Jury to get case of bookmaker Weinstein's 1996 murder

A District Court jury will be handed the fate of Amy DeChant today as her trial on charges she killed her wealthy bookmaker boyfriend winds up.

DeChant is alleged to have shot Bruce Weinstein to death two years ago and hauled his nearly 300-pound body to an isolated spot in the desert near Mesquite, where it was found carefully covered with rocks.

As police pieced together the circumstantial bits of evidence, DeChant fled Las Vegas for the East Coast, where she was tracked down early this year.

Her story to police was that vindictive "New York-looking type guys" actually were the killers and they allowed her to live only if she cleaned up the bloody death scene and kept quiet.

During closing arguments Monday, Deputy District Attorney Ed Kane didn't dispute that vindictiveness was a motive for the murder, but he said it was DeChant's vindictiveness, not the elusive four thugs she talked about.

Kane portrayed DeChant as a "dominating person" who never took no for an answer and was determined to get her hands on Weinstein's wealth no matter what it took. When she couldn't manipulate control of the money from the illegal bookmaking operation, he contended, she killed him and took it.

"Bruce Weinstein said no over and over and over again, and now he's dead," the prosecutor told the jury in District Judge John McGroarty's courtroom.

Her attorney, Dan Albregts, argued that DeChant -- at 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds and suffering a bad hip -- couldn't have carried Weinstein's burley body out of the posh house they shared and buried it in its shallow grave.

Kane countered that "there is nothing physically she couldn't do and nothing morally she wouldn't do to get what she wanted."

The 50-year-old DeChant, who owned a carpet-cleaning business, is alleged to have been aided by an employee, Robert Wayne Jones, 59, who also is on trial.

He is alleged to have supplied the semi-automatic pistol that was used to kill Weinstein on July 5, 1996. The .380-caliber weapon was found under a bush a year after the slaying, but ballistic tests could not confirm it was the one used.

On Friday, Metro firearms expert Richard Good testified his tests were inconclusive, and the weapon that fired the fatal shot could have been the same make or one of three other makes.

Jones' attorney, Deputy Special Public Defender Kristina Wildeveld, will give her closing argument today, followed by the rebuttal argument from Deputy District Attorney David Roger.

Albregts told the jury the state's case is "based on innuendo, rumor and speculation" and the result of a "tunnel vision" investigation by police and a private investigator hired by Weinstein's parents.

The attorney said the circumstantial evidence in the case supports DeChant's story more than the prosecution's version of events.

He added that had police focused on a friend of Weinstein's with the same tunnel vision, they could have built an equally damaging case against him.

Albregts said evidence supports DeChant's story that masked men entered the house and said they were going to "teach Bruce a lesson," then killed him and took away his body, leaving some bloody spots in the house that she was told to clean.

The attorney noted that police used high-tech methods to check for blood residue in DeChant's car and carpet-cleaning van and in Weinstein's car and found nothing.

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