Edward Lyng’s written instructions for killing his former secretary were terse and direct.
“Tape mouth, then loose tape with gauze or cotton around nose. Add chloroform ’til she is out. Undress, run hot water in bathtub, use razor blade on one wrist, wait until sure she is dead. Leave blade with her prints on it.”
Under questioning Wednesday in Lyng’s trial on charges of solicitation to commit murder, former fellow jail inmate Mauricio Valdez read those words from two pages of handwritten instructions he said Lyng gave him last year as part of a plot to kill Christine Rezba Knutson.
“What did the defendant want you to do?” asked Assistant State’s Atty. James McKay.
“To cut her wrist and let her bleed to death,” Valdez told a jury and Criminal Court Judge Richard Neville. “I told him I was going to have someone do it for me.”
“How much did he offer you?” McKay asked.
“$100,000,” Valdez replied.
The testimony came in the third day of the trial of Lyng, 61, a former Palatine businessman who is accused of soliciting Valdez and another inmate at the Cook County Jail to kill Knutson.
She had worked as a secretary at Lyng’s vending machine business in 1977 when Lyng’s wife, Stephanie, disappeared. In 1992, after remaining mum for 15 years, Knutson told authorities that Lyng had admitted to her that he had killed his wife and buried the body at an undisclosed location in Lake County.
Though Stephanie Lyng’s body has never been found, her husband was convicted of her murder in March 1994, largely on the basis of Knutson’s testimony.
Facing 15 to 50 years in prison for that conviction, Lyng began plotting to kill Knutson after she had been persuaded to write a statement saying she had lied at his murder trial, according to McKay and co-prosecutor Scott Cassidy.
Valdez, 21, testified that while he was jailed on charges of auto theft and escape, he and Lyng became friends and Lyng ultimately asked him to kill Knutson, giving him detailed instructions that the death be made to look like a suicide.
According to testimony, Lyng arranged for Valdez’s then-girlfriend to have legal authority to withdraw $100,000 from his bank account.
In the instructions, which were enlarged and shown to the jury, Lyng told Valdez that the money was to be flashed in front of Knutson and she was to be told it was $400,000 and that it would be hers if she would write three letters saying she was sorry, that she had lied at Lyng’s murder trial and that Lyng was innocent.
“Flash big bucks, tell her it’s $400,000,” the instructions said. “Choice of 3 cities like Memphis, Dallas, Phoenix, furnished apartment, good job if wanted, will give her all new ID.”
One letter was to be sent to Lyng’s lawyer, another to the state’s attorney’s office and the third was to be left in Knutson’s home, according to the instructions.
Then Knutson was to be killed, Lyng wrote.
Valdez was the second former jail inmate to testify that Lyng wanted Knutson killed. On Tuesday, Raymond Burke, a convicted armed robber, said that Lyng posted his $7,500 bail in return for killing Knutson and Ronald Christensen, who was then dating Judith Warchol. She was Lyng’s girlfriend when he was convicted of murder.
After authorities nabbed Burke, he wore an eavesdropping device and visited Lyng at the jail, where Lyng described how he wanted Christensen killed and buried, according to a tape of the conversation that was aired in court Tuesday.
When Lyng was charged with soliciting Burke, he turned to Valdez and offered him the $100,000 to kill Knutson and another $25,000 to kill Burke, said prosecutors.
Under cross-examination by Lyng’s attorney, Richard Kling, Valdez said he had befriended Lyng in the hope of taking advantage of him because he was a millionaire. “He trusted me with everything,” Valdez said.
