Witness Tells of Series of Assaults by Merriman

A 31-year-old Ventura woman told jurors Tuesday that murder defendant Justin Merriman repeatedly raped and beat her during a tumultuous three-year period in the mid-1990s.

The woman, who dated Merriman sporadically between 1992 and 1995, said he would often show up at her apartment, high on drugs and demanding sex.

“He didn’t take no for an answer,” she said.

Merriman, a 28-year-old Ventura white supremacist, is charged with murder and rape in the November 1992 slaying of 20-year-old college student Katrina Montgomery, whose throat was slit after she had been sexually assaulted. He is also charged with four counts of rape in the alleged assault of two other women in the years after the slaying.

Prosecutors started presenting evidence of those alleged assaults Tuesday, calling the first woman to the stand.

Rocking nervously in a chair with her jaw clenched, the witness told jurors she met Merriman at a skinhead party 13 years ago, when she was a student at Buena High School in Ventura.

At first, they hung out as friends and later began to date.

But after Montgomery’s disappearance, she said, the relationship changed. Merriman started using methamphetamines and became verbally abusive, she said. She told the jury that in early 1993, he hit her for the first time.

The incident occurred late one night in the kitchen of her Ventura apartment as she was trying to comfort her baby daughter, who awoke crying.

“Justin went into a rage I’d never seen before,” she testified, describing how Merriman hit her several times in the face while yelling at her to “shut the [expletive] brat up.”

The woman told jurors she thought the moisture on her face was tears, but when she turned on the kitchen light she realized it was blood.

“He was laughing,” she said. “He said how stupid I looked all beaten up and crying.”

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Afterward, Merriman warned that she would be “taken care of” if she reported the incident to police, the woman testified. She said she was scared and obeyed Merriman, because of his senior position in the gang.

A year later, she said, Merriman came to her apartment and sexually assaulted her for several hours in a hallway. She told jurors it was the beginning of a series of similar attacks in which she submitted, because she feared him.

“I was scared, humiliated,” she said, stealing quick glances at Merriman seated at the defense table in a navy blue sweater. “The more I tried to resist him, the more angry he would get at me.”

One of the last incidents the woman described occurred in late 1995 when she was working at Acapulco Mexican restaurant in Ventura, located less than a mile from the condominium where Merriman lived with his mother.

Merriman had just been released from jail and had dropped by the restaurant looking for her, she said. Concerned, she went to his home to talk to him. She testified that she thought she would be safe, because it was the middle of the day and his mother was home.

But when she walked upstairs to the second-story apartment where Merriman lived above a garage, she said, he tackled her and raped her on the floor.

“He was laughing,” she recalled. “I don’t even think my shoes came off this day.”

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On cross-examination, the woman acknowledged that she never reported any of the alleged rapes to police--or anyone else until an investigator in the Montgomery slaying talked to her in late 1997.

She told the jury she was afraid of Merriman and doubted anyone would believe her, because she and Merriman had had consensual sex in the past.

When pressed further by defense attorney Willard Wiksell, the witness became angry and snapped at him in a raised voice.

“This is very difficult for me,” she said. “I am not the one on trial, so if I have a hard time talking about things that have happened . . . God forgive me.”

In other testimony Tuesday, an informant who is the alleged rape victim’s ex-husband told jurors that during a conversation four years ago, Merriman blurted out that he had killed Montgomery.

The alleged confession--which defense attorneys have suggested is a fabrication--occurred when Merriman dropped by the informant’s home for a visit in December 1996.

The witness testified that he didn’t know Montgomery and that he suspected Merriman was lying. When the witness was arrested two years later on a felony offense, he offered the information to a Ventura police officer. He was subsequently given a reduced prison sentence in exchange for his cooperation with the prosecution of Merriman.

Testimony is scheduled to resume today in Ventura County Superior Court before Judge Vincent O’Neill.