Jurors Tour Caro Home for Glimpse of Crime Scene

Transported in a Ventura County Sheriff’s Department bus customarily used for jail inmates, jurors on Monday were taken to the opulent Mediterranean-style home where Socorro Caro is accused of shooting three of her four young sons as they slept.

Charged with three counts of first-degree murder, Caro declined to accompany the party of 12 jurors, four alternates, attorneys, sheriff’s deputies, an investigator for the district attorney’s office, and Superior Court Judge Donald D. Coleman.

The hourlong tour was designed not for jurors to hear testimony, but simply to give them a firsthand glimpse of the Santa Rosa Valley house they have been hearing about for more than five weeks. Prosecutors rested their case against Caro on Friday, and the defense is to call the first of as many as three dozen witnesses today.

Because jurors are not permitted to discuss the case until both sides have presented their witnesses, they were forbidden from conversing as they threaded their way, single-file, through the Caros’ five-bedroom hilltop home. They also were instructed not to touch anything, as the million-dollar home still is considered a crime scene. Owned by Xavier Caro, the defendant’s physician husband, it has been unoccupied since the crime that shattered the Caro family on Nov. 22, 1999.

In silent procession, the group filed through the garage and into the kitchen--the same route that Xavier Caro testified he took before treading upstairs to discover the bodies of his children.

At the foot of the stairs, they saw the family’s grandfather clock, which defense attorneys say Xavier Caro manipulated to stop at the time of the killings. They contend that he framed his wife in the boys’ slayings and made it appear as if she had attempted suicide.

Jurors climbed the stairs and entered the rooms they had seen so often in heart-wrenching photographs enlarged on a 6-square-foot patch of courtroom wall. In one room, 8-year-old Michael and 5-year-old Christopher lay side by side on the bloodstained lower berth of a bunk bed. In another, 11-year-old Joey lay with his eyes half-open and his lips apart. Each of the boys had been shot in the head.

Beneath a toy in one of the rooms lay the children’s Christmas lists, which were typed up by Socorro Caro in a letter to Santa hours before the boys’ deaths. Jurors had been barred from hearing testimony about the lists because Judge Coleman deemed it inflammatory. In their tour, the lists remained hidden from their view.

Finally, they saw the room in which Xavier Caro and Socorro Caro lived out the most private moments of their tortured marriage--the master bedroom in which Socorro Caro was allegedly found by her husband with a near-fatal bullet wound to the brain.

After the tour, jurors were asked to write down any questions that occurred to them. Coleman received two and declined to answer them, telling the jurors that the answers probably will be supplied by witnesses yet to take the stand.

On Tuesday, the defense is expected to call Laura Gillard, a former employee at Xavier Caro’s medical office with whom he had an affair. Dr. Warren Lovell, a former Ventura County coroner, is to appear as an expert witness, testifying that the angle of Socorro Caro’s head wound is not typical of suicide attempts.