Wife Denies Killing Her Husband

As a throng of reporters crowded the courtroom, a pale and passive Gladis Barreras Soto on Thursday denied charges that she shot and killed her husband of 15 years, then dismembered his body with an electric table saw.

While Soto, dressed in a blue jail jumpsuit, hung her head dejectedly, Oxnard attorney Jorge Alvarado entered a not-guilty plea on her behalf during a brief appearance before Superior Court Judge Bruce Clark.

Clark increased bail for the 37-year-old mother of five from $250,000 to $1 million at the request of Deputy Dist. Atty. Patty Murphy. Murphy said Soto, who has family in Mexico, is a flight risk and a continuing threat to society.

“Because of the nature of the crime committed, that makes her a danger to others,” Murphy said in an interview outside court.

Soto, who said nothing during her few minutes in court, kept her eyes toward the floor and her hands tightly clasped in front of her.

She was originally supposed to appear in court this week on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon stemming from a January incident. In that case, Soto is accused of trying to ram her husband Pedro Barragan’s van with her blue Chevy Nova. At the time, the van’s passenger was Maria Ortega, an Oxnard woman with whom Soto believed her husband was having an affair.

Soto was arrested in that case but released on $20,000 bond posted by Barragan, according to a family member.

On Thursday, Clark set a preliminary hearing on the assault case and the murder charge for April 15. The gruesome nature of the case has attracted wide media interest.

Police arrested Soto on Tuesday after authorities used fingerprints to identify a partially burned bagful of body parts found near a Ventura RV park as Barragan’s.

In interviews since her arrest, Soto has told authorities that she was a battered wife who endured years of infidelity and brutality at the hands of her husband.

The couple’s marital problems reached a crisis when Barragan left Saturday morning and didn’t return until 2 a.m. Sunday, Soto told police. She said she had had enough. After her husband fell asleep, she shot him in the head, police said.

Later that day, according to the police account, she used a table saw to cut off the body’s head, arms and legs. None of the couple’s five children witnessed the shooting or dismemberment, authorities said.

But a transient reported seeing a woman fitting Soto’s description setting fire to a trash bag containing the remains outside the RV park on Monday, police said.

Those who knew the couple said the marriage had been turbulent for years and that each struck out in his or her own way to hurt the other.

Soto lashed out with psychological games, said a sister-in-law of Barragan’s, Claudia Covarrubias. Soto told her husband he had AIDS and had infected some of the children, though she later recanted that tale, Covarrubias said. She also threatened to feed her husband rat poison. And on more than one occasion, she fled the state with the couple’s children.

Court records document Barragan’s abuse. He was arrested for striking his wife in 1996 and again in 1997.

“She just took an awful lot,” said a friend of Soto’s who visited the defendant in jail Thursday. “We knew about the abuse,” said the friend, who declined to give her name. “But she didn’t talk about it, mostly.” The friend said Barragan tried to run his wife over with a car in Los Angeles several years ago, breaking several bones. The account could not be immediately confirmed.

“She would leave him, but she would come back, leave and come back,” the friend said. “It was for the kids, always for the kids.”

During her 30-minute visit, the friend said Soto sobbed.

“I just told her, ‘I understand, I understand . . . ‘ “

Barragan’s remains are scheduled to be flown this morning to the state of Jalisco, Mexico, for burial, said Roberto Garcia of Garcia Mortuary in Oxnard.

Garcia said services for the dead man will be held just outside Guadalajara, where Barragan was raised. Two of Barragan’s brothers live in Port Hueneme. Three more brothers and several other family members still reside in Jalisco, Garcia said.

The couple’s children are currently in the care of the county’s Public Social Services Agency.

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Tina Dirmann is a Times staff writer and Holly J. Wolcott is a Times Community News correspondent.