The State : Salcido’s First Wife in Terror

The former wife of accused wine country slayer Ramon Salcido said he was a kind and gentle suitor, but he beat her regularly after they were married. In an interview with the Fresno Bee, Debra Salcido, 27, recounted how she hid in terror in a hotel after hearing reports that her former husband had killed his wife, two of his three daughters and four others in a violent rampage. She told of one incident--in late 1983, or early 1984--in the couple’s Sonoma home when she said Ramon went into a drunken rage. “He got me onto the floor and put his knees on my arms,” she said. “He took a pair of scissors and put them right to my throat and said ‘I could kill you.’ ” She said she left Salcido three weeks after another incident in which he brandished a .22-caliber rifle when she refused to tell him where she had been that day.