HILO — The prosecutor in the murder trial of a man accused of the fatal stabbing of his mother three years ago in lower Puna told jurors that the defendant, Sean Rutledge, “made good on his threats” to kill her, while the defense attorney said witnesses saw “the real killer” and the real killer was not Sean Rutledge.
Deputy Prosecutor Kevin Hashizaki said Monday in Hilo Circuit Court that Sean Rutledge, a 43-year-old disbarred former attorney, chose to end a dispute with his 63-year-old mother, Nadean Rutledge, by stabbing her “over and over and over again.”
“The end result of this dispute, that Nadean Rutledge — lifeless, naked, discarded like a piece of garbage, hidden under a bed sheet,” Hashizaki said. The body of the information officer for the former Wai‘opae Tide Pools was found Aug. 25, 2015, in a side yard of her Kapoho Vacationland subdivision home, which was inundated earlier this year by lava from Kilauea volcano’s lower East Rift Zone eruption. The woman’s body, which had numerous stab wounds, was discovered by another of her sons, Daniel Rutledge.
“That very day that Nadean Rutledge was found by Daniel, lying in that garbage pile, stabbed to death, the defendant, himself, made threats. Daniel and Kymi Rutledge came into this courtroom and they told you they were walking past Nadean’s house at midafternoon. They heard the defendant from inside the house yelling, ‘Today is a day of reckoning. Everyone shall die.’ Over and over.”
Hashizaki also recounted the testimony of Sandra Mondragon, who testified that as she and her boyfriend, Laurence Klein, drove by the Rutledge home, she saw a man thrust a “long, pointy object into the middle part of the body” of a woman, and Klein, who said he backed up his sport-utility vehicle to the Rutledge home and approached a man in the driveway attempting to prop up a woman with blood on her clothes.
Klein testified the man said, “She made me do it!”
Brian De Lima, Rutledge’s court-appointed defense counsel, noted time was short Monday and he didn’t have time for a closing argument, but he delivered a dramatic 12-minute preview — much of it with fluctuations in volume and gesticulations reminiscent of a pro wrestling monologue.
De Lima said the prosecutor’s case presented “not enough information and the testimony wasn’t really accurate.”
The prosecution rested last week, and the defense — which is not required to present witnesses — didn’t, including Sean Rutledge.
De Lima noted inconsistencies in what Rian Jamison, a teenager on vacation who testified she saw a man “with blood on his right calf” and pointed to Rutledge in the courtroom as that man, told jurors and police.
“She had a glimpse of approximately two seconds … ,” De Lima said. “The question is, ‘Who did she see?’ … The person that she saw was not Sean Rutledge. She said the person that she saw had a baseball hat. Did they recover a baseball hat in the house? No. They recover a baseball hat in the car? No.”
De Lima said Klein — who did not correctly pick Rutledge’s image from a police photo lineup in 2015 — told police the person he saw in the driveway “had headphones.”
“Did they find any headphones? No,” he said.
According to De Lima, Mondragon told police the person she saw “had blonde hair.”
“If you look at Mr. Rutledge, that isn’t the person that was there,” De Lima said. “That was somebody else.”
“Sean Rutledge is not guilty of murder in the second-degree,” De Lima told the jury.
De Lima is scheduled to conclude his closing argument at 9:15 a.m. today in Judge Henry Nakamoto’s courtroom. The jury will start deliberations afterward.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.