After 12 days of testimony and 31 hours of deliberations, the jury told Warren County Common Pleas Judge Neal Bronson on Tuesday it was deadlocked.
Widmer, 29, is accused of drowning his wife, Sarah, an Edgewood High School graduate, in the bathtub of their home on Aug. 11, 2008. His conviction last year was thrown out because of juror misconduct.
The juror in the retrial said when the jury took its first vote on Friday, there were five votes for guilty, three for acquittal and four on the fence when it first reported the jury was at impasse.
Five jurors had swayed to the guilty side by Tuesday, but two women were firmly convinced of Widmer’s innocence, she said.
“There was no smoking gun that said yes Ryan did it,” she said. “And they could not get past that.”
Jurors in both trials found the 911 call Widmer made suspicious, she said.
“The first words out of a man’s mouth should be ‘please come help, my wife is dead,’ ” she said. “The first words out of his mouth was she fell asleep.”
As a former medic, the juror said when they examined autopsy photos of the bruises on Sarah Widmer’s neck and chest, the hemorrhages appeared too deep to have been caused by heroic efforts to save her. The defense claimed the bruising was caused when medics stuck a needle into her jugular vein, and both arms, when they tried unsuccessfully to intubate her six times.
“They wanted to try and blame it on the resuscitation,” she said. “People kept wanting to talk about the Sellicks maneuver and cricoid pressure. I have done it personally and for that bruise to be all the way to thyroid cartilage on the front of her neck, that person would have had to try to shove her trachea out the back end of her neck to get that kind of bruise, that deep, right to the bone.”
This time around defense lawyers also showed ghastly bruises on Sarah Widmer’s arms the first jury never saw. The juror said she was leaning toward a not guilty verdict when she saw those, but on further examination, she said those bruises didn’t appear to be as deep as the ones on the neck.
“Those arms really said something to me at first,” she said. “But that does not explain the throat and the chest. I just don’t buy that.”
The defense also pointed out several inconsistencies in first responders’ testimonies and incomplete and incorrect records the medics and hospital filed. As a former medic she said she wasn’t pleased with the sloppiness, but that Sarah Widmer was already dead when they arrived on the scene.
The juror said they were not impressed with either of the defense’s star witnesses, Dr. Werner Spitz, a world-renowned forensic pathologist, nor Dr. Chandler Phillips, an engineer, medical doctor and Nobel Peace Prize nominee.
The jury asked to see Spitz’s textbook about an hour after they started deliberating and again an hour before they announced they were deadlocked. The jury was denied both times because the book wasn’t entered into evidence.
The juror said some had wanted the text book to study Spitz’s theory of hemodilution and how water-suffused blood could have exacerbated the bruising on Sarah Widmer’s neck.
“Some of us didn’t find him as credible, even though he had an awesome resume. He is 80-some years old and in a lot of his testimony he said the injuries were on the wrong side of her body,” she said. “He did other things that he kind of lost credibility. We wanted to see the book, but I never personally wanted it because I thought it would confuse people with the terminology and these people would have had no clue what it meant.”
She recommended the prosecution retry Widmer a third time.
“I would like to see Sarah and her family get the justice,” she said. “And a hung jury doesn’t get them that justice.”
The juror said they elected the statistician from Procter & Gamble as their foreman and he was devastated when they couldn’t render a decision.
“He took it personally on the chin that he did not do his job by us being a hung jury,” she said. “He was phenomenal at his job.”
When contacted at his office Wednesday, the jury foreman said he didn’t want to talk about the trial.
Widmer’s defense has 14 days to file a motion for an acquittal. Rob Dziech, who was co-counsel on the first trial — when the jury found him not guilty of aggravated murder but guilty of murder — says if any judge might decide to free Widmer, it would be Bronson.
“From what I know of him, he is willing to do hard things,” he said. “I can say that probably out of all the judges out there, he is probably the most likely to rule on a motion to acquit.”
Mark Krumbein, a seasoned defense attorney who spent a good deal of time in the courtroom during the 16 days of trial, said Bronson, though he has rejected prior requests for acquittal in this case, could free Widmer. Bronson is one of eight judges in the state to go against a jury recommendation for the death penalty, he said.
However, David Fornshell, who has indicated he might throw his hat in the ring to replace Prosecutor Rachel Hutzel when she eventually leaves to become a judge on the 12th District of Appeals, disagreed.
“I would think the judge will likely let the prosecution make the decision on whether they feel confident enough in their case to tee it up for a third time,” he said. “They won one and they lost one.”
Mike Mayleben, who started the “Free Ryan Widmer” website, said he will not stop their fight.
“Now it’s just full court press on the prosecutor’s office to show them a lot of people don’t want them to have a third trial,” Mayleben said.
Contact this reporter at (513) 696-4525 or dcallahan@coxohio.com.
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