Ex-Lover Barred From Testifying

Dr. Xavier Caro’s ex-lover cannot be called to testify at his wife’s murder trial, a Ventura County judge ruled Friday.

Defense attorneys hoped the woman’s testimony would advance their claim that three of the couple’s young boys were killed in an elaborate scheme hatched by the physician to frame his wife, Socorro Caro, for murder.

But after a hearing outside the presence of the jury, Judge Donald D. Coleman said the woman’s testimony would “add nothing new to the issue other than prurient interest.”

“This is a criminal case in a courtroom of justice and law,” he angrily reminded Socorro Caro’s lead attorney, Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley. “We are not here to write fodder for the National Enquirer.”

Accused of shooting her three sons as they slept in the family’s Santa Rosa Valley home, Socorro Caro is charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Her attorneys have argued she was set up by her husband.

Last month Xavier Caro acknowledged on the witness stand he had conducted an affair with Laura Gillard, a biofeedback technician in his Northridge medical office.

On Friday, Gillard appeared before the judge. Because prosecutors had objected to her pending testimony, Coleman wanted to hear it before deciding whether the jury should.

Under questioning from Farley, Gillard admitted to the affair, but said she and Xavier Caro never planned a long-term relationship.

“Did the two of you discuss how you could be together?” Farley asked.

“It was more like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be together,’ ” Gillard replied.

Gillard said the romance began with a kiss after a professional meeting in May 1999. In August of that year, Gillard said, she and Caro had sex twice, and then not again before the deaths of his children on Nov. 22.

The timing of those encounters would be crucial information for the jury, Farley insisted. One of the encounters, she said, was on Aug. 11--the date of the youngest Caro son’s first birthday and the day Xavier Caro fired his wife from her job as his office manager.

The judge, however, wasn’t convinced jurors would benefit from that knowledge.

Gillard’s testimony would give the jurors little they hadn’t already heard from Xavier Caro, he said. Meanwhile, he said, it would “waste court time and take the jury off on tangential issues.”

Gillard said the last time she and Xavier Caro had a sexual liaison was in February of this year. When Farley attempted to ask her about any sexual encounters they had between the killings and the affair’s end, she was blocked by repeated objections from prosecutor Cheryl Temple.

Such questions were irrelevant, Temple argued, and the judge agreed.

“Every objection has been sustained,” he noted, “and I would have sustained a heck of a lot more of them if they’d been made.”