Camden County woman convicted of killing her 17-month-old son and acquitted of plotting to kill her ex-boyfriend

A Camden County woman was convicted of murder Thursday in the death of her 17-month-old son and found not guilty of conspiracy in an alleged murder-for-hire plot to kill her ex-boyfriend.

Heather Reynolds, 45, of Sicklerville, wept as the jury delivered its verdict, which means that she will face a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

Prosecutors said Reynolds killed her son by holding a cleaning wipe over his nose and mouth in May 2018. Later, as police investigated, prosecutors said, Reynolds conspired with her then-boyfriend to kill her former boyfriend because he had spoken to police about the child’s death.

Reynolds, who has been jailed without bail since her June 2019 arrest, had denied any role in the crimes. After six hours of deliberations over two days, the jury of nine women and three men found her guilty of murder, endangering the welfare of a child, and possession of methamphetamine, but acquitted her of conspiracy to commit murder and witness tampering.

Reynolds’ lawyer, Richard “Skip” Fuschino, said he plans to appeal the verdict.

“We respect very much the jury’s time, but we are devastated the jury did not find reasonable doubt,” he said.

Reynolds did not testify during the two-week trial in a courtroom cleared of spectators due to COVID-19 restrictions.

During the trial, Peter Gallagher, chief of the Homicide Unit in the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, and Fuschino painted contrasting pictures of Reynolds.

The prosecutor said Reynolds, driven by a drug addiction and desire to maintain an extramarital affair, killed her son to get him out of the way. The married Reynolds then conspired with her boyfriend, Jeffrey Callahan, to kill her ex-boyfriend, Domenic Caruso, Gallagher said.

“All the evidence at this point says it is not possible for anybody else to have killed that child,” Gallagher told the jury.

Fuschino told the panel that Reynolds was a devoted mother who tried to perform CPR on her son when she found him unresponsive in his bed and ran from her home holding him and screaming for help from neighbors. He suggested that her then-boyfriend, Caruso, had killed the child while Reynolds slept. Caruso, who was temporarily living in the basement of her home while her husband was out of town, gave police conflicting accounts of his whereabouts in the hours before and after the child died, Fuschino said.

“She did not commit this murder,” he said in an interview. “The reason that we have trials is for when arrests are made of the wrong person, because that really does happen.”

Gallagher, the prosecutor, told the jury Caruso had no motive to kill the child. The culprit, he said, was Reynolds. After suffocating her son, Gallagher said, Reynolds tried to cover her tracks before police arrived at her home on the morning that her son died. One of her son’s shirts was in the dryer, along with a towel in the washing machine, he said.

After Reynolds was charged in connection with her son’s death, the prosecutor said, she plotted with Callahan to have Caruso killed. Gallagher said Callahan told Reynolds in a phone call that he had sent “a threatening message” to Caruso after learning that he had spoken to law enforcement officials about the murder investigation. He said Callahan then approached a “third party” with hopes of being connected to “someone who would be able to kill” Caruso, offering up to about $25,000.

Fuschino, the defense attorney, said there was no such plot. “He’s talking tough, he’s trying to impress a girl,” he said in an interview. ”There’s never talk of a real figure or talk of where the money’s coming from.”

Callahan, 45, of Clayton, was initially charged with conspiracy to commit murder, but prosecutors dropped that charge after he agreed to plead guilty to witness tampering. He is awaiting sentencing.