Soto Made Threats, Woman Says

Accused murderer Gladis Soto repeatedly threatened an Oxnard widow she believed to be her husband’s lover--confronting her twice in person, threatening her twice by phone and ramming her van with a car, the woman testified Tuesday.

Hairstylist Maria Ortega, who described herself as slain Ventura welder Pedro Alba’s best friend, told a Ventura County Superior Court jury a jealous Soto refused to believe Ortega’s relationship with Alba was platonic and ending.

“You better stop seeing Pedro or something bad is going to happen,” Ortega said Soto declared in a late-night phone call about two months before Soto shot her husband in the head and dismembered him with a metal-cutting saw. “She told me she hated me . . . that soon a lot of people would become aware of who she was.”

Ortega said she saw Alba the night Soto admits killing him, Feb. 21, when he went to her house to pay a $250 debt.

“I remember it very well,” Ortega testified, weeping quietly. “He told me he didn’t feel like returning home that night. He said he didn’t know why, but he didn’t want to return home.”

A few hours later, after Soto says Alba battered her, raped her and then fell asleep, Soto admits she put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

Although prosecutors insist Soto considered violence for up to two months before the killing, defense lawyers say she shot her husband because 15 years of mental, physical and sexual abuse made her think she had no other way out.

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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 body parts into the trunk of her Chevy Nova.

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

Soto, a mother of six, faces 50 years to life in prison if found guilty of using a gun in a premeditated murder.

But defense lawyers argued 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.

On the trial’s first day of testimony, Ortega, a 40-ish mother of four and widow since 1996, was the principal witness.

Ortega described Alba as a “a normal person, charming, respectful,” whom she met while cutting his hair in February 1998. By July, they were close friends, she said, sharing their troubles.

“We loved each other as friends. That’s all.”

But Ortega said Soto, 38, still blamed her for problems in her marriage.

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Ortega said Soto first confronted her at work in September 1998, after returning from Mexico, where she had taken her children to await Alba’s move back to their home country. Soto returned, attorneys say, because a relative told her of Alba’s relationship with Ortega.

“She was shouting at me that she wanted me to return Pedro to her. She told me that Pedro said he didn’t love her anymore, that he didn’t want to live with her anymore. That he only wanted her close by with his children,” Ortega said. “I told her I had never taken him away from her.”

Ortega said she told Soto that Alba was just a close friend who attended weekly self-help classes with her to rebuild his life. She asked Soto to join the group too, Ortega said, but the wife refused.

Instead, Soto took the children and moved to North Carolina to start over with the help of friends. But two months later she was back, living with Alba in a small Ventura apartment.

Meanwhile, Ortega had lent Alba money to buy a truck and co-signed when he bought a van, she said. He was prospering and optimistic about the future, Ortega said. He made $31,000 last year as a welder, attorneys say. He thought he would have enough money to return his family to Mexico and start his own business by the end of this year, Ortega said.

Yet Soto was still jealous, Ortega said, showing up one evening in early December to ask Ortega to go with her to tell Alba she had no romantic interest in him. As the Oxnard woman followed Soto to Ventura by car, Soto pulled over in a dark area and got out.

“I was very afraid,” Ortega said. “But she realized my young child was with me.”

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At the apartment, a surprised Alba sat with Ortega as Soto questioned them about their relationship. Both insisted they were just friends, Ortega said.

“It ended well,” Ortega said. “Everything was calm. She thanked me.”

But later in December, Soto telephoned Ortega at night and called her names: “She told me that I was a . . . prostitute.”

A second nighttime call followed a few days later, with Soto shouting the same obscenities, said Ortega, whose 20-year-old daughter was listening on another phone.

About that time Ortega said she essentially severed relations with Alba, telling him she wanted no involvement in his problems. She saw him only three times over the next two months, she said.

The first time was on Jan. 10, when Alba visited to pay her $250 for some of her deceased husband’s welding tools, she said. Soto showed up and rammed Alba’s truck and Ortega’s van with her Chevy Nova.

Although police reported that Ortega once described Soto as “my boyfriend’s ex-wife,” Ortega testified that “I didn’t say my boyfriend, I said my best friend.”