Murder Mystery : Miguel Bravo Fled an Unknown Attacker for Three Tortured Years Before His 1991 Slaying. Police Now Say His Wife Was the Killer.

Miguel Bravo was hard-working and mild, the sort of guy who would look at the floor when you talked to him. Debts? He had many. But enemies? Come on. Who would want to hurt Miguel?

This was the question, five years ago this month, when the 38-year-old Los Angeles glass-factory worker found himself running for his life. In the three tortured years that were to be his last, Bravo was gunned down, run down and even car-bombed in what would become a series of seven mysterious murder attempts. Neither suspect nor motive suggested itself until long after Bravo was found in his van on a back road south of Bakersfield, shot twice, point-blank, in the head.

“He lived in fear, and maybe that’s why, after his death, I felt an obligation to him,” Los Angeles Police Detective Lawrence Garrett said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to do all I could for him while he was alive.”

Thus, authorities say, was launched a dogged hunt for Bravo’s killer--a case that culminated this month in the arrest of his wife. Lucia Bravo, 56, a cleaning woman and home care nursing aide now behind bars without bail, is scheduled to be arraigned Friday on charges that range from forgery to murder for financial gain.

Prosecutors allege that she had taken a lover, and, unbeknown to Bravo, was plotting to kill her husband so she could collect on $700,000 worth of life insurance policies she had secretly taken out on him. Indeed, they charge, the insurance was such a priority with her that she continued to pay the premiums even as mounting debts were forcing the blue-collar family into bankruptcy.

Bravo faces the death penalty if convicted. Public defenders assigned this week to her case say they know too little about it to speak for her. But her children say they are shocked to see her behind bars.

“She has helped more people than I can remember, and has always been out to help people who were down and out,” said one grown son who asked that his name not be used. “She took care of him. If she had been trying to kill him, why did he continue to stay close to her?”

Authorities trace Bravo’s terrifying odyssey to the morning in 1988 when the first attempt was made on his life. But his sister, Rosa Provencio, believes his problems began six months earlier, when Bravo asked for a divorce.

Provencio, a Montclair cannery worker, says Miguel’s family never much liked his wife, a Guatemalan-born woman who was 16 years his senior and who matched him nearly pound for pound.

“She never let my brother go to his family. She is possessive of him. And my brother, he is scared of her,” said Provencio, who came to Southern California with her brother 20 years ago from the tiny coastal state of Colima, Mexico. “When he worked in the glass factory, she picked up his check for him all the time, and never left nothing for him, not even money for a soda. When he married her, he took her to my house and, let me tell you, she was terrible. I said to my brother, ‘You know what? This lady is no good for you.’ ”

Provencio said her sister-in-law made constant, unexplained visits out of town. In court documents, LAPD’s Garrett alleges that “it can be proved that Lucia Bravo was having an extramarital affair which began in 1985.” Records also indicate that the Bravos were deeply in debt. Despite her low pay and his $16,000 factory wages, they had invested heavily in property. By 1988, they faced a flurry of foreclosure notices and unpaid utility bills.

One night, after one too many arguments, Provencio said, her brother asked his wife for a divorce--”but she don’t want to divorce him.” He moved out, she said, “and after that, things began to happen.”

First, Provencio said, her brother’s house was burglarized, and everything of value in it disappeared. Then his car burned.

Then, on Nov. 18, 1988, as the day shift dawned on the glass factory where Bravo worked, a white Ford Falcon made a U-turn and parked across the street. At five minutes before 6, as Bravo--a short, trim man with a black mustache and a thickening middle--crossed the still-dark street, three shots exploded and witnesses turned to see Bravo crumple and scream as a bullet lodged in his jaw and knocked out half his teeth.

No one got a good look at his assailants or caught the license number as the car sped away. But three days later, according to police reports, his wife came to the LAPD’s Wilshire Division, which was then handling the case, to report that she suspected one of several moneylenders to whom she and her husband were in debt.

According to court records, however, those people denied any involvement, and the investigation dead-ended. It took three months for Bravo to recover, his sister said, and the bullet remained in his jaw until the day he died. When he was well, she said, he announced he was moving back to Los Angeles, to an apartment that belonged to one of his wife’s friends.

Just before he left, Bravo was shot at again. He was in his car, Detective Garrett said, but the bullet went wide. Three months after that came a third attempt. Lucia Bravo told authorities someone shot at her while she was driving her car. But Garrett said witnesses later told him the driver actually had been Miguel.

Another three months went by, and there was a fourth attempt, as Bravo was trying to get his car to start. As Bravo bent over to check under his hood, a fusillade of bullets zinged over his head, missing by just a hair. About six months after that one, the detective said, Bravo told his brothers that, on a trip to Bakersfield, someone pulled up next to him on the freeway and tried to force him off the road.

Provencio recalled well the terror her brother felt, as it became all too clear that someone wanted him dead. He began moving constantly, living sometimes with friends, sometimes in his van.

Gradually, Provencio said, she became convinced his stalker was Lucia because only she knew his whereabouts. But Provencio had no hard evidence and Miguel refused to believe his wife was capable of such a thing--so stubbornly, in fact, that at one point Provencio said, she shouted at him: “Tiene embrujado!” Her brother, she believed, had been bewitched.

On Sept. 24, 1990, a pipe bomb exploded under Bravo’s Thunderbird. Garrett, a veteran detective then new to the department’s criminal conspiracy section, got the call.

“They told me, we got a good one for you,” he said, and indeed, the case was a rarity. Car bombings are uncommon in Los Angeles. And Garrett found himself even more intrigued after meeting the terrified Bravo, who miraculously had survived the blast despite disabling injuries to his buttocks and groin.

“He was a very mild-mannered individual, even meek,” Garrett said. The detective felt compassion for the man. Although the Bravo case would eventually come to be known, in the black humor of the criminal courts, as the “toon case” (after the tough-to-kill cartoon characters), the detective found himself drawn in.

“Things just didn’t add up,” Garrett said. “It had to be someone close to him.” But why? The Bravos denied they had insurance--an assertion, Garrett said, that he had no legal way to double-check. And he had no way of knowing then that the letters Lucia Bravo brought him--allegedly written by her husband and pointing the finger at moneylenders again--would later be determined by LAPD handwriting experts to be forgeries.

Deeply depressed, Bravo was recovering but told his sister he felt sure death was imminent. She begged him not to return to Los Angeles. But return he did, taking Lucia with him in June, 1991, when he visited his brother and made an offhand remark about planning to drive up to Bakersfield to pick up a car part.

A security guard found his body on the afternoon of June 26, parked next to a cotton field canal, just off California 99. Bravo’s wallet was still in his pocket, untouched. Kern County Sheriff’s Detective John Soliz said the widow sobbed aloud when he notified her of the death, but strangely, he could not see a single tear.

Provencio, meanwhile, said Lucia Bravo suggested they buy the cheapest coffin and came late to the funeral.

Five months later, Garrett said, an insurance investigator called him to verify that Miguel Bravo had been murdered, since his wife, Lucia, had filed a life insurance claim. Insurance? Garrett perked up. But the Bravos had insisted there was none. Then another policy popped up. Then another. And another, for a total of five separate life insurance policies, all taken out during a period of 15 months before Bravo’s death, and all listing Lucia Bravo as the beneficiary.

Confronted, Garrett said, Lucia Bravo first denied she had known of the policies, then said Miguel had told her to keep them secret. A grand jury subpoena of the Bravos’ financial records showed that Lucia Bravo was inexplicably paying premium after premium even while banks were foreclosing on their properties.

Finally, after piecing together a paper trail that took more than two years to compile, authorities arrested Lucia Bravo in Arizona, where her son said she had moved to escape threats from her late husband’s relatives.

To this day, authorities don’t know for sure who pulled the trigger. Provencio said she is simply thanking God that her sister-in-law is behind bars.

“I knew it was her all along,” she said.