In February 2018, a Florida couple’s weekend reunion ended in a bloody confrontation inside their Gainesville home. The two people involved gave opposing accounts of what happened, and a jury later had to decide which was true.
A New Partner Arrives
In 2005, after 25 years of marriage, Didi Hoffman asked her husband, Mike Reuschel, for a divorce. Mike was 49 and had spent much of the marriage traveling for work.
That July, Didi moved out of the family home. She chose to leave the house to the family so that the couple’s two daughters, who were away at college, could still return to the place where they had been raised.
Soon afterward, another woman moved in. Susan Reuschel, known as Sue, was 38 years old and worked as a hospice nurse. She and Mike had met through the dating website Match.com.
Didi describes herself as reserved and Mike as engaging and outgoing, and she believes he was looking for someone more exuberant. She says Sue quickly became the lady of the house and that everything she had left behind, including the family dog, came to belong to Sue.
Mike’s daughter Caroline remembers meeting Sue at a dinner. Her father seemed to be laughing and enjoying himself, but Caroline noticed how much Sue was drinking. She says she had never seen anyone consume five or six martinis and still be able to stand and speak clearly.
Mike and Sue married in August 2007. Mike stopped traveling and bought a local business. The early years of the marriage left a record of affection in thousands of text messages that later surfaced in court. In them, Mike calls Sue his trophy bride and describes their life together as simply amazing.
Caroline saw a different side of the relationship. She says Sue grew jealous of the bond between father and daughter and worked to keep them apart. Mike would not telephone her unless he was alone in his car, she says, and he was not to take her calls in front of his wife.
A Wedding and a Rift
In 2016, Caroline announced that she was engaged. Sue was happy to help and offered to host a bridal shower. Caroline’s mother was invited, but none of her mother’s friends were, so most of the guests were friends and relatives of Sue. Caroline remembers the shower as a lot of fun.
Sue also went with her to choose a wedding dress. When Caroline tried on a gown she liked, Sue kept telling her it was the one, that it was beautiful and that she had to have it. Sue handed over her credit card, and the purchase was made. The dress cost about $11,000.
The wedding took place in November 2017 at Oheka Castle on Long Island. About 160 guests attended, and Caroline describes the weekend as magical and nearly perfect.
One detail troubled her. As she prepared to walk down the aisle, she noticed a white scar running across her father’s face and wondered what had caused it.
Shortly after the wedding, Mike told Sue that the celebration had gone nearly $150,000 over budget.
Sue was upset, mostly with Caroline, and the couple’s marriage fell to what Mike later called the lowest point it could reach short of divorce. An argument followed. Mike says Sue threw a phone, charged around the bed and pushed him.
Sue herself called 911 that day, saying the situation had gotten out of control. When police arrived, she admitted pushing Mike and agreed to go to the couple’s beach condominium to calm things down.
About half an hour later, she had not yet left the house, and officers arrested her on a charge of domestic battery on November 20, 2017.
Sue was ordered to stay away from Mike. She moved to the beach condominium and began counseling for alcohol use and anger management. She has acknowledged that when she drank, she sometimes lost her temper. A few weeks later, Mike declined to pursue the charge, and it was dropped.
Mike describes the November incident as one of many. He says Sue abused him for years, punching him in the face, scratching him, hitting him in the arms and bending his glasses. He says she threw heavy objects such as vases and coffee mugs.
Sue denies all of it. Mike never reported any of the alleged incidents to police, but he photographed some of his injuries, including a black eye, and showed the pictures to Caroline and, later, to the jury.
One photograph showed his face bleeding heavily, with a long mark across it. Prosecutors later conceded that Sue may well have caused that injury.
In late November 2017, Caroline called her father on his birthday and asked how he was doing. He began to cry. He told her that Sue had been arrested and that she had started attacking him, a secret he had promised not to share.
The Weekend in Gainesville
Mike says that despite the arrest and the quarrels, he still loved his wife and wanted the marriage to continue. In February 2018, he asked Sue to come to Gainesville for the weekend so that the two could work on their relationship.
He has said that he did not care if she was a mellow drunk for the rest of her life, so long as the anger stopped. On Friday, February 2, they decided to go to their favorite steakhouse.
Home security video shows Sue getting ready and enjoying a glass of wine. When Mike arrived home, the two shared a kiss before leaving. At the restaurant, over steaks and more wine, old wounds reopened.
Caroline sent a text message to Mike during the meal, and Sue says that was when Mike admitted he had told Caroline about the arrest. The couple had agreed not to discuss it with anyone.
Mike drove home alone. Sue followed in an Uber, venting her anger in a series of messages about Caroline. She wrote that Caroline would ruin any relationship her father had.
Once home, the couple went to separate parts of the house, and Sue kept writing. She told Mike she was filing for divorce and would leave in the morning. Her final message, sent at 10:13 p.m., said he had serious boundary issues with his daughter.
What happened next took place in a guest room with no cameras, and only Sue and Mike have described it.
Sue says she was alone in the room when Mike came in and climbed on top of her. She felt pressure and then saw a knife. She says Mike told her they were not getting a divorce.
He pinned her arms with his legs, and during the struggle her left thumb was sliced. He stabbed her again, in the neck, and then began slashing at her wrist.
She says she could see into her arm and could no longer feel her hand. She vomited and lost control of her bodily functions as she bled.
Sue says she tried to wriggle free, and the two ended up lying sideways across the bed. She says Mike told her they were just going to lie there until she died, and as she fought to stay conscious she saw him raise the knife once more.
She told him she would not divorce him if he put it down. He did, and she begged him to call for help. She says he agreed only if she would tell people that an intruder had stabbed her. She agreed, believing it saved her life.
Mike tells a different story. He says he entered the guest room a little after 10 p.m. and was startled to find Sue kneeling on the bed holding a knife. He asked her to hand it over and felt what he describes as searing heat.
He says he grabbed for the knife and that the two ended up on their knees on the bed. He does not say how he got his hands on it.
As they struggled and fell over, he says, the blade entered Sue’s stomach. He rolled away as fast as he could, afraid that a deeper wound would kill her. He has offered no explanation for the wounds to her neck and thumb.
About a minute into the struggle, Mike says, he calmed Sue and put the knife out of reach. Both were bleeding, but not heavily. He wanted to call for help, he says, but Sue refused because she feared being arrested again and told him to make up a story.
They argued about a cover story and then, he says, simply lay together for several hours, talking about future vacations in Europe, including river cruises on the Rhine and the Moselle, a trip to Burgundy and a visit to Greece.
At about 3 a.m., Mike says, the couple’s dog, Susie, wandered into the room. He got up to deal with her, and when he turned back, Sue had cut her own right wrist with her left hand.
She told him she did not want to go to jail, and he promised he would not have her arrested. He says he reluctantly agreed to her plan to tell police that someone had broken in.
He told Sue that his only chance was to turn off the security cameras, which would give him a window of opportunity for the story. He turned them off and staged a break-in. Twenty-five minutes passed before he called 911 and switched the cameras back on.
The Investigation
Detective David Visconti was called at about 4 a.m. on February 3 to a reported home invasion in an upscale part of Gainesville.
The caller, Mike, reported that a stranger had stabbed him and his wife. Sue’s injuries were life-threatening, and medics rushed her to a hospital that had been alerted to receive a trauma patient.
At the house, Visconti found no sign of forced entry, no broken window and no door that had been knocked down. There was a vast amount of blood around the bed and on the bedroom wall, and the detective had no doubt that a struggle had taken place.
Even so, the scene seemed to be missing something. In a fight with a violent intruder, he explained, investigators typically find overturned furniture, broken objects and dents in the drywall. None of those were present.
The couple’s security cameras also covered the outside of the house. A stranger fleeing in that direction would have been captured on video. The veteran detective grew suspicious that no intruder had been there.
Hours later, Sue woke from surgery and told detectives that the story of an intruder was a lie. She said Mike had invented it and that he was the person who had inflicted her injuries. Mike was arrested and charged with attempted murder.
In Chicago, Caroline was with her husband when her cell phone rang. The call was collected, and a recording said that an inmate from the Alachua County Jail was calling. Minutes later, the phone rang again, and she answered.
She heard the voice she had known her whole life. Her father said, “Caroline, you have to get me out of here. You need to call my lawyer.” She dropped to the sidewalk and sat there.
The Trial
The trial lasted nine days. Prosecutors David Byron and Sean Brewer argued that the case was about money and about control. They described the attack as a calculated, premeditated decision. Mike, they said, did not want to give up half of his fortune in a divorce.
The state presented physical evidence to support Sue’s account. Brewer presented the knife in its protective casing, and a witness agreed that the bend in the blade resulted from its striking bone.
He also showed Mike’s pajamas, which were soaked in blood, and said the stains showed that Mike had been on top of Sue while stabbing her, since she was the one who had suffered the injuries that caused so much bleeding.
The state’s expert testified that the blood on the nightstand was most likely cast off from the knife, not spurted from a wound, and that the pattern showed the blade swinging as it was plunged into Sue’s stomach and neck.
Byron pointed out that a full glass of wine, other glasses and a lamp sat on that table undisturbed, which he said showed that one person had control of the situation.
Byron questioned why anyone should believe Mike’s version, noting that he had months to review the evidence and shape a story around facts he could not deny.
The wrist wound, prosecutors said, was cut to the bone and was too severe for Sue to have inflicted on herself. They noted that Mike’s injuries were far less serious, small cuts on his fingers and stomach.
Sue testified that the larger cuts on his forearms were self-inflicted and that he had put the knife in her hand and stabbed himself.
Mike took the stand and repeated the story of the knife in Sue’s hands. His attorneys, Patrick McGuinness and Ann Finnell, said he had been defending himself and that the blood proved it.
Their expert, Michael Berkland, a former doctor and bloodstain pattern analyst, said the stains on the pillowcase and nightstand came from an artery in Sue’s wrist. Because an artery does not close on its own, he said, a cut made before 11 p.m. would have killed Sue before midnight.
To demonstrate, Berkland used stage blood and a small syringe to show how blood from a cut artery could travel in a fine spray with each heartbeat.
He concluded that Mike’s timeline made more sense. Finnell argued that if Sue could not be trusted about when events occurred, her entire account was suspect.
Brewer challenged the expert’s credibility. He told jurors that Berkland’s medical license had been suspended and that he had been arrested for storing autopsy specimens, including brains and hearts, in a rented storage unit.
Berkland said the organs were preserved for private cases he worked on while still licensed and that the unit was safer than his house. The charges were later dropped.
Text messages became a central part of the case. The defense produced dozens of messages dating to 2015 in which Sue had threatened divorce many times, including one that said “for the 50th time” she wanted one.
Sue said it was an expression, and that she had not counted. Finnell also pointed to messages in which Sue wrote that she would destroy Mike and one sent on their 10th anniversary in 2017 saying she hated him and was divorcing him.
Sue admitted she had told Mike she hated Caroline and had used an insulting word for her. The prosecution noted that Sue had accused Mike of smothering her with a pillow in a text message and said this was the same incident in which she scratched his face.
Under questioning, Mike agreed that after everything he had been through, dividing his money with Sue did not seem fair. Prosecutors also examined Mike’s internet history.
He had visited three dating sites, including one featuring Ukrainian women, and they suggested he was looking for his next girlfriend. Mike said he was looking for someone who would be kind to him and that he had only looked at photographs and descriptions of how the women would treat their partners.
The defense countered that he had also searched for sites about battered husbands, but Byron said Mike, who had full access to money and family, did not fit the criteria of an abused spouse.
Caroline took the stand as well. Asked who she believed had brought the knife into the confrontation, she named Sue, and she described her father as the victim. In closing, Finnell insisted that Mike would never try to kill for money.
She said Sue was the aggressor, describing her as someone who hated his daughters and his former wife. Byron said the evidence did not show a frenzied struggle between two adults. He called the scene a bloodbath committed by one person who had imprisoned the other on the bed.
Caroline waited through the deliberations hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. The jury deliberated for little more than four hours, a short time that made her wonder whether a quick verdict favored the prosecution.
The jurors rejected Mike’s account of a knife fight in which Sue held the weapon. They found Mike guilty of attempted first-degree murder, the most serious count, and of four additional crimes: false imprisonment, depriving Sue of medical care, tampering with the victim and tampering with evidence.
While Mike was in jail awaiting trial, an informant also claimed he had tried to hire a hitman to kill Sue. Mike denies it, and Caroline calls the idea beyond laughable. The murder-for-hire charges were later dropped.
Sentencing and Aftermath
Judge William Davis held the sentencing hearing on December 13, 2019. Sue did not appear in person. Mike was 64. Prosecutors asked for 50 years in prison. The judge said that the person he had come to know through the evidence and the witnesses was cold and brutal.
On the count of attempted first-degree premeditated murder, he sentenced Mike to 30 years, which for a man his age amounts to a life sentence. Mike received five years on each of the four other charges, to be served at the same time.
Brewer said the verdict delivered justice for a man who had lied to investigators and to the jury. He said that Mike went to great lengths to kill Sue but was not very good at it.
Mike and Sue were divorcing and fighting over the marital assets, including the house where the stabbing occurred. In May 2021, an appeals court noted that the divorce was still under way and that Sapphire Dental, a business of which Mike is the sole member, was a marital asset.
The court said Mike was serving his 30-year sentence and that the parties had agreed to appoint a custodian to operate the business.
Mike also appealed his conviction. On November 23, 2021, Florida’s First District Court of Appeal affirmed it in a brief ruling, and the sentence stands.
Mike’s Early Life
Michael James Reuschel met Didi in college, and she says she has known him since she was 19. They raised two daughters, Caroline and Kate. Mike built a career in the technology business and made millions of dollars.
When he was arrested, Didi was incredulous and said she could not believe he had done anything like this. She says that in all the years of their marriage he never touched her. She has also said she would not be there today if she believed he were capable of harming another person.
At sentencing, friends and colleagues described him in glowing terms. One called him a good person, and another called him a stand-up gentleman.
Caroline said that no one was more positive, caring and generous than her father, and called him one of the kindest and gentlest people she had ever met.
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