Haun’s Attorneys Focus on Letter, Kidnapper’s Height

Working feverishly to sow doubt among jurors as their portion of Diana Haun’s murder trial prepares to close next week, her attorneys put on evidence Friday meant to undermine the prosecution’s case and bolster their own theory that someone else killed Ventura homemaker Sherri Dally.

Deputy Public Defenders Susan Olson and Neil Quinn presented 11 witnesses in less than six hours, focusing on everything from eyewitness estimates of the height of Dally’s kidnapper to the typewritten letter in which “British extremists” claimed responsibility for her death.

They began on Canada Larga Road.

Prosecution witnesses have testified that they saw a blond woman parked alone in a teal Nissan Altima in the wee hours of the day after Dally’s abduction. One identified the woman as Haun.

But Norma Wade, a Canada Larga rancher, testified Friday she saw a blond woman there one morning in May 1996, along with two casually dressed men. The three were hanging around a teal car parked on the shoulder of Canada Larga Road, she testified.

“I just got a real sense of something unusual [going] on,” Wade testified. “It happens a lot on Canada Larga Road. People drop off unwanted animals and refrigerators and things like that. . . . It just looked out of place.”

But under cross-examination by Deputy Dist. Atty. Lela Henke-Dobroth, Wade admitted that she could not remember the time or even the date she saw the car.

And confronted with a photograph of the Nissan allegedly rented by Haun, Wade testified that the car she saw was a slightly different shade of teal, with more chrome.

Then the defense brought out Benny Estrella, the brother of Teresa Estrella, a woman who earlier testified about Haun’s involvement in witchcraft.

Teresa Estrella sometimes exaggerates, and she even exaggerated once about witchcraft, her brother testified.

Benny Estrella told jurors that his sister once told friends that he claimed he and fellow heavy-metal music fans sacrificed a cat during a black magic ritual. But that was merely a rumor they circulated to scare away tougher youths who had been harassing them, Benny Estrella testified, and he never told her he had actually performed the ritual.

Defense attorneys also questioned a former co-worker of Haun’s, who had testified about her devotion to the victim’s husband, Michael Dally. Dally also faces a murder trial once Haun’s is done, on charges that he killed his wife in a conspiracy with Haun.

Vons deli worker Ericka Burton testified Friday that Haun believed that once the Dallys’ sons were old enough, Michael Dally would leave his wife for her.

“But he was scared to leave his wife with the boys, he felt she was unstable with the boys,” Burton testified.

On cross-examination, Burton testified that Haun told her “that Sherri Dally was a psycho,” but that she did not explain the remark.

A defense investigator also sought to puncture a prosecution theory: that witnesses to Sherri Dally’s abduction remembered Dally and a woman they believe to be Haun being of different heights because the Target parking lot in Ventura where it happened was unevenly paved.

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Public Defender Investigator Arthur Jimenez testified that he measured the pavement with a level and found that the lot slopes by no more than half an inch within 4 feet.

Jimenez told jurors that he took four female models there, ranging in height from 5-foot-4 to 5-foot-9, and photographed them standing in several different places. Then he showed the jurors photos that he said demonstrated the models’ location had no effect on how tall or short they appeared when compared with one another.

And late in the day, witness Walt SooHoo took the stand to testify about an incident in which a young man apparently used a credit card to fuel a teal car the morning after Sherri Dally disappeared.

SooHoo testified that he was paying a birthday visit to friend Richard Tristan’s gas station in Oxnard on May 7 when they noticed an odd credit card presented at the register.

The card bore the Vons supermarket logo, and although he did not see anyone take it back after paying, SooHoo said he believed a young Hispanic man retrieved the card.

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This testimony appears to mesh with Tristan’s earlier testimony that a young Hispanic man presented the card to pay for gas he had put into a teal Nissan Altima the morning after Sherri Dally’s abduction.

Other witnesses included Ventura Police Department word-processing operator Pamela Nazar. She was the one who prepared a copy of the so-called “British letter”--complete with misspellings from the original--on a typewriter that was seized from Haun’s house.

Nazar testified that the typewriter has a built-in spell-check function that beeps whenever a word is misspelled, and a correction button for erasing errors. But under cross-examination, Nazar said she did not know whether the typewriter’s ribbons or tab settings had been changed.

And Dist. Atty. Investigator Richard Haas testified that Haun’s former boyfriend, Christopher McGinty, told him that she had never done modeling or acting--evidence that defense attorneys apparently hoped would jab at prosecutors’ statements that Haun was a master of disguise.

Haas also testified that an apartment manager told him that Haun appeared to be “subservient” to Michael Dally. Her attorneys have sought to paint Haun as a love-struck dupe who unwittingly bought an ax and other equipment used in the murder.