Neighbor Identifies Defendant as Assailant : Courts: A witness says she saw a woman beaten on the night of slaying. JoAnn Linkenauger’s body was found hours later.

A Moorpark woman stood up on the witness stand Tuesday, pointed to James Linkenauger and said he was the man she had seen beating a woman outside his house on a rainy night last January.

“It’s him,” Nora Reynoso said, rising to her feet in Ventura County Superior Court and pointing directly at Linkenauger. “The one with the striped shirt.”

Linkenauger, 38, is accused of beating and strangling his wife of two years Jan. 17 after she returned home from a weekend with friends in Las Vegas.

Reynoso, who said she had moved next door to the Linkenaugers on Flory Avenue only weeks before the killing, told the jury she saw Linkenauger from her living room window, dragging someone by the hair from the street to the couple’s driveway.

But Reynoso, who testified through a court-appointed interpreter, was unable to say with certainty that the woman she saw Linkenauger beating was JoAnn Linkenauger, whose half-naked and bloodied body was found in a Somis ravine hours later.

“I did not recognize her,” Reynoso said. “I came to that conclusion (that it was JoAnn Linkenauger) when he took her to the garage.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Matthew J. Hardy told the jury in his opening statement last week that Linkenauger was a deeply jealous man who spent his time drinking while his wife worked at a well-paying job.

Although he has not yet given his opening statement to jurors, defense attorney Louis B. Samonsky Jr. maintains Linkenauger’s innocence and suggests that someone JoAnn Linkenauger knew from a “secret life” she kept hidden from his client may have committed the crime.

Reynoso told the jury that she first heard what sounded like cats fighting about 10:30 p.m. Jan. 17 while she, her boyfriend, her mother and her brother were watching a movie.

“When they went by the car, then I realized it was a woman being pulled,” she said. “He was bending over, he was grabbing her by the hair.”

Hardy had Reynoso move to the center of the courtroom to show the jury the position the two were in when she saw them near the sidewalk. District attorney’s investigator Dan Miller mimicked James Linkenauger and Reynoso bent to her knees as Miller staged the dragging.

Samonsky did not severely challenge Reynoso’s testimony, concluding his cross-examination in under 20 minutes.

But Reynoso admitted under Samonsky’s questioning that it was raining “a little” on the night she witnessed the beating, and acknowledged that at first she had declined to talk to police.

“Perhaps it was fear, I don’t know,” she said.

Samuel Reynoso, Nora’s brother, told the jury he too had witnessed part of the beating, and called 911 to report it.

“Through a window I could see a man that was pulling and dragging a woman,” he testified, also through an interpreter. But he could not say for certain that the man he saw was Linkenauger.

Hardy played the 911 recording requesting that an officer investigate a report of a man beating a woman near the intersection of Flory and Los Angeles avenues.