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Tuesday, August 04, 1998
Pair sentenced in attempted murder
A woman and a former veterinarian are punished for a plan to club a man to death.
By Caren Benjamin
Review-Journal
A former veterinarian was sentenced to 12 years in prison Monday, and his one-time client got four years, after being found guilty of a plan to club a fellow animal doctor to death.
Before the sentence was handed down, Alan Ruegamer, 56, protested his innocence, and Jacqueline DeMaria, 31, begged not to be taken from her three small children.
Their attorneys asked that the verdict finding them guilty be thrown out for lack of evidence. But District Judge Michael Douglas refused and said the memory of the victim, James Reilly, was enough for a reasonable jury to have convicted.
Reilly was beaten and left for dead in a vacant northwest Las Vegas home in May 1994.
Ruegamer and Reilly had a brief partnership in 1993, formed when Ruegamer had his license suspended temporarily by the state Veterinary Board.
The partnership soured, and Reilly walked out, taking with him medicine and equipment. Ruegamer tried to press charges against Reilly for theft. Reilly reported to the Veterinary Board that Ruegamer had been practicing despite his suspended license.
The beating was days before Reilly was to testify before the board on those charges.
At the June trial, Reilly said that a woman called him to tranquilize a cat on the day of the beating and that when he arrived at the house, he saw DeMaria and Ruegamer's girlfriend, Charmaine Guss. Then, he said, he saw Ruegamer raise a club over his head and then he blacked out.
No physical evidence was found at the scene pointing to either of the defendants. A judge dismissed the case against Guss years ago. Both DeMaria and Ruegamer presented alibis. DeMaria stressed she barely knew Ruegamer and had used Reilly as her veterinarian after the partnership broke up. Attorneys for both suggested that investigators from the Veterinary Board could have planted the "memory" of that day in Reilly's mind when in fact he really could not remember what happened.
But the jurors believed Reilly's eyewitness account and found Ruegamer guilty of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. They found DeMaria guilty of attempted murder.
DeMaria's attorney, Lamond Mills, said jury members explained after the trial that they did not think DeMaria meant for Reilly to be killed but did think she was there and could have made an anonymous call after the beating and had medical help sent to Reilly, left bleeding in the house.
Reilly asked the judge for the stiffest possible sentence, 20 years, for Ruegamer and less than that for DeMaria. "He has no principles. He's willing to hurt people and animals," Reilly said of his former partner.
DeMaria sobbed throughout his speech as she had for much of the trial. Mills stressed the number of letters from members of the community supporting DeMaria and touting her life as a self-sufficient, hard-working, single mother with no prior record.
Ruegamer, who was calm throughout the trial, was angry and stumbled slightly over his words. He said had no record and had a long history of hard work, community involvement and naval service. All that, he said, is inconsistent, with his having been involved in anything violent. "This is my life. This is how I've lived it," Ruegamer said.
DeMaria will be eligible for parole in about a year, Ruegamer in about four years.
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Jacqueline DeMaria and former veterinarian Alan Ruegamer leave District Court. They were sentenced Monday in an attempted murder case.
Photos by John Gurzinski.
Ex-veterinarian Alan Ruegamer appears in court Monday for sentencing for the attempted murder of a business partner.
James Reilly watches the Monday sentencing.
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