May 26—Jurors deliberated a little less than two hours Wednesday before returning verdicts clearing Guillermo Ruiz of all three counts that he was facing in the sexual abuse of two girls.
Ruiz, 62, chose not to take the witness stand in his own defense in the second day of his trial in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin, relying instead on his attorney’s cross-examinations of the state’s witnesses and closing argument.
The two girls, ages 16 and 17, testified Tuesday that Ruiz sexually abused them around the same time 10 years ago.
The older girl said that he had inappropriately touched her when she was 7 or 8 years old. The younger one testified that he had sodomized her when she was in kindergarten or first grade.
Defense attorney Bob Briggs questioned both girls as to their recall of details such as what time of year it was, how they were dressed and various details of the sexual contact.
In his closing argument Wednesday, Briggs seized on their inability to recall such details and on what he saw as inconsistencies between the older girl’s testimony at the trial and what she had said during a pretrial deposition two weeks ago.
The state claims the girls provide details of the abuse that corroborate each other, Briggs said. But there was much that they could not recall.
“Isn’t it reasonable to expect those things to be remembered?” Briggs asked.
The prosecution called Sgt. Travis Hitchcock, a Missouri State Highway Patrol investigator, as its final witness Wednesday to tell the jury about his interview of Ruiz three years ago when the allegations surfaced. An audio recording of that interview was then played for jurors.
During the interview conducted in an informal setting in Pineville, Ruiz began by flatly denying the girls’ accusations.
“Why would those young girls tell me that?” Hitchcock asked.
“I don’t know,” Ruiz responded.
He acknowledged that he had carried them at times when they were young and touched them and sometimes would bring them towels after a shower.
But he could recall just one time that the girls were ever in bed with him as they claimed, he told Hitchcock. He said the younger one tried to get on top of him on that occasion but not in a sexual way.
Why would she then allege that he had sodomized her, Hitchcock wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” Ruiz said. “I’d never do something like that. I really do care for those girls.”
But as the interview progressed, the suspect’s story did change some as Assistant Prosecutor Taylor Haas pointed out in his closing argument. Ruiz acknowledged that they actually may have slept in the same bed with him two or three times and that he “may have rubbed one of them some.”
“That kind of deception is present throughout the interview,” Haas told jurors.
When Hitchcock asked Ruiz what he would say to the girls if they were there with them at that point, he said he would tell them that he was sorry for the things they think happened to them, a statement that Hitchcock and prosecutor saw as a near admission of guilt.
Approached after the verdicts had been read and the defendant discharged by the court, one juror told the Globe that the state simply lacked sufficient evidence to remove reasonable doubts about the girls’ allegations.