Horsham woman who strangled her son with belt and drove into ocean found guilty of murder

A Horsham woman was found guilty of first-degree murder Thursday for strangling her 11-year-old son, Matthew, with a leather belt as he slept at the family’s home last April, what prosecutors say was an act of rage-filled spite against her husband.

Ruth DiRienzo-Whitehead, 51, faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison and is scheduled for sentencing Friday morning. Montgomery County Judge William Carpenter rendered a verdict after closing arguments in which DiRienzo-Whitehead’s lawyer argued that she strangled her son during a “psychotic episode” and prosecutors argued that she did it out of anger, vengeance, and spite for her husband.

DiRienzo-Whitehead did not visibly react to the verdict or respond to reporters’ questions as Montgomery County Sheriff’s officers led her to an elevator.

After strangling Matthew with her husband’s belt, the former Keller-Williams Realtor drove her Toyota Highlander to Cape May and then drove into the ocean. The car shut down in shallow water and DiRienzo-Whitehead was later taken into custody by police in Wildwood Crest, where her family owned a beach house.

Her lawyer, Eugene Tinari, moved for his client’s case to be heard before a judge earlier this year, forgoing a jury. Since DiRienzo-Whitehead’s first court appearance, Tinari has said the killing came during a psychotic break, one that capped a steady deterioration of her mental health over the course of several months.

Outside the courtroom, Tinari said he was disappointed by and disagreed with the verdict, saying he’d move to pursue next steps in the appellate court. Prosecutors’ contention that DiRienzo-Whitehead killed her son as an act of vengeance didn’t comport with the friends and family — some of whom testified — who knew her as a doting, dedicated mother who loved Matthew more than anything, he said.

“I believe it was strictly as a result of her being in psychosis and mental illness based on the reasons I said: the love of her child, her character,” Tinari said after the hearing. “Revenge, in my opinion, makes absolutely no sense in this case, to take one’s child.”

Assistant District Attorneys Lauren Marvel and Gwendolyn Kull said the verdict was fair and could offer Matthew’s loved ones some semblance of closure for the loss of a boy they described as loving, caring, and happy-go-lucky.

“Today we got justice for a beautiful little boy who should have never been in a position to need justice,” said Marvel.

During the trial, Tinari asserted that DiRienzo-Whitehead was under tremendous stress in the weeks leading up to Matthew’s killing. She and her husband were having financial issues, compounding the stress of her role as the primary caregiver for her aging mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia.

Tinari said that the onset of menopause had exacerbated these external factors. All of it together led her to snap, he said. DiRienzo-Whitehead later told investigators that she didn’t want her son to “grow up with these struggles.” She was particularly concerned that the family would no longer be able to afford his tuition at Germantown Academy.

DiRienzo-Whitehead had completely “detached from reality,” Tinari said in his closing arguments Thursday, and while in the throes of mental illness, she killed her son, believing she was benefiting him, sparing him a difficult and painful future. Tinari argued that DiRienzo-Whitehead met all the criteria for legal insanity.

“She was a sick woman,” Tinari said. “She was more sick than evil. More sick than sinister.”

Prosecutors, meanwhile, argued that DiRienzo-Whitehead had grown increasingly angry and resentful of her husband because she believed that their financial troubles had robbed her of the lifestyle she deserved. After agreeing to sell the beach house in Wildwood Crest — a “final indignity,” said Marvel — DiRienzo-Whitehead had enough and decided to kill her son to rob her husband of a life he couldn’t provide for her, prosecutors said.

DiRienzo-Whitehead’s choice of her husband’s belt as the murder weapon and a makeshift memorial — a photo of Matthew when he was 1 year old, a recent report card, and a note he had written his mother — she left on a counter inside the home were deliberate choices to send a message to her husband, said Marvel.

“This defendant hated her husband so much that she wanted revenge against him for failing to provide for her family in the way that she felt she deserved, more than she loved her son,” Marvel said. “And she chose to take that out on her little boy by killing him so that if she couldn’t have the life she wanted to have, her husband wasn’t going to get to have any kind of life, either.”