Trial Begins in 21-Year-Old Murder Case : Suspect Found After Seeking Social Security Under Real Name

If only Armando Liberati had not applied for Social Security benefits under his real name when he turned 65 early this year, the gaunt, graying retiree would no doubt still be living quietly in South Philadelphia.

Instead, Liberati, who left Los Angeles 21 years ago and took the assumed name Albert Abbonizio, was seated in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, fidgeting as his ex-wife, Mary Ann Carter, testified against him in his trial for a murder he allegedly committed more than two decades ago.

Liberati, who could face life imprisonment if convicted, is accused of stabbing Carter’s lover, Fred Shaheen, in the heart in an attack outside her Hollywood apartment on Sept. 12, 1964. According to authorities, Liberati had learned that Shaheen planned to wed Carter, from whom Liberati was divorced a year earlier.

Authorities finally tracked down Liberati last February after learning that he had filed for retirement benefits.

He would still be free, said the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Allan S. Tyson, “if he hadn’t used his original Social Security number or his real name.”

“This is a story of possessive, jealous love,” Tyson told the jury in his opening statement this week, noting that the case “is the oldest one I’ve found where someone actually got arrested 20 years later under another name.”

“Miss Carter met Mr. Liberati at a dance (in 1961). From that point on, Mr. Liberati became very possessive of Miss Carter. She found him at her door the next morning, even though she had not given him her phone number or address. And he started to essentially hound her.”

Carter spoke calmly on the stand, although she refused to look directly at her mustachioed former husband. She told jurors she agreed to marry Liberati within months after they met because he repeatedly threatened to stab her if she refused.

“That was his favorite expression,” Carter asserted.

By early 1962, the witness continued, she had left Liberati. But he still bothered her, she said, even after their divorce became final a year later.

Shaheen was killed, she said, after Liberati showed up as she was leaving for work on the morning of Sept. 12, 1964, walking arm-in-arm with Shaheen.

Carter, appearing to contradict her testimony at the preliminary hearing, said she did not actually see the two men fighting because she could not see their arms. But clearly, she noted, “they were not dancing.”

Moreover, Carter said, she heard Shaheen yell, “He got me!”

A brief struggle followed between Carter and Liberati during which she, too, was stabbed before her former husband fled.

Before she could call police, she said, her phone rang and, “It was (Liberati’s) voice. He said, ‘How does it feel to be stabbed in the back?’ ”

In his own opening statements, defense counsel Charles E. Lloyd said the death resulted from an “eternal triangle. . . . The decedent was Mr. Liberati’s best friend. He did beg his ex-wife not to go out with this man.”

The lawyer questioned the prosecution’s account, noting that “Miss Carter didn’t see a knife or anything.”

Lloyd said he will contend that his client was merely defending himself in a struggle with Shaheen.

Liberati, who had come to California from Philadelphia about 15 years before Shaheen’s death, has told authorities that he worked in a Philadelphia restaurant after leaving Los Angeles two days after the incident.

Philadelphia Police Detective Daniel Rosenstein testified that Liberati told police there that he “lost (his) head” when he saw the couple together.

“ ‘I took a knife, and I don’t remember what happened,’ ” Rosenstein quoted Liberati as telling him.