Trial Opens for Man Accused of Murdering 90-Year-Old Woman

Testifying as trial began Tuesday for the man accused of killing his wife, a 90-year-old Ventura man looked at defendant Kevin Kolodziej and said: “That’s him there.”

Aiming a wooden pointer at the 25-year-old Kolodziej, Clyde R. Johnson identified him as the disheveled man that he encountered wandering outside his Agnus Drive house on Jan. 17.

A few minutes later, Johnson said, he and his grandson found his wife, 90-year-old Velasta Johnson, sprawled in her favorite chair, a fatal knife wound in her chest.

Johnson’s testimony, unemotional and almost matter-of-fact for two hours, ended on an unusual note with a brief exchange with the judge who will decide Kolodziej’s fate.

Before leaving the witness stand, Johnson started to say a few words to the judge, ignoring efforts by his daughter to gently steer him away. When Superior Court Judge James M. McNally said it would be improper for them to discuss the case, the 90-year-old Johnson persisted, reaching over to take the judge’s hand.

“I just want to shake your hand, because you’re a good boy,” Johnson said.

“I guess it’s all relative,” the judge replied, “when you’re a 57-year-old boy.”

The exchange was one of a few light moments in otherwise grim testimony during the first day of the murder trial of Kolodziej, a transient from Virginia with a history of mental illness.

Steve P. Lipson, one of two deputy public defenders representing Kolodziej, said Clyde Johnson’s comments to the judge were harmless because McNally is hearing the case without a jury.

“It won’t affect McNally,” Lipson said.

Both Lipson and Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris frequently had to repeat their questions to the hard-of-hearing Johnson, even after McNally turned up the volume on the public address system.

For the most part, Johnson repeated the account that he had given at Kolodziej’s preliminary hearing in February:

Just before 8 a.m. that Friday, as he left on his daily walk to a doughnut shop, Johnson encountered a disheveled man on the sidewalk. The man asked Johnson if he had a place to take a shower, and Johnson said no. The last he saw of the man, he was heading up the driveway of Johnson’s next-door neighbor’s house.

Suspicious, Johnson returned to his home and summoned his grandson, he testified. They searched the neighbor’s yard but found no one.

The grandson, Kevin Hildreth, 31, testified that he returned home after the search and found his grandmother mortally wounded.

In his opening statement, Kossoris said Kolodziej--who had just walked away from the nearby Ventura County Medical Center, still dressed in hospital garb--had entered the Johnson house to take a shower and get food. When he encountered the elderly woman, Kolodziej grabbed a large knife from atop a pie and stabbed her, then stashed the weapon in a closet, Kossoris said.

As for Kolodziej’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, Kossoris said: “Nobody disputes that the defendant has significant mental problems. . . . Nevertheless, he had a clear intent and a motive.”

In his opening remarks, Lipson conceded that Kolodziej stabbed the victim. But he said the defendant is so seriously mentally ill that “it causes him to perceive reality differently.”

While Kolodziej was in the hospital for self-inflicted stab wounds, Lipson said, two county psychologists had urged that he be locked up for psychiatric treatment as soon as he was discharged. He said one doctor had called Kolodziej psychotic and the other diagnosed his problem as schizophrenia.

But Ventura police officers who found Kolodziej shortly after he left the hospital were not aware of the psychologists’ lockup recommendation, Lipson said, and they let him go.

After wandering from house to house, trying in vain to get a shower, “by now he is really deteriorating,” Lipson said, because of stress and inability to get assistance.

“He went to the victim’s house like he went to the others--to get help,” Lipson said. “ Nothing was taken. There was no intent to steal, there was no intent to kill.”

Testimony resumes today in the trial, which is expected to last about three weeks.