GUILTY ME - Hilary Saenz, 29, beaten to death in her Ellsworth home, 25 Dec 2013

Rebecca Hobbs recalls the shocked feeling many community members had in the wake of Hilary Saenz’s death one year ago.

“A lot of people remember her for her smiling face,” said Hobbs, executive director of The Next Step Domestic Violence Project. “They would see Hilary being this really sweet person, and then to find out what she had been living with — it really shocked a lot of people.”

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According to neighbors, the deceased is a mother of two who lived in the house on Central Street with her two young children and husband.

Early in the afternoon on Christmas Day, the children, ages 12 and 8, knocked on a neighbor’s door and told the woman who answered that their mother wasn’t waking up.

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Police allege that Christopher Saenz had a history of abusing his wife and accused him of beating her to death. In the medical examiner’s report of the causes of Hilary Saenz’s death, investigators wrote that she died as a result of blunt force trauma to her head and torso, according to Maine State Police.

In documents filed in Hancock County Unified Criminal Court in Ellsworth, Christopher Saenz’s defense attorneys wrote that a “traumatic head injury” that Hilary Saenz suffered in a 2003 car crash left her in a coma for “several days.”

Ellsworth attorneys Jeff Toothaker and Robert Van Horn wrote that their client Christopher Saenz denied to police that he struck his wife in the head or torso on the day that she died. Saenz told police that his wife collapsed suddenly and appeared to have a seizure immediately before her death, they indicated.

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A spokesman for the Maine attorney general said Saenz's attorneys are asking to postpone the trial to spring. The trial was initially expected to begin Tuesday. The attorney general spokesman said there will be no court appearance Tuesday.

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The fate of an Ellsworth man accused of killing his wife on Christmas Day 2013 rests with a Superior Court judge after closing arguments were presented Thursday after seven days of testimony in his jury-waived trial...

Justice Ann Murray will have to decide if the cerebral hemorrhage that caused Hilary Saenz’s death was a result of the blows her husband admitted inflicting on Dec. 22, 2013, or of the unexplained fall Christopher Saenz told police she suffered three days later.

The judge took the case under advisement Thursday but did not say when she would issue a verdict. Murray has issued written verdicts in other murder cases she has decided. There is no timetable under which she must make a decision.

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The father of Hilary Saenz, the Ellsworth woman murdered on Christmas Day 2013 by her husband, said Friday after Christopher Saenz was sentenced to 47 years in prison for the crime that he hoped her death shed some light on the issue of domestic violence...

“Hilary Saenz’s death occurred in the context of a multiday argument during which Hilary Saenz sustained multiple traumas at the hand of the defendant,” Murray wrote last month in her verdict, which detailed the victim’s injuries, including 50 bruises. “Hilary Saenz was bruised, literally, from head to toe by the defendant.”

Murray found Saenz guilty of depraved indifference murder last month. She said Friday that she did not believe he intended to kill his wife, but did delay getting medical treatment for her in order to protect himself.

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