Murder Trial Gets Underway

Slumped over a courtroom table, Gladis Soto sobbed as a prosecutor opened her murder trial Monday by recounting Soto’s confession to police, explaining why she shot her sleeping husband through the head and then cut his body into pieces with an electric saw.

“I was very enraged, I was angry at what he had done to me,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Patricia Murphy said Soto told police after the killing. “He kept on doing whatever he wanted. . . . I shot him once in the head.”

As Murphy spoke to the jury, Soto, 38, buried her face in her hands and wept.

The sobs punctuated an emotional first day of a trial to determine whether Soto killed her husband in February because she was battered and irrational, or because she wanted revenge for his chronic infidelity. Prosecutors say that Soto planned the killing for two months, while defense lawyers told the jury she killed her husband only after suffering 15 years of abuse.

No one disputes that Soto killed her husband of 15 years, cut off his head and limbs, dumped the parts under a bridge and then set them on fire.

Jurors, who looked at the big, red, metal-cutting saw Soto allegedly used in the dismemberment, were shown photos of 35-year-old welder Pedro Alba after his body was found at two locations.

Defense attorneys told the jury that Alba refused to let her leave him and had taunted her with his girlfriend. On the night of his death, they said, he returned from a visit with a woman to rape his wife and toss her aside like trash.

“She lost all hope for the future . . . and her judgment failed her,” said defense lawyer Jorge Alvarado. “This action was the termination of her torment.”

Soto is accused of firing one shot from a .25-caliber handgun into her husband’s head and dragging his body to their garage, where she cut him apart so she could lift the limbs into the trunk of her car.

She was arrested after a homeless man reported seeing a woman set fire to trash bags near the Ventura River. Authorities identified the body through fingerprints.

Soto, a mother of six, faces 50 years to life in prison if she is found guilty of murder.

Defense lawyers argue that she is guilty of no more than voluntary manslaughter because of her state of mind as a battered woman at the time of the killing.

Prosecutor Murphy told jurors, however, that Soto is a strong woman--not a victim--who repeatedly confronted Alba’s lovers. She put herself through community college despite her husband’s objections. And she moved away from her husband when she thought she needed to be apart from him, Murphy said.

During the first two months of this year, Murphy said, Soto began plotting revenge. She tracked Alba to his girlfriend’s house in Oxnard and smashed her car into the vehicles the two were driving. She begged for money to buy a gun, then within a week she killed her husband, Murphy said.

“[She was] driven to murder by a passion for revenge,” Murphy said. “[She was] a woman who refused to let go of her husband. . . . She shot and killed him in his bed while he was sleeping, then she tried to get away with it.”