Death on Mother’s Day

From the moment she turned up by a freeway call box, dazed and bleeding from a large gash in her abdomen, Donna Kay Lee has been the wild card in the case of the Mother’s Day double murder at Universal CityWalk.

Would she incriminate her boyfriend, Paul Carasi? Or would she stand by the man police say was her accomplice in the slayings of Carasi’s 61-year-old mother, Doris, and ex-girlfriend Sonia Salinas, 29, in front of their young son?

Over the next three months, those and other questions should be answered as Carasi, 32, and Lee, 46, are tried for the highly publicized killings, for which the Los Angeles district attorney is seeking the death penalty. Jury selection is to begin today in Santa Monica Superior Court for the joint trial of the pair, who have pleaded not guilty.

Even for a town hardened by a parade of criminal depravity, the case gives one pause. Carasi allegedly lured his mother and Salinas, the mother of his son, to a celebratory Mother’s Day dinner before helping his lover, Lee, slash them both to death. The alleged motive: His ex-girlfriend had garnished his wages for child support, with the backing of his mother.

In an apparent preview of the defense, Lee’s attorney, Henry J. Hall, filed documents last month asserting that his client was a victim of battered women’s syndrome.

“Our position has always been that she’s 100% not guilty,” Hall said. “There are things that happened, positions that were taken and statements that were made that call out for explanation. The battered women’s syndrome attempts to explain that.”

In contrast, Carasi’s lawyer has filed documents that portray Lee as cunning and obsessed. Whether that portrait will emerge at the trial--it was gleaned through a jailhouse informant--is unclear.

Hall’s defense could present problems for Carasi’s lawyer, Public Defender Ralph Courtney, who has already asked Judge Leslie Light for more time to prepare his case.

Courtney acknowledged that he has requested an expert of his own on battered women’s syndrome to assist in Carasi’s defense. “We have an expert to evaluate that opinion. But what it’s . . . based on, I won’t know.”

Both Carasi and Lee have been held without bail in County Jail since their arrests shortly after the slayings. Their relationship continues, according to court records, but neither prosecutors nor defense lawyers would elaborate.

Deputy Dist. Attys. John Gilligan and Phil Stirling said that whatever the defense, they will counter with both direct and circumstantial evidence.

Prosecutors say they have the murder weapon and DNA evidence that links the defendants to the crime scene. Prosecutors will argue that child support was at the heart of the crime and that it was motivated by financial gain.

Carasi and Lee were “co-equals and co-participants before, during and after the murders,” Gilligan said.

“This crime demonstrated painstaking planning and preparation on the part of both defendants,” he added.

Prosecutors plan to call at least 70 witnesses, including a number of medical experts, the defendants’ co-workers, Paul Carasi’s creditors, law enforcement officers, CityWalk security guards and other employees of the popular mall.

Prosecutors will concentrate not only on the nature of the love triangle, but on how its dynamics may have led to murder.

Records show that Lee met Carasi when the pair--along with Salinas--worked at a Bank of America data-processing center in downtown Los Angeles.

Carasi left Salinas for Lee, and the pair moved into a North Hollywood apartment building where his mother also lived. Doris Carasi’s frequent visitors, according to court records, included Salinas and her 2-year-old son, Doris Carasi’s grandson.

At a preliminary hearing, colleagues said Carasi had told them he would punish his ex-lover for trying to win sole custody of their son and for garnishing his wages to pay child support, which amounted to $365 a month.

One man testified during the hearing that Carasi said, allegedly in reference to Salinas, “That bitch won’t get away with it. . . . I’ll get her one day.”

At the same proceeding, another witness testified that Carasi said, “Yeah, I wish she were dead” after the witness had inquired about whether Salinas was “getting half of [Carasi’s] stuff.”

But the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case will be the events of May 14, 1995.

Around 11 p.m., Doris Carasi, Paul Carasi, Salinas and the child returned to a parking garage after dinner at the Country Star restaurant.

In a sudden attack in a “secluded location of the CityWalk parking structure,” prosecutors said, the women were stabbed repeatedly in the neck, face, chest and hands. Their throats were slashed to the spinal cord in what prosecutors contend was a violent struggle.

Moments after the bodies were discovered, Carasi’s son was found strapped in his child seat in the back of Carasi’s car, screaming “Mommy, mommy, mommy.”

Court documents show Carasi told investigators he had been knocked to the ground and held there by one assailant while feigning unconsciousness.

He said that when he opened his eyes, the women were dead, lying in pools of blood. He told CityWalk guards he suffered a cut to his hand and that an unknown male attacker had stolen his fanny pack.

Then events took a strange turn when, 15 minutes after the slayings, a distress call was placed to authorities from a call box along the Hollywood Freeway.

Rolling up to the scene, four miles from where the bodies had been found, California Highway Patrol Officer Edmund Munoz Castaneda Jr. found Donna Lee lying by her red Chevrolet Beretta with a knife wound that had exposed her intestines. She had locked herself out of the car, he testified.

On a nearby freeway embankment, police found bloody washcloths, bloody latex-and-cloth gloves and two bloodstained fanny packs.

Also found, according to the officer’s testimony, were a blue denim jacket, a blue sweater, a bloody brown purse that contained Salinas’ identification, and a bloodstained kitchen knife with a 6-inch blade.

Another knife turned up in the case, according to court records, a serrated one that witnesses found on a parking garage stairway. Carasi allegedly identified it as belonging to him. But prosecutors said they believe that knife was a “red herring used by Carasi to throw off investigators.”

Inside Lee’s car, meanwhile, investigators found bloodstained plastic bags and a bloody black leather fanny pack containing Lee’s driver’s license and $24.

In her initial call to authorities, Lee claimed she had been robbed and stabbed after stopping to rest along the freeway because she felt sick.

Later, Lee’s first defense attorney, Martin Zaehringer, stated that he was collecting evidence to prove his client had been abducted the night of the slayings. To prosecutors, Stirling said, the defendants “perpetrated a fiction.”

Paul Carasi’s celebratory dinner was nothing more than “a final goodbye, getting the victims together and putting them at ease before they were led to their deaths,” according to Stirling. Lee was placed at the vicinity of the killings by one witness.

Also to be introduced into evidence: a parking stub for a Universal CityWalk garage, seized from Lee’s car, stamped an hour before the slayings.