Terror Led to Killing, Widow Claims : Crime: Solana Beach woman buried her husband in garden because he had vowed to do the same to her, according to testimony.

The night she stabbed him to death, Kimberly Delon told investigators, she faced a husband panting with anger, threatening to kill her because she had embarrassed him in front of his mother.

Bernard Delon said he would bury her in the garden plot alongside the driveway of their Solana Beach home that she so carefully tended with corn and tomatoes and pumpkins, she said.

As he lay across her in their bed and tried to strangle her, she told detectives, she reached down beneath the mattress, used two fingers to tease out a knife with an 8-inch blade that was there to fend off burglars, grabbed it and stabbed him, first in the chest and then in the back.

As his body lay on the family-room floor for two hours, she said, she wondered what to do. Then, she said, because his words repeatedly rang out in her mind--”in your garden, in your garden”--she decided her next step.

She buried her husband in that very garden plot.

So went the testimony at Monday’s preliminary hearing before Municipal Judge Donald Rudloff in Vista, on charges that Kimberly Delon murdered her French-born husband of five years, tried to conceal the death so she wouldn’t startle her two children and then, at her mother’s behest, called authorities a day later.

Delon, 34, already has admitted killing him, but said she did so in self-defense after three back-to-back nights of horror and a history of spousal abuse. The district attorney’s office is prosecuting Delon for murder, and suggested during Monday’s testimony that the killing might have been premeditated.

Delon did not testify herself, but her memory of the night was recalled by the sheriff’s homicide detective who, along with the prosecutor, interviewed her about the Aug. 31 killing a week later.

Detective Robert B. Sams was called to the stand as a prosecution witness, but defense attorney Charles Goldberg used the opportunity for the detective to recite the facts of the night as they were related to him by Delon herself in a jailhouse interview.

The killing followed three nights of terror, according to various witnesses and Delon herself.

First, there was the midweek beach party, when Bernard Delon was outraged that he had been prohibited by a lifeguard from building a bonfire. He cursed America and blamed his wife, said Kimberly Delon’s mother, Charlotte Mann.

“It became her fault,” she said of how her son-in-law directed his anger about the beach fire toward Kimberly. “Everything is her fault,” she said of his attitude.

Then, on the Thursday night before the killing, he was angry that his wife forgot to have a parking receipt validated at a restaurant after the couple dined with Bernard Delon’s mother, who was to return home to France the next day.

Kimberly Delon returned to the restaurant to have the parking receipt validated, returned to the car and threw it at him, remarking, “You were supposed to take care of this when you pay the bill,” Mann said, quoting her daughter. He responded, “You’ll pay for this,” Mann said, again quoting her daughter.

The argument carried to their home, where Bernard Delon grabbed his wife’s hair and threw her against a bedroom wall, bruising her so badly that she couldn’t bear to be touched the next day, Mann testified.

Friday night, after the couple went to bed, Bernard Delon’s mother called to say she had arrived safely home in France. It was unclear what mother and son talked about during the 1 a.m. call, but, after he returned to bed, he attacked his wife and accused her of embarrassing him about the parking validation in front of his mother, Kimberly Delon told an investigator.

Sams said Delon quoted her husband as saying, “I’m going to make you suffer for what you did in front of my mother. I’m going to make you suffer for this.”

“He started heaving and ranting. He called her stupid, was sick of her and her mother, and America,” Sams quoted the woman’s recollection of the night.

Bernard Delon had told his wife, she said, that the couple’s two children, ages 3 and 5, “were his children. He had made them, and he could do with them whatever he wanted to.” He said he could “destroy” the children, Kimberly Delon told Sam.

“She felt to herself that he was going mad,” Sams said of the murder defendant. “She felt he was trying to kill her.”

According to her interview with him, her husband had first put his hand on her mouth, then across her neck, and put his full body weight against her as she lay in bed. The pressure of his fingers on her neck was still evident two days later, the defense contended.

“He threatened to kill her. He was panting. He said she loved her garden, and he said he was going to kill her and bury her in her garden,” Sams said, paraphrasing Delon’s own remarks to him last month.

The woman told the detective: “I kept hearing, over and over and over and over again, ‘in your garden, in your garden, I’m going to put you in your garden where you’ll spend the rest of your life.’ ”

So, Kimberly Delon decided, she would put his body in the garden, “so when the police come, he’ll be right there,” alongside the driveway, she told Sams.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Barber showed that Kimberly Delon initially made up two different stories to hide the killing before she came clean with her mother on Sunday, Sept. 1.

On Saturday morning, just hours after the killing, she asked her mother to take the two children, Mann said. And, when Mann asked about the red stains on the carpeting, she said her daughter told her that Bernard had thrown a glass of red wine in a fit of anger. Such an act would have been consistent with Bernard’s temper tantrums, Mann said.

In fact, Kimberly Delon on Saturday called a carpet cleaning company and told them that she had hemorrhaged during a miscarriage.

A neighbor also testified Monday that Kimberly Delon had been working in her garden shortly before the killing.

Under questioning from the prosecutor, James O’Farrell said he remembered seeing Kimberly Delon hoeing her garden “very vigorously” on either the Thursday evening or Friday evening before the killing.

“It seemed unusual to me . . . that she’d be out there at that hour, hoeing the ground very vigorously,” O’Farrell testified.

But Carol Zeis, the next door neighbor, said she frequently saw Kimberly Delon working on her garden plantings, at “7 in the morning, and after work.”

Dr. Mark Super, a deputy San Diego County medical examiner, said Bernard Delon was stabbed twice in the back and three times in the chest.

Super said he couldn’t be sure in what order the stabbings occurred, or in what positions the husband and wife would have been in, relative to each other, to allow for the various directions of the stabbings.

Goldberg said he would call several witnesses to the stand today, and said he fully expects his client to be bound over for trial, where he will try to show a jury that Kimberly Delon killed her husband in self-defense.

vista municipal court judge Donald Rudloff