Lawyer Calls Caro a Coward

The three brothers went to bed happy little boys and never awoke--thanks to a mother who killed them to punish her straying husband, a Ventura County prosecutor charged Thursday.

In a six-hour closing argument at the murder trial of Socorro “Cora” Caro, Deputy Dist. Atty. Cheryl Temple called the 44-year-old defendant “a classic weakling, a textbook coward.” “If you can’t be a winner, be a spoiler,” Temple told the jury. “If you can’t win the game, flip the game table over on your opponent’s lap. . . .If she didn’t get to be Mrs. Dr. Xavier Caro, then he didn’t get his family.”

Charged with three counts of first-degree murder, Caro has pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. If convicted, she faces either a life prison sentence without parole or the death penalty.

Three of the Caros’ four young sons were shot point-blank in the head as they slept in the family’s lavish Santa Rosa Valley home on Nov. 22, 1999. Caro lay bleeding on her bedroom floor with a near-fatal bullet wound to the brain.

On Thursday, Temple sketched out the themes of betrayal and brutality that have emerged in the two-month trial. She cast Socorro Caro as a calculating schemer, lying whenever she felt it might help her avoid responsibility. The defense has depicted her husband in much the same way, suggesting the arthritis specialist killed three of his four boys, shot his wife and manipulated the crime scene to incriminate her.

“That claim is absurd,” Temple argued, contending that Socorro Caro’s attorneys have offered no credible evidence pointing to a frame-up. “It is insulting and should make anyone who hears it cringe with disgust.”

In fact, she said, it was Caro herself who engaged in macabre stagecraft the night her three sons died.

After killing 11-year-old Joey, she returned to the bedroom where he lay face down in a pool of blood, Temple said.

“She rolled Joey over and left him there face up, eyes open and covered with blood,” Temple said. “She left him there for his father to find.”

Temple recounted for jurors the details of the Caros’ tortured 13-year marriage, which by the summer of 1999 appeared to be collapsing. In August, Xavier Caro fired his wife from her longtime job as office manager at his Northridge medical practice. Convinced that his wife had secretly channeled office funds--some $220,000, Temple maintained--to her parents, he took away her checkbook and credit cards.

In addition, he was in love with his office biofeedback technician and conferred with a divorce lawyer. “What’s she going to do when she loses this golden goose?” Temple asked. “Her lifestyle would come to an end.”

After a dinner-time argument on Nov. 22, Xavier Caro left the house and Socorro Caro was convinced he wouldn’t come back, Temple argued. Calling his car phone and office repeatedly, she grew increasingly frustrated when he wouldn’t respond. “Storming through the house,” she fell down the stairs and broke her foot, Temple theorized.

The intense physical pain was bad enough--but it was compounded by a surge of rage against a husband who had provided a million-dollar home and was on the verge of leaving, Temple said.

“She’d lost her leverage,” Temple said. “Her husband was taking control of his own life, and she was losing her position as his wife.”

To avenge the loss, Temple said, she held her .38-caliber revolver against Joey’s head and pulled the trigger. Then she went to the room where 8-year-old Michael and 5-year-old Christopher lay arm in arm. Awakened, the younger boy was rising off the pillow as his mother shot him, Temple said.

“She pulled him back down on to that pillow so she could have another shot at him,” Temple contended. “This bullet finally did what she wanted. This bullet killed him.”

Temple theorized that Caro also intended to kill their youngest son, 13-month-old Gabriel. But with just one bullet left in the five-shot firearm, she chose to kill herself instead. Temple scoffed at the expert witnesses presented by the defense. She said Caro’s lead attorney, Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley, had not presented the definitive explanation of the boys’ deaths.

“The defense has never told us what happened,” she said. “The defense witnesses all come down to ‘it’s a mystery,’ or ‘it can’t be explained,’ or ‘I can’t remember.’ ”

As a witness, Caro herself lied continually, Temple charged, underscoring her point with a slide headlined “Lies” projected on the courtroom wall.

Caro lied, Temple alleged, when she denied putting on the sleepwear she was found in on the night of the killings--pajama shorts and a T-shirt stained with her boys’ blood and brain matter.

She also lied when she testified that she wasn’t angry about her dismissal from her job or her husband’s divorce plans, Temple said.

But Caro gave herself away, Temple contended, when from her hospital bed she anxiously asked a detective whether Gabriel was OK. Caro had never been told by police which of her sons had been killed, Temple said, suggesting that she must have known Gabriel was still alive.

Caro’s biggest lie, Temple maintained, was in saying she couldn’t remember details of that tragic night.

“She did it, and she knows she did it,” Temple said. “She knew that Xavier didn’t love her. She knew he was leaving. She knew how to hurt him. And she did.”

Temple is to wrap up her statement this morning and Farley is to deliver the closing in Caro’s defense.