Murder Defendant Burrus Testifies He Was on Good Terms With Wife : Trial: Judge refuses to allow alleged evidence of homosexual affairs to be used at Burrus’ trial on charges he killed his wife.

John Burrus spent his second day on the witness stand Monday and told a jury he shared a close relationship with the wife he is accused of murdering in a slaying rigged to look like a traffic accident.

Burrus said the relationship continued even after his wife had filed for divorce.

Prosecution plans to counter those claims suffered a blow Monday when Superior Court Judge J. Morgan Lester ruled against evidence it had hoped to introduce.

In a session outside the presence of the jury, Deputy Dist. Atty. Garrett Randall saidthat Burrus’ defense should allow him to raise allegations of extramarital affairs as a stress on the marriage.

Randall said he could produce a witness that would testify that John Burrus had extramarital homosexual affairs, and Grace Burrus knew it, and that is why she wanted a divorce.

Lester, however, ruled that the evidence would unfairly bias the jury against the 69-year-old former religion reporter for a San Diego newspaper. “I don’t find a high enough degree of relevance to overcome the undue prejudice that might result,” Lester said.

A large part of Burrus’ defense has been that there was no animosity between the couple, who had been married for more than 30 years. They even slept together the night after he had been served with divorce papers, he testified.

“I knew (the divorce) was going to be filed, and it was nothing,” Burrus said in his second day on the witness stand. “We were sleeping together, we were living together.”

Burrus is accused of bludgeoning his estranged wife to death in 1990, and then faking her death to make it appear to be an accident. Grace Burrus’ body was found June 28 near Borrego Springs. She was thrown from her car as it went over a cliff near Montezuma Grade.

An autopsy showed that she was not killed in the car crash but had died hours before and that her extensive head wounds could not have been caused by anything in the car or on the cliff.

Outside the courtroom, Randall said the exclusion of the evidence did not significantly hurt his case because friends of Grace Burrus previously testified that the two did not get along as well as John Burrus portrayed in his testimony.

Among the evidence Randall said he would have brought to court were condoms found at John Burrus’ apartment in Alaska, a residence that Grace Burrus never visited.

Although Burrus traveled extensively throughout the Western United States, Grace Burrus only occasionally accompanied him, a fact that John Burrus said was because “she didn’t like the way I traveled.”

John Burrus also testified that, in the divorce proceedings, which began in 1987, about $1.1 million in property was in contention, including real estate in Oceanside, Salton City and Alaska.

In giving his account of June 27, the last day anyone is known to have seen Grace Burrus alive, John Burrus testified that the two of them had left their Oceanside apartment complex early in the morning, driving separately to Salton City, where they owned another apartment building.

Grace Burrus left the apartment first, taking a county road route, while John Burrus left sometime later, he testified. When he arrived in Salton City, she was not there. After waiting for several hours, he unsuccessfully tried to locate her by retracing her route, he said.

It wasn’t until June 28 that a group of friends and relatives found her car and body at the bottom of a Borrego Springs canyon.