Wednesday, November 10, 1999
Detective: Suspect told about killing
Woman's fate allegedly sealed when she arrived
BY STEVE KEMME
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HAMILTON — A Middletown police detective said Richard Bainum told him he knew what he was going to do to Sandra Ronto the minute she entered his apartment to have sex.
“He said, "She was dead as soon as she walked through the door,'” Detective John Magill testified Tuesday at Mr. Bainum's murder trial.
“"She was acting like she was an angel. I knew she was a whore. So she deserved to die, and I killed her.'”
Mr. Bainum, 26, of Middletown, is accused of strangling Ms. Ronto, 51, of Middletown, with her purse straps Nov. 6, 1998, after they had sex in his apartment.
Her body was found two days later at the bottom of the stairway in his building.
Mr. Bainum has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge. Originally, he had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
The defense rested its case without presenting any witnesses. The jury will listen to closing arguments today before deliberating a verdict.
In written and taped statements to Detective Magill, Mr. Bainum gave this version of his encounter with Ms. Ronto on the afternoon of Nov. 6, 1998:
He began talking with Ms. Ronto in a Middletown bar after noticing she was crying.
She said she was crying because she was tired of being physically and emotionally abused her whole life. Mr. Bainum comforted her, and they kissed. She consented to come to his apartment.
She quickly removed her clothes and they had sex.
But when she asked for a particular kind of sex, Mr. Bainum refused and told her she was sick.
She told him if he didn't do what she wanted, she would run from his apartment and tell people he had raped her.
“That's when I scared, man,” Mr. Bainum said in a transcript of his taped interview Detective Magill read in court. “And I panicked.”
He said he thought about how to kill her.
“I ain't got a gun,” he said, “and I sure as hell ain't going to stab her and get blood all over my room.”
So he grabbed her purse and wrapped the purse straps around her neck.
He said he placed her body in a closet in his apartment, and moved it the next day to the bottom of a stairway in his building, hoping someone would find it.
“What I did do, other people think is 110 percent wrong,” Mr. Bainum wrote in his statement to police. “But I think it's right. I set her free from all the hurt and anger.”
Judge Keith Spaeth ruled Tuesday that jurors can consider the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.
The penalty for that crime is three to 10 years in prison, while the penalty for murder is 15 years to life.
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