Defense Points to Caro Spouse as True Culprit

After nine weeks of testimony, Ventura County jurors today are to start weighing the case against Socorro Caro, the Santa Rosa Valley mother accused of killing her three young sons as they slept.

In the final segments of her nine-hour closing argument, Caro’s lead attorney on Monday tried to drive home defense contentions that the real culprit in the shooting deaths has not been charged.

Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley argued that Caro’s physician husband, Xavier Caro, killed the boys before turning a .38-caliber revolver on her. She likened him to the title character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” reading jurors a passage from the 1886 novel about a physician who led a secret life of violence:

“ ‘The man is not truly one, but two,’ ” Farley read. “ ‘If each could be housed in separate identities, life would be so much easier . . . ‘ “

In the prosecution’s rebuttal, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jim Ellison said the defense’s attempt to cast blame on the husband was a desperate smoke screen. No testimony indicated that Xavier Caro had ever been abusive toward his children, the prosecutor said. Defense claims that he had planted evidence and rehearsed his frantic call to 911 were unproven, he said.

Pointing to the 44-year-old defendant, he urged jurors in a quavering voice to “do the right thing” and find Caro guilty as charged with three counts of first-degree murder.

Caro has pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. If convicted, she faces the death penalty or life in prison without parole.

Three of the Caro’s four sons were found dead in their beds on the night of Nov. 22, 1999.

Joey, 11, Michael, 8, and Christopher, 5, each were shot in the head. Gabriel, who was then 13 months old, was unharmed.

Farley has said Xavier Caro orchestrated the slayings to extricate himself from a painful marriage. She has theorized that her client’s injuries--a bullet wound to the brain and a broken foot--occurred as she tried to defend the children from her husband’s rage.

Using a slide presentation, she urged jurors not to be swayed by the medical credentials or intellectual bearing of Xavier Caro, a Northridge arthritis specialist.

“It is sad, but reasonable, to conclude that credentialed, intelligent people do horribly unreasonable things,” she said, reciting to jurors from a slide projected on the courtroom wall.

Xavier Caro manipulated physical evidence, Farley said, pointing to Socorro Caro’s pajama bottoms, which were splattered with the boys’ blood.

The staining patterns were “beyond the laws of physics and even common sense,” Farley said.

In testimony earlier this month, Caro said she hadn’t put those pajamas on when she went to bed. They were maternity clothes, she said, and she hadn’t worn them since she was pregnant the previous year.

Farley returned to that assertion Monday.

“Does Mrs. Caro look like the kind of person who would put on maternity clothes when she’s not pregnant?” she asked, holding up the baggy striped shorts for jurors to inspect. “You can see these shorts are too big for Mrs. Caro.”

In his remarks, Ellison scoffed at the defense’s implication that Xavier Caro committed the crimes while wearing his wife’s pajamas, slipping them on her before calling 911.

“What a bunch of hooey,” Ellison said.

He added that maternity pajamas may have been comfort clothing for Caro, who testified that she was taking diet pills around the time of the crimes.

He also disputed defense contentions that Caro, who was known to her friends and her children’s teachers as a devoted mother, would never have killed her sons.

“Mothers do kill their children,” he said. “No character evidence in the world could overcome the physical evidence that this defendant killed three children.”