Sister-in-Law Says Sherri Dally Confronted Haun

“She told Diana Haun that she was not going to get her husband and her boys, except . . . over Sherri’s dead body.”

Patricia Dally choked on those words Tuesday as she tearfully recalled for a jury her sister-in-law’s desperate attempts to save a failing marriage, including an angry confrontation with her husband’s lover.

The incident occurred in a supermarket parking lot a few months before Sherri Dally’s slaying in May 1996, the sister-in-law testified. It was intended to break up the love affair between Haun and Michael Dally, she said, an affair prosecutors contend was a catalyst of murder.

Patricia Dally was one of 11 witnesses called to the stand Tuesday during the first full day of testimony in Haun’s murder trial in Ventura County Superior Court.

At one point, Patricia Dally said, Sherri told her that Michael refused to remove a king-size pillow from their bed that had a picture of Diana Haun attached to it.

“It upset me that the pillow was left on the bed and could not be taken off the bed,” she testified, crying softly.

In launching their case against the 36-year-old grocery clerk, prosecutors sought to establish the love triangle between Haun, Michael Dally and his wife while also introducing testimony about his desire to avoid a costly divorce.

Among other motives, Dally and Haun are accused of plotting and carrying out Sherri Dally’s killing for financial gain.

Early in the day, prosecutors called a series of supermarket co-workers to testify about the love affair that developed between Haun, 36, and Michael Dally, 37, in the aisles of the Oxnard grocery store where they both worked.

Several testified about the character of the pair, describing Haun as a quiet deli worker devoted to her man and Dally as a cocky womanizer who showed outward happiness when his wife mysteriously disappeared.

“It was like someone winning the lottery,” co-worker Richard Ready testified. “He never once looked upset.”

Ready told jurors about conversations he had with Michael Dally while working the night shift more than a year ago at the Vons store on Rose Avenue in Oxnard.

At the time, Ready said, he was going through an expensive divorce and his wages were being garnished to pay child support--a situation Dally liked to tease him about, he said.

“He said it wouldn’t happen to him,” Ready testified.

One time, Ready said, he joked with Dally about how it would have been cheaper for Ready to hire a hit man to get rid of his wife, rather than pay for his divorce.

Dally responded that he had “contacts,” Ready said, and could get “guns and knives--whatever he needed.”

Although he could not recall in court Tuesday the precise statement, Ready said he told a district attorney’s investigator that Dally also said: “I’ve got connections, they could get anything you wanted.”

Anna Marie Fair, another Vons employee, told the jury that Michael Dally also talked to her about the high price of divorce.

“He said that it [divorce] would be too much,” she testified. “That he didn’t want to pay child support.”

Darrell Anderson, a Vons store manager, handled the retirement accounts for both Sherri and Michael Dally.

He told the jury that before his wife’s slaying, Michael Dally inquired about cashing out her account on which he was the beneficiary. When Dally learned that he could not touch the $4,000 in savings, Anderson said, he became “upset.”

“He thought that he controlled the money,” Anderson said. He said Dally then asked him: “If something happens to Sherri, what happens to the money?”

Dally and Haun are facing murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges in connection with Sherri Dally’s slaying.

They have pleaded not guilty to the charges and are facing separate trials.

In addition to the charges, Dally and Haun face two special circumstance allegations making them eligible for the death penalty if convicted, including one alleging that Sherri Dally’s killing was committed for financial gain.

Several co-workers testified about the character of both Haun and Michael Dally--an issue that has emerged as a significant aspect of the trial.

Fair said that Haun increasingly started to wear alluring “tight-fitting clothes” around Dally and changed her hairstyle. She also flaunted a sapphire necklace that he bought her, she said.

“She wanted to marry him,” Fair testified.

When she asked Haun whether Sherri Dally knew about their affair, Fair said that Haun responded: “We don’t talk about that bitch.”

Fair told jurors that both Dally and Haun bragged about their intelligence around other co-workers. She said Michael Dally once told her that he thought he was smart enough “to get away with murder.”

Another co-worker said that after Sherri Dally disappeared, she confronted Diana Haun and asked her point blank whether she killed the Ventura homemaker. She said Haun blamed the slaying on another co-worker.

“She got in my face and said, ‘Why, do you think I did it?’ ” Vons employee Yvette Bohnert testified. “I replied: ‘If you didn’t do it, I guess the Ventura Satanist people did.”

Asked under cross-examination what she meant by that statement, Bohnert said she didn’t know why she said it and told the attorneys that everyone at the store was under intense stress and anxiety because of the publicity surrounding the case and its link to Haun.

Prosecutors have suggested that Haun was involved in black magic and witchcraft and killed Sherri Dally as a human sacrifice to her lover, Michael.

Sherri Dally disappeared on May 6, 1996, and her remains were found in a remote canyon north of Ventura about a month later.

A week before she was last seen shopping at a Ventura Target store, Sherri Dally confided in her sister-in-law about her marital problems while Patricia and Michael’s brother, Frank, were visiting on vacation.

Michael Dally was continuing his affair with Diana Haun and increasingly using drugs despite Sherri Dally’s concerns, Patricia Dally testified.

“It was a strained relationship,” Dally told the jury. “Sherri felt she had done everything she could to be the wife and mother and couldn’t understand why that wasn’t enough.”

Patricia Dally said that she and Sherri were close, “like sisters,” she said.

Over the 16 years that they knew one another, Patricia said, she observed her brother-in-law acting in a displeasing way toward his wife. After the birth of their first child, for instance, Sherri had trouble loosing weight, she said.

“He told her she was fat,” Patricia said, adding that at times she heard Michael refer to Sherri as a “fat cow.”

At the same time, she told the jury, he would bring home large chocolate bars and encourage her to eat them.

“He didn’t make it easy for her.”

During the April 1996 visit, just before her death, Sherri told Patricia that she was considering leaving Michael because of his drug use and the adultery, she said. But it was difficult for her, Patricia Dally testified, because Sherri loved her husband so much.

“She knew the right thing to do was leave him,” she said, “but she was struggling with the decision because he was her high school sweetheart.”