Chicago, March 16: Marni Yang, a former business associate of ex-Chicago Bears player Shaun Gayle, was found guilty today of the murder of Gayle’s pregnant girlfriend Rhoni Reuter in 2007.
“This was an execution – a very well planned carefully thought out execution. The defendant was obsessed with eliminating the competition. She murdered Rhoni Reuter because Rhoni was pregnant,” the prosecutor told the court in Waukegan.
Gayle had testified that he and Yang, 43, had an on-and-off sexual/business relationship, and that they had sex the night before the murder, myFOXchicago.com reported.
The defence said he also had more than a dozen other girlfriends.
Reuter, 42, had been Gayle’s long-time girlfriend and was pregnant with Gayle’s child at the time of the murder.
The coroner testified that the unborn baby was shot twice and killed, and that Reuter tried to shield her stomach as she, too, was shot.
The jury deliberated just four hours before finding Yang guilty of first-degree murder and the intentional homicide of an unborn child. They agreed with prosecutors that she hunted Reuter down at her Deerfield apartment in October of 2007 and shot her.
The defence had argued that since Gayle had so many other girlfriends, police were wrong to focus on Yang so early in their investigation.
The defence also argued that the key prosecution witness, one of Yang’s friends, was an unreliable storyteller who also claimed that she had worked as a psychic for the US military.
——–Agencies