Neighbors of Deerfield Murder Victim Testify in Yang Trial

On the morning of Oct. 4, 2007 Deerfield residents Christa Amsden and Peter Cowles were following their normal routines. Little did they know their actions that morning would lead them to be witnesses in the murder trial of their neighbor three years later.

“I heard a short scream, a plop plop and a humongous crash on the floor,” Amsden told jurors Friday in court.

She was speaking at the murder trial of Marni Yang, who is charged with first-degree murder and intentional homicide of an unborn child in the death of Rhoni Reuter. Authorities say at the time of the shooting Reuter was six months pregnant with the child of former Bears player Shaun Gayle. 

Prosecutors claimed Friday Yang was also intimate with the Super Bowl winner and once she realized he was having a  relationship with Reuter wanted to “eliminate the competition.”

Amsden still lives in an Elm Street apartment right below the condo where Reuter was murdered. It was directly above me … It stopped me in my tracks when I heard it,” Amsden said of that October morning. She decided to call her neighbor to see if everything was all right. “I looked up Rhoni Reuter’s phone number and dialed her phone,” she said. “Her answering machine came on.”

After contacting another neighbor who told Amsden she heard the crash too she called 911.

Around that same time Peter Cowles, who lives next door to Reuter’s apartment complex, was walking to his car to head to the health club. “I saw a black boy running across the parking lot into a car parked alongside the garage,” Cowles told jurors Friday while questioned by prosecutors.

Cowles said he was paying attention to the subject because he originally thought the boy “was running late to school” and was surprised when he headed for the cars instead of a nearby bus stop. “I thought, ‘My goodness, how could a kid like that be driving?’”

Prosecutors claimed Friday the boy Cowles was referring to was actually Marni Yang wearing a disguise.  They also said Yang used a silencer to minimize the sounds of shots fired which coincides with what Amsden told the court she heard. “It sounded very much like that,” Amsden said when comparing the noise to what she’s seen in a “crime movie.”

When Deerfield paramedic and firefighter Mark McManaman took the stand Friday he told jurors he responded to Amsden’s 911 call. When he arrived at the scene, “I saw a woman lying face down in the kitchen in a large pool of blood,” he said. He quickly realized, “There’s nothing more that we could do.”

During opening statements Friday Yang’s defense took aim at how authorities investigated Reuter’s death and questioned the reliability of her neighbors’ accounts of what happened.

According to defense attorney Ben Hedrick, the Lake County Task Force was obsessed with Yang as a suspect. “No other person was subjected to that kind of investigation,” he said about the authorities’ methods of getting information about his client, like a number of “garbage pulls” that were conducted on her trash.

Defense attorneys stated that officials didn’t follow up on other leads including 18-19 females Hedrick claimed Gayle was also seeing. “The dating card was rather filled,” he commented about the Bears player’s love life.

Yang’s defense also insinuated that some authorities tried to plant details into witness’s statements. “Did police suggest to you certain aspects of information?” the defense asked Cowles during cross-examination. Yang’s defense referenced the fact Cowles had limited details about the incident when he initially spoke to police but added new information when talking to them several months later.

The defense said when Cowles first spoke to officers about the subject he saw running through the parking lot he could only recall the individual looking like a black male. A few months later, during another round of police questioning, Yang’s attorneys stated Cowles added new details about the subject's age and build.

Trial proceedings are scheduled to continue Monday morning with Gayle possibly taking the stand. His lawyer as well as family members were in court on Friday.