New Brunswick, NJ: New Brunswick man faces trial in wife's slaying

Published: Thursday, September 09, 2010, 3:53 PM Updated: Thursday, September 09, 2010, 4:08 PM

N.J. Department of Corrections
Carmelo Cruz, who also goes by the name Ishmael Serrano.

NEW BRUNSWICK — A New Brunswick man is on trial for the second time on charges he bludgeoned and strangled his wife in their apartment in 2002.
Carmelo Cruz tied a cord around the neck of 36-year-old Refugia Ruiz Olmedo, and fractured her skull because she planned to leave him, Middlesex County Assistant Prosecutor Linda Estremera said in her opening statement today to a jury in New Brunswick.
"It’s a story of, if he couldn’t have her, nobody would," Estremera said in the trial before Superior Court Judge Bradley Ferencz.
Defense attorney Robert Corbin said the jurors will hear inconsistencies in the evidence. Corbin said that although two of couples’ three children were home, including a 10 year old who was sleeping in the bedroom when the killing supposedly occurred, no one heard a struggle or noise.
Authorities said Cruz put his wife's body in trash bags, then dumped the body in a wooded area off Route 130 in South Brunswick. Cruz later told his children that their mother left and didn’t return. He filed a missing persons report with police. He also claimed to have received a letter from a street gang that kidnapped Olmedo.
However, Cruz later took police to where he left the body and admitted killing Olmedo when investigators challenged his story, authorities said.
Cruz, 41, was convicted in 2005 of killing Olmedo in their French Street apartment.
However, in 2008 an appeals court overturned the conviction, ruling the judge didn’t properly instruct the jury on the possibility that Cruz acted in self-defense.
Cruz said Olmedo tried to strangle him with an electrical cord but that she got tangled up in it. He also said he struck her head on the floor twice.
Cruz, who came with his wife and their children to New Brunswick from Mexico in 1990, sat in the court today wearing headphones, listening to the proceedings with the assistance of a Spanish interpreter.