To the dismay of his in-laws, the Boston doctor who, after a night of drinking in 2020, murdered his wife and disposed of her body in a pond sobbed when he was found guilty.
When Ingolf Tuerk was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter inside Norfolk Superior Court on Thursday, NBC Boston captured his head dropping as he started to cry.
The jury foreperson declared, “He is guilty of voluntary manslaughter.”
Tuerk was on trial for killing his wife, Kathleen McLean, inside their suburban Boston home in May 2020. Tuerk was the former chief of urology at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton.
After drinking with McLean, 45, the now-63-year-old acknowledged that she shattered a wine glass over his head during a quarrel.
“I was scared to hell,” Tuerk stated to the court Tuesday. “I snapped. I kind of blacked out.”
Two days after she vanished, McLean’s body was discovered in a pond in a forested region close to the couple’s house.
After being arrested, Tuerk admitted to the murder, but he insisted it was an accident and added that he had placed rocks inside McLean’s pants so her body would sink to the bottom of the pond.
“I walked through the yard and tried to look for something that may, you know, bring her down,” he stated.
Tuerk’s attorneys centered their case on the former surgeon defending himself against his spouse, alleging that McLean had tried to take control of her husband’s assets.
“This is all about money,” Kevin Reddington contended. “And she played him pretty darn good.”
“I suggest to you that he reacted. He was drunk… He defended himself. And the beauty of the law is that the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not act in self defense.”
Tuerk threw his wife out “like a piece of trash,” according to the prosecution’s argument for a first-degree murder conviction.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest it is not the heat of passion. It is not self-defense”. Assistant Norfolk District Attorney Lisa Beatty concluded by stating, “It is motive to kill.”
The fifth anniversary of McLean’s body’s discovery, May 16, is set aside for a sentencing hearing.
Tuerk might be imprisoned for up to 20 years.
Before eloping in Las Vegas in December 2019, the couple had been dating for two and a half years, having first connected on a dating app.
A month before they were married, Tuerk struck a settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, which accused him of defrauding the state’s Medicaid program, according to McLean’s friends, and their relationship began to suffer.
Tuerk settled claims that he led his employer to incorrectly bill MassHealth by paying $150,000.
“The slow deterioration of his career as doctor and surgeon is when he started getting more violent,” McLean’s friend Larry Corcoran told.
Tuerk allegedly repeatedly attacked his wife, strangling her and cutting her with scissors. McLean issued a restraining order against him and accused him of abuse.
After McLean stated in a court affidavit that she felt secure in her husband’s presence, the couple finally got back together on May 2.
When it was disclosed last year that Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor was involved in the case, the hearing took a different course.
When Proctor was the primary detective in the high-profile investigation, he sent obscene texts about Karen Read, which led to his termination as an agency investigator.
In August 2024, Reddington submitted a number of motions to the court, but was informed that he would have to provide an affidavit explaining why he had to read police text conversations while conducting the inquiry.
Source: NY Post
