3 on Trial in ’89 Death of 72-Year-Old Mission Viejo Man : Courts: Victim’s daughter faces one count of first-degree murder for allegedly hiring two co-defendants to kill her father.

A mixture of abuse, alcohol, drugs, loose talk and unhappy, aimless people led to the death of a 72-year-old Mission Viejo man, attorneys said Monday at the opening of a murder-for-hire trial.

On April 15, 1989, David Werner--described by both prosecution and defense lawyers as a controlling and abusive alcoholic--was suffocated, beaten and stabbed in the throat with a hunting knife as he lay in his bed.

Deborah Werner, the victim’s 43-year-old daughter, faces one count of first-degree murder for allegedly hiring her two co-defendants to slip through an unlocked, sliding glass door into the rented townhouse she shared with her father, and kill him.

The pair, Miguel (Mike) Ruiz, 22, of Huntington Beach and Charles Clemmons, 21, of Anaheim, face the same charge. All three defendants are also charged with murder for financial gain, which carries with it a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Another accomplice, Carrie Marie Chidester, 21, of Huntington Beach, who pleaded guilty to her role in the killing last year, testified Monday, and David Werner’s granddaughter, Cindy Diebolt, is awaiting trial for solicitation to commit murder for her role in the slaying.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David L. Brent told jurors that Deborah Werner made one unsuccessful attempt to get someone to kill her father before succeeding on her second try with the help of her daughter and a group of friends recruited at an after-hours dance club in Huntington Beach.

The prosecutor said he intended to introduce telephone records linking the three defendants and others at critical points leading up to and following the killing.

He also said he would submit into evidence Clemmons’ jeans, stained with blood consistent with that of David Werner.

In describing the case as not the most sophisticated of contract murders, the prosecutor said Deborah Werner paid the two accused killers with a personal check for $3,000, on which she later stopped payment, and $100 in cash.

But Deborah Werner’s attorney--the only defense lawyer among the three who made opening statements--painted a different picture of David Werner’s death.

Jack M. Earley told jurors that Deborah Werner suffers from “borderline personality disorders,” due in part to physical, emotional and sexual abuse she suffered as a child and as an adolescent at the hands of her father. As a result, her attorney said, Deborah Werner ran away from home and entered into a series of similarly abusive relationships and marriages before returning to California to live with her father.

By this time, David Werner was divorced from his second wife and in ill health, Earley said, and was in equally precarious financial shape after suffering investment losses. His daughter helped support him, while serving as his companion, by working at a series of jobs, including liquor store clerk.

Earley described the father-daughter relationship as “love-hate” and sadomasochistic and said the father prevented his daughter from contacting her own daughter, Cindy Diebolt, and newborn granddaughter.

At this point, Earley said, “based on Deborah Werner’s psychological conditions, the problems she had, she started having some very bad thoughts about her father. There were times when she wished her father was dead. There were times when she thought that, if he was dead, that she wouldn’t have all the domination and control.”

These feelings, Earley said, led to discussions along similar lines between Werner and her daughter, Cindy Diebolt, who shared an “animosity” toward David Werner because he rejected her and her baby.

Deborah Werner restated these feelings at her daughter’s home, a house where drugs were commonly used, Earley said, to her daughter’s friends. These were young people who had family problems of their own, who liked to stay out all night dancing. And while they gave Deborah Werner “positive feedback” about her feelings, she never actually intended to kill her father, Earley said.

“Deborah Werner was not involved in a conspiracy,” Earley said. “There was a lot of talk . . . and she is not guilty of the crime that she is charged with.”

But the prosecution’s first witness testified that Deborah Werner did more than talk about killing her father.

Chidester pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 1991 for her role in helping to arrange the slaying.

Now serving an 11-year prison term, the maximum sentence she could have received, Chidester testified that at the request of Deborah Werner and Diebolt she recruited the two men charged with David Werner’s death.

Chidester testified that the mother and daughter promised her David Werner’s car in exchange for her help and invited her to live with the reunited family after the killing.

When they asked her to suggest someone to commit the slaying, Chidester said, “the first person I thought of was Mike (Ruiz), my best friend.”

Chidester testified that in the days leading up to the killing she had ambivalent feelings about what she had done and what was going to happen.

On one level, she said, “I didn’t think they were going to kill him. . . . I didn’t think it was actually going to happen. . . . It never dawned on me that somebody would actually get hurt.”

The trial continues today.