Mystery of Ruthann Aron
They found the body of Ruthann Aron’s father in the cellar of the house where she grew up. David Greenzweig’s skull had been crushed by a handyman’s pipe wrench and his head wrapped like a mummy’s in masking tape. The investigation fell to Detective Bart Rasnick, whose own father had been a short-order cook in the Greenzweigs’ Fallsburg Diner way back when the diner was the place locals gathered in the Upstate New York resort town. The policeman followed the trail to Florida and closed the case with the convictions of two drifters who said they killed the old man for the money in his pocket and the keys to his rusty Cadillac.
For the funeral, Ruthann took off a week from her job, which in August 1994 happened to be a campaign for her own election to the U.S. Senate. It may have been strange to go from shaking hands in condo lobbies to accepting condolences in a funeral home chapel, but well-wishers say the former Ruthann Greenzweig was the picture of poise – well-dressed, polite, gracious.
You would never have known, they say, that she had interrupted the most intense experience of her life so far to bury the father to whom she had not spoken in years.
“I specifically and unequivocably leave absolutely nothing for my daughter Ruth Anne Aaron [sic] of Potomac, Maryland, who has been cruel to me,” David Greenzweig wrote in his will, “and direct my executor to reject any claim that she may make, using the proceeds of my estate to take such legal steps as are necessary to disinherit my daughter, and carry out my intent.”
Nearly three years passed between the ghastly events in the Catskills and the arrest of Ruthann Aron last June. The Montgomery County politician stands charged with soliciting a would-be hit man to do away with her husband, Barry Aron, and a lawyer named Arthur Kahn. Neither was killed, and certainly the daughter’s arrest has no connection to the father’s murder. Yet they have something in common. Aron’s trial in a Rockville courtroom later this month will turn on the same subject that nagged well-wishers so impressed by her outward composure in that Upstate New York funeral home:
The mystery of Ruthann Aron’s mind.
Ruthann Aron
In her days as a government official, Aron took target practice with Montgomery park police.
(Montgomery Department of Parks and Recreation)
The brainy, clumsy only daughter of David and Frieda Greenzweig had grown into a fit, wealthy, rather formidable success. She married a doctor. She earned a couple of million on her own. She helped raise two fine children. She made a respectable showing in the Maryland Republican Senate primary, her very first campaign for public office.
And then, on a summer afternoon in her 54th year, Ruthann Aron allegedly went to a local man she hardly knew and said she wanted someone “eliminated.”
The startled man went to the police. The police arranged for someone to pose as a hit man. Aron allegedly phoned this man. Twice. The police taped it all.
“The tapes,” says Aron’s lead attorney, Barry Helfand, “are bad.” He does not mean they are hard to hear.
And Ruthann Aron? Is she villainy distilled? Or is she sick? Did something going on within her head somehow render her, in the operative phrase of Maryland lawbooks, “not criminally responsible”?
That is the plea she has entered on charges of solicitation to commit murder. It is an insanity defense.
Her trial, scheduled to begin February 25, will take place in two parts. The first section, which determines guilt or innocence, will cover only what Aron allegedly did. The burden of proof lies with the prosecution, which must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. And court papers suggest the state will arrive prepared.
Besides the tapes (“We’ll be listening to a lot of tapes,” says Montgomery Deputy State’s Attorney I. Matthew Campbell), prosecutors will present evidence to the jury that, for instance, Aron’s home computer revealed that she made visits to a Web site that peddles how-to books on homemade silencers; that copies of these books were found in her possession; that also in her possession were the prescribed components for such silencers, including two lawn mower mufflers; and that the Arons do not own a lawn mower.
Ruthann Aron and her lawyers
Ruthann Aron with her lawyers Barry Helfand, left, and Erik Bolog in November 1997.
(By Dayna Smith/The Washington Post)
Part two of the trial, however, will address not what Aron did, but why. Not guilt, not innocence, but responsibility. The burden of proof shifts to the defense, but the standard drops to “a preponderance of the evidence.” That evidence will come from a battery of forensic psychiatrists, standing ready to address whether a mental defect prevented Aron from “conforming her conduct” to the law. With Aron’s deep pockets on one side and the reputation of the state’s attorney’s office on the other, it is sizing up as an insanity trial on a scale never seen in Montgomery courts.
“We’re going to put in Ruthann’s life from soup to nuts,” says Helfand. “Everything. Nothing’s going to be held back.”
“The whole trial,” he says, “will be her life story.”
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