Shimon Gutman is accused of stabbing Haviva Vashdi, 67, over suspicions that she was stealing his money and jewelry
Times of Israel
Prosecutors filed charges on Thursday against an 83-year-old man for murdering his caregiver.
Jerusalem resident Shimon Gutman, the suspected killer, had served time in jail over four decades ago for a deadly mail bombing.
The victim, Haviva Vashdi, 67, had been caring for Gutman for four years. He allegedly became suspicious that Vashdi was stealing money and jewelry from him, and therefore decided to murder her, according to the indictment.
During her time caring for Gutman, Vashdi helped him with housekeeping, grocery shopping, and laundry, prosecutors said.
During one of Vashdi’s visits to Gutman around the time of Rosh Hashanah last month, the elderly man took a knife to Vashdi’s throat, then repeatedly stabbed her in the back and chest, prosecutors say.
Gutman told a social worker scheduled to visit him that day not to come, saying that he would be ‘out of town’, according to the Kan public broadcaster.
The suspect then attempted to hide her body in a bathtub, filling it with water in order to hasten the corpse’s decomposition. He cleaned the bloodstains from the scene of the murder and lied about Vashdi’s whereabouts to her family, according to the indictment.
One of Gutman’s neighbors told Kan that police had shown up to take him in for questioning in the morning of the day they found the body, but that they didn’t find Vashdi until later in the afternoon when they returned to conduct a search.
Gutman was charged with aggravated murder and obstruction of justice over his attempts to hide the body. Prosecutors requested that the court extend his detention until the end of legal proceedings.
Gutman was previously convicted of mailing a bomb to his mother-in-law in 1980 in revenge for what he claimed was his ruined marriage. The mother-in-law and two others were killed when she opened the package at a Givatayim post office.