Jury Hears Girl on Tape Tell of Killing Father

“They poured gasoline on him, lit a match and we watched him burn,” said the girlish voice on a tape, in a calm, matter-of-fact tone.

The voice belonged to the 14-year-old daughter of Daniel Allen, describing to police how she and two friends killed her father. The recording was played Monday, on the first day of her murder trial.

The minor is accused of killing Allen, a 46-year-old unemployed graphic artist, in Highland Park on June 10. Police made the tape during an interview after Allen’s body was discovered several days later in a shallow grave beside a railroad track. He was found by hikers who noticed a hand protruding from the soil.

The girl’s boyfriend, Guido Anthony Cuza, 18, and another friend, Evelyn Solorzano, 16, are being tried as adults in the murder, and face a preliminary hearing this month. The girl, whose name has not been made public, is on trial in Juvenile Court. She could face confinement with the California Youth Authority until she is 25.

Allen had taken his daughter to live with him nearly a year before his death. They had been apart with no contact since she was a toddler and his ex-wife moved to Texas. But the new father-daughter relationship soured when the girl felt that her father was too strict. She claimed to have married Cuza in a trip to Tijuana two months before the murder, and resented that Allen kept her from living with her lover.

Los Angeles Police Department Detective John Spreitzer described the girl’s demeanor when he interviewed and taped her as “calm and cold . . . (with) no type of remorse.”

On the tape, she says her father hit her. “He became more mean and violent. . . . He would lie to me about my mother and father’s marriage, that he never hit her, and he did. When I wouldn’t agree with him he would hit me and tell me to shut up.”

While the tape played, the girl, small-boned and pale, with shoulder-length brown hair, sat slumped with her head in one hand.

The three got together one day and “we decided to kill my father,” she says on the recording. While she then says she took this as a joke, she adds, “We set a date and everything.” Evelyn would supply the gun, filched from her brother, and Cuza a shovel--to dig the grave--and gasoline.

The tape set out the events of the day of the murder:

The girl and Evelyn put eight sleeping pills into Allen’s Coca-Cola, and when he fell asleep, they shot him. But they missed, and they put a sticker over the place in the wall where the bullet lodged.

When Cuza arrived, he finished the job, firing another shot through a pillow into Allen’s head. The trio then covered the head with plastic, “so the blood wouldn’t go anywhere,” and carried Allen out. They drove to a spot near a Santa Fe track and while the girl played lookout, the other two buried him and tried to burn him, hoping he would never be identified. His head kept sticking up, so “we put a rock on it to keep him down.”

They all went back to Allen’s apartment for the night. After a few days, she moved in with Cuza and his family. “We decided to tell everybody he kicked me out,” she says on the tape.

Her motive, she says, was “to get away from my father, so he would stop hitting me.”

After this interview, Spreitzer testified, he monitored a phone call the girl made to her mother in Texas. “Her mother was hysterical, saying ‘why,’ ” the detective said. “She (said) . . . ‘I got rid of my problem.’ ”

Spreitzer also read passages from a diary the girl kept, which police found hidden in a mattress in Allen’s apartment. An entry six days before the murder said, “We’re going to shoot him, burn him and bury him,” Spreitzer testified. “With all three of our brains . . . everything will work out real cool.”

There were several references to her father, and how much she hated him for keeping her from Cuza. “I’m so tired of him interfering in my life,” Spreitzer read from one entry, and then from another: “He ruins everything happy in my life.”

Yet another view of Allen came from Joel Kroll, a close friend and neighbor of the father, who testified that Allen, a recovering alcoholic, was desperately searching for ways to handle an unruly and rebellious daughter.

“She was running away,” Kroll testified. “She was missing school some days. He was very concerned. He was trying to do whatever he could.”

Kroll said he never observed any abuse, and only knew of one incident of violence, when Allen kicked down a bathroom door after his daughter screamed a profanity at him. “He ran over to my place. He was scared, because there was blood,” he said.

The girl later had five stitches taken in her forehead.