An Irvine woman was convicted Friday of drowning her 92-year-old mother, who was found face down in a swimming pool in 2018.
Prosecutors argue that Cynthia Strange, 70, went to her mother, Ruth Strange’s Huntington Beach home, stabbed her in the head and dragged her through terrace, dragged to the poolside, when she hoped to secure an inheritance and avoid paying debts.
While an Orange County Superior Court jury found Strange guilty of first-degree murder, it rejected prosecutors’ argument that she committed the crime for financial gain.
Cynthia Strange in police photo.
(Huntington Beach Police Department)
While motive hangs in the balance, the verdict features a compromise among jurors who began deliberations on Tuesday after a seven-week trial that relied heavily on circumstantial evidence.
Deputy District Atty. Nicholas Thomo told jurors that Cynthia Strange was unemployed, dependent on her mother’s money and feared her will would be deleted.
“If she killed her mother before she removed her from her will, the money would be hers,” Tomo said.
The defendant’s sister, Amy Hamilton, went to her mother’s house on the morning of September 4, 2018, to take her to a doctor’s appointment.
She found the garage door open, which made her suspicious, and when her mother didn’t answer her calls, she called police.
Police entered the home and found blood in the bathroom, blood on the floor and blood on the recliner. Ruth Strange’s body was in the pool.
An autopsy revealed she had been stabbed six times in the head, but the official cause of death was drowning.
Prosecutors said Cynthia Strange left her cellphone at her home in Irvine the night of the murder, apparently to confuse detectives, but surveillance cameras placed her near her mother’s Huntington Beach home.
Police said shoe print patterns found at the crime scene matched the Orthofeet brand worn by the defendant.
During the trial, jurors heard a voicemail Ruth Strange left for her daughter Amy Hamilton about a day before she died, saying Cynthia was outside her home.
“I’m scared,” she said in panic. “I don’t know what she’s doing…please answer. I need help…she’s in the driveway…”
Although the defendant sat forward in a wheelchair throughout the trial and did not testify, her own voice may have sealed her conviction.
Her mother’s voice can be heard on recordings she searched on Google before she died. In one post, she asked: “Hey Google, what is the average age of death for women in the United States?” Another: “How do you break your neck?”
She asked about “signs of suffocation,” the effects of injecting air into a person, and the difference between bruises from a fall and bruises from a blow.
“These were not innocent searches,” Tomo said, arguing that Cynthia Strange was showing guilt by trying to erase her search history.
assistant. Public Defender Sarah Rose believes Strange’s sister (who has not been charged) is the real killer and that the motive was a $2 million inheritance.
“Amy Hamilton had two million reasons to want her mother dead,” Ross said.
Defense attorneys described Hamilton as a “liar” who manipulated her mother into changing family trusts in her favor and deceived the older woman into believing Cynthia intended to harm her.
“She was bleeding Ruth out of her in the last few years of her life,” she said of Hamilton. “She desperately needed money but didn’t want to work.”
Hamilton invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify at the trial, and Judge Lewis Clapp told jurors not to speculate as to why.
Ross argued that her client was not physically capable of what prosecutors alleged. Her lawyer said she suffered from arthritis and had shoulder surgery six weeks before her mother’s death, making it impossible for her to drag or carry her mother to the swimming pool.
The defense struggled to explain the incriminating Google searches. “She’s looking for a lot of weird things,” Ross admits. She said her clients enjoy spy novels and true crime.
“No [the searches] Involving stabbing, drowning – that’s how Ruth was killed in this case.
On July 12, Judge Clapp sentenced Cynthia Strange to 25 years to life in prison.
