Woman Pleads Guilty in O.C. Murder Plot

A 20-year-old woman pleaded guilty Friday to voluntary manslaughter in the suffocation of an elderly Mission Viejo man and agreed to testify against three others, including the man’s daughter.

A few hours after she entered the plea, one of the accused, 21-year-old Miguel (Mike) Ruiz, was arrested near his Garden Grove home.

Prosecutors claim Ruiz and Charles Clemmens, 20, of Anaheim, were hired by Deborah Ann Werner to kill her 72-year-old father, David Werner, on April 15, 1989, while he slept in the townhouse they shared.

Carrie Marie Chidester of Huntington Beach, who pleaded guilty Friday, admitted she had arranged it for Werner.

Chidester claims she did not benefit financially from the killing. She told authorities she did it because she and Werner, 40, whom she often called “Mom,” were friends. Clemmens was her boyfriend at the time and Ruiz a close friend.

The friendship among the four began to unravel soon after the first arrests. Within a week after the killing, Clemmens and Chidester confessed their roles in the slaying to authorities.

According to those confessions, and other testimony from pretrial prosecution witnesses, Werner told several others that her father had said he didn’t want to live anymore, and that she therefore wanted him dead. But she also told at least two people she wanted him dead because he bossed her around and interfered with her freedom. One woman testified that Werner complained her father would not let her daughter and granddaughter visit.

Police have gathered some evidence that Werner, along with two stepbrothers, stood to inherit some money and insurance from her father, but the amounts remain unclear.

Clemmens has said he killed Werner for a promise of $2,000 and that Ruiz agreed to do it for a check for $3,000, with a promise of another $1,000 later.

A week after the killing, Clemmens sat in a sheriff’s interrogation room and tried to coax Chidester by telephone into making damning statements about her role, with authorities listening in.

Chidester, two hours later, sat in that same interrogation room and tried to coax Werner by telephone into making similar damning admissions, court records show.

Werner and Ruiz have both denied they were involved. But at a pretrial hearing, one witness testified that Werner first tried to hire him to kill her father, but he refused. A friend of Werner’s testified at the same hearing that Werner said she wanted her father dead for his own good, and that she might ask friends of her daughters to kill him.

Chidester, Clemmens and Ruiz were all friends of her daughter, Cynthia Debolt.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Bernadette Cemore made clear to the court Friday before Chidester’s plea that he was reducing her charges only in exchange for her testimony against the others.

“And do you understand that if you do not testify truthfully against (all three co-defendants), first-degree murder charges can be reinstated against you?” Cemore asked.

Chidester, crying throughout the plea hearing, answered “yes” while she sobbed.

Later, Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin allowed Chidester and her mother, sitting in the courtroom, to engage in a tearful hug before Chidester was returned to the Orange County Jail.

Before her guilty plea Friday, Chidester faced life in prison without parole if convicted on murder charges. Now the maximum sentence she faces is 11 years.

Her sentencing will be postponed until after the other three stand trial. But prosecutor Cemore told the court her office will recommend the maximum sentence for voluntary manslaughter, which is 11 years.

Although Cemore has not discussed the case outside the courtroom, several others involved said the prosecutor had no choice but to offer Chidester a deal in an effort to convict Ruiz.

“The minute either Chidester or Clemmens makes a deal, Ruiz will be arrested,” one attorney involved had predicted months ago.

Clemmens also had volunteered to testify against the other three, but prosecutors refused to seriously negotiate with him. Clemmens, Ruiz and Werner all face sentences of life without parole if convicted, because they are accused of murder “for financial gain.”

In recent months, Werner wrote an angry letter to the court, denying her guilt and offering a bizarre proposition: If charges against her were dropped, she would renounce her American citizenship and move to Canada.

“If I am allowed to leave, and if I ever come into the U.S., I will turn myself in and you or whoever can lock me up and throw away the key. I am even willing to wear an electronic device and pay for it.”

She added that, if permitted to go to Canada, “I will also go into therapy to help me get over the trauma of this whole nightmare.”

She also chided prosecutors for not being able to prove that she had ever turned over to Ruiz a $3,000 check--information Clemmens gave authorities--for killing her father. But in the taped conversation she had with Chidester, they discussed a plan for Ruiz to destroy the check.

Clemmens’ attorney, James G. Merwin, has declined to discuss the case. But Clemmens is expected to contend at his trial that Ruiz was the leader of the two.

“He’s an easygoing kind of guy,” Merwin said.

After telling authorities on April 21, 1989, in detail how the older man had vigorously tried to fight them off, and how Clemmens had stabbed him with the knife to make sure he was dead, Clemmens then said: “I don’t want to go to jail.”

Times staff writer James M. Gomez contributed to this story.