Woman Found Guilty in Her Sons’ Slayings

As Socorro Caro sobbed quietly, a Ventura County jury on Monday convicted her of first-degree murder for shooting her three young sons as they slept.

The verdicts, which came after five days of deliberation, drew mixed reactions from the two sides of the family.

Caro’s mother, Juanita Leon, collapsed in the hall, wailing into the arms of defense attorneys, who led her through reporters and TV cameras. Caro’s physician husband, Xavier Caro, was embraced by well-wishers pleased over his vindication.

Caro’s defense had hinged on persuading jurors that the wrong person had been accused of the carnage that took place in the Caros’ Santa Rosa Valley home the night of Nov. 22, 1999.

Throughout the nine-week trial, defense attorneys maintained that Xavier Caro framed his wife after killing 11-year-old Joey, 8-year-old Michael and 5-year-old Christopher. They also argued that he shot his wife in the head and broke her foot as she struggled to shield the children.

The family rift was evident outside the courtroom Monday. While Xavier Caro expressed relief at the verdicts, his wife’s uncle sat on a corridor bench and shook his head.

“He’s a cold person,” said Julian Leon, who had driven almost every day from San Fernando to his niece’s trial. “I can’t believe that this took place.”

Caro, 44, had pleaded not guilty, later changing that to not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jurors now will decide whether she was sane when she killed her boys. If she was, they will recommend either life without parole or the death penalty.

After the verdicts, Caro’s attorneys declined to comment. Prosecutor Jim Ellison said he was satisfied but declined additional comment, saying that the trial has yet to be completed.

The jury reached its verdicts about six hours after Superior Court Judge Donald D. Coleman replaced one panel member. In a hearing Monday morning, that juror admitted that he had talked to another juror about the case, a violation of a court order not to talk about the case outside the jury room.

During the hearing, the man also said that deliberations had been bogged down by “emotional attacks” from other jurors. In another indication of frayed nerves on the panel, the jury foreman complained to Coleman last week that one of the jurors was refusing to deliberate.

On many days during the trial, Caro wept into the shoulder of one of her attorneys. On a courtroom wall a few feet away, 6-foot-square photos showed the bodies of her boys on their blood-soaked bedding.

At one point during testimony about the pattern of bloodstains, the trial was briefly halted after Caro screamed and burst into tears.

In the autumn of 1999, prosecutors claimed, Caro was seething over her deteriorating marriage. Her husband had fired her from her job as office manager at his Northridge medical practice. Convinced she was secretly funneling money to her parents, he confiscated her checkbook and credit cards. She knew he had conferred with a divorce attorney and suspected--rightly, as it turned out--that he was having an affair with a woman on his staff.

“Her little empire was crumbling,” argued prosecutor Cheryl Temple, “and she lashed out at the man she blamed for it.”

Prosecutors portrayed Caro as selfish and calculating, a woman willing to punish her husband by sacrificing her children.

Defense attorneys presented her as a pious woman and loving mother, lavishly praised by her children’s teachers as a classroom volunteer. She was depicted as eager to work out differences with her husband but realistic about the possibility of divorce.

Xavier Caro, on the other hand, was portrayed by the defense as a cruel and brilliant manipulator. Beset by middle-aged angst and passion for a younger woman, he was “so unhappy with his family situation at the time that he would do anything to not have to be with them,” contended Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley.

On the witness stand for five days, Xavier Caro told of coming home from his office after a quarrel with his wife and discovering three of his four sons dead and his wife moaning in a pool of blood on the bedroom floor. He spoke with precision but at moments lost his composure.

When Socorro Caro testified, she was calm and articulate. She had little memory of the night; a brain surgeon earlier testified that injuries like hers often result in partial amnesia.

She also had difficulty remembering statements she made from her hospital bed to a sheriff’s investigator. “Is the baby OK?” she had asked, which prosecutors saw as an admission of guilt because Caro apparently had not been told that 13-month-old Gabriel was the only child unharmed.

But Caro clearly recalled the difficulties of her 13-year marriage. She said she was saddened by her husband’s growing dissatisfaction, not enraged, as prosecutors insisted.

Jurors also had to consider prosecution evidence that Caro had the boys’ blood on her palm and pajama shorts.

Caro testified that she had not put on the shorts she was found in that night. They were maternity shorts, she said, and she hadn’t worn them in a year.

The next hurdle for the defense will be the trial’s sanity phase, which is to begin Wednesday. Under California law, Caro’s attorneys must prove that she could not distinguish right from wrong or was so mentally ill that she felt she had no choice but to kill. If the jury agrees, she will be treated in a state mental hospital and released only if she recovers.

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Times staff writer Holly J. Wolcott contributed to this report.