Acquaintances Describe a Polite Boy Who Turned Mean

Until Michael Dally’s tawdry story spun out in the two murder trials, his life had seemed altogether commonplace.

He had lived all his 37 years in Ventura, had worked 20 years for the same employer, married his high school sweetheart and stayed with her, more or less, for two decades.

The son of a soft-spoken general contractor father and a Japanese homemaker mother, Dally was a quiet, well-mannered boy and remains today cool and calm, displaying a casual cockiness even while he was on trial for the murder of his wife, Sherri.

Through it all, he has remained close to his parents. At the time of his arrest in November 1996, Dally still lived just a few houses from his mother and father and a block or so from his sister’s family.

His father, Lawrence, remains his greatest supporter--doggedly maintaining his son’s innocence and vouching for his whereabouts the night after Sherri disappeared.

With Sherri dead and Michael in jail, Dally’s parents have cared for the couple’s sons, Devon, 9, and Max, 8.

It is a closeness of family that friends remember from the childhood of Dally, whose father dubbed him “Butchy.”

“Butchy was raised being very polite,” said onetime friend John Avila, who helped organize searches for Sherri Dally’s body and testified against Dally this year. “His mom was Japanese from Okinawa. His dad was over there in the Seabees during the Korean War.”

By the time Dally transferred from St. Bonaventure High School to Ventura High as a sophomore, however, he had begun to change, Avila said.

An average student, Dally drove a fast metallic-green Chevy Supersport and reveled in things that would bring him special attention.

“Even in high school he’d do anything that was enough to shock somebody,” Avila said. “If it was weird or different then, ‘OK, what’s the big deal?’ That was always his personality.”

Dally’s best friend through elementary and high school, Avila said his old pal’s penchant for doing “wild things” created a gulf between them.

One incident led to Dally’s arrest, court records show. He was arrested in 1990 in downtown Ventura for possession of an illegal knife.

“I would characterize him as overconfident,” Avila said. “He was someone who always wanted to stand out in a crowd.”

That tendency showed itself even in the years just after the Dallys married in 1982, Avila said.

“A lot of what Michael was about didn’t really incorporate with Sherri,” Avila said. “He’d do his own thing. Just going off on little one- or two-day trips. He liked Big Sur and Carmel. He’d say, ‘I’m just going to go drive.’ ”

Dally used drugs and bought prostitutes, according to trial testimony.

And, in addition to Haun, he had at least one long-term girlfriend during his marriage. That three-year relationship ended in 1992, former girlfriend Sallie Lowe testified. During the affair, Lowe said, Dally asked her to kill his wife.

A Dally co-worker told The Times, “If you went back into his record, he’s always got a girl on the side. He’s cocky--a very manipulating, strong-willed, egotistical man.”

Indeed, after Haun’s trial, some jurors expressed a strong dislike for Dally and said they only wished he had been on trial too.

“She was a gal under the influence of that turkey Michael Dally,” one juror said after recommending she be sentenced to life in prison, not execution.

Just last week, his lover Diana Haun, depicted by Dally’s lawyers as a “psycho, crazed, wacked-out witch,” told reporters that she had been manipulated by him.

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“The Mike I had fallen in love with back then never existed. . . . He was a false, made-up person,” she said. “I think he’s a psychotic.”

Dally never went to college, pursuing instead his livelihood in the grocery business. However, the former 16-year-old box boy saw his career founder. In fact, Haun said in a 1996 interview with The Times that Dally’s aloof demeanor is really a defense mechanism that helped him handle the stress of a management job he once held.

“He said that developed from when he was working as a manager at Vons,” she said. “He would get bleeding ulcers because of the pressures. And one way of dealing with it is to put on this outside thing so that people wouldn’t pressure him.”

But some friends and co-workers judged Dally more harshly.

Friends said Dally is even estranged from some members of his family because of the way he treated his wife for years and because of his behavior after she disappeared.

Within a week of her disappearance, he had filed for legal separation and custody of their two sons.

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And while Dally publicly vouched for Haun’s integrity, he described his wife as “just your average homemaker . . . just your average mom.”

“She’s a beautiful and wonderful person,” he said of Haun. Of his wife, he said, “I wish they’d just find Sherri so her family can go on. Her mother’s a mess.”

When a search party of friends found Sherri Dally’s skeletal remains June 1, 1996--nearly a month after her disappearance--her husband expressed little emotion, even smiling and joking at her funeral two weeks later.

Several of Sherri Dally’s closest friends were appalled by Dally’s behavior.

“I’ve never felt this kind of anger,” Kristin Best said.

For years, she went to the beach or the movies with the Dallys. Even then, Michael Dally’s disrespect for his wife showed, Best said.

“He was cold,” she said. “Even when there were several of us in a group, I always got the feeling the rest of us were treated with more dignity and respect, and Sherri sort of got the leftover.”