CRIME : Murder Confession Found on Tape : Slayings: Police say a recorded apology indicates that a Pasadena man killed his wife before intentionally causing a fatal freeway crash.

A Pasadena warehouse worker’s taped apology to his three young children has led detectives to conclude that he probably murdered his wife and then committed suicide by driving his truck across the double yellow line of the Corona Expressway in San Bernardino County, killing another man.

On Feb. 1, a truck driven by Jorge Jesus Gonzalez, 39, slammed head-on into a pickup driven by 29-year-old Thomas David Shanahan, a Fountain Valley construction worker.

Police were ready to call the wreck an accident until they found the body of Gonzalez’s wife that afternoon on the living room floor of the family’s home at 173 W. Maple St. in Pasadena. Honoria Josefina Gonzalez, 38, had died of head injuries, police said.

The audiotape of Gonzalez’s apology, unearthed in the wreckage of Gonzalez’s truck Friday, prompted investigators to reclassify the case as a homicide-suicide-homicide. Pasadena police detectives closed the case Monday on the assumption that Gonzalez killed his wife, Lt. Denis Petersen said.

Friends reported talk of the couple’s having a troubled marriage, and police searching the house found a restraining order against Jorge that Josefina never filed. But there were no witnesses to the murder, believed to have occurred Feb. 1, and the tape Gonzalez left in his car never tells detectives what he did, only that he was sorry he did it, Petersen said.

The bizarre nature of the triple killing is compounded by the good fortune the family had been experiencing in recent years. After coming to the United States from Mexico in 1980, the Gonzalezes fell on hard times and joined the Door of Hope Family Homeless Shelter in Pasadena in 1990, Director Jim Martin said.

After spending five months in the shelter, Jorge, Josefina and their three young children had saved enough to rent a house and applied to the local office of Habitat for Humanity, a national agency that provides funds for low-income families to build their homes.

Jorge spent more than 600 hours helping to build the Maple Street home, Habitat Vice President Pat Myers said. Josefina got a job with World Vision, a Christian international relief organization based in Monrovia, World Vision spokesman Bruce Brander said.

“You’re talking about a family that was just totally upward mobile,” Martin said. “They had no drug-addiction problems, no gambling problems. . . . Jorge was a good father who loved his children. They were two great people.”

A relative traveled to Pasadena from Mexico to take custody of the children, who were staying at a shelter in Altadena. The bodies of Jorge Gonzalez and Thomas Shanahan had not been claimed by relatives this week, the San Bernardino County Coroner reported.