Records Show Volatile History of Man in Murder-Suicide

The Aliso Viejo man who apparently stabbed his second wife to death last weekend and then killed himself as her children played in the next room had a “violent ballistic temper” and had beaten and threatened to kill his first wife, according to court records.

In a July 1995 declaration filed in connection with their divorce, Mark Sliger’s first wife, Yvonne Sliger, said he once kicked her across the living room when she asked him to help with Christmas decorations, and another time grabbed her by the throat and “yelled that he was going to snap my neck and kill me dead.”

Yvonne Sliger, 41, also said in her declaration that her husband had once grabbed a neighbor boy by the neck, lifted him off the ground and sworn at him after the boy broke a toy belonging to the Sligers’ son.

And in a request for a restraining order against Sliger, she said, “I fear for my life and the life of my son.”

Mark Sliger, 34, was found dead of self-inflicted knife wounds Saturday afternoon in the home he had shared in Wood Canyon Villa Apartments with his second wife, 32-year-old Lisa Ellsworth, and her two children from a previous marriage. The couple had been separated.

Ellsworth’s body lay next to Sliger’s in the upstairs bedroom. Her children, ages 7 and 4, were building a fort with several neighborhood children in the closet of the adjacent bedroom when the murder-suicide occurred, police and neighbors said.

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Orange County sheriff’s deputies broke down Ellsworth’s bedroom door after her 7-year-old son called authorities saying his mother wouldn’t answer and he had “seen a bloody foot when he looked under the door,” sheriff’s officials said Saturday.

The children were taken to Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, and their father flew from Utah this week to take them home with him.

Sheriff’s deputies had responded several times to the apartment in the 28500 block of Wood Canyon Drive to mediate fights between Mark Sliger and Ellsworth.

They were summoned at 3 a.m. on the day of the deaths, but sheriff’s officials said no crime had been committed. Deputies advised Ellsworth to get a restraining order against Sliger and took him to a local motel “to cool off.”

But other than those police contacts, neighbors had seen no glaring signs of trouble between the couple, whom they described as “real handsome and . . . really pretty.”

Paul Morrical, 40, who lived next door to the couple at a previous Aliso Viejo address, said Mark Sliger loved playing with his dog, Lucky, and often stopped to chat about his Porsche as Morrical worked on his Mustang.

“I didn’t know him very well, just as a neighbor, and he seemed perfectly normal,” Morrical said. “There was nothing that was off about them. I never saw the police at his place.”

The records from Sliger’s divorce, however, portray a volatile man.

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Yvonne and Mark Sliger married in 1988 and separated six years later. The court entered a dissolution judgment in May 1995, and Mark Sliger married Lisa Ellsworth two weeks later. But Mark and Yvonne Sliger continued to battle over custody issues.

After going through mediation, the couple reached an agreement for joint custody of their son, now 5, in November 1995 and Mark Sliger was ordered to pay $942 in monthly child support, the divorce records show.

But in July, she had sought a restraining order against him, saying that he and Lisa Ellsworth were threatening her.

In her request for that order, Yvonne Sliger said her husband had “violently kicked me” after an argument over Christmas decorations, causing her to fly across the room and fracture her wrist on the tile floor.

“The respondent was not concerned with my injury; he went to sleep,” she wrote in her declaration. “I drove myself to the emergency room and had my wrist cast.”

And in June 1995, Yvonne Sliger said, her ex-husband pushed their son “out the door and slammed the door on him. Then respondent grabbed me by the throat and lifted me off my feet and threatened to kill me.”

Their son “was crying outside the door. I could hardly breathe and my feet could not touch the floor,” she wrote. “The respondent is 6-foot-2 and approximately 240 pounds. I am 5-foot-1 1/2 and weigh 115 pounds. . . . I managed to speak through clenched mouth to beg the respondent to put me down because our son . . . needs me.”