Roommate Pleads Guilty to Killing Elderly Woman : Courts: In plea bargain, the prosecutor says that Mary Asbury felt as if she was ‘treated like a dog’ by the 79-year-old victim, who was dismembered.

A Chula Vista woman pleaded guilty Thursday to charges of suffocating her roommate, whose dismembered body was left on the street in Coronado.

Mary Louise Asbury, 59, pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree murder for killing Lillian B. Shepherd, 79, whose torso was discovered by joggers April 30.

Asbury told Municipal Court Judge Joan P. Weber that she killed the elderly woman under her care more than three weeks before the remains were found. Weber will sentence Asbury on Aug. 28 to serve 15 years to life in state prison.

In a plea bargain, prosecutors agreed to drop first-degree murder charges and a special allegation of using a deadly weapon, a pillow.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lori Koster said the motive for the killing was “deterioration in their relationship,” in which Shepherd paid Asbury $50 a week to assist with cleaning, cooking and driving.

“She gave two reasons for committing the murder,” Koster said. “One was that she was being treated like a dog. She felt that Lillian Shepherd wasn’t treating her well.

“The second reason she gave was that she wanted to help Lillian join her dead husband--whose name was Dutch--in heaven. She said she went in in the morning, and she saw her lying there peacefully and decided to smother her.”

Koster said Asbury admitted disposing of Shepherd’s head, arms and legs in a South Bay trash bin behind a supermarket. Those remains were never recovered.

Though Asbury was a beneficiary of Shepherd’s life insurance policy, Koster said, there was no evidence that the killing was motivated by financial gain. Asbury had access to the victim’s checking account and safe-deposit box, but the only money taken was used to pay for rent and essential items.

Asbury told investigators that, after killing Shepherd on April 5, she took the body to a shed behind the mobile home they shared in the 1500 block of 3rd Avenue in Chula Vista. Asbury used a hacksaw to cut up the corpse because she suffers from emphysema and was not strong enough to move the body in one piece, according to her statements and the coroner’s report.

Asbury said she stored the torso on the porch of the mobile home for several weeks before dumping the plastic-wrapped remains along a road in Coronado.

When asked to explain Shepherd’s absence in April, Asbury told everyone that she had requested a ride to Pomona to visit a relative and ordered Asbury to drop her off in a restaurant parking lot, said a friend of both women who identified herself only as Ida.

“This is a big shock,” she said. “We all thought Mary was a very good friend of Lillian’s, (and) she was very good to her.”