her.”