Friend Denies Dally Told Her He Helped Kill Wife

A witness whose comments to a hotline counselor may have been pivotal in the recent murder indictment of grocery clerk Michael Dally told The Times on Saturday that her longtime friend never implicated himself in his wife’s slaying, and instead said he loved his wife.

“Michael never confided to me that he killed his wife or that he planned it. . . . He told me he had nothing to do with it and that he loves his wife and would never hurt her,” said the Ventura woman, who allegedly told a crisis hotline counselor in July about a friend’s confession that he had helped kill his wife.

The woman, who asked not to be named, said she testified before the Ventura County Grand Jury on Nov. 15, the same day the secret panel indicted Dally, 36, and his girlfriend, Diana Haun, 35, in the kidnap-slaying of Dally’s wife, Sherri.

The woman, who said she had known Michael Dally for 20 years as a family friend, said she told the grand jury that Dally did not implicate himself in his wife’s death when he came to see her in May, shortly after Sherri Dally was abducted from the parking lot of a Ventura department store.

She said that hotline counselor Claire Connelly must have mixed the woman’s comments with information from newspaper accounts of the Dally case when telling investigators that Dally had confessed to her.

But Connelly, 61, former director of the Resource Center, a Ventura County crisis hotline, said in an interview Saturday that the woman did, in fact, say Dally had confessed to her.

“My guess is she’s a very reluctant witness out of a sense of loyalty to Michael Dally and his family, and out of fear that there were other people involved in the killing,” Connelly said. “She told me that he was in a satanic cult and so was Diana Haun, and that there were others involved, and that they planned it so he would be at work when the murder occurred, so he would have an alibi.”

According to Connelly, the Ventura woman called at 2 a.m. on July 19, slurring her words, grieving for a dead son and angry that a friend had burdened her by confessing to participating in his wife’s slaying. Connelly said she took written notes on the session.

“She was intoxicated and mentioned that this old friend had dropped by and confided in her that he and his girlfriend had killed his wife,” Connelly said. “She told me a little bit about him and his family history.”

After the woman failed to show up for a subsequent counseling session, Connelly called the district attorney’s office in July to report the incident. Investigators did not call back until Aug. 20, Connelly said. That was the week after the grand jury refused to indict Dally despite the urging of Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury.

Prosecutors apparently tried to buttress their case by further checking out the hotline incident.

Connelly said they bought her a round-trip airline ticket from her new home in Connecticut and paid for her rental car so she could return to Ventura to call the woman and get her comments on tape.

Connelly said that on Sept. 9, she called the woman in the presence of Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Lela Henke-Dobroth and investigator Richard Haas, with a tape recorder running. Under the ruse that she was doing a follow-up counseling call, Connelly introduced the Dally case by saying that the woman’s friend had not done her any favors by confiding in her. Then, Connelly said, she mentioned that she drove from her Ojai home every day past Canada Larga Road, where Sherri Dally’s body was found.

“I said, ‘Is that the one?’ and she said, ‘That’s the one,’ ” Connelly said.

Then the woman mentioned Haun and Dally’s purported involvement in a satanic cult and said that others were involved in the killing, Connelly said.

“She said that this person seemed to think he was in the clear because he wasn’t at the murder,” Connelly said. “And she said she had told him not to come around anymore because she didn’t want to hear this sort of stuff. She also told me that the cult was based in Ojai, where I happened to be living.”

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Haun, in a June interview with The Times, acknowledged that she and Dally sometimes joked about being a witch and a warlock in front of co-workers at a Vons market in Oxnard, but that was nothing more than black humor. Law enforcement sources have said that they place little importance on such comments and that Satanism plays no significant role in the case.

Connelly said she declined a district attorney’s request to return to testify before the grand jury in November because prosecutors already had the woman’s comments on tape and the woman was available as a witness. The trip would have been a hardship, Connelly said, because she is physically disabled.

On Nov. 14 and 15, the grand jury heard additional evidence against Dally, including testimony from the woman and evidence of her conversation with Connelly.

Dally’s friend said she told the grand jury that Dally made no confession and that he had dropped by for the first time in years to seek solace because of his wife’s disappearance. Sherri Dally’s stabbed and battered body, discovered June 1 in a ravine north of Ventura, had not yet been discovered, the woman said.

The woman, who is in her 40s, said she went to high school with Dally’s aunt and got to know the family. “It was his birthday,” she said. “He came over.”

She said the session with Dally threw her back into grieving for a son who died in an auto accident two years ago. She drank alcohol and then called Connelly for help, she said.

“I was looking for grief therapy,” she said. “I had mentioned that a friend’s wife had been murdered and that’s why I was feeling bad about my child. That’s about it. Then we discussed different ways of counseling.” The conversation lasted about 45 minutes, Connelly said.

In their follow-up conversation in September, the woman said, Connelly tried to get her to talk about the Dally case. “I know she did bring it up, and I didn’t want to talk about it.”

The woman said the whole conversation lasted about one minute. Connelly estimated it lasted 12 to 15 minutes.

Bradbury declined to comment on the tape Saturday, citing a gag order on the case.

The woman said Connelly distorted the facts, and she didn’t know why.

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“I believe she must have me mixed up with other people,” the woman said. “It sounds more like something she was reading in the paper, and she knew I knew Mike, so she put it together. I didn’t mention his name, but I think she just put things together with what she’d read in the paper.”

Dally’s attorney, James Farley, said Saturday that he did not know what to make of the woman’s alleged comments about his client.

“I don’t think he would confide this to anyone because Michael Dally was not involved with the killing of his wife,” Farley said. “Why would he confide to something that from the very beginning he has said he had nothing to do with?

“I don’t know where this woman was coming from,” the lawyer added. “Maybe she wanted her 15 minutes of fame, or maybe she’s just a wacko. We’ll find out.”