Jury Urges Death for Killer of 3 Sons

A jury recommended Monday that Socorro Caro be put to death for killing her three sons, in what Ventura County’s district attorney described as “probably the saddest case” of his 23-year tenure.

As the panel’s 10 women and two men filed into the hushed courtroom on their second day of deliberation, Caro, 44, sat quietly, her Bible beside her. When the verdict was read, Caro, looking pale with deep circles under her eyes, maintained her composure. She sobbed softly several minutes later.

Caro was convicted Nov. 5 of first-degree murder. Two years earlier, she shot her sons, 11-year-old Joey, 8-year-old Michael, and 5-year-old Christopher, before shooting herself in the brain.

The wife of physician Xavier Caro, she sought to punish her husband for firing her as his office manager, restricting her funds and taking steps toward divorce, as well as for a suspected affair with a staff member, prosecutors argued during Caro’s nine-week trial.

Caro’s attorneys attempted to convince the jury that it was their client’s husband who shot her and killed the boys. They also tried to prove that he manipulated items at the family’s million-dollar Santa Rosa Valley home to frame her.

After the verdict, jurors stayed behind to give attorneys their impressions of the case, a common practice in major trials. An hour later, they were escorted by deputies through a back exit of the courthouse, declining to answer reporters’ questions.

They had sat through 53 days of often disturbing testimony, frequently viewing the boys’ bloodied bodies in images projected on the courtroom wall. On Monday, Superior Court Judge Donald D. Coleman said he would arrange counseling for any juror who may want it.

Caro is to be formally sentenced Feb. 27. Coleman can discard the jury’s recommendation, but that seldom happens.

If he upholds the sentence, Caro, who was portrayed by defense witnesses as a loving soccer mom, will become the 13th woman on California’s death row.

She is the first woman sentenced to death by a Ventura County jury since Elizabeth “Ma” Duncan, who was executed in 1962 for hiring two men to kill her daughter-in-law.

“It’s the right verdict but not one we can take any pleasure in, that’s for sure,” Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said. “The murder of three children pretty clearly leads to only one conclusion.”

The verdict stunned defense attorneys Jean Farley and Nicholas Beeson.

“I just cannot imagine sentencing someone to death who has no memory of the actions and was so good to her children on every other occasion,” said Farley, who described the jury’s decision as the most shocking event in her long career as a public defender.

“It just can’t be right,” she said.

A few hours after the verdict, Farley and Beeson were questioning tactical decisions they made during the case, including arguing that Xavier Caro was the real killer.

“We will always second-guess that,” Beeson said, adding that he and Farley will always wonder if they did everything possible to save their client.

Prosecutors said there was no mystery to jurors opting for the ultimate penalty.

“You have three dead children,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Cheryl Temple. “This was a compelling case.”

Temple said jurors didn’t disclose much about their deliberations after the verdict.

“Everything is a little bit raw,” she said.

The defense effort to blame Caro’s husband, she said, may have backfired.

None of Caro’s relatives was present for the verdict. When she was convicted last month, her mother, Juanita Leon, collapsed in a courtroom corridor.

“Her family is devastated by this,” Farley said. “Everyone feels completely lost.”

Xavier Caro, an arthritis specialist with a practice in Northridge, also was absent and declined to respond to a request for comment. He lives with the couple’s surviving son, 3-year-old Gabriel, who was not harmed in the attack.

During the trial’s penalty phase, Caro’s attorneys portrayed her as a loving mother. But on Nov. 22, 1999, she was overwhelmed by depression and blinded by a mix of tequila, diet pills, Prozac and an anti-anxiety medication, they said. She didn’t know what she was doing when she held her .38-caliber revolver against the head of each sleeping boy and squeezed the trigger, they argued.

They pointed to testimony from a psychiatrist who said that Caro probably set out only to kill herself, as she had threatened weeks before. But she probably obeyed the same twisted impulse as certain other homicidal mothers, killing the children she loved to protect them from life without her, the psychiatrist told jurors.

Prosecutors argued that Caro was fully aware of her actions. They pointed to a pattern of bloodstains that suggested she turned the body of Joey over so her husband would be greeted by his lifeless face. They said that she shot Christopher in the head twice, because after the first shot he evidently jolted up in his bed.

Caro must be executed, not because she’s less than human, but because all people must be held accountable, Temple told the jury.

“She wasn’t some cosmic force or a tool of Satan,” Temple said. “If you forget that she’s a human being, then the act of voting for the death penalty becomes morally weightless.”

Defense attorneys argued that putting her to death would achieve nothing.

“You know she’s never going to be a danger to anybody--you know that,” Beeson said. “She’ll be in prison the rest of her life. She will suffer.”

In reaching a decision, the jury had to weigh a number of factors that were presented as either aggravating or mitigating by attorneys for both sides.

Caro was chronically violent, prosecutors claimed. They pointed to a series of alleged assaults on her husband, including a punch to the jaw that was so forceful she broke a finger.

Defense attorneys questioned whether all the incidents actually happened and argued that Caro acted in self-defense when they did.

Defense attorneys emphasized that prosecutors could find nobody to even hint that Caro may have abused her children. Instead, a string of teachers from Santa Rosa Elementary School in Camarillo described her as an avid volunteer and a woman they knew as a wonderful mother--despite her convictions for murder.

Times staff writers Daryl Kelley, Tracy Wilson, Tina Dirmann and Holly J. Wolcott contributed to this report.