Delon Murder Trial Winds Down : Courts: Defense stresses battered-wife argument, prosecutors say defendant’s statements contradict the evidence. Jury will begin deliberating today.

Closing arguments in the Kimberly Delon homicide trial continued Tuesday, with her defense attorney stressing that Delon was an innocent woman battered by her husband.

Meanwhile, the prosecution hammered away at “serious problems” in Delon’s statements that contradict the physical evidence in the case.

The jury will begin deliberating today whether the Aug. 31 stabbing death of Bernard Delon, 34, was an act of self-defense.

According to her attorney, Kimberly Delon, 34, stabbed her husband five times when he allegedly “pinned her down in bed and began choking her.” Kimberly Delon claims she buried her husband in a front-yard garden to protect her children from the sight.

In defense attorney Charles Goldberg’s closing arguments, he told jurors that the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Barber, “mischaracterized evidence and attempted to lead you in the wrong direction.”

Delon did not dig a man-size hole in her garden in order to bury her husband, as the prosecutor claimed; rather, she was preparing to plant a summer crop, Goldberg said.

In discussing the most troublesome aspect of the killing, Goldberg attempted to convince the jury that his client was “paralyzed with shock” when she decided to bury his body in the garden.

Goldberg also asserted that the idea to bury the body came from Bernard Delon himself. Goldberg played a jailhouse interview tape-recorded one week after the killing in which Kimberly Delon describes what her husband said.

“ ‘Do you love your garden?’ ” Kimberly Delon said her husband asked her. “ ‘Then, I’m going to kill you and put you in your garden. You can spend the rest of your life in your garden.’ ”

After Goldberg concluded his argument, Barber, the prosecutor, discussed what she said were contradictions between Delon’s self-defense story and physical evidence, such as the hidden knife and a pool of blood on the couple’s bed.

Barber ridiculed the idea that Kimberly Delon stabbed her husband during a struggle, because so much blood had pooled on the bed that it was dripping onto the floor. If there was a fight, then blood would have been all over the bed, Barber said.

The prosecutor also questioned the lack of “defensive wounds” on Bernard Delon’s hands and forearms.

A knife hidden in the bed, apparently for Kimberly Delon’s protection because her husband worked late at night and there had been several robberies in the area of the couple’s Solana Beach home, was removed by Delon’s mother-in-law weeks before the killing.

Even though Kimberly Delon denied any knowledge of the knife being removed, there is no evidence that anyone else replaced the extremely sharp fishing knife used in the killing, the prosecutor said.

If convicted by the jury, Delon faces a maximum sentence of 15 years to life in prison.