Trial Delayed After McKinzie Yells at Witness

Kenneth McKinzie brought his murder trial to a brief halt Tuesday after accusing a witness of lying about his alleged confession to killing an elderly Oxnard woman during a robbery for drug money.

“Why don’t you tell the truth?” McKinzie yelled from his seat at the defense table.

“I am, Kenny,” witness Theresa Johnson shot back from the stand during a brief but heated exchange.

Judge Vincent J. O’Neill immediately cleared the courtroom and ordered a 10-minute recess. When jurors returned, he instructed them to ignore the remarks.

The courtroom fireworks didn’t end with McKinzie’s outburst. Johnson grew increasingly agitated under questioning by defense attorney Willard Wiksell.

Raising her voice and flailing her arms, the 41-year-old recovering drug addict said over and over that she was telling the truth about the things McKinzie allegedly told her the night 73-year-old Ruth Eloise Avril was killed.

According to Johnson’s testimony, the events of that evening in December 1995 were as follows:

A few hours after the slaying, McKinzie showed up at her door and showed her Avril’s ATM card. He said he didn’t know how to use it and asked her help. Johnson said the two withdrew $440 and he bought rock cocaine with it.

McKinzie returned to her Perkins Road apartment to smoke it with her. That’s when a tearful McKinzie confessed to fatally beating Avril during an attempted robbery.

“He told me, ‘I think I killed somebody,’ ” Johnson testified, adding that she hid the truth from authorities for more than a year.

“I took it that he was confiding in me, and, as a friend, I never told anybody.”

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But last year, an anonymous tipster contacted the Oxnard Police Department and told detectives that Johnson knew who killed Avril. Authorities found her at a drug rehabilitation center, and she told them what McKinzie had allegedly said.

“I didn’t have any evidence, I didn’t see. All I know is what was said to me in my bedroom,” Johnson testified.

Her version was sharply challenged by Wiksell, who questioned how she could recall word for word a statement uttered three years ago while she was in a haze of cocaine and alcohol.

Johnson acknowledged that in addition to smoking cocaine with McKinzie, she used the drug twice earlier in the evening and drank some white Zinfandel with her mother.

She denied that her memory was affected.

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“What’s that got to do with it?” she snapped at the defense attorney. “That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it!” But Wiksell pressed on. He asked what time McKinzie came over, what time they went out that night to get the cash, and what his client was wearing--questions she could not answer with certainty.

“I didn’t even care about the time,” she yelled. “All I wanted was a hit.”

“All you wanted was to get high and crawl into that little room you lived in, right?” Wiksell interrupted.

“Uh-huh,” she replied.

Despite dogged questioning, however, Johnson never changed her story. She said McKinzie even threatened her to keep her quiet.

“He could have been playing,” she said, “but whether he meant it or not, it was said.”

Outside the courtroom, Johnson said the entire experience has been nerve-racking. “It’s been interrupting my life,” she said, before stomping out of the courthouse.

Later in the day, another friend of McKinzie’s took the witness stand.

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Seventeen-year-old Donald Bullard, the son of McKinzie’s girlfriend, told the jury that shortly before Christmas 1995 he and the defendant helped Avril carry a Christmas tree into her second-story apartment.

“We asked her if she needed help,” said Bullard, who lived next door and occasionally helped the elderly woman carry her groceries up a flight of stairs.

On that day, he said, Avril was struggling to get the tree out of the trunk of her car. He and McKinzie carried it into the living room of her home and adjusted it to a tree stand. He said it took about 10 minutes.

Prosecutors contend that McKinzie later went back to Avril’s home, waited in her garage and attacked her when she came out to turn off a light. They say he beat her, forced her into the trunk of her car and then drove her to a remote beach spot and dumped her body in a ditch.

McKinzie faces a possible death sentence. He says a another man did the crime. Testimony is scheduled to continue today.