Moorpark Man Convicted of Murder for Torturing Spouse : Courts: James Linkenauger faces a sentence of 25 years to life in the beating and strangulation of his wife.

After deliberating less than six hours, a Ventura County jury convicted a Moorpark man of first-degree murder Thursday for torturing his wife to death.

James Michael Linkenauger, who repeatedly told investigators he had no idea how his wife’s blood came to be spattered in three rooms of the cottage they shared, faces 25 years to life in prison.

Linkenauger, 39, was convicted in the beating and strangulation of JoAnn Linkenauger, his wife of three years whom he met in a West Virginia bar before they moved to Ventura County. The woman’s battered and half-naked body was found Jan. 18 in a muddy Somis ravine.

The defendant, who had chuckled with his jailers and defense team throughout the five-week trial, displayed no reaction as the verdict was read, other than to lean over to whisper to his attorney.

Defense attorney Louis B. Samonsky Jr. said Linkenauger asked Samonsky not to tell his mother the verdict right away because his father was undergoing surgery on Thursday in West Virginia.

Outside court, jurors said they had little doubt that Linkenauger murdered his wife.

“We all agreed he was guilty,” said one juror, a Simi Valley plumber who asked not to be named. “It was just a matter of to what degree.”

Under the law, murder by torture is first-degree murder, while a murder without premeditation is second degree.

The killing “might have been in the heat of passion at first, but to me, he had the time to think about what he was doing,” the juror said. “You think about the time it took for him to beat the woman . . . he chased her out of the house.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Matthew J. Hardy told the jury that Linkenauger, an out-of-work mechanic, battered his wife because of an intense hatred fueled by her success and his failure.

After inflicting the brutal beating Jan. 17, Linkenauger strangled his wife to prevent her from having him arrested, Hardy said. Linkenauger then drove her body to Somis to divert suspicion from himself, the prosecutor said.

Linkenauger is only the second man in Ventura County to be found guilty of the first-degree murder of a spouse, Hardy said. He said Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury had insisted on a charge of first-degree murder after other senior prosecutors recommended accepting a plea of second degree.

“Traditionally, domestic homicides are treated like manslaughter cases,” Hardy said. “But it’s murder and that’s the way it should be treated.”

Superior Court Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr. scheduled sentencing for Oct. 1.

Samonsky had refused to put his client on the witness stand because it would have exposed him to damaging evidence on cross-examination. But Samonsky said Linkenauger never expressed to him anything but his innocence.

“Only Mr. Linkenauger knows whether he did or did not do this,” Samonsky said.

Had Linkenauger agreed to testify, Hardy would have been allowed to question him about allegations that the victim told her friends only hours before she was murdered that she feared her husband might kill her.

The jury, which listened to more than 30 prosecution witnesses and just one defense witness, began deliberations Wednesday morning. Panelists were told they could find the defendant guilty of first-degree murder, guilty of second-degree murder, or not guilty.

According to some jurors, nearly everyone agreed within two hours that Linkenauger was guilty. The rest of the deliberations focused on whether it was first- or second-degree murder, jurors said.

“We know that she went through three rooms bloodied,” said juror David Hamilton, a Channel Islands yachtsman.

“There was a point when he had his hands on her neck and he had to see what a bloody mess she was,” Hamilton said. “Instead of walking away or stopping, he choked her to death. To be holding her throat and see her bloody face and to go on with it. . . . “

Hamilton said the pictures presented as evidence “turned my stomach.”

Prosecutor Hardy gave the jury enlarged color photographs that first showed a woman with wavy dark hair framing a smiling face, and then displayed a beaten and bloodied body dumped along a muddy roadside.

“To see a real human being with that kind of beating, a beautiful woman to be mutilated like that and beaten to death. . . . That really got to me,” Hamilton said.

JoAnn Linkenauger, a 39-year-old food service manager who had obtained two restraining orders against her husband but dropped them, spent the last weekend of her life in Las Vegas with friends. She had told her husband she was traveling to San Francisco for a food industry convention.

Hardy told the jury that Linkenauger spent the weekend drinking with friends, making threats and stewing about what he thought was his wife’s infidelity.

When the drunken Linkenauger returned home to his wife that Sunday night, his anger boiled into a violent rage, Hardy said. At least three neighbors testified they heard screams and saw a man beating a woman in the street and dragging her back toward the Linkenauger home.

Samonsky tried to persuade the jury that someone other than his client, a jilted lover perhaps, had killed the woman. But the jury didn’t buy it.

“We were all unanimous that he was guilty right away,” said a juror from Ventura, a woman who works at the Point Mugu Navy base.

Others had to reflect on the evidence by themselves before reaching a decision.

“I felt there was no way anyone else would beat her in her home and take the body off to dump it, other than her husband,” said a Westlake woman who served on the panel.

“It wasn’t until I went home and sat in a room by myself and thought it through that I knew it was first-degree murder,” she said.

Times staff writer Joanna M. Miller contributed to this story.