Samuels Denies Role in Double Slaying : Trial: Countering witness testimony, she disputes charges of hiring a hit man to kill her husband and paying for executioner’s death.

Mary Ellen Samuels denied in Van Nuys Superior Court Monday that she hired a hit man to kill her husband, then another to kill the executioner. She also denied that she had openly searched for hired killers in bars.

But during her first full day of testifying in her own defense at her double murder-solicitation trial, Samuels admitted turning to a friend in a bar and complaining about her husband, whom she branded a child molester. “I wish the son of a bitch was dead,” she recalled saying. Then, she testified, a stranger named Dave approached her and said he knew where she could find a killer for hire.

“I fell off the barstool,” Samuels said. Then, she said, she giggled.

In her testimony, Samuels, 45, disputed the stories of nearly a dozen witnesses, some of whom testified under grants of immunity from prosecution for their roles in the deaths of Robert Samuels, 40, and James Bernstein, 27, the man suspected of arranging his death.

She also denied she had flirted with detectives during questioning immediately after her husband’s body was found. The investigators had testified that she frequently leaned over in a low-cut blouse, and rubbed one investigator’s head, saying, “I like bald guys.”

“No,” she testified Monday. “I never did it.”

It was a constant refrain: She denied hiring Bernstein to kill her husband; she denied offering the job to her daughter Nicole’s high school friends, and she denied asking a man named Angelo to do it after meeting him at a Beverly Hills restaurant.

Robert Samuels, an assistant motion picture camera operator who worked on several films including “Lethal Weapon” and “Heaven Can Wait,” was shot to death in December, 1988, in the hallway of his Northridge home. Bernstein, a reputed cocaine dealer, was beaten and strangled and dumped in a remote canyon in Ventura County in June, 1989.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi is alleging that Samuels, who was divorcing her husband, had him killed so she could inherit his $500,000 estate, which included insurance, the Northridge house and a Sherman Oaks sandwich shop. She allegedly orchestrated Bernstein’s slaying when she feared he would crack under an intensifying police investigation, prosecutors say.

Bob Samuels had a crush on Mary Ellen Gurnick while they were growing up in Santa Ana, according to testimony. Although their back yards were joined, he admired her only from a distance all through elementary school, junior high and high school.

“We were too shy to do anything about it,” she testified.

They went their separate ways, then met again in 1980 after her 10-year marriage ended. He had never married. They dated for several months, marrying in 1980. But a happy ending proved elusive.

She claims he drank excessively, berated her, struck her and molested her teen-age daughter.

Much of Samuels’ testimony Monday focused on her descriptions of an abusive marriage and on-again, off-again separation. Samuels’ defense team contends she had nothing to do with either slaying.

Instead, attorneys Phil Nameth and Josh Groshan contend that Bernstein, the alleged hit man, acted on his own. The reason: He was smitten with Nicole Samuels and angered by her stories of her stepfather’s abuse and molestation.

In earlier testimony, Nicole Samuels Moroianu, now 26, said her stepfather had molested and raped her since she was 12 years old.

Mary Ellen Samuels has described a harsh six-year marriage in which she had no say in decisions, was pressured to work and was treated like a child. She has described her husband’s late-night drinking bouts and the black eye she says he gave her during a liquor-fueled quarrel that followed a Fourth of July party.

She told of an early morning trip to the bathroom that planted the seeds of suspicion in her mind. “I surprised my husband. He was walking out of my daughter’s bedroom. . . . I surprised him and he surprised me. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was letting the cat out.”

Only there was no cat around, she said, and he was walking out of the room. Suspicion gnawed at her all day, and she confronted him that night. It led to the blowup that eventually resulted in their split.

A few days before Halloween in 1986, she moved out, leaving a four-page “Dear John” note on the dining room table. In the note, she said she wished she’d known him better.

“I didn’t like being abused, his alcohol problem, which accommodated the abuse, and I didn’t want to run the store,” she said.

The letter gave no hint that marital abuse or child sexual abuse led to the split. Instead, she wrote: “It seems strange that we have been married for just about 7 years and I don’t know you at all! . . . I feel, (you probably do, too) our marriage has gone completely stale and to save my sanity and what’s left of my health, I want out.

“No matter what happens or what you think of me now or later, I will still always care for you. We just can’t live together!” she said in the note, written in pencil on lined paper.

Testimony continues today.