Christina Hall

Detroit Free Press

DETROIT — Donna Scrivo told a Macomb County jury that a masked man killed her adult son and dismembered his body with a saw last year in her son's St. Clair Shores condo.

But the jury didn't believe her.

It found the 61-year-old registered nurse guilty of first-degree premeditated murder and related charges in the gruesome January 2014 slaying of her son, Ramsay Scrivo, after one hour and 40 minutes of deliberation Monday.

Scrivo, who spent about three hours testifying in her own defense Friday and Monday, sat emotionless as the verdict was read and looked at the jurors as they were polled.

She was found guilty of first-degree premeditated murder, disinterment and mutilation of a body and removing a body without the permission of the medical examiner. She is to be sentenced to life in prison without parole June 23 in Macomb County Circuit Court.

Her court-appointed attorney, Mark Haddad, had no comment after the verdict.

Judge Richard Caretti thanked the jurors saying, "It's been a long case. It's been a difficult case." Jury selection started almost two weeks ago and the trial had dozens of witnesses and exhibits, including photographs.

The verdict came after riveting testimony by Scrivo, who took the stand in her own defense starting Friday and was cross examined Monday.

During her testimony Monday, she said that she was afraid, which is why she said she didn't tell the more than dozen people she encountered at various locations about the man who killed and dismembered her son and was keeping her hostage for five days in January 2014.

She was afraid that he would kill her other son, nieces and other relatives. She said that she did exactly what the man told her to do, having no faith even in the police she spoke with during that five-day time period.

"I trusted the man who was holding the gun to my head," Scrivo testified.

The cross examination by Assistant Prosecutor William Cataldo had the two sparring at times.

"Are you done?" she asked him at one point at the beginning of the cross examination.

"Oh, I'm just gettin' started," Cataldo told her.

The jury, composed of eight women and four men, started to deliberate just before 3 p.m. Monday. Shortly thereafter, they asked for exhibits and transcripts of two witnesses, including Scrivo. The jurors could see the requested exhibits, but Caretti told them they had to rely on their collective memories for the two witnesses' testimonies.

Scrivo testified that a man wearing a mask, who knew about her son and family, killed her son and cut up his body while she was being held hostage, handcuffed in her bedroom with a scarf in her mouth.

Prosecutors claim Ramsay Scrivo was drugged, killed by ligature strangulation and dumped in a bathtub. Scrivo also is accused of dismembering his body with a power saw and later dumping his remains, some of them charred, in bags across rural St. Clair County. She reported him missing to St. Clair Shores police in January 2014.

Again Monday, Scrivo talked softly in a Texas drawl and often sobbed. There were gasps in the courtroom today when Cataldo asked Scrivo if she hired this killer to come in.

No specific motive for the brutal crime was given.

Scrivo testified that said she found the man in her son's room and that he made her help him, including carrying the bags with her son's remains out of the home and driving them to St. Clair County.

She testified that she talked with and texted the people the man told her to talk with and text. She testified that she heard sawing, but didn't see her son dismembered.

And, she testified, the man told her that she would be blamed for her son's death. Five days after her killing her son, the man left, telling her to leave the country.

"You actually want the jury to believe that story?" Cataldo asked Scrivo at the start of his cross-examination.

"Yes," Scrivo replied.

"That's what actually happened?" he asked.

"Yes sir," she replied.

"This is horrible. You're right," she said at one point during the cross examination.

"I'm not mother of the year. I have multiple problems," Scrivo later said during testimony. "I think I did everything to protect the rest of my family. I did everything he told me to."

Cataldo asked Scrivo if she lied to numerous people that she had contact with during those five days, including the workers at Lowe's where she bought the saw that was used to cut up her son's body. She said yes, but paused a second when it came to the store workers, whom she told she was doing household projects.

"Chopping up a body isn't a household project, is it?" Cataldo asked her.

During his closing argument, Cataldo told the jury Scrivo's story was "fake" and isn't true.

"It doesn't make any sense," he said. "It's because Donna Scrivo is the murderer."

He told the jurors "you either believe that ... or you believe the physical evidence," he said, adding that the saw "is what connects her to every element of this case."

Cataldo said, "Mother of the year, I don't think so."

Haddad told jurors they couldn't vote guilty upon a suspicion, a possibility or a probability. He asked them to think about whether police tracked down all the leads and reiterated that none of Ramsay Scrivo's DNA or blood were found on Donna Scrivo.

He said his client's 110-pound frame couldn't lift her approximately 235-pound son's body into a bathroom and asked what reason she would have for killing and mutilating him.

"She would have to be the stupidest murderer in the world" to behave in such a way "unless she was forced," Haddad told the jury during his closing argument. "Unless she was directed at gunpoint to do these seemingly stupid things."