Wife Bolsters Doctor’s Account of Killing

The wife of Pasadena pediatrician Kevin Anderson, testifying Tuesday at his trial, challenged prosecutors’ arguments that he committed premeditated murder when he strangled a colleague pregnant with his child and shoved her off a cliff in a car.

Anderson, 41, is accused of murdering Dr. Deepti Gupta, 33, while they were stargazing Nov. 11, 1999, in the Angeles National Forest. Prosecutors allege that the trip was a ruse, and that Anderson planned to kill Gupta to cover up their affair, which threatened his marriage, career and financial success.

But Heidi Anderson, wiping away tears, told jurors that she had gone stargazing with her husband several times in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Prosecutors also contend that Anderson that night had equipped himself with a murder kit that included matches and a plastic gasoline can, and that he doused Gupta’s body with gasoline to fake a traffic accident.

But Heidi Anderson said she had seen the gas can, which they used for their speedboat, in her husband’s Toyota 4Runner months before the fatal night, and “matches were in the glove box.”

Michael Abzug, Anderson’s attorney, has conceded from the outset that his client killed Gupta, but says Anderson acted on impulse after Gupta made a threat against his daughter as they argued over their relationship and failed business partnership.

If jurors agree with Abzug, Anderson could be convicted of voluntary manslaughter instead of first-degree murder, which could lead to the death penalty.

Jurors already have heard Anderson admit in a taped interview with sheriff’s deputies that he “just snapped.” “I was just choking her,” he said, after Gupta “said she knows where my daughter goes to school.”

Bolstering Abzug’s argument, Heidi Anderson testified that was not the first time her husband had reacted violently. A few years ago, she said, during a heated argument, “He grabbed me and dragged me” to the door. As he tried to shut the door on her arm, she said, he realized what he was doing and stopped, she testified. He then called a marriage counselor.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Marian M.J. Thompson has portrayed Anderson as a calculating murderer driven not by impulse but by money, who tried to create an alibi the night of the killing by telling nurses at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Pasadena, where he practices, that he would be making rounds.

Another attempt at an alibi, Thompson alleges, occurred on the mountain road when Anderson paged Gupta as if he were trying to reach her.

The doctor was arrested after a passing motorist saw Gupta’s Mercedes truck plunge off the cliff and followed Anderson’s vehicle from the scene until it got stuck on a shoulder.

Throughout the trial, prosecutors have cast Anderson as a womanizer who lured Gupta, a married mother, into a relationship. But Heidi Anderson testified it was Gupta who pursued her husband and once told her she was unhappy with her own marriage.

Anderson, a registered nurse at Huntington Memorial in Pasadena, said her husband and Gupta had planned to open a practice together last summer, but that the plans fell apart when Gupta became too controlling and made romantic overtures to her husband.

It came to a head, she said, when Gupta brought her family to the Andersons’ home unannounced last August to discuss the practice.

Abzug asked Anderson whether she realized her husband cheated on her, impregnated the woman and killed her. She replied “Yes” to each question. Then he asked, “Do you intend to leave him?”

“No,” she said. “I try to write him every day. . . . I talk to him on the phone every day.”