Haun Says She Passed Lie Detector Examination

Quietly professing her innocence, murder suspect Diana J. Haun said Wednesday that she has been “set up” by the real killer in the Sherri Dally murder case.

“I am innocent. I had nothing to do with it,” Haun, 35, said softly but emphatically in an 80-minute telephone interview with The Times from her Port Hueneme house.

She stressed that she had even passed a lie detector test during an early grilling by detectives.

Identified by police as the prime suspect in the May slaying of the Ventura homemaker, the Port Hueneme grocery clerk also said she does not think her longtime lover, Michael Dally, killed his wife then implicated her.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t think so. . . . ,” she said. “Everybody tells me that--co-workers, friends. They say you’ve been set up in a big way. And we just want to know who did it, who set me up. He [Dally] told me he would never hurt me like that.”

Michael Dally, 36, is identified by law enforcement sources as a second suspect in the case. But Haun said she believes that he had also passed a lie detector test.

“We did take lie detector tests . . . and passed, Mike and I both,” she said. “I know I passed. I think he said we both passed.”

She said her feelings for Dally have cooled over the past seven weeks--since Sherri Dally’s May 6 abduction, Haun’s May 18 arrest and subsequent release for lack of evidence, the June 1 discovery of Dally’s stabbed and beaten body and a series of police raids on the Haun and Dally homes.

“We’re still friends,” she said. But Haun said she is not sure if she wants to reestablish the romantic relationship that flourished for two years, as Dally and Haun worked together at a Vons grocery store in Oxnard and as her engagement to another man foundered.

Dally still calls her and beeps her to return his calls, Haun said. But they try not to talk about the murder case because they assume their phones are tapped by investigators.

Dally has proclaimed his innocence and in recent weeks refused repeatedly to be interviewed. He could not be reached for comment Wednesday. Police say he is cooperating with their investigation.

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Haun’s interview represents the first time she has publicly discussed the Dally case in depth. Speaking clearly and with strong recall, she commented on topics ranging from Sherri Dally’s angry confrontations with her to accusations that Haun has told co-workers that she practices witchcraft.

In the interview, Haun also identified a third person she believes is the only person who hates her enough to set her up. “She once told me that I stole Mike away from her,” Haun said.

Contacted by The Times, the woman said she never was interested in Michael Dally romantically, does not hate Haun and can hardly believe Haun would tell co-workers and a reporter that she is involved in the slaying.

“I just can’t believe that she’s pointing at me,” the woman said. “It just seems to be coming off the top of her head. That’s why I’m laughing about it. It’s so far-fetched. If I was worried about it, I’d say, ‘Oh no, how could she?’ But I just can’t take it seriously.”

In the same interview, Haun also said she and Michael Dally vacationed in Cancun this spring on the Dallys’ 14th wedding anniversary, and that she feels no guilt about that since Dally had told her repeatedly that he did not love his wife and could never patch up their relationship.

“Even when I told him he should try to make things work out way back when,” she said, “he was not responsive to that.”

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Sherri Dally twice angrily confronted Haun in the Vons parking lot on Rose Avenue, once last fall and once this year, Haun added.

“She came out of nowhere,” Haun said of the initial confrontation. “She was yelling. Mike and I were speaking [to her]. She was just going off. . . . That was the first time I met her.

“She was calling names and stuff,” Haun said. “But Mike had already made up his mind, even if I had left, he had made up his mind that he was not married in his heart.”

Haun said she lived with Dally from May until September of last year in an Oxnard apartment he had rented, and that Dally only went back to his wife because he feared for the psychological well-being of his two sons, Devon, 8, and Max, 6.

“He told me that he told her that he would never give me up,” Haun said. “ . . . He mentioned her as a nanny or a baby-sitter, and roommate. He said that he never really thought he loved her.”

Dally did not return to be with his wife, Haun said, he went “back to the boys.”

Before her death, Sherri and Michael Dally had been together for nearly two decades, first as prom date sweethearts at Ventura High School, then in marriage.

Sherri Dally, 35, has been described repeatedly by those who know her well as a good mother and great friend--dedicated completely to her family until her death. In fact, she was kidnapped after she had dropped off her sons at school and bought a Mother’s Day present for her mother, and before she had hoped to return home to oversee her day-care operation.

Commenting on evidence in Sherri Dally’s slaying, Haun said she had no idea why police seem so confident they can make a case against her. Not only did she pass a lie detector test, she said, the other evidence against her does not add up either.

Police spokesman Lt. Carl Handy referred questions on the tests to Lt. Don Arth, lead investigator in the case. Arth could not be reached for comment.

Addressing an enticing bit of evidence, Haun also said she did not buy a short blond wig two days before Sherri Dally’s abduction, as a wig shop clerk has told authorities. Witnesses have said Sherri Dally was abducted from the parking lot of the Ventura Target store by a short, blond woman. Haun’s hair is long and brown.

Haun predicted that detailed handwriting samples detectives took from her last week will not match those on receipts for a rental car thought to be used in the slaying.

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Witnesses say that on the morning of May 6 they saw Sherri Dally get into the back seat of a blue-green car that had kept her from backing her van out of a parking stall. Days later, police seized a blood-stained, blue-green Nissan Altima rented in Haun’s name between May 5 and 7.

But Haun said Wednesday she had lost credit cards, her driver’s license and some checks before the car had been rented. Investigators have conceded that the signature on the receipts apparently does not match Haun’s normal handwriting. Police seized her wallet as evidence, she said.

Haun did confirm that during a police raid last week detectives seized old typewriters from her house--along with a computer and letters she had saved from Michael Dally.

The typewriters, bypassed in an initial search May 18, were apparently seized so detectives could determine whether any of them were used to write a bizarre, anonymous letter circulated to The Times and other news media recently.

The letter said Dally’s death was the work of British nationalists seeking to embarrass Ventura County law enforcement, and that Haun has been incorrectly implicated by lazy detectives.

Haun said she had nothing to do with the letter and has no idea where it originated.

Since the time Haun was first arrested, rumors have circulated among Vons employees that Haun and Dally were interested in witchcraft and Satanism.

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But she said Wednesday that neither she nor Dally believe in occult practices. It is true, Haun said, that she and another employee would joke about Satanism and witchcraft because the co-worker had a relative interested in it.

“We would tell stories back and forth . . . make up a bunch of stories,” Haun said. “She would make up stories, and I would make up stories.” Haun said she may have referred to herself as a character in those stories, but said they were not true.

“I told a lot of people at work: Just don’t take me seriously, because I joke around a lot. . . . But apparently some people take things too seriously. . . . I don’t become close to people at work. They like to spread rumors. That’s why I just joke around and tell them not to take me seriously.”

There were also times when Haun and Dally, both night-shift workers, would joke about vampires, she said. “We would have vampire jokes and that kind of thing . . . being vampires because you work nights and sleep in the day.”

Co-workers, however, recall the situation differently. They say it was Haun, not a fellow employee, who would bring up the subject of Satanism, saying she sometimes talked about being a witch who practices white and black magic.

Haun and Dally first met, she said, soon after she took a clerk’s position at Vons in December 1993. That was the latest in a series of jobs--clerk, waitress, bank teller, vending-machine stocker and postal worker--she said she had held since graduating from Hueneme High School in 1979.

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At Vons, she grew to know Dally well, working with him a couple of nights a week initially, then full time. By about June 1994 they were dating, and she quickly fell in love with Dally, she said.

“I tried to tell him that he should work things out [with his wife],” Haun said. “He said that he cared about me.” Dally also told her, Haun said, that he had intended to leave his wife nine years ago, but didn’t because she became pregnant with their first child.

Haun said she was drawn to Dally because he treated her with respect--unlike some men, she said, who had apparently considered her a “trophy” to be shown off in public.

“He’s caring, understanding. If I needed help, he was there,” she said of Dally, who she said has been in the grocery business since he was a teenager. “ . . . We cared about each other. If he needed to talk, he could always turn to me. And if I needed to talk, I could always turn to him.”

The couple dated for nearly a year, then moved into an Oxnard apartment together, living happily for five months, she said. But Dally was concerned about the toll the separation was having on his two boys, she said.

“We decided it was better for the boys. She was hurting them mentally,” Haun said. “She was telling them all kinds of stuff about their father. . . . That he left them and stuff; and that wasn’t true.”

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Friends have said that Sherri Dally loved her husband and family so much--reveling in the concept if not the reality of traditional family life--that she accepted a series of indignities from him, being treated dismissively and without regard. But she drew the line, they said, when he allegedly told her he would return home only if Haun could move in too.

Haun laughed at that suggestion Wednesday. She said Dally had mentioned that proposition, but said she never thought he was serious.

“He joked around about it once,” Haun said. “I laughed. I thought it was funny. But I never thought he actually said that to her.”

Haun said Dally told her he wanted her to raise his sons, but that divorce would have to wait until the children were old enough to understand the separation of their parents. Haun said Dally went so far as to have family Christmas pictures taken last year that included the couple and the two Dally boys. She carried those pictures in her wallet with her, she said.

Dally maintained that his wife was emotionally cold toward him and the two boys when they were not around other people, Haun said.

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That is why the public persona that has developed around Sherri Dally since her disappearance--as selfless wife and friend who wanted nothing for herself but a family--struck Haun as odd, she said.

“[That] was not the person Mike told me she was,” Haun said.

Personally, Haun said she met Sherri Dally only during the two parking lot confrontations, though she saw Sherri sometimes when she came to the store to visit her husband.

Despite his return home to Sherri and the boys, the Haun-Dally romance continued until Sherri Dally’s May 6 disappearance, and police questioning started, Haun said. She said she still loves Dally, and is convinced he did not set her up.

“[But] friends and relatives and everybody are trying to unconvince me,” she said.

Times correspondent Scott Hadly contributed to this story.