Mother Holds Garage Sale to Offset Famalaro’s Legal Fees

The ad in the local newspaper said “Paint Give-Away,” and the address was familiar.

Seventeen days after Denise Huber’s battered body was found stashed in a freezer in a stolen Ryder truck parked in John J. Famalaro’s driveway here, his mother stood in the same driveway, hawking her son’s paint, tools and old pickup truck in an effort to offset his legal expenses.

“I’m just trying to do this right now to pay some of the immediate bills,” said Anna Famalaro, 69, as she puttered about the driveway Saturday morning, greeting each customer personally and bidding them goodby with a “God bless you.”

“It’s all been very hard,” she added, picking out dried leaves from a planter in her son’s front lawn and stuffing them into a garbage bag. “I don’t know if I’m going to be alive tomorrow. . . . My husband is dying, my son is in jail. How would you feel if your family was falling apart?”

Her son, John Famalaro, 37, a handyman and house-painter, faces charges of first-degree murder and kidnaping of Huber, a 23-year-old waitress from Newport Beach who disappeared June 3, 1991, after a rock concert. He is being held without bond in Yavapai County Jail while he awaits extradition to California.

Despite the trauma, Anna Famalaro was cheerful Saturday morning as she played host to a steady trickle of visitors at the makeshift garage sale in a blue-and-yellow floral frock, black flats, and a smile coated in bright pink lipstick. Her husband, frail with Parkinson’s disease, sat in a parked car at the driveway’s edge.

“Come on in and see what you see,” Anna Famalaro repeated each time a car arrived on the quiet street inside the Prescott Country Club.

Some 3,000 cans of brand-name paint and a couple dozen larger buckets crowded most of the driveway and surrounded the white pickup John Famalaro used to drive around town. The truck, with 140,000 miles on it, was priced to sell at $1,000.

A chain saw, leaf blower, electric paint washer, extension cords, jumper cables, wooden rods, shovels, cassette-tape holder and an old pair of sneakers were awaiting an offer among the assorted tools lining one wall of the driveway.

“The paint is $2 a gallon, any of it, and this stuff,” she told shoppers, pointing to the tools. “If you see anything you like, we can talk about it.”

When one man held up a rake, she asked, “Well, how much do you think I should charge for that?”

Bob Lunsford, 69, a Californian who moved nine years ago to a house around the corner from the Famalaros, bought a couple of gallons of paint to use for a base coat on the shutters of his patio.

“It’s a good buy if I can find what I need,” Lunsford said as he peered at the veritable mountain of cans whose colors were not clearly marked. Estimating that the paint would normally cost up to $15 a gallon in a store, Lunsford said of the price, “Hell, you can’t touch it.”

Like Lunsford, most of the customers Saturday knew of Famalaro’s arrest, but shrugged it off in the name of a good bargain. And, some expressed sympathy toward Anna Famalaro.

“She’s got to get rid of (the stuff). The sheriff’s moved all the stuff out onto her driveway, and now the county is on her tail to clean it out,” said Ron Frank, a house painter from neighboring Prescott Valley who bought a $20 ladder.

“A ladder is something you can always use, and also I feel bad for the family,” said Frank, 41, who used to live in Ventura County. “I mean, I feel bad for the family of the victim, but the family of the accused is also going through hell.”

Between customers, Anna Famalaro spoke gravely about her son’s predicament, saying she was unsure whether she would prefer a trial in Arizona or California. She said she had not yet decided whether she would travel to Orange County if he is sent there.

“I don’t know anything about which state has stiffer penalties,” she said. “I don’t know if Afghanistan would be better.”

While she has visited her son at every opportunity since his arrest, Anna Famalaro said she has “seen him but I haven’t talked to him. How can you talk to someone through glass?”

The morning was marked by a small stream of potential buyers, and sales were slow.

“I was looking for three cans of water-based brown paint,” said a white-haired man who walked away empty-handed and refused to give his name. “I don’t know if they have it or not, I just don’t want to rummage through all that.”

Two couples from Prescott Valley piled back into their station wagon almost as quickly as they’d gotten out when they discovered that the paint was not exactly free.

“It doesn’t say paint sale, it says paint give-away,” one young man said, fingering the classified ad that had lured him. “We were just going to come out and get a few gallons and paint our trim, but now she says it’s $2 a gallon! That’s why it’s all still there.”

Incredulous, Anna Famalaro said, “I can’t believe they thought it was really free.”

“I thought I was being clever. It was an advertising gimmick,” she sighed. “Now they’re mad at me. Like I don’t already have enough people mad at me?”