Delon Tells of Love and Terror : Acquitted: Solana Beach woman recounts what began as a whirlwind romance and ended in a deadly nightmare and a murder trial for killing her brutal husband.

Kimberly Delon’s 6-year-old daughter, Nathalie, doesn’t panic at the sound of sirens like she used to.

“She would shake and she would get sick. If she was at school, she would have to call home because she always thought the police were going to come and take me away,” Delon said Monday in her first extensive interview.

The 34-year-old Solana Beach mother of two was acquitted June 26 of murder charges after she stabbed her husband, Bernard Delon, and buried him in their front garden last August. She said he was trying to strangle her when she killed him.

The day after the trial ended, Nathalie and Kimberly Delon were getting dressed to go to a restaurant.

“We were in the bathroom, we heard an ambulance go by, and you could see it in her face: she got tense and her eyes would light up, “Delon said. “And then she said, ‘Oh, it’s OK, I don’t have to be scared any more.’ ”

A neighbor, Steve Zeis, who along with his wife was baby-sitting the Delon children when their mother was arrested in September, said there has been a change in Delon’s 4-year-old son Nicolas, too.

“He’s much more at ease. He’s been much more outgoing, and he talks more and smiles more. He’s just generally happier,” said Zeis, whose children are the same age as the Delon children.

Despite her painful, public trial, Delon still feels comfortable in the neighborhood on Lomas Santa Fe Drive and hopes she can find the money to stay there. She said her neighbors remained supportive throughout, some of them bringing her cooked meals during the trial. Others, such as Zeis and the local grocery clerks, defended her reputation during the ordeal.

“She’s the best mother I can think of outside of my wife,” Zeis said. “I would trust my kids with her, and have, before (Bernard’s death) and since then and will continue to. She’s just a warm and caring person.”

Peggy Smith, a bookkeeper at a local grocery store, said Delon has always been welcomed in the market.

“She receives hugs and kisses, and she knows that she could come in here and get those any time. She was well-loved. We all prayed, and that’s exactly what it took,” Smith said.

“We are all extremely happy for her, and we’ve become friends. When she cried, we cried.”

Delon hopes to get a part-time office job to complement the income from her wholesale mail-order knitting supplies business. She also wants to return to college to earn a degree and maybe start teaching.

“I live in a great community, a wonderful community. . . . The thought of leaving my neighbors is unheard of. I don’t want to start my new life alone,” Delon said.

While she is “not fond” of the name Delon, she plans on keeping it, instead of reverting to her maiden name of Neubert, since her children do not want a name different than hers.

Delon appeared relaxed and in good spirits, at times laughing, as she talked openly about her new life Monday, standing in stark contrast to the woman who trembled a month ago as 12 strangers were selected to sit on her jury.

“I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get out of my chair,” Delon said. “I couldn’t believe that these people who don’t know me, will never see me with my children and don’t know the real me and what’s in my heart, are going to decide my future.”

The jury selection was the beginning of the end of a trip through the criminal justice system that has left Delon with a distaste for that system.

“I only have derogatory things to say (about the justice system) . . . but it works,” Delon said.

The five-year marriage that turned violent and finally ended in death began with a whirlwind romance in an exotic South Africa resort, where Bernard Delon worked as the maitre d’hotel at a five-star restaurant and Cleveland-born Kimberly Neubert was a dancer.

Candlelit dinners and flowers? “Always . . . and dancing on the golf course in the moonlight,” Delon said.

An athletic man who ran marathons and played tennis, worked hard and was “a fun sort of person,” Bernard Delon was the kind of man that women “swoon for,” she said.

“It was very romantic. He was very, very charming. . . . He was a fraud, but he was very good at it,” said Delon, who had always wanted a family, “a little house on the lake and someone to grow old with.”

At the same time, Bernard Delon was “mean-spirited” with “a terrible temper,” she said. He would be hospitable toward people in their company, but would make derogatory remarks when they had gone.

His critical nature often was aimed at her, over trivial matters, she said.

“He used to say, ‘You breathe too much,’ ” Delon said.

Two or three months after their romance began, while she and Bernard were dirt-biking in the bush of Botswana, Kimberly Delon had an accident that ended her dancing career.

The accident left her immobile, her leg in a cast with pins implanted in it. She was at the mercy of Bernard Delon, a situation that, in retrospect, was a batterer’s dream, Delon’s attorney Charles Goldberg said.

“The batterer wants absolute control, control of their spouse, or whoever the other party is. Interestingly enough in this case, he got it from the very beginning because she was completely helpless,” said Goldberg, who sat in on the Monday interview in his office.

The accident threw the two together, Bernard Delon saying to Kimberly: “You just stay with me until you’re well enough to move,” Delon said.

Bernard Delon, who was from Paris, returned with Kimberly Delon to California in May, 1985, when they stayed with her mother in Huntington Beach. Eventually, they got an apartment on their own and, on the last day of the year, they got married in a spur-of-the-moment ceremony in Oceanside.

“It was very unexpected. We didn’t plan it. We decided in the morning and we got married that afternoon,” Delon said.

By then, Bernard Delon had already shown signs of an abusive future, signs that Kimberly Delon either didn’t see or ignored.

“All of my friends and relatives told me not to marry him,” Delon said. “I knew he was a mean person, but I just didn’t know that he was sick.”

Bernard Delon isolated her from her friends and family, kept close tabs on her, and prevented her from making new friends, she said.

But Delon said she didn’t recognize that before they got married.

“I loved him, and I was naive as, unfortunately, many women are. They think that, with enough loving and caring and tenderness, they could make it all better,” Delon said.

“I thought nobody hugged him enough as a baby, nobody sniffed him and kissed him and held him and loved him as a child, and, if I gave him that, he would be all right, and I could make him all right.”

When their first child, Nathalie, was born six years ago, Bernard Delon treated her strictly, but never hurt her physically, Delon said.

Their second child, Nicolas, was unplanned, and his birth made Bernard Delon “furious,” she said.

“He never had anything to do with our son, never. From the first day, he didn’t come to the hospital to pick him up, and he never held him or took care of him,” Delon said.

When Nicolas got seriously ill one summer, Bernard Delon ignored him, saying, “I don’t want to hear it,” Delon said.

Their marriage became increasingly strained in its last six months, and took on tones of violence, she said.

On Aug. 31, Bernard Delon threatened to bury her in the garden plot that she so carefully tended with corn, tomatoes and pumpkin, she said. As he lay across her in their bed and tried to strangle her, she said, she reached down and grabbed an 8-inch knife and stabbed him, first in the chest and then in the back. Then she dug a shallow grave in the same garden plot.

In the end, the jury of 11 women and one man apparently believed her.

But Delon characterized her first experience with law enforcement, which included two strip searches, as “totally dehumanizing.”

“I had just been nearly killed, was beat up, in shock, I was scared for my children, and they chained me by my feet, by my waist and by my hands,” she said.

During her nine days in jail, “I thought I would never see anybody I loved again. I was just completely mortified and horrified,” she said.

Her journey through the trial process was a roller coaster of stunning victories and losses, with a Municipal Court judge dismissing the murder charge last November, only for the charges to be reinstated in February by another judge. A third judge again threw out the murder charge during the trial last month.

“How many times can your hopes be dashed on the rocks before you are just wrung out?” said Delon, who never testified at her trial.

The trial itself left her feeling helpless as others testified and argued about her guilt or innocence.

“I knew that I was completely out of the driver’s seat, I was out of control, and that my part in this whole thing was pretty much finished,” Delon said.