Murder Suspect Charged With Welfare Fraud

Already facing charges that she murdered and dismembered her spouse, Ventura resident Gladis Soto was charged Wednesday with a single count of welfare fraud for allegedly stealing $47,605 in government aid for her five children.

Soto, 38, allegedly scammed more than $15,800 a year in welfare support between Aug. 1, 1994, and Aug. 31, 1997.

She did so by making false statements or representations to obtain aid for her children, ages 6 to 12, according to a felony complaint filed in Ventura County Superior Court.

“She applied for welfare and did not list her husband as being in her home--which he was and full-time employed,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Kim Gibbons. “And she got $47,000 worth of welfare that she was not entitled to. That’s taxpayers’ money.”

Gibbons said this is the second-largest case of alleged welfare fraud his office has handled this year, based on the amount in dispute.

Soto is scheduled to be arraigned on the charge Sept. 1, and faces up to three years in prison and a $5,000 fine if convicted.

Although the penalties are far less than what Soto would receive if convicted of the murder charge, the district attorney’s office said it has a zero-tolerance policy for cases of welfare fraud.

“Forty-seven thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Gibbons said. “We just decided it was the appropriate thing to do.”

Citing the office’s aggressive approach to such cases, investigators recently announced that they closed all but 19 of the 365 cases they were assigned last year.

The district attorney’s office took over responsibility for welfare fraud investigations from the county’s Human Services Agency in July 1996. Under the old system, there was an average of 10 arrests a year and an emphasis on restitution rather than prosecution.

“We’ve been more aggressive since we moved to the D.A.’s office,” investigator Gene Signor said in a February interview. “Nobody escapes us.”

Gibbons said he does not expect Soto’s fraud case to be joined with her pending murder case.

Soto was arrested six months ago on suspicion of fatally shooting her husband, Pedro Alba, cutting off his limbs and head with an electric saw and trying to burn the remains in a dry riverbed.

She confessed to police that she shot her husband of 15 years once in the head on Feb. 22 as he slept in their Ventura apartment. She said she hid the body in a closet for 18 hours before dismembering it in an unattached garage.

She has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and deadly assault. The assault charge stems from a January incident in which she allegedly rammed her car into her husband’s van while his girlfriend was inside.

Last week, defense attorney Jorge Alvarado said he planned to file a motion to reduce the murder charge to voluntary manslaughter on grounds that his client was a battered woman who acted in self-defense.

Alvarado contends that Soto lashed out 20 minutes after her husband raped her that night. The attorney criticized prosecutors for filing a murder charge despite evidence that Soto was a victim of repeated domestic abuse.

But prosecutors say the case doesn’t precisely fit into the criteria expected for battered woman’s syndrome, and have suggested Soto was primarily motivated by jealousy over her husband’s adultery.

Alvarado could not be reached for comment Wednesday. Soto’s trial date on the murder and assault charges is set for Oct. 18, and she remains jailed on $1-million bail.