Caro’s Husband Grilled About Office Affair

In his third day on the witness stand, Dr. Xavier Caro disclosed details of his affair with an employee at his medical practice--a romance his wife’s attorneys tried Wednesday to cast as passionate enough for him to frame her in the slayings of their three young sons.

Accused of fatally shooting the boys as they slept, Socorro Caro, 44, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder. She has pleaded not guilty, later amending her plea with one of not guilty by reason of insanity.

As police conducted their initial investigation into the deaths at the Caros’ lavish Santa Rosa Valley home, Xavier Caro brought up his affair with a biofeedback technician at his Northridge office. Earlier in his wife’s trial, he testified that he mentioned the affair because he wanted to do what he could to aid the investigation.

In cross-examining him Wednesday, Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley tried to show that his relationship with Laura Gillard was far deeper than the physician had let on to investigators.

“Did you ever intend to mislead prosecutors as to the facts about Laura Gillard?” she asked him sharply. “Have you ever lied to prosecutors about your love for Ms. Gillard?”

Judge Issues Rebuke Over Questioning

Superior Court Judge Donald D. Coleman agreed with prosecutors’ objections that the questions were improper. Still, Farley persisted in attempting to piece together a picture of Xavier Caro as so profoundly in love that he had a reason to kill three of his four sons, shoot his wife, and then arrange the crime scene to make it appear as if she had done it.

Under questioning from Farley, Xavier Caro testified that the affair with Gillard was his first. It started in May 1999, although the two didn’t have sexual relations until August--three months before the Caro boys were killed on Nov. 22, 1999.

The couple communicated through an e-mail account known only to them, he said.

One of his messages to her was enlarged and propped on an easel before the jury of nine women and three men.

“I love you and miss you and want to be with you,” it read. “I guess I want a taste of you to hold me over until we can be together.”

Xavier Caro testified that he and Gillard had sex on two occasions before the boys’ deaths and that their romance continued only sporadically afterward. But Farley maintained that he has downplayed the affair, and by the day’s end was asking Xavier Caro for dates, times and locations of the couple’s sexual encounters in the months after the crime.

After the jury was excused, those questions drew a mild rebuke from Judge Coleman.

Coleman contended that if Xavier Caro conducted a prolonged affair, that could be a relevant point for the defense in attempting to establish his motive. But whether the lovers’ meetings were “at the Marriott, or a no-tell motel, or someone’s penthouse condo--and who performed what on whom, I don’t see as relevant,” he said.

In an echo of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Farley told the judge that “I actually do not enjoy asking questions about the type of sex people mean when the say ‘sex.’ ”

Coleman sympathized.

“We’re in the post-Clinton years,” he said. “I used to believe sex was sex; perhaps people have different definitions these days.”

Earlier in the day, Farley focused her cross-examination on the grandfather clock that Xavier Caro liked to call “the heart” of his household.

Grandfather Clock as ‘Symbol’ or Stagecraft

About a week after the killings, he noticed that the clock had stopped at 10:59--a “symbol” left by his wife, he told investigators. The shootings in his home occurred about that time, according to investigators.

Farley contended throughout her questioning that Xavier Caro had stopped the clock himself by grasping the pendulum. It was a bit of stagecraft he had designed after the killings to cast blame on his wife, Farley argued.

In videos of the crime scene, the clock was shown to be running.

But it stopped frequently and had to be rewound every week, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Cheryl Temple, who called Farley’s argument “a waste of time and energy.”

Asked if he had stopped the clock, Xavier Caro was emphatic: “Oh no,” he said. “Absolutely not.”