Deputy Says He Did Not Kill Woman He Met at Bar in 1988

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy accused in a lawsuit of killing a Van Nuys woman after a day of heavy drinking and sex seven years ago told a federal court jury Wednesday that someone else killed her.

Robert J. Mallon, testifying on the first trial day in a $10-million wrongful-death suit filed against him by the victim’s family, described how he and Catherine Braley became intoxicated at a bar, left together and engaged in sex in his county-owned car. However, Mallon testified, Braley was alive when she left his car later that night--just hours before her beaten and strangled body was found in a nearby parking lot on Jan. 15, 1988.

“I was not the last person with her,” Mallon, 44, said under sometimes intense questioning from Stephen Yagman, a lawyer representing Braley’s family. “The murderer was the last person to be with her.”