Transcript Offers Prosecution Theories in Huber Slaying : Courts: The district attorney’s office believes the Newport Beach woman was assaulted while still alive and feared fighting off her abductor, grand jury records show.

Court documents unsealed Tuesday lay out in disturbing detail prosecution theories in the Denise Huber murder case, including the belief the victim might have feared fighting off her assailant and was sexually assaulted while still alive.

Huber disappeared in June, 1991, after her car broke down along the Corona del Mar Freeway, just a short distance from her Newport Beach home. Her nude, handcuffed body was found in Arizona last July in a freezer owned by a former Orange County man who could receive the death sentence. His murder trial is scheduled for October. Huber had been fatally bludgeoned and duct tape covered her mouth and eyes.

Other developments revealed by the 323-page grand jury transcript unsealed at the request of The Times include:

* DNA testing concludes Huber’s blood matches blood found at a Laguna Hills storage facility where suspect John J. Famalaro was living at the time of the killing. Prosecutors believe Huber was killed there.

* Forensic tests fail to conclude whether the scant traces of decomposed semen found in Huber’s body can be linked to the defendant.

In presenting the case to the Orange County Grand Jury in September, Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans argued that circumstantial evidence--the nudity, the handcuffs, the duct tape--taken together indicate Famalaro’s intention was to assault Huber while she was alive.

“You don’t handcuff a dead person. What’s the point? Why do you need to control the flailing arms of a dead (person)? . . . Would you want a dead person not to see or a dead person not to speak?” he asked the grand jurors.

Evans told jurors that Huber’s head was covered with plastic bags before she was fatally bludgeoned. Evans also said he believes the lack of bruising beneath the handcuffs shows Huber was in fear for her life: “You could say they were put on someone that was so afraid there was no struggle.”

In making a case for the kidnaping allegation, Evans stressed that even if Huber willingly accepted a ride from a stranger, her assailant is still guilty of kidnaping for not taking her to safety.