As Rhoni Reuter lay dying on her kitchen floor, Marni Yang paused to look at an ultrasound photo of the baby Reuter hoped to deliver in two months, officials said. Before leaving Reuter’s Deerfield condo, they said, Yang took a few personal items of Reuter’s, including a silver and pearl bracelet inscribed with one word: pregnant.
Intensely jealous of Reuter’s relationship with former Chicago Bear Shaun Gayle and of her pregnancy with his daughter, Yang shot and killed Reuter and her unborn child on Oct. 4, 2007, prosecutors said Wednesday. Reuter, 42, was shot seven times, including twice in the abdomen.According to authorities, Yang spent months plotting the slaying and hatched a plan in painstaking detail to cover her tracks — adding stolen plates to a getaway car that she had rented with someone else’s credit card, wearing a wig in disguise and burying the weapon in a bucket of cement.
“This was a murder that was committed in cold blood,” said Lake County State’s Atty. Mike Waller.
Yang, 41, had been the chief suspect for months, authorities said, but they didn’t have enough to charge her. In the end, it was her own loose tongue, sharing telltale details with a friend, that cinched her arrest, authorities said.
Investigators used electronic eavesdropping devices to monitor Yang’s cell phone conversations since last month, Waller said. They got the break they were looking for when Yang made incriminating statements in calls last week with the friend, who agreed to wear a listening device to get evidence that was “instrumental,” he said.
“Marni Yang in her own words described how she committed this murder and how she disposed of the evidence,” Deerfield Deputy Police Chief Rick Wilk said.
A lawyer for Yang said she would plead not guilty.
Gayle said Wednesday that he and Yang were friends and business associates for years and that she helped him on some real estate deals. Prosecutors say Yang and Gayle dated, but Gayle insisted he never dated Yang and wasn’t aware of her desire to be his girlfriend. She had a history of harassing women who were involved with Gayle, Deerfield police said.
“This individual wanted to replace Rhoni. She was trying to get Rhoni out of the way so she could possibly foster a relationship,” Gayle said as he stood outside the Waukegan courthouse, where a judge ordered Yang held without bail on two first-degree murder charges.
“This all happened because someone had a crush,” said Gayle, a member of the Bears team that won the Super Bowl in 1986.
After Reuter was killed, Yang was one of the first people to offer condolences, Gayle said.
“I can’t get into the mind-set of someone who could commit such a crime,” Gayle said, adding that he is still grieving the deaths of Reuter, whom he was involved with for 17 years, and their unborn daughter.
Yang, whose maiden name is Merar, grew up in Skokie, where she graduated from Niles North High School in 1986. In the years after high school, Yang married and had three children, including a set of twins, and divorced in 1997. She works in the real estate and mortgage business.
On her personal profile on the Web site reunion.com, Yang wrote that she loves high-octane sports like sky diving and scuba diving. On the Web site, she described herself as “goal-driven, hard-working, authoritative” and owning “one very large pit bull.”
Investigators said Yang had access to many of Gayle’s personal files and searched through his records for the names and addresses of Gayle’s girlfriends. She began sending some of them threatening letters and e-mails, prosecutors said, and made it sound like those threats were coming from a different girlfriend of Gayle’s.
Several months before she allegedly killed Reuter, she began to plan the attack, said prosecutors, who gave the following timeline:
* On Aug. 3, 2007, two months before the killing, she bought books online — including one called “How to Make a Disposable Silencer” — and ordered overnight delivery. Investigators tracked her purchases at Home Depot, where she is alleged to have bought the pieces for the silencer.
* In the weeks before the killing, witnesses spotted Yang several times at a shooting range, where she practiced firing a gun with different grips.
* The day before the slaying, Yang went to a Walgreens to buy items that became part of the disguise authorities said she wore to Reuter’s house, including a swim cap and hairnet. That night she stayed at a friend’s house and told that friend she was going to kill Reuter the next day, prosecutors said. Even though the friend knew about Yang’s plans, she will not be charged with a crime, Waller said. The friend is the same person who later wore a wire to help break the case.
* The next morning, Yang took a rental car to Reuter’s house, authorities said. She allegedly put stolen plates on the car so if anyone spotted the Volkswagen, it wouldn’t be traced back to her. Wearing a wig and hiding her tiny frame under baggy sweat pants and a hooded shirt, she went to Reuter’s condo before 8 a.m., and Reuter opened the door, prosecutors said.
* After the shooting, Yang switched the rental car plates back and returned the car, authorities said. She deliberately left her cell phone at home and used a disposable cell phone that day so her location could not be tracked, Waller said.
* The next day, Yang told the friend she had killed Reuter and went back to Home Depot, this time for cement and a bucket, authorities said. She put the gun in it, filled it with cement and put the bucket in a trash bin on Chicago’s South Side, prosecutors said.
Yang is alleged to have buried the bracelet in a Cook County forest preserve near her home in the 5100 block of North St. Louis Avenue. The friend, who was with Yang at the time, later helped investigators find the bracelet, according to prosecutors. They said a friend of Reuter’s identified the bracelet as belonging to the victim.
The weapon was never found. But police say Yang owned a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, the same type of weapon used in Reuter’s killing. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security found an undeclared 9 mm in Yang’s luggage on a flight a few years ago, prosecutors said.
Waller noted that Yang was involved in Chicago’s community policing program, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, and suggested she might have learned things through CAPS that helped her plan the killings.
A Chicago police official said Yang at one time was a volunteer facilitator of beat meetings but was believed to have been uninvolved in the program since 2006.
“The department is unaware at this time of what an individual could have learned from this participation in regards to the homicides in question,” the official said.
On Yang’s block, neighbors complained about her noisy house and her short temper.
Linda Forbes, 44, who lives across the street, remembered an incident several years back when she found Yang’s youngest child, then a toddler, wandering in the alley around 9 p.m. She said she took the boy to his home.
“[Yang] was so ticked off like I was interrupting something,” said Forbes, a pastor at Sauganash Community Church. “I was so shocked that she wouldn’t be thankful that I brought him home.”
Forbes said she warned Yang that if she found the child wandering unattended at that hour again, she would have to report the neglect to authorities.
“She said, ‘I work for the police,'” Forbes said.
Forbes and other neighbors said she was often visited by bikers and police officers. When police came through the neighborhood last summer asking questions about Yang, Forbes said she thought authorities were conducting an internal investigation about the officers who visited Yang.
One of Yang’s attorneys, William Hedrick of Arlington Heights, urged people to avoid a rush to judgment.
“At this point, it’s all a one-sided procedure,” Hedrick said.
Reuter’s family in Potosi, Wis., previously had said Reuter’s dream was to be a mother. On Wednesday they described in a written statement how the arrest brought some relief, but their loss causes daily heartache.
“Not a day goes by that we do not think about them and what might have been,” the family said.
Freelance reporter Robert Channick contributed to this report
