Miralle Case Expected to Go to Jury Today

Circumstantial evidence and tire tracks, coupled with his conduct before and after his wife’s disappearance, spell out a La Canada Flintridge man’s guilt in her murder, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Donald Miralle, a civil engineer with an office in Pasadena, smiled and once nearly laughed as Deputy Dist. Atty. Elizabeth Elwood summed up seven weeks of testimony in Miralle’s trial in San Bernardino County Superior Court.

The case is expected to go to the jury today.

Authorities charged Miralle, 47, with strangling his wife, Tessie, on Sept. 12, 1990, and burning her body along a dirt road 15 miles northwest of Victorville.

Since then, Elwood argued, Miralle has gained his children’s sympathy and support. Since his release on $500,000 bail last November, the defendant has lived at home with his family.

“He’s turned his children against their mother,” Elwood said. “You heard them all testify.”

Miralle and his three children smiled in apparent derision when Elwood suggested that Miralle’s daughter, Anita, invented a story to protect her father in which others had motives to kill her mother.

Although Anita Miralle, 20, at first told police that she suspected her father of foul play when her mother failed to return home, her attitude changed when she realized that “there wouldn’t be anyone to write her $700 checks when she screwed up her checking account,” Elwood said.

Anita Miralle testified about threats to her mother over a soured business deal and about a loan-sharking operation she said her mother ran.

Defense lawyers contended the case against Miralle was largely circumstantial and that others had motives to kill Tessie Miralle.

Besides her loans at high rates of interest and the soured business deals, the defense tried during the case to present testimony about Tessie Miralle’s alleged ties to a Philippine underworld through a mysterious Madame X. But Judge Frederick A. Mandabach refused to allow the Madame X theory before the jury.

During the closing arguments, Anita, Dawn Miralle, 15, and Donald Miralle Jr., 17, sat together in the front row behind their father. Brothers, sisters-in-law and friends of Tessie Miralle sat across the aisle.

Elwood said Tessie Miralle believed that her husband was having an affair and had threatened a costly divorce.

As evidence of Donald Miralle’s intent, Elwood cited books on booby traps, guerrilla warfare and incendiary devices, as well as 100 feet of cannon fuse that Miralle ordered in 1988 from a Washington military surplus company.

Investigators said cannon fuse ignited Tessie Miralle’s body, which had been stuffed into a 33-gallon plastic trash can and doused with a flammable liquid.

Motioning toward Miralle, Elwood said: “You’re a smart guy and you want to kill your wife, so what do you do? Ask somebody? Take a class? Read a book? You can’t ask somebody. There are no classes in murdering your wife.”

She also said Miralle did not seem overly concerned after his wife’s disappearance, or saddened after her death.

Elwood said the most compelling evidence was tire tracks left near Tessie Miralle’s body. A prosecution expert said those tracks matched tires Donald Miralle removed from his Chevrolet Suburban three days after his wife’s disappearance.

Defense attorney A. Brent Carruth, however, pointed out the prosecution’s expert testified on cross-examination that he did not find a wear marking that would make his identification positive. A defense tire expert said the tires and tracks did not match.

He said Elwood’s charge that Anita Miralle would betray her mother for money was “a bit of an insult.”

Carruth said in his closing that the state had not mustered any real evidence against his client and that the jury had been lied to.

“It’s like this: If those tires don’t fit, does anything else matter?” Carruth said after court.