Case Goes to Jury in Slaying of Girl, 9 : Trial: The defense for Maria del Rosio Alfaro rests without calling witnesses. Her attorney argues that the fatal wounds were delivered by an accomplice.

A 9-year-old girl who was stabbed more than 50 times was murdered by someone with “an abandoned and malignant heart,” but that killer was not Maria del Rosio Alfaro, her attorney told jurors Thursday.

Most of the 57 stab wounds inflicted on Autumn Wallace in the bathroom of her Anaheim home were done by someone else, said attorney William M. Monroe in his closing arguments in Alfaro’s murder trial at Santa Ana Superior Court.

“Rosie Alfaro may have stabbed little Autumn Wallace, but she did not kill her,” said Monroe, who rested his case Wednesday without calling any witnesses.

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles J. Middleton, asked the jury to convict the 20-year-old Anaheim woman of first-degree murder, burglary and robbery. He used half a dozen charts on two easels and a life-size mannequin of a child to demonstrate how the killing occurred.

“You can’t get much more violence than you have in this case,” Middleton said, calling it “the most senseless killing you could imagine.”

If convicted of first-degree murder with either of two special allegations--that the murder took place in the course of a robbery or of a burglary--Alfaro, the mother of four young children, could face the death penalty and become the first woman from Orange County on Death Row.

The jury begins deliberations Monday.

According to Middleton, Autumn came home from Jonas E. Salk Elementary School, where she was an A student, on the afternoon of June 15, 1990. She was playing with crayons and cutouts, waiting for her mother and older sister to return home.

In a videotaped confession played for the jury, Alfaro said she decided to rob the house that day while high on cocaine and heroin, knowing the girl would be home alone. Alfaro told sheriff’s investigators that because she was a friend of Autumn’s older sister, she was able to gain entry to the house by telling Autumn she needed to use the bathroom.

Meanwhile, Middleton said, two male accomplices waited outside the house, baby-sitting Alfaro’s infant son.

“Where’s Rosie? She’s inside murdering Autumn,” Middleton told jurors.

Several times during her 4 1/2-hour confession, Alfaro told investigators that she alone stabbed the girl because she could identify her.

Alfaro said she took a knife from a kitchen drawer and lured the girl into the bathroom on the pretext of helping Alfaro clean her eyelash curlers.

“That’s when I did it. . . . I stabbed her . . . ‘cause she knew who I was,” Alfaro told investigators between sobs.

Then, Middleton said, after “systematically looting the place,” Alfaro sold the stolen goods for $250 to buy more drugs.

With Alfaro and members of the Wallace family weeping through much of the proceeding, both attorneys summarized their cases.

Middleton told jurors at the outset that there was so much evidence in the testimony and the 109 exhibits--including Alfaro’s confession, her fingerprint and bloody footprint in the bathroom--that he almost felt as though “I don’t have to argue at all.”

Nonetheless, the prosecutor went through a lengthy, if low-key review of the evidence, which he said was “uncontroverted” and “unusually strong.”

Monroe, at times standing behind his client, grasping Alfaro’s shoulders, acknowledged the weight of evidence against his client.

Monroe conceded that Alfaro was in the Wallace house and may have delivered “a couple of perfunctory stabs,” but added, “she was not the butcher of the little girl.”

Rather, Monroe said, one of Alfaro’s accomplices was responsible for the killing, someone Alfaro was trying to protect, someone capable of going “absolutely so berserk” as to commit such an act.

“Is there a cover-up?” Monroe asked. “Is she trying to protect someone? What’s the truth? Was there someone else in the house?”

Monroe asked the jurors repeatedly to view the videotaped confession and to analyze it for the inconsistencies in the three different versions of the crime Alfaro gave investigators.

“Butchering that little girl--does it make sense?” he asked. “(The) killing doesn’t make sense, the way it was done doesn’t make sense.”

The mortal wounds, Monroe said, could have been inflicted “by someone other than Rosie.”