Attorney Calls Caro Devoted

A devoted mother, Socorro Caro never could have killed her three boys, a defense attorney maintained at her murder trial Friday.

But her dissatisfied husband, gripped with passion for a younger woman, would have done anything to get out of his troubled marriage, argued Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley, Socorro Caro’s lead attorney.

In a closing statement that included allusions to English common law and the biblical book of Deuteronomy, Farley reiterated the theory she unveiled when the trial started 10 weeks ago: Caro was the target of an elaborate scheme orchestrated by her husband, Dr. Xavier Caro.

On Friday, Farley stopped short of explicitly alleging that Xavier Caro shot three of the couple’s four young sons as they slept on the night of Nov. 22, 1999. Nor did she directly assert that he pulled the trigger and put a bullet into his wife’s brain before frantically calling 911 to report the carnage in his home.

“The law doesn’t require us to prove that Dr. Caro did it,” she told the jury. “It would be an impossible task and one that is not required of us.”

Even so, she said the broken foot Socorro Caro suffered on the night of the killings didn’t stem from a fall down the stairs, as prosecutors have suggested.

“It’s reasonable to think she got it in a struggle--a struggle to save the lives of her children,” Farley said.

She also cited testimony from Dr. Warren Lovell, a retired Ventura County coroner who was an expert witness for the defense. Lovell concluded that Caro’s head wound was inconsistent with a suicide attempt, although he acknowledged it was not impossible.

The attorney spoke for six hours and is to resume Monday morning. She did not address incriminating physical evidence--like the boys’ blood on Caro’s pajamas--but tried to plant enough doubt for jurors to acquit the 44-year-old Santa Rosa Valley woman, who has pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity.

Farley pointed to the teachers and parents who testified that Caro was a loving mother and devoted volunteer at Santa Rosa School in Camarillo.

How is it, she asked, that prosecutors failed to produce witnesses who could testify otherwise?

“Bring them in,” she urged. “A teacher, a kid--bring them in.”

A day earlier, prosecutors painted Caro as a cold, conniving woman eager to punish her husband. Farley, however, tried to show Caro as a reasonable wife eager to reconcile with a husband beset by middle-age angst.

Five months before the killings, Xavier Caro abruptly left home for a few days.

In an e-mail to him, his wife tried to find common ground, Farley said, propping up an enlarged version of the message on an easel before the jurors.

“Over the years, we’ve both said and done things that have eaten away at our relationship,” Socorro Caro wrote. “I just wish we could have a reasonable conversation without it turning into an argument. . . . Despite what you think, I don’t hate you. I’ll always love you.”

In another e-mail a month before the killings, Caro expressed her disappointment with their crumbling relationship.

“I feel like you’re getting even with me for all the hurts you’ve ever had in your life,” she wrote.

Farley used the messages in an attempt to rebut prosecutors’ portrayals of Caro as brutal and self-centered.

“Are these the rantings,” she asked, “of an incoherent, hysterical woman--or do we have instead a woman who reasons logically, attempting to capitalize on those aspects of her relationship with her husband that are negotiable?”

Xavier Caro, the attorney contended, was not about to negotiate. He had launched an affair with one of his office employees and was preparing to leave his family for good--although his wife didn’t yet know it, Farley argued.

“He was so unhappy with his family situation at the time that he would do anything to not have to be with them,” she said, calling his affair “an obsession . . . that preoccupied him with desire and need.”

Three months before the killings, Xavier Caro, an arthritis specialist, had fired his wife from her job as office manager at his Northridge medical practice. On the brink of eviction from his office complex, he discovered his wife had secretly channeled large sums from office accounts to her aging parents.

As she has throughout the trial, Farley on Friday challenged the prosecution’s rendition of the Caro family finances. She said Xavier Caro knew for years that his wife used family funds to help her parents, who, in turn, did a variety of maintenance and child-care chores for the Caros.

In any event, she said, Caro was not seething about her dismissal, as prosecutors suggested, or about her husband’s confiscation of her checkbook and credit cards. The firing allowed her to spend more time with her boys. And the financial restrictions were nil, Farley said.

“She lost nothing,” Farley said, pointing to the weekly manicures she still received after her funds were supposedly cut off.

Xavier Caro was never seriously considered a suspect in the boys’ deaths--a failing, Farley maintained, of local law enforcement. She contended that he planted evidence, such as a print-out of an October e-mail in which Socorro Caro expressed her disappointment with their marriage, in the home to incriminate his wife. It was the closest thing he could find to a suicide note, Farley said.

Earlier in the day, Deputy Dist. Atty. Cheryl Temple completed her closing argument, calling Caro “a selfish, selfish, calculating woman who wanted to hurt her husband in the worst way imaginable.” Farley took exception.

“I don’t know which trial she’s been watching,” Farley said, “but this one has been entirely different.”