Man in his 80s charged with murdering caregiver, trying to hide her body

Prosecutors filed charges on Thursday against an 83-year-old man suspected of murdering his caregiver.

Jerusalem resident Shimon Gutman, the suspected killer, had served time in jail over four decades ago for a deadly mail bombing.

The victim, Haviva Vashdi, 67, had been caring for Gutman for four years. He allegedly became suspicious that Vashdi was stealing money and jewelry from him, and therefore decided to kill her, according to the indictment.

During her time caring for Gutman, Vashdi helped him with housekeeping, grocery shopping and laundry, prosecutors said.

During one of Vashdi’s visits to Gutman around the time of Rosh Hashanah last month, the elderly man took a knife to Vashdi’s throat, then stabbed her in the back and chest, prosecutors say.

Gutman told a social worker scheduled to visit him that day not to come, saying that he would be out of town, according to the Kan public broadcaster.

The suspect then allegedly attempted to hide her body in a bathtub, filling it with water in order to hasten the corpse’s decomposition. He cleaned the bloodstains from the scene of the murder and lied about Vashdi’s whereabouts to her family, according to the indictment.

One of Gutman’s neighbors told Kan that police had shown up to take him in for questioning in the morning of the day they found the body, but that they didn’t find Vashdi until later in the afternoon when they returned to conduct a search.

Gutman was charged with aggravated murder and obstruction of justice over his attempts to hide the body. Prosecutors requested that the court extend his detention until the end of legal proceedings.

Gutman was previously convicted of mailing an explosive to his mother-in-law in 1980 in revenge for what he claimed was his ruined marriage. The mother-in-law and two others were killed when she opened the package at a Givatayim post office. He served 18 years in prison for the killings.

In a statement made through their lawyer, Vashdi’s family said she was “a woman who had never hurt anyone, a woman who had mercy for everyone and fed animals on the street. She never had a stain to her name, and no one wished her any ill will.”

They added that they hoped to see justice served for the murder.

Prosecutors Sagiv Ozri and Rotem Bras said in a statement on Thursday that “the indictment describes the shocking murder of a woman who did her job with dedication.”

“Haviva Vashdi was the person who helped the defendant and cared for him, and he, based on nothing but suspicion, decided to cause her death, calmly murdered her in his home, hid the body, and disrupted the murder scene,” they added, sending their condolences to Vashdi’s family.