Cindy Mulligan, stepdaughter of Donnie Rudd, in 2016 near Bateman and Dundee roads in Barrington Hills, close to the site where Noreen Kumeta Rudd died in 1973. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)
Convicted murderer Donnie Rudd has died while serving his prison sentence — 49 years to the day after the death of his wife, whom he was found guilty of killing in 2018.
Rudd was an attorney and school board member in Hoffman Estates in 1973 when his wife of less than a month, 19-year-old Noreen Kumeta, died from what police believed at the time were injuries from a car crash in Barrington Hills, with Rudd behind the wheel.
Despite some of the unusual circumstances of the case — including that Rudd had been living with another woman and her children up until his wedding to Kumeta — Rudd remained a free man for four decades.
But authorities were prompted to take a fresh look at the case in 2013, after an Arlington Heights detective — while reviewing the 1991 unsolved murder of a local woman who was Rudd’s client — raised new suspicions. Kumeta’s body was exhumed and a pathologist found she’d died of blunt-force injuries to her skull that were inconsistent with a car crash.
In 2015, Rudd was arrested in Texas and charged in his wife’s murder. He was convicted in 2018, despite his continued assertions of his innocence.
Rudd, who was sentenced to 75 to 150 years in prison, died Wednesday.
Rudd was 80.
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