CRIME HUNTER: Chicago Bear's mistress gets bullets from a bimbo

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The suburban condo resembled a slaughterhouse.

It was not a robbery gone awry.

Lying dead inside the condominium unit was Rhoni Reuter. The attractive 42-year-old had been pregnant, and there were two bullet wounds in her abdomen.

It was clear that not only did the killer want Reuter dead, they also wanted her unborn child to die too.

The love of her life for the previous 17 years was Shaun Gayle.

A football star with the NFL’s Chicago Bears, Gayle was handsome, charming and the centre of Rhoni’s world for almost two decades. They met when she was in college, and he was starring for the Bears.

In March 2007, Rhoni’s most cherished dream came true: she was pregnant with Shaun’s child. Her family had feared Rhoni might not be able to have children.

“That was the happiest I had ever seen my sister in her whole life, and she was just glowing,” her brother Wayde said, adding the child was going to be a baby girl. They would call her Skylar.

Gayle had reportedly been a notorious womanizer but seemed to be settling down. He was even going to the doctor with Rhoni, despite allegedly having a roster of 17 playmates on the side.

The pair had never lived together, and a baby would not change that. If the floozies on the side bothered her, Rhoni didn’t let on. Despite his sexual hijinks, Rhoni was the woman Gayle took to events and the one he considered his true girlfriend.

She would tell her family, “I just love him. I don’t know what to tell you. I just love him.”

Who would want to kill the pretty farm girl? As far as cops knew, Rhoni had no enemies. Yet the grim evidence suggested that the murder was personal.

Gayle seemed a natural place to look first. He had his hands in many pies: NFL Europe, business promotion and real estate. And everywhere he went, women followed.

That’s how he met 41-year-old Marni Yang, a divorced mother of three.

A driven real estate agent and wannabe fitness model, Marni hinted to pals that she was having an explosive sexual relationship with a former Chicago Bear. She was a sexual adventuress who had many male irons in the fire.

It was never really clear if Rhoni knew just how much of a love rat Gayle was, but in mid-2007, she started receiving disturbing anonymous letters. Gayle claimed the lurid letters were lies.

On Oct. 4, 2007, Rhoni was murdered. Her condominium was full of baby clothes.

One law enforcement official said: “The sheer number of shots would indicate that this — there was some emotion. There was something driving the shooter. It appeared to be personal. In all likelihood, the victim could have known the offender.”

Cops quickly figured out the gun was a 9mm semi-automatic and that a silencer may have been used. Witnesses saw a young man with a dark complexion, wearing small, baggy clothes.

Gayle was emotional, but he had an alibi. He was getting his hair cut at a barbershop 65 kilometres away. Detectives were certain he was involved, partly because of the letters. They chronicled Gayle’s sex life and included passages from emails, travel itineraries and much more.

One of the letters was poorly written, as if by an immigrant.

His special friend, the fitness trainer, was a Polish native. It ended badly, and he took out an order of protection. The focus began shifting to fitness babe Monika Kurowska for the slaying.

Like Gayle, she too had an alibi. But one name came up again and again. Marni Yang.

Yang had a temper and a gun. And there were protective orders against her, including one from a married Chicago cop.

She’d sent the cop’s wife a letter “threatening his life, career and marriage.” And he was scared.

Gayle was still having sex with the diminutive real estate dynamo. Marni tended to become wildly obsessed with the men she was involved with, dating back to her teen years.

One friend, Melissa Dessent said: “She was a very intense person. She was very into boys — very into herself. ‘Everything is about me’ type of attitude.”

She was wildly promiscuous, regaling pals with her sexploits. And when one high school boyfriend moved away to college, Marni stalked him.

Eventually, she married a Cambodian refugee but it was almost called off when he discovered her diary detailing her sexual conquests. They married in 1990, but even at her bachelorette party, Marni could not control herself with the male strippers.

Dessent added: “Her and a stripper had apparently taken a liking to each other, and he invited her into the back room after he was done dancing for free sex backstage.

“She became obsessed with this stripper, and after she had come back from her honeymoon, she wanted to go back and have sex with him again.”

Yang’s marriage ended in 1997.

One source told cops it was Marni writing the letters and had even boasted she nearly got Monika deported.

Cops searched the trash in her alley finding unopened credit card bills.

On the bills? Books on how to build a silencer.

They found someone who went to a gun range with Marni where she used her .9mm handgun — the same type used to kill Rhoni.

Detectives began searching a rental car database and soon discovered Marni had rented a black Volkswagen on the day of the murder. The same car was seen at the crime scene.

They focused on her friend and self-proclaimed psychic Christi Paschen.

Marni had been talking about killing Shaun Gayle for months, then the focus shifted to Rhoni. Paschen never believed she’d go through with it.

Paschen wore a wire, and at a local diner, Marni told her: “I just started emptying my clip. I took one last shot in the head and finished her off.”

Marni Yang is now serving a double life sentence.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun