Tape of Accused Tells of Husband’s Abuse, Death

In a taped interview with investigators at the Las Colinas women’s jail only a few days after her arrest, an emotional and apparently frightened Kimberly Delon described how her husband verbally and physically abused her before she grabbed a hidden knife and plunged it into his body.

Prosecutors played the tape of the unusual interview Thursday for the jury in Delon’s murder trial. It clearly buttresses her claim that she was being abused at the time of the killing, and that she buried her husband’s body in her Solana Beach vegetable garden only to hide the gruesome sight from her children.

Between fits of violent crying, Delon, 34, told Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Barber that, after the couple went to bed in the early morning hours of Aug. 31, Bernard Delon, 34, blamed her for upsetting his mother during a recent visit and said, “I’m going to make you suffer for this.”

Her agitated husband then began to pace around the bedroom, all the while berating his wife of five years, saying, “You’re so . . . stupid, I can’t stand you,” Delon recounted.

In her teary answers to Barber’s questions, Delon said her husband threatened to kill her in a slow, agonizing way similar to one he had dreamed about subjecting his stepmother to before she committed suicide.

“ ‘I’m going to kill and put you in your garden. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in your garden,’ ” Delon said her husband told her.

With his face illuminated by the glow of a clock radio, Bernard Delon then climbed on top of his wife and began to push on her jaw, she said. “From my mouth, he went down to my throat and started squeezing,” she said.

“I was feeling lightheaded, my left arm was tingling, and I thought I was going to die,” she said, barely understandable between her sobs. “I thought, my God, if I don’t do something, he’s going to kill me.”

It was at this point that she remembered there was a knife hidden in the bed: “We used it to scale the fish. It was very sharp. He gave it to me when he got his first job at night.”

Delon then used the knife to end her husband’s life. “I hit him,” she said. “I don’t know if I stabbed him or hit him, but I hit him.”

As the tape was being played in court, Delon held her head in her hands and shook her head back and forth. One of her attorneys, Ronald Frant, consoled her by putting his arm over her shoulder and handing her tissues.

After Delon landed the initial blow, she told investigators, her husband rolled off her, and while he was still on the bed, she continued to stab him.

“I jumped up as fast as I could on the bed, and I stabbed him” at least once in the back, using both hands to hold the knife, Delon said on the tape.

A struggle ensued and Bernard momentarily gained control of the knife, which led to a gash on the palm of her left hand, Delon is heard to say, while apparently showing the healing wound to investigators.

However, Bernard soon gave up fighting for control of the knife, rose from the bed, and walked into the hallway, where he collapsed on the floor and died, she said.

Delon said she then sat on the bed, watching her husband’s lifeless body for about three hours.

As Delon continued telling authorities her version of the events, she often mentioned the welfare of her children and her fear of calling the police.

Even though Bernard outweighed her by at least 50 pounds, she dragged her husband by the ankles until he was outside, she said, because she did not want her 3-year-old to see the bloody corpse.

After obtaining a dolly from the garage at the couple’s home, she wheeled his body to the freshly tilled garden and dumped him in, she said.

“I just kept hearing over and over again, ‘I’m going to put you in your garden, you’re going to spend the rest of your life there,’ ” she said.

Delon said she used her arms to cover the body with dirt.

Later that morning, Delon said, she stripped the bedsheets because there was “a pool of blood on the left side, (and) it was dripping onto the mattress and down to the carpet.” She also reported covering up the carpet with sheets so her family would not see the stains.

Delon also admitted calling a carpet-cleaning firm and telling employees that the blood had come from a miscarriage.

Police were not called until the next day, after Delon worked up the courage to tell a casual acquaintance about the killing.

“I could tell him,” she said. “He was a total stranger.”

Although Delon maintains that she acted in self-defense when she killed her husband, prosecutors charge that the slaying was premeditated, as evidenced by a very shallow grave in the front yard vegetable garden that had been dug only hours before Bernard Delon was killed.

Testimony in Delon’s trial continues today.