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Alfred Ruf in an interrogation (Wayne County Sheriff’s Office).
An Indiana man is seen on interrogation footage blaming two women for a plot in which he poisoned his wife’s Coca-Cola, but the defendant still admitted that he carried out the act in spite of the others’ alleged murder plot.
Wayne County sheriff’s investigators tried to pin Alfred Ruf down on precisely when the supposed co-conspirators voiced their plan.
“And you’re saying they hinted around to it. There’s no hinting around to this,” one of them said. “It’s either they said it or they didn’t say it.”
Ruf relayed a lurid story in which there were a series of incidents when he put a substance in his wife’s Coke, and then, when she went to sleep, he had relations with one of the two other women, or they “put on a show” for him. He said the murder plot was over life insurance money.
Ruf maintained he did not know what the substance was, and that it was their goal, not his, to attempt murder.
“I didn’t want to kill her,” he said.
As an investigator pointed out, however, Ruf nonetheless carried out the action: “But you were the one giving her the stuff in order to do it.”
Ruf is the only person on the hook for the incident. A Wayne County prosecutor’s staffer reached by Law&Crime declined to confirm if there are any plans to charge the other women. Ruf is currently serving a four-year prison sentence, plus five more years suspended, for aggravated battery. The court acknowledged mitigating factors including the now 72-year-old’s “heath concerns,” his previously “law-abiding life,” as well as cooperating with investigators and showing “genuine remorse” for what happened.
“The crime was a result of circumstances unlikely to recur,” the court wrote.
