Testimony: Husband had $200K policy on slain wife

Sept. 13--NORWICH -- An insurance company executive testified Friday that Ganesh "Remy" Ramsaran was potentially eligible to collect as much as $200,000 from a life insurance policy on his wife, Jennifer, after her body was recovered in late February 2013.

The Prudential Life Insurance Co. policy, offered to the Ramsaran family as a result of Ganesh Ramsaran's employment at the time with IBM, provided "basic" coverage of $100,000 in the event of Jennifer Ramsaran's death, said Victoria Angle, a Prudential senior client services specialist.

Taking the stand in the Chenango County Court trial of Ganesh Ramsaran on a charge of second-degree murder, Angle said the policy was designed to provide an additional $100,000 payout in the event of an accidental death or a homicide. That second $100,000, she explained, would not be paid to a beneficiary who is convicted of murder or manslaughter of the person covered by the policy.

Chenango District Attorney Joseph McBride presented not only Angle's testimony but also the actual policy as a prosecution evidence exhibit to convince the jury that collecting on the life insurance was part of the motive for the killing.

The indictment against Ganesh Ramsaran alleges he killed his wife on Dec. 11, 2012. Her body was not recovered until Feb. 26, 2013 when a sawmill operator, Richard Hayner, the father of Chenango County Deputy Sheriff Kelly Hayner, spotted what turned out to be a frozen corpse down an embankment off Center Road in Pharsalia.

On March 11, 2013, Ganesh Ramsaran, now 39, contacted the Prudential call center and advised customer representative Andrea Workman that his wife had died and an autopsy was expected to yield the cause of her death in three to four weeks, Angle testified. (As it turned out, the autopsy was not completed by the Onondaga County medical examiner's office until May 20, 2013.)

Through cross examination, defense lawyer Gil Garcia was able to establish that his client stopped short of requesting payment from the policy when he contacted Prudential in March 2013.

Not quite four months later, on July 2, 2013, Ganesh Ramsaran submitted a written form to Prudential, requesting that payment be made on the policy, Angle said.

Garcia was able to establish in his questioning of the witness that Ganesh Ramsaran did not ask for a specific amount of money in making that request.

During the back-and-forth parrying between the defense lawyer and the prosecutor, however, McBride pointed out that Ganesh Ramsaran "stood to gain" as much as $200,000 as the result of his wife's death. Angle said she agreed with that synopsis.

Prosecution testimony has suggested Ganesh Ramsaran had other financial concerns at that time in his life as well.

An earlier prosecution witness, Jason Wicks, a former close friend of Ganesh Ramsaran as well as one of his running partners, said he warned Ramsaran that he would likely end up paying alimony to Jennifer Ramsaran, a mother of three children, if it became known the defendant was involved in a sexual affair with his wife's best friend, Eileen Sayles.

Sayles has testified that she had advised Ganesh Ramsaran that she was going to return to her husband and end the affair just prior to the disappearance of Jennifer Ramsaran, who was 36 years old when she was reported missing.

Garcia got Angle to acknowledge that Ganesh Ramsaran paid for the life insurance out of his salary from IBM, the computer company that had been employing him as a work-from-home program manager.

Ganesh Ramsaran's only public comments about the life insurance came in interviews with The Daily Star in early 2013, a few months before he was indicted in May 2013.

The newspaper reported that Ramsaran initially declined to comment when asked if there was a life insurance policy on his wife. In a subsequent interview, he complained about how his refusal to discuss the matter was noted in a newspaper article.

"I've been totally open and honest with you from the beginning, and you've treated me like some nitwit," he was quoted as saying in the subsequent interview.

He also confirmed in the subsequent interview that he in fact did have a life insurance policy through his employer that covered both his wife and himself, one he said had been "taken out many, many years ago." He added that no changes had been made to it in recent years.

In other testimony Friday, Andrew Tocheny of the State Police computer crime unit testified that Jennifer Ramsaran's iPhone connected to the Wi-Fi network inside the Ramsaran home at 10:57 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2012

Tocheny also testified that such a device would not be able to connect to a home Wi-Fi unit once it was moved 200 feet or more from the modem. Tocheny also noted that the Ramsaran home Wi-Fi network was called "Psycho."

The testimony elicited from Tocheny stands in contrast to the reported alibi of Ganesh Ramsaran, who said his wife left the house alone at about 10 a.m. that day to go Christmas shopping at a Syracuse-area mall while the couple's three children were in school.

Jennifer Ramsaran's iPhone was found the next day by Ganesh Ramsaran, who told authorities he located it by using the Find My iPhone application. There has also been testimony that the husband had the passwords to all her devices.

When Ramsaran called police from the location where he said he found the phone -- near the intersection of Moon Hill Road and State Route 23 in Plymouth -- the device had very little damage despite being found in a creek bed, surrounded by stones, according to earlier testimony from police officers.

McBride also sought to discredit the defendant's alibi by putting Christopher Roper, IBM's director of computer security, on the stand. Roper testified that the defendant's IBM computers sat silent after 8:24 a.m.Dec. 11, 2012.

The computers showed no activity in the time periods Ramsaran had told police he was doing his IBM computer work from the house at 473 Sheff Rd., South New Berlin, according to Roper.

Another prosecution witness, A. Wesley Jones, who oversees Chenango County's 911 center for the Sheriff's Department, testified it rained a little more than a half inch on Dec. 11, 2011.

Dirty and muddy, the family Chrysler van that Ramsaran told police his wife had driven from the home that morning was found five days later outside the Plank Road Manor Apartments in Norwich. Records showed it had not rained again in that interval, Jones said.

The prosecutor has tried to build a circumstantial case against Ramsaran, piecing together a mosaic of information aimed at convincing the jury of nine men and three women that he has assembled enough pieces of the puzzle to show Jennifer Ramsaran was killed in her home and her husband is the responsible party.

In felony trials, it is routine for defense lawyers to argue before judges that there should be a directed verdict of acquittal once the prosecution rests its case. And Garcia said he expects to make such a request of Judge Frank Revoir Jr. once the prosecution concludes its case.

"I'm going to argue it vigorously, and I'm sure Mr. McBride is going to argue his side vigorously, too," said Garcia, calling the prosecutor "a good lawyer."

Asked how Ramsaran views his chances of winning an acquittal, Garcia said, "My client feels confident. He's in a good state of mind."

Ramsaran was placed into a police van after the trial recessed for the weekend and was transported back to Chenango County Correctional Facility, where he is being held for lack of $500,000 bail.

Testimony is slated to resume Monday morning.

McBride is hoping to rest the prosecution case late Monday, with his final witness expected to be Chenango County Sheriff's Department Lt. Richard Cobb, who coordinated the investigation.

If Ramsaran declines to take the stand in his own defense, the jurors, before beginning deliberations, are expected to be instructed by the judge to refrain from viewing that as an indication he committed the crime in question.

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