Dally Called Search for Wife Futile, Jury Told

Two weeks after his wife vanished, Michael Dally told a friend that it would be futile to search for her because animals would have already devoured her remains.

And he pressed the point when Gary Aanerud suggested that the only way to bring closure to Sherri Dally’s disappearance was to locate her body.

“You don’t want to be the one to find that body,” Dally said during a May 24, 1996, phone conversation recorded by police. “Trust me.”

A tape recording of the 20-minute conversation with Aanerud--who organized the search party that found Sherri Dally’s stabbed and beaten remains the following week--was played for the jury during Dally’s murder trial Thursday.

Aanerud was called as a prosecution witness to testify about a series of statements the defendant made after his wife was abducted from a Target parking lot on May 6, 1996.

Dally, 37, is charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy for allegedly plotting to kill his wife with longtime lover Diana Haun. She was convicted of the same charges last fall and sentenced to life in prison.

But defense attorneys contend that Haun acted alone. They say Dally loved his wife of 14 years and never wanted to see harm come to her.

It was the defense, in fact, who requested on cross-examination that the tape recording of Dally’s conversation with Aanerud be played, because of a series of statements the defendant makes about how much he loved his wife.

“I miss her something fierce,” Dally tells Aanerud at one point. “I love that woman and I miss her. . . . I really want to believe that she’s alive. . . . But Gary, there is no way she would leave the boys.

“Sherri was a very special woman and she’ll always be close to my heart,” Dally continues. “She is the mother of those boys and my first love.”

At one point on the tape, Dally talks about his desire to see the person who killed his wife punished. But he also defends Haun and suggests she was “set up” by his wife’s real killers.

“They are going to pay for the anguish to my boys,” he said on the tape, adding that “the people who did this” should suffer like she did.

As the tape played, Dally began to silently cry in court--the first time he has shown emotion since his murder trial began a month ago.

“I miss her, she is my wife,” Dally’s recorded voice said as he wiped away tears with a tissue. “I really don’t want to believe she’s dead either, but I have to move on.”

Dally’s comments to Aanerud covered a wide range of subjects dealing with his wife’s disappearance.

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His tone ranged from upbeat and chipper as he discussed details of the police investigation to somber and hushed as he talked about jet-skiing with Sherri a week before she was last seen getting into a car driven by a blond woman.

At one point, Dally warns Aanerud not to search for his wife, suggesting that Aanerud’s former fiancee, Kristin Best, could be a suspect because she matched the description of the blond abductor.

Dally also tells Aanerud that he knows the police are listening to his phone calls, then continues to talk about the case.

Before the tape recording was played for the jury, prosecutor Lela Henke-Dobroth questioned Aanerud about his observations of Dally’s demeanor during the days and weeks after Sherri Dally disappeared.

“My perception was that he wasn’t playing the role of the grieving husband,” Aanerud said.

On May 7, 1996--the day after Sherri Dally disappeared--Aanerud went to Dally’s house at 8 a.m. to pick up a photograph of her that he planned to use on fliers announcing that she was missing.

“He wasn’t willing to help,” Aanerud said. “I asked for a photo, he gave me a photo and I was on my way.”

When Dally greeted him at the door that morning, Aanerud said the defendant told him he had been up all night and hadn’t slept from worrying.

But according to earlier testimony, police went to Dally’s house after midnight and could not get an answer--despite knocking repeatedly.

Defense attorneys have suggested that Dally was home but sleeping soundly. Prosecutors contend that he was not home but out with Haun covering up the crime.

With regard to the phone conversation on May 24, 1996, Aanerud told the jury that Dally discussed blood found in a rental car. He said police had found a car with “lots of blood” in the back seat.

“He said there was like a slash to the throat or a gunshot to the head,” Aanerud testified. “He acted like he had just heard a juicy rumor and was passing it along.”

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Prosecutors asked Aanerud specific questions about statements Dally made to him during that phone call, including remarks about how he wanted to thank Aanerud for his help by drinking beer and going to an adult entertainment club.

“He said we’d go out, get drunk and go to a nudie bar and smoke some dope,” Aanerud testified. “I told him I wasn’t into that.”

Aanerud said Dally never volunteered to help in searches for his wife: “He indicated to me that it was a waste of time.”

But on cross-examination, attorney James M. Farley tried to provide some context to those statements. Addressing the searches for Sherri Dally, Farley asked Aanerud if it was true that what Dally also said was that he was letting the police handle the investigation. Aanerud said that was true.

“So in essence, he was telling you to leave it up to the professionals?” Farley asked.

“Yes, that’s correct,” Aanerud said.

In other testimony Thursday, criminalist Margaret Schaeffer testified about her examination of the teal-colored Nissan Altima that Haun rented one day before Sherri Dally’s disappearance.

Witnesses say they saw Sherri Dally allow herself to be handcuffed by a blond woman before climbing into the back seat of a teal-colored car.

When Schaeffer examined the Altima 11 days later, she found evidence of blood pooled on the floor of the back seat. She also found blood soaked on the seat and spattered in various places. The blood was later determined to be Sherri Dally’s.

Schaeffer said she also found blood stains in the trunk, including a long, straight stain between 3 and 5 inches long. She said it could have been left there by the edge of a knife or an ax.

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During her analysis of the car, Schaeffer said she also found six hair fibers from at least two different blond wigs.

Haun bought a blond wig two days before Sherri Dally was abducted, and police found a different wig in her closet during a later search.

The last witness to testify Thursday was Ventura County Medical Examiner Ronald O’Halloran, who performed the autopsy on Sherri Dally’s skeletal remains.

O’Halloran collected Dally’s bones from the bottom of a ravine on Canada Larga Road on June 1, 1996, about an hour after a volunteer search party found the bones and pieces of Dally’s clothing.

The bones were strewn about 25 to 30 feet apart. They had been torn apart by animals, the medical examiner said. One of Dally’s legs, in fact, was discovered about 100 feet away from the rest of her body and her skull was found under a bush.

After collecting the bones, O’Halloran said he cleaned and examined them for signs of injury at his office in Ventura. What he found were a series of blows to Dally’s head that broke her face in several places.

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Dally’s cheekbone was fractured in three places. Her jawbone was split in two and cut on the right side. A piece of metal determined to be the tooth of a serrated knife was embedded in the bone.

In addition, O’Halloran observed two notched cuts to Dally’s jaw, which he said could have been caused by the blade of an ax.

“An object, like this hatchet, could have produced all of these injuries,” he said, holding a camping ax similar to one sales records show Haun bought before Sherri Dally was abducted.

During the autopsy, O’Halloran said he also found a clean cut and a rough break to the back of Sherri Dally’s skull--injuries that may be consistent with a beheading or attempted beheading.

In addition to the head injuries, O’Halloran said that Sherri Dally was stabbed at least six times in the chest based on cuts to her ribs and clavicle.

O’Halloran is scheduled to continue testifying today.