An Irvine woman was convicted Friday of drowning her 92-year-old mother, who was found face down in a pool in 2018.
Prosecutors argued that Cynthia Strange, 70, was hoping to secure her inheritance and avoid paying a debt when she went to her mother Ruth Strange's Huntington Beach home, stabbed her in the head and dragged her across the yard to the pool.
While the Orange County Superior Court jury found Strange guilty of first-degree murder, it rejected the prosecutor's claim that he committed the crime for financial gain.
Cynthia Strange in a mugshot.
(Huntington Beach Police Department)
By leaving the motive unresolved, the verdict bore the hallmarks of a compromise among jurors who had begun deliberating Tuesday after a seven-week trial that relied heavily on circumstantial evidence.
Deputy District. Lawyer. Nicholas Thomo told the jury that Cynthia Strange was unemployed, she depended on her mother's money and she feared being left out of her will.
“If you kill mom before mom takes her out of that will, that money is yours,” Thomo said.
Amy Hamilton, the defendant's sister, went to her mother's house on the morning of September 4, 2018 to take her to a doctor's appointment.
He found the garage door open, which made him suspicious, and when his mother didn't respond to his calls, he called the police.
Police entered the home and found blood in the bathroom, blood on the floor and blood soaking a reclining chair. Ruth Strange's body was in the pool.
An autopsy showed she had been stabbed six times in the head, but the official cause of death was drowning.
Although Cynthia Strange left her cellphone at her Irvine home the night of the murder, apparently to confuse detectives, surveillance cameras located her in her mother's Huntington Beach neighborhood, the prosecutor said.
And police said shoe print patterns found at the crime scene matched the Orthofeet brand the defendant was known to wear.
During the trial, jurors heard voicemails that Ruth Strange had left her daughter Amy Hamilton about a day before her death, saying that Cynthia was outside her home.
“I'm scared,” he said in a panicked voice. “I don't know what she is doing… Please answer her. “I need help… She's in the driveway…”
Although the defendant, slumped forward in a wheelchair throughout the trial, did not testify, it was her own voice that could have sealed her conviction.
She could be heard on recordings of Google searches she conducted before her mother's death. In one, she asked, “Hey Google, what is the average age of death for an American woman?” In another: “How does her neck break?”
He asked about the “signs of suffocation,” about the effects of injecting air into a person, about the difference between a bruise from a fall and a bruise from a blow.
“These are not innocent searches,” Thomo said, arguing that Cynthia Strange had shown guilty awareness by attempting to delete her search history.
Assistant. Public defender Sara Ross suggested that Strange's sister, who was not charged, was the real killer, motivated by the $2 million inheritance.
“Amy Hamilton had two million reasons for wanting her mother dead,” Ross said.
The defense attorney described Hamilton as a “con artist” who had manipulated her mother into changing the family trust to favor her and had tricked the older woman into believing Cynthia intended to harm her.
“She was bleeding Ruth dry for the last few years of her life,” he said of Hamilton. “She's desperate for money, but she doesn't want to work.”
Hamilton invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify at trial, and Judge Lewis Clapp told jurors not to speculate about his motive.
Ross argued that his client was physically incapable of what prosecutors alleged. He suffers from arthritis and underwent shoulder surgery six weeks before his mother's death, making it unlikely he would be able to drag or carry his mother to the pool, his attorney said.
The defense had difficulty explaining the incriminating Google searches. “He's looking for a lot of weird stuff,” Ross admitted. He said his client liked spy novels and true crimes.
“None [the searches] “They involve stabbing, drowning, the way Ruth was killed in this case.”
Cynthia Strange faces 25 years to life in prison when Judge Clapp sentences her on July 12.
