Friend Testifies Caro Shared Thoughts of Shooting Herself

It started out as chitchat, a meandering phone call between two old friends.

But when Socorro Caro talked about her crumbling marriage and her bleak mood, it started to get frightening.

“Sometimes, I think it would just be better if I wasn’t here,” she said.

“Stop it, Cora!” Lisa Vanessen told her.

But she didn’t. She was sitting on her bed, she said, staring at the gun in her hand.

“What would it matter?” Caro asked.

You have four boys who need you, her friend replied.

On Monday, Vanessen recounted the grim exchange during her testimony in Ventura County Superior Court, where Caro is charged with shooting three of her sons to death in their beds. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Vanessen didn’t think her friend was serious about suicide, she testified. Still, she was shaken and told Dr. Xavier Caro, Socorro Caro’s husband, about the conversation.

“He said, ‘Maybe I should get the guns out of the house,’ ” she told the jury.

It was on Nov. 22, 1999, a month or two after that phone call, that the boys were killed and Socorro Caro was found in the master bedroom of the family’s Santa Rosa Valley home, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. The Caros’ youngest son, who is now 3, was unharmed.

Vanessen, an employee at Dr. Caro’s medical practice in Northridge, had an intimate view of the couple’s deteriorating relationship. For more than five years, she served as assistant to Socorro Caro, who was the office’s business manager. When the doctor fired his wife in August 1999 for allegedly diverting more than $105,000 to her parents without his knowledge, he gave Vanessen her job.

Both Xavier and Socorro Caro were decent employers, she testified, although Socorro could be demanding. When employees fell down on the job, “she’d take it personally, or as a sign of disrespect,” she said.

By the summer of 1999, both were coping with profound unhappiness. Socorro Caro was taking an anti-depressant, at her husband’s urging. He was wondering whether to seek a divorce, a terrifying prospect to his wife, who was convinced that she and the children would wind up penniless, Vanessen said.

Their unhappiness was compounded by the bill collectors who called the office with increasing frequency. Vanessen testified that by August, the office rent was more than $70,000 in arrears.

Trying to piece together the financial obligations that Socorro Caro allegedly neglected, Vanessen said she felt uncomfortable--caught between two friends who were at odds with each other.

But by November, the storms seemed to have calmed. Vanessen said she saw no sign of depression in her old friend, despite the tortured phone call earlier that fall. Socorro Caro took her out for a birthday lunch and appeared to be in good spirits, even a little giddy after a margarita. She said that Prozac was helping her keep an even keel, an impression that was reinforced by a conversation between the two on Nov. 22, the day the Caro children would die.

“She seemed fine--normal,” Vanessen said.

But that night something in the Caro home went tragically wrong.

Testifying Monday morning, in the last hours of a week on the witness stand, Dr. Caro acknowledged his concern after the killings that he would be blamed for them.

“I always got blamed for everything in the household by Cora,” he said. “Anything that went wrong was my fault.

His wife’s defense attorneys have suggested that he framed her.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Cheryl Temple asked him about that strategy Monday.

“Did you ever think she would actually claim you shot your children?” she asked.

Dr. Caro said he wasn’t surprised.

“I assumed that in some convoluted fashion Cora’s evil act would in some way come back to reflect on me,” he said. “But I never in my wildest dream believed anyone would think that I actually killed my children.”