Police investigators considered staging a phony attack on Edward Lyng’s girlfriend in an effort to scare her into telling authorities that Lyng killed his wife, a defense lawyer contended in opening statements Wednesday at Lyng’s murder trial.
The girlfriend, Christina Rezba Knutson, is the prosecution’s star witness in the state’s case against Lyng, 58, charged with killing Stephanie Lyng in the couple’s Palatine home almost 17 years ago.
Knutson allegedly told police in 1992 that Edward Lyng confided to her that he had stabbed his wife to death and buried her body in Lake County.
Her credibility was the focus of opening statements Wednesday as Lyng’s first-degree murder trial opened before a jury of nine women and three men in the Rolling Meadows branch of Cook County Circuit Court.
Defense laywer Ronald Menaker, who with Patrick Tuite is representing Lyng, insisted that Knutson made up the story about the killing to put an end to several years of police harassment about the case.
Knutson was the victim of “an incessant campaign of harassment” for 15 years by investigators who were under tremendous pressure to solve the case, Menaker said.
At one point in the investigation, police considered staging a phony hit on Knutson, Menaker said. Officers planned to rush to her rescue and then tell her that the hitman was hired by Lyng to kill her, Menaker told the jurors. “They were hoping she was going to say `God, he was going to do that to me? I’ll talk.’ “
The plan was apparently detailed in notes in the police file, Menaker said during a pretrial motion outside the presence of the jury. He did not say the plan was carried out.
The prosecution countered that it was Edward Lyng whom Knutson feared, and that fear prevented her from coming forward with what she knew sooner.
“The defendant, Edward Lyng, has spent the last 17 years trying to bury this crime,” said prosecutor Patrick O’Brien, who is being aided by Assistant State’s Atty. James McKay. “He entangled his girlfriend in a web of fear and feelings which, until October 1992, did not allow her to come forward.”
Stephanie Lyng, then 38, disappeared on the morning of Oct. 25, 1977, after running an errand a few blocks from her home, prosecutors said.
Her body has never been found.
Her station wagon was discovered at O’Hare International Airport a few days after the disappearance. A few drops of blood, matching Stephanie Lyng’s blood type, were found in the front seat of the car by evidence technicians, prosecutors said.
Knutson, a former employee at Lyng’s defunct Elgin-based vending machine company, initially provided an alibi for Lyng, prosecutors and defense lawyers said.
But in 1992, she told investigators that Lyng told her he waited for his wife, a part-time real estate agent, to return from an errand, hit her on the head with a gun, stabbed her and wrapped her body in a rug, O’Brien said. Knutson would testify that Lyng then put the body in Stephanie Lyng’s blue station wagon, and buried her body in Lake County, O’Brien said.
Knutson’s testimony is crucial to the prosecution because a search of Lyng’s home turned up no traces of blood or other physical evidence, defense lawyers said.
“Christina Knutson and the truth have never met,” Menaker said. “Christina Knutson, ending 15 years of virtual desperation, 15 years of frustration, plucks out of thin air . . . this story she’s going to feed you.
“It’s not something you’ll be capable of digesting.”
The pressure campaign waged against Knutson was prompted by pressure from Stephanie Lyng’s mother, Dorsey Connors, Menaker argued.
Connors, described as a Chicago newspaper columnist with considerable clout, had always suspected Edward Lyng killed her daughter, and she hounded authorities to prove it, Menaker said.
“She exercised her self-importance and political connections and ran roughshod over investigators, driving them and driving them,” Menaker said. “If she did not agree with the way the investigation was going on, she would call on George Dunne (former Cook County Board president).
“And if she didn’t like the legal aspects of what was occurring, she’d get a meeting with Richie Daley.”
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Richard M. Daley was the Cook County state’s attorney during much of the investigation.
“They were being driven to a solution, and Edward Lyng was the designated suspect.”
In addition to Knutson’s statement about the alleged killing, prosecutors said they planned to introduce evidence that Edward Lyng was distraught over divorce proceedings his wife had initiated against him.
“You will learn that Edward Lyng told people that he would never allow his wife to divorce him,” O’Brien told jurors.
To that end, prosecutors called the eldest of Lyng’s four daughters, Dorsey Anne Uhrich, 32, as one of their first witnesses Wednesday.
She said her mother and father slept in separate bedrooms, but that her father once asked Uhrich, who was then 15, to help him keep the family together.
“He came to my room, closed the door and said `Dorsey, I want you to tell Mommy that you want to live with me if we get a divorce, because she won’t leave you, and you can hold the family together,” Uhrich testified.
Uhrich refused to comply with her father’s request, she said.
Lyng sat expressionless at the defense table as Uhrich also testified that her father didn’t seem too concerned when her mother did not return on the night of her disappearance.
” `She is probably still out selling houses,’ ” Uhrich quoted her father as saying.
Testimony was scheduled to continue on Thursday.