Revelations about alleged mistakes by Rutland City police officers have threatened to complicate the murder case against a man who hit and killed a 19-year-old trainee during a high-speed chase.
Tate Rheaume, 22, remains jailed as he awaits a trial related to the crash that killed Jessica Ebbighausen in 2023. His charges include aggravated murder, which carries the most severe punishment allowed under Vermont law: life imprisonment without a chance of parole.
Prosecutors say the charge is justified. But Rheaume’s attorney, David Sleigh, said his client deserves leniency in light of a recently disclosed internal affairs review. It concluded that Ebbinghausen’s death resulted from a reckless and unjustified police pursuit.
That report was kept under wraps for months by the city’s police chief, Brian Kilcullen, despite repeated requests for it from the Rutland County state’s attorney. It only came to light through a subpoena from Sleigh this fall. Prosecutors have since issued a “Brady letter” against Kilcullen. That’s a mechanism used to flag police officers alleged to have credibility issues. The chief, meanwhile, has announced that he intends to retire in March.
The developments have called into question the credibility of the entire Rutland City Police Department and must be considered when weighing Rheaume’s culpability, Sleigh said in an interview.
The aggravated murder charge “is clearly an attempt to vindicate or somehow address the emotional impact the community has felt as a result of this young officer dying in what turns out to be a completely misguided, reckless departure from well-known policies and procedures,” Sleigh said.
People summoned police several times on July 7, 2023 because of Rheaume’s conduct at homes connected to the mother of his children. Witnesses reported during the first two calls that Rheaume had stopped taking his medication and seemed psychotic. He left the scene both times without incident.
A third caller reported Rheaume had broken into an apartment. Rutland City police officer Jared Dumas arrived and ordered Rheaume outside, then called the mother of Rheaume’s children and asked whether she wanted to pursue charges.
That’s when Rheaume ran to his truck and drove away. Dumas pursued, while Ebbighausen and her supervisor, Richard Caravaggio, left the station and traveled toward the pursuit from the opposite direction.
Rheaume was still fleeing Dumas two minutes later when he crossed the center line in an attempt to pass traffic. He hit Ebbighausen’s cruiser nearly head-on. She was thrown from the car and killed; Caravaggio sustained serious injuries but later recovered and returned to work.
State prosecutors initially charged Rheaume with felony negligent operation and attempt to elude, both with death resulting, and he was released on bail.
But in April 2024, Rutland County State’s Attorney Ian Sullivan filed the new, enhanced charge of aggravated murder and convinced a judge to hold Rheaume without bail pending trial.
In court filings, the prosecutor noted that a reconstruction of the crash appears to show that Rheaume neither slowed down nor attempted to avoid Ebbighausen’s cruiser before the collision.
Prosecutors typically reserve aggravated murder for the most severe acts of violence. Only four people have been convicted of the charge over the past 20 years, according to data from the state court system.
Two were men who sexually assaulted and murdered young women, while the other two both committed double homicides. Other aggravated murder cases are pending against a man accused of sexually assaulting and killing his 82-year-old neighbor and another defendant who stands accused of fatally shooting his father, stepmother and 13-year-old stepbrother.
Second-degree murder carries a potential life sentence, but defendants can introduce evidence that mitigates their responsibility in a bid for less time. A jury might consider, for instance, whether a defendant had a mental health issue that affected their decision-making.
An aggravated-murder conviction all but guarantees someone will die in prison.
Judges have no such discretion in aggravated murder cases. A conviction all but guarantees someone will die in prison.
Justifying an aggravated murder charge requires prosecutors to prove at least one of eight elements existed at the time of a crime. Sullivan cited three that he believes apply to Rheaume, including that the defendant knew the victim of his crime to be a law enforcement officer performing “official duties.”
Both the trial court judge and the Vermont Supreme Court have said they believe the state could convince a jury to sign off on the aggravated murder charge. Those determinations were made during the bail process, however, when judges are required to consider evidence in a light most favorable to the state.
Sleigh has told Seven Days he plans to challenge the legitimacy of the charge before the case heads to trial, in part by introducing evidence that he says will cast doubt on the theory that Rheaume purposefully crashed into Ebbighausen. “The visibility of approaching vehicles was sufficiently obstructed [so] that no one could see what the nature of the oncoming traffic was,” Sleigh said.
Even if Sleigh doesn’t get the charge tossed, the police department’s internal affairs review of the fatal crash could lead a jury to think twice before deciding to send Rheaume to prison for the rest of his life.
As previously reported by Seven Days, the nine-page report, completed by former Rutland City commander Sam Delpha, concluded that more experienced officers made a series of “egregious” errors that contributed to their colleague’s death.
Delpha wrote that responding officers never should have pursued Rheaume after he fled the scene of a reported break-in and that supervisors should have called off the chase well before its deadly end. He tallied 16 policy violations in total between four officers, including one for Ebbighausen, for not wearing her seat belt.
“The death of Officer Ebbighausen WAS preventable,” Delpha’s report states. “This incident and more specifically the pursuit should have never happened.” Delpha, who has since retired, could not be reached for comment.
Kilcullen has said he does not remember exactly when Delpha submitted the report. But he told the city’s police commission in March 2025 that he’d received a copy and would brief them in the coming weeks.
Instead, he remained quiet about the report’s findings. Kilcullen defended that decision in an interview with Seven Days last month, saying he did not want to compromise Rheaume’s right to a fair trial.
But that decision flew in the face of advice from state prosecutors, who had explicitly informed him that a failure to disclose the report to the defense team could jeopardize the entire case.
Over the course of 18 months, Sullivan wrote to Kilcullen several times to ask about the status of the internal affairs review, according to emails Seven Days received through a public records request.
The first inquiry, on April 19, 2024, came about a week after Sullivan filed the enhanced charge against Rheaume. Delpha’s investigation was ramping up, and Sullivan wanted to remind the chief that any reports produced would need to be shared with the defense as part of the discovery process.
He noted that in 2023, Sleigh defended a man who was accused of assaulting a Vermont state trooper. Sleigh managed to get the case thrown out because the Attorney General’s Office did not disclose internal “use of force” reports related to the incident until the eve of trial.
“Beyond my desire to make sure we fulfill our discovery obligation, I want to avoid a situation where the case is harmed,” Sullivan wrote.
Sullivan followed up with Kilcullen in May 2024 and again in June 2025 to reiterate the importance of disclosing the report. The prosecutor said he understood the city may not want to release the findings unless it was served a subpoena and said he would be happy to issue one once the investigation was complete.
Sullivan wrote to the chief a fourth time last September to ask for an update. But it was not until Sleigh sent a subpoena later that month that Kilcullen coughed up the report.
On December 20, two weeks after media outlets broke news of the report’s findings, Rutland City’s citizen-led police commission held a closed-door meeting. Afterward, the panel announced that oversight of the department would be handed over to an interim police chief, while Kilcullen would stay on to assist in a “limited capacity” until his upcoming retirement.
Two days later, Sullivan sent defense attorneys around Rutland County a copy of Brady letters that he had issued against Kilcullen and Delpha over their failure to send him the report. He cited Kilcullen’s statements to Seven Days and accused him in particular of attempting to shape the outcome of Rheaume’s trial.
“The prosecution did not tell Chief Kilcullen that suppression of evidence favorable to the defense is acceptable,” Sullivan wrote. “Quite to the contrary, we sought the internal investigation materials so we could disclose them to the defense.”
Now that the report has become public, however, Sullivan is attempting to block it from being introduced as evidence, arguing that none of the policy violations cited in the report amount to a permissible legal defense.
“Each and every action or inaction [Delpha] took issue with in the officers’ conduct, could not, without Mr. Rheaume’s decisions and actions, have caused this fatal crash,” Sullivan wrote in a recent court filing.
Sullivan declined to comment for this story, while Kilcullen did not respond to an interview request.
Sleigh, meanwhile, said the problematic police response and Rheaume’s subsequent decision-making are inextricably linked and cannot be overlooked.
“They knew they had violated core police principles — that if they had been good cops, this wouldn’t have happened — and then they buried the report,” Sleigh said. “That has significance beyond the question of legality. That goes to the humanity of it.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Pursuit and Justice | A Rutland Police internal affairs report could complicate a criminal case stemming from the crash that killed a department recruit”
This article appears in January 21 • 2026.
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