ANAHEIM : Murder Defendant Claims Deception

One of three defendants on trial for murder testified Wednesday that she was unaware that the briefcase she carried into the home of an Anaheim couple contained .45-caliber and 9-millimeter handguns and a pair of handcuffs.

Nanette Scheid, 29, told jurors she thought she was carrying $20,000 in cash for her boyfriend, co-defendant Robert (T-Bone) Taylor. Taylor and Scheid, accompanied by another man, told Kazumi and Ryoko Hanano on the evening of July 10, 1988, that they were interested in buying their mint-condition 1984 black Corvette.

After Scheid left the house, the Hananos were handcuffed by Taylor and a partner. Ryoko Hanano, 60, was shot to death; Kazumi Hanano, now 65, survived two bullets to the back of the head but was left permanently paralyzed.

Taylor, 39, has admitted that he shot the Hananos and stole their car. Co-defendant Norman James Dewitt has been identified by Scheid, Taylor and Hanano as the other party present.

If convicted, Taylor and Dewitt, 34, both face possible death sentences. Prosecutors are seeking a murder conviction, but not the death penalty, against Scheid.

Hanano has testified that the guns the two men drew could only have come from the briefcase that Scheid carried into the house.

“I assumed the briefcase contained the money T-Bone would use to buy the car,” Scheid testified Wednesday.

But when Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown handed her the briefcase in the courtroom, her hand almost dropped from its weight. Brown walked back to the counsel table and opened it. He had placed both guns back inside.

“You knew this briefcase didn’t have any money in it (that night), because it was too heavy, didn’t you?” Brown asked her.

“It wasn’t that heavy at the time,” Scheid insisted.

Scheid spent a full day testifying, telling jurors that she did not know about the shootings until her arrest three days later. She said she never reads newspaper or watches TV, and by then had split from Taylor because he had too many women around him.

Scheid said she had met Taylor about a week before. She had left her parents’ Newport Beach home after a family dispute and was staying with friends when Taylor offered to let her stay at a house where he was living in Sunset Beach.

Prosecutors contend that it was Scheid who set up the ruse of wanting to buy the Hananos’ Corvette so the three defendants could then steal the car and eliminate the Hananos as witnesses. Taylor was arrested driving the Hananos’ car.

Scheid denied that she knew that Taylor planned to kill. She said he had told her that he had received some money from an insurance settlement, and she did not know him well enough to doubt him.

But prosecutor Brown pointed out to her that Taylor was “mooching” off friends for a place to live, and by all appearances was broke.

“You knew he had no job, no money, no car, no nothing,” Brown told her.