Mom's murder trial starts

Delia White told police she killed her son's fiancee on Nov. 11, 2005, inside the Mundelein apartment all three shared.

But eight women and four men in a Lake County courtroom will have to decide if White, 57, was telling the truth or being forced to confess.

Audelia Bogard, 45, was found lying facedown in a pool of blood in her bedroom; the back of her skull had been crushed with an unknown object.

On the opening day of White's first-degree murder trial Wednesday, Assistant State's Attorney Dan Kleinhubert said White confessed after more than two days of questioning by police because police convinced her they knew she was lying.

Defense attorney Christopher Lombardo told the jurors the intensity of the interrogation coerced an innocent woman to parrot the story police wanted to hear.

Steven Arthurs, Bogard's fiancee and White's son, arrived at the apartment on Deepwoods Drive around noon on the day of the killing, taking a break from his job as a cab driver.

His mother was sitting in Bogard's Jeep in the parking lot with a dazed look on her face, Kleinhubert said, and both of them went inside where Bogard's body was.

Police arrived and took both in for questioning, and Kleinhubert said discrepancies began to arise in White's version of events early on.

Arthurs told police Bogard had called him to come and get his mother out of the apartment because they were arguing, as Kleinhubert said they often did.

Lombardo contended the women got along fine, so much so that they were planning to move out of the apartment together.

They only argued when White told Bogard she would not be the one to tell her son that Bogard wanted to break off their engagement, Lombardo said.

Kleinhubert said Arthurs also told police his mother told him she had hurt herself walking the couple's dogs, which he thought strange because Bogard said she was walking the dogs when she called him.

White originally did not mention an argument on the morning of Nov. 11 to police, and said that she had left the apartment earlier in the day because a man had come to visit Bogard.

Lombardo said police never listened to White when she told them about the man, even though there were other residents of the building prepared to say they had seen a man running away on the day of the murder.

Police contend White finally confessed she and Bogard had begun slapping each other during their argument and she eventually picked up an object and hit her repeatedly in the head with it.

She then took the object, which she was unable to describe to police, and threw it into Lake Michigan, police said.

Lombardo said police mentally exhausted his client to the point where she simply repeated their theory of the crime for the video recorder.

Kleinhubert said he has more than 12 hours of videotape of police questioning White he intends to begin presenting to the jury today.