Motive Questioned in Murder-for-Hire Trial : Courts: Defense says suspect’s girlfriend had as much reason as he did to contract for the killing of her fiance.

A defense attorney for a businessman accused of arranging to kill his secretary’s fiance so he could pursue an affair with her said Tuesday that the woman had just as much of a motive for the crime as his client.

In a rebuttal of the prosecution’s allegation that Julius F. Schill, 57, arranged the unsuccessful murder of Wilbur Constable, 26, attorney Allan H. Stokke told a U.S. District Court jury that Constable’s fiancee stood to gain more than $100,000 in life insurance benefits from his death.

“She is a very material person,” Stokke said of the fiancee, Cynthia Asher, 24. “She can be very shrewd about getting what she wants.”

Stokke also disputed the prosecution’s contention that Schill desperately wanted to have an affair with Asher, saying the San Juan Capistrano businessman had already been having sex with her in exchange for gifts and money for some time before the October, 1991, attack on Constable.

“He already had what the government alleges is his motive,” Stokke said. “He certainly would not have killed for Cynthia Asher. . . . This was not love or romance, it was simply sex for money.”

Stokke’s comments came during the first day of the trial of Schill and Richard M. Dota, a reputed member of the Genovese crime family who allegedly set up the attack on Constable at Schill’s request.

In his opening statements to the jury, Assistant U.S. Atty. Paul Seave said Schill paid Dota $21,000 to kill Constable because he was “so desperate . . . to possess his secretary.” The payment was “cloaked” to look like a business deal between Dota and Auto Photos System, a Tustin-based company where Schill was then president, the prosecutor said.

Seave said Dota then hired Blake Tek Yoon to make Constable “disappear.” Yoon, in turn, enlisted the help of two other men who assisted in luring Constable to a dark Irvine parking lot where he was beaten and shot. But Constable survived the attack.

Yoon and his two accomplices have pleaded guilty to charges of attempted murder. Taped conversations between Yoon and Dota, as well as between Asher and Schill, will be presented during the projected two-week trial, Seave said.

Dota’s attorney, federal Public Defender H. Dean Steward, also attacked the prosecution’s case, saying the government’s key witness--Yoon--”is a colossal liar of monumental proportions.”

Steward said his client was “uninvolved” in the case and was set up by Yoon, who is cooperating in exchange “for a sweetheart of a deal”: relatively little prison time.

Steward also said Yoon is making “outrageous” statements because he is trying to get a movie made about his life.

The first witness called to the stand Tuesday was Constable, who testified that on the night of Oct. 11, 1991, he got off work at Home Depot in Tustin about 11 p.m. and walked to the lot, where he found a dent in his car. On his windshield was a business card asking him to call the number on the card to settle the matter rather than reporting the accident to police.

When Constable called the number, the man who answered said his insurance company would drop him if the accident were reported and asked Constable whether he would accept $1,000 for the damage, Constable testified.

He agreed to meet the man that night because the man on the phone said he was going out of the country the next day.

Shortly after arriving back at the parking lot, Constable said, he was confronted by three men, who ordered him at gunpoint to lie down. Although he was carrying a gun, Constable told jurors that he was caught by surprise and unable to defend himself.

“I thought it was a mugging,” Constable testified. Once he was on the ground, the men beat him with baseball bats, he said, breaking at least two of them on his body.

“I distinctly remember a crushing blow to my forehead, my jaw was cracked . . . and I remember asking myself, ‘How can anything hurt so bad?’ ” Constable said. “The next thing I remember was hearing a gunshot, and it was dark.”