The State - News from Oct. 24, 1988

An 11-year-old boy’s secret tape-recording of his mother’s killing was played in court on the first day of the trial of a man charged with fatally shooting his wife while family members watched. “Help, help please. . . . My dad just shot my mother,” 12-year-old Shawna Lockhart is heard telling police on the phone after seven shots ring out during a quarrel between her father and stepmother. Robert Ray Lockhart, a former Riverside firefighter, is charged with murdering Susan Lockhart, whose son by a previous marriage secretly made the recording that was played in Riverside Superior Court. Lockhart’s attorney said the killing was manslaughter, a rash act with no advanced planning, prompted by tension over the wife’s alleged verbal and mental abuse of the children. Susan Lockhart was killed June 6, 1987, in the couple’s home in front of the two children--Shawna and her stepbrother Christopher Allen Moody, who was in the hallway with the tape recorder--and the victim’s stepfather, Escal E. Thornton.