Toward the late afternoon, once the last prosecution witness answered the last question, Stephen Tully announced there was no murder case against the 29-year-old local DJ sitting by his side.
Even if Thomas Ryan lied to police about finding his longtime girlfriend kneeling on a mattress in her Remington apartment with a cord wrapped around her neck and tethered to a ceiling fan above, Tully said on Monday, there was “no evidence whatsoever” that he killed Anuradha Ramasamy.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Paul Alpert disagreed and sent Ryan?s trial into a second day of testimony set for today. But in his motion, Tully seized on the web of circumstantial evidence forming the state?s case against Ryan. In a courtroom packed with their friends, Ramasamy and Ryan were described as a social couple who lived together for most of three years but broke up before she died last May. He was an aspiring chef who held a job at the Red Maple in Mount Vernon. Ramasamy, 26, planned to help cater a wedding at the Brass Elephant the day she died.
Instead, after about 2 p.m. on May 27, no one heard from her. The next day, according to court testimony, Ryan ran screaming from her apartment saying he had gone to check on her and discovered she?d hanged herself. Prosecutor Brian Fish said they?d had an argument, and that was Ryan?s coverup for her murder.
Fish held up in court the 4-foot-9-inch-long electrical cord of a curling iron found around Ramasamy?s neck ? too short, a medical examiner said, to reach the ceiling as Ryan said it did. Fish described how blood settled in Ramasamy?s chest and stomach, implying she died face-down and not vertically as Ryan described finding her.
Alpert denied the defense motion saying that the implication of that evidence, if viewed most favorably for the state, is that Ryan “did something he was trying to hide.”
