Woman’s Trial Begins in Fatal Stabbing of 9-Year-Old Girl : Courts: Defendant accused of knifing victim more than 50 times to eliminate potential witness. Defense denies she is capable of such violence.

Nine-year-old Autumn Wallace was playing with crayons and scissors when her older sister’s friend lured her into the bathroom where she brutally stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife, a prosecutor charged Monday.

Maria del Rosio Alfaro, 20, of Anaheim knew Autumn was home alone on June 15, 1990, when she planned to burglarize the house, Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles J. Middleton said at the start of Alfaro’s trial in Superior Court on Monday.

Alfaro killed the girl--stabbing her at least 50 times--to get rid of a potential witness, Middleton told the jury. As the prosecutor talked, he held up pictures of Autumn, her face and body covered with bloody knife gashes.

Leaving the child lying in a pool of blood, Alfaro “methodically went through the house” and looted items she could sell to get money to support her drug habit, the prosecutor said.

Alfaro’s attorney, William M. Monroe, painted a different scenario during the court session.

Although his client admitted being at the house the day Autumn was killed, a man who drove her there did the actuall killing, Monroe said. He also told jurors that Alfaro had been injecting cocaine and heroin that day and was too high to have committed the gruesome crime.

The defense attorney said he doesn’t think that Alfaro, who has four young children, is capable of violence. Much like little Autumn, he maintained, Alfaro was “only a part of that tragedy.”

Alfaro was arrested two weeks after the killing when investigators found her thumbprint in the bathroom and a blood-stained shoe print matching what prosecutors said was a sole of the shoes Alfaro purportedly wore that afternoon. She is charged with murder, burglary and robbery.

Prosecutors also charged Alfaro with murder involving special circumstances, alleging that she did the killing during the commission of a robbery and burglary. If convicted of the special allegations, Alfaro could face the death penalty.

She is being held in Orange County Jail with no bail.

Autumn, a popular student at Jonas E. Salk Elementary School in Anaheim, was waiting for her mother, Linda Wallace, and older sister, April, to come home from work on the afternoon of her death.

Linda Wallace testified Monday that she came home that afternoon to find neighbors crowding around her front yard. She frantically searched through her house and found a virtual blood bath in her bathroom where her daughter’s lifeless body lay on the floor, she said.

“I just started screaming and started crying,” Wallace said quietly on the stand.

In a taped interview with detectives after her arrest, Alfaro reportedly admitted going to the house with her baby and two men, one she knew as “Shorty,” and the other she had just met. While Shorty and the other man waited outside with her son, Alfaro went to the house and asked Autumn if she could use the restroom, according to a transcript of the interview.

Autumn apparently knew Alfaro, who was a friend of April Wallace and had been to the house numerous times.

Once inside, Alfaro almost immediately plotted to kill the child, Middleton charged. She apparently found a knife while going through the kitchen, he said.

Autumn had been cutting and pasting papers, Middleton said, when Alfaro lured her to the bathroom on the pretense of getting the girl to help her clean an eyelash curler, which was later found on the floor near her feet.

After the little girl was killed, Middleton said, Alfaro proceeded to rummage through the house and stole electronic equipment, a telephone and clothes. Alfaro reportedly told investigators that she later sold the stolen goods for money for drugs, according to a court transcript.

Monroe, the defense attorney, said that Alfaro was under duress during the interview and that authorities may have coerced the alleged confession. He said his investigators are still searching for the unidentified man who drove Alfaro to the house.

“I believe the other guy we’re looking for is the perpetrator,” Monroe said.