70-Year-Old Murder Defendant Characterized as Scheming Miser : Courts: Arguments end in the trial of former reporter accused of killing his estranged wife.

John Burrus reached two milestones Friday: his 70th birthday and the final day of his murder trial in the death of his estranged wife.

As arguments in the three-week trial ended, Deputy Dist. Atty. Garrett Randall characterized Burrus, a former reporter for the San Diego Union, as a scheming miser who murdered Grace Burrus for her money and coldly cracked jokes with police investigators shortly afterward.

“These were going to be some of the best years of her life,” Randall told the jury. “John Burrus crushed that life out of her and took her final, precious life from her. We just can’t let him get away with it.”

Burrus’ face tightened as the prosecutor pantomimed the fatal bludgeoning he said Burrus delivered to his 75-year-old wife as she lay in bed on a summer night two years ago.

Randall said Burrus carefully plotted his wife’s death, enlisting an unknown accomplice to help him dispose of the body and procuring drivers’ licenses and credit cards with aliases as “an avenue of escape.”

Randall said Burrus wanted to protect the property and money he stood to lose in the couple’s impending divorce. Burrus testified earlier that about $1.1 million in property was in contention, including real estate in Oceanside, Salton City and Alaska.

But the defense asserted that there are other ways to explain Grace Burrus’ death--ways that create a reasonable doubt and should lead to the husband’s acquittal.

A criminal could have killed her for money or sex, defense attorney John Mitchell said. Or she could have fainted and driven her car off the desert cliff where her body was found.

At one point, Mitchell suggested that the dead woman’s family had a financial motive for killing her. The remark drew expressions of disbelief from Grace Burrus’ sisters, nieces and other relatives in the courtroom.

“Sure, he’s cheap. Sure, he’s a miser,” Mitchell said. “But that doesn’t make him a murderer.”

The prosecution says Burrus killed his wife by striking her at least four times with a blunt object as she lay in bed on the night of July 26, 1990.

Blood splattered all over, they said, hitting the ceiling fan, the TV screen, the headboard and a portrait of Burrus hanging on the wall. The blood was cited as key evidence linking Burrus to the killing.

Next, Burrus haphazardly dressed the body, authorities said, pulling his wife’s pants only halfway up, forgetting a bra--a garment she always wore--and draping her blouse over one shoulder.

Then he allegedly put his wife’s body in the passenger seat of her 1979 maroon Saab, drove to a gravel turnaround alongside a winding country road near Borrego Springs, moved the body behind the wheel and sent the car over the cliff.

Burrus was arrested last October after an autopsy concluded that his wife was already dead when the car went over the cliff and that she sustained her fatal injuries elsewhere. Authorities also said they did not understand how the passenger seat became soaked with blood when Grace Burrus was supposedly driving the car and was ejected on impact.

On Friday, Mitchell tried to convince jurors that the blood spatters in the bedroom were caused, as Burrus testified, when Grace Burrus accidentally cut her hand and then waved it around.

He also held up as key testimony the account of a 15-year-old girl who said she saw Grace Burrus alive in Salton City hours after Burrus supposedly killed her. The girl’s story proves, Mitchell said, that Grace Burrus was far from her husband when she was killed.

But prosecutors say the girl’s memory was of seeing Grace Burrus on another day.