Cara Rintala with attorney Luke Ryan yesterday in Hampshire Superior Court in Northampton. (Photo by Republican Staff photographer Dave Roback)
By BOB DUNN
@BDGazette
NORTHAMPTON — By this afternoon, Cara Lee Rintala’s fate will likely rest in the hands of a dozen strangers chosen to consider the evidence in her murder trial.
The prosecution rested its case yesterday, the 12th day of testimony in the first-degree murder trial, and Rintala’s defense team should have finished its presentation this morning.
Rintala, 47, is charged with strangling her wife Annamarie Cochrane Rintala, 37, to death in the couple’s Granby home on March 29, 2010.
The prosecution’s final two witnesses yesterday were Carla Daniele, a former girlfriend of Annamarie Rintala’s who defense attorney David Hoose has said wasn’t examined closely enough by investigators, and Annamarie Rintala’s mother, Lucy Cochrane.
Daniele testified that she and Annamarie Rintala had an “on-again, off-again” relationship that finally ended for good when Annamarie told her she was moving back in with Cara Rintala in November, 2009.
The two had dated during a period when the Rintalas were separated and had filed for divorce from each other, from June to November 2009.
During that time, Daniele and Annamarie Rintala took trips to Cape Cod, Connecticut and Las Vegas and had discussed publicly announcing their relationship when the divorce was final, which would have been in December 2009 if proceedings had continued.
Daniele said she helped Annamarie Rintala get set up in a South Hadley apartment during the separation, including paying for the first and last months’ rent and the security deposit and paying for a security system.
Daniele said she was “devastated” by the news that Annamarie was returning to her wife, and didn’t see or speak to her from that point on.
Daniele testified that in the days after Annamarie Rintala’s death, she called her cellphone upward of 20 times, “just to hear her voice.”
In his opening argument and throughout cross-examination, Hoose suggested Daniele wasn’t vetted enough by investigators. He said they should have looked more closely at her whereabouts on the day of Annamarie Rintala’s death, and also at the violent circumstances in which the life of a former domestic partner of Daniele’s ended.
Daniele, a Springfield police officer, is on probation after pleading guilty to a charge of improper storage of a firearm after her domestic partner took her own life with Daniele’s service weapon in January 2013.
Jurors did not hear about the suicide, nor about the specifics surrounding the charge.
In court, Daniele said she was at her father’s home in Springfield the morning of Annamarie Rintala’s death, went to a gym in East Longmeadow about 3 p.m., worked out, went for a run, returned to the gym and left about 7 p.m.
Cara Rintala told investigators she left her home about 3 p.m. the day of the killing and returned about 7 p.m. to find her wife’s body in the basement.
When asked by the prosecutor why she left the gym building to go for a jog, despite the rainy weather, Daniele said she jogs whatever the weather conditions are.
“I’m a runner. You can’t wait for the weather in New England,” she said.
The electronic check-in log shows her arriving about 3 p.m. that day and surveillance photos from the gym show Daniele arriving in her car, leaving her car behind to jog and her car leaving about 7 p.m.
Lucy Cochrane, the prosecution’s final witness, testified that when the Rintalas were separated, her daughter had gone to the Granby home to pick up some items and Cochrane received an angry phone call from Cara Rintala, asking her to come and get her “(expletive) daughter out of her house.”
Cochrane said it was Cara who called her the night of the killing to tell her that her daughter was dead.
“I just dropped the phone,” Cochrane said.
The defense called Cara Rintala’s father, Carl Montagna, and uncle James Roberts, who both said when they saw the couple together they appeared happy and loving.
“They seemed very fine together,” Montagna said.
Roberts said when he visited the couple during their separation they seemed “surprising good” together, considering they were heading for divorce.
Questioned by prosecutor Steven Gagne, Roberts said he wasn’t aware that Annamarie Rintala had been dating during the separation, didn’t know about renewed talk of divorce in February 2010, and didn’t know that Cara Rintala had been accused by her wife of assault and battery and arrested on that charge in 2008.
Mark Babineau, a co-worker of Cara Rintala’s from the Ludlow Fire Department where she worked as a paramedic, also testified that he didn’t see any strife between the couple.
About two weeks before she died, Annamarie Rintala was snapping photos of her wife and other fire department members during the annual St. Patrick’s Day road race in Holyoke.
Another defense witness, Susan Cordes, said she met the couple at First Congregational Church in South Hadley. The day before the killing, she said, the women were showing photos of themselves smiling with their daughter on a trip to Florida a few weeks earlier.
Under cross-examination, Cordes said she wasn’t aware that later that same night, there was an angry exchange of text messages between the women including one from Annamarie to Cara stating, “I HATE THE RELATIONSHIP WE HAVE.”
Cordes said that while she only saw the couple on Sundays during church, they always seemed like a happy, loving couple.
The jury, comprising 10 women and five men, was told at the end of yesterday’s proceedings to expect to hear closing arguments from both legal teams this morning, and likely began deliberations this afternoon. Three jurors will be randomly selected to stand by as alternates, leaving the remaining 12 to consider the case.
Cara Rintala’s first trial on the charge ended with a deadlocked jury and mistrial last March. Testimony in her retrial began on Jan. 9.
A first-degree murder conviction in Massachusetts carries a penalty of life in prison.
Bob Dunn can be reached at [email protected].
