A New Chapter in a Sad Family Saga

After a seven-year campaign, Milton Dykstra believed he had won a measure of justice for the violent death of his daughter Toni in an ugly custody dispute.

Last week, Carlo Ventre, the father of Toni Dykstra’s daughter Santina, was deported to his native Italy to face murder charges for the mother’s killing.

Toni Dykstra, 29, had gone to Italy in 1998 to bring back Santina, who Ventre, ignoring a court order, had taken out of the U.S. She died in Ventre’s Rome apartment. Ventre told authorities that the couple had a scuffle and that he killed her in self-defense.

Convinced that Ventre was getting away with murder, Dykstra and his attorney, Gloria Allred, spent years trying to get reluctant Italian authorities to press charges. They ordered an independent autopsy, met with prosecutors and presented evidence of Toni’s escalating fears that her former boyfriend would kill her so he could keep their child.

“I’m relieved to hear that he’s being charged with first-degree murder,” Milt Dykstra said last week.

But in the latest twist in the long case, the Los Angeles County district attorney plans to charge Ventre today with solicitation to commit murder. The alleged targets were Milt Dykstra and his wife, Betty, Toni’s stepmother.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Al MacKenzie was reluctant to provide details of the alleged plot. But it was described during a 2002 immigration hearing for Ventre that Allred attended, she said.

At the proceeding, Immigration Judge Rose Peters said that Ventre, a onetime Downey businessman, had provided the would-be killer with the couple’s home address and suggested he try to make the killing look like a botched robbery, Allred said. According to Allred, the judge also said a confidential informant had told authorities that Ventre planned to kidnap Santina again.

MacKenzie said prosecutors purposely waited to file the murder-for-hire charge until after Ventre’s deportation so that they wouldn’t delay the murder case in Rome.

“We want to [deport] him to Italy first because that’s a homicide case and needs to be given priority,” MacKenzie said. “Hopefully justice will be done in Italy.... But if for some reason they’re not successful in their prosecution, we’ll bring him back.”

The Dykstras have been “taking precautions” and their local police department “has been very vigilant in making sure we have protection” since the solicitation allegation, Milt Dykstra said.

Giovanni Le Pera, an attorney in Italy representing Ventre, said he could not respond to the murder solicitation charge because he didn’t know anything about it. His client will plead self-defense to the murder charge, he said.

Ventre deserves pity, not blame, La Pera added.

“This poor man -- pushed by the love towards his child,” Le Pera said. “I do not understand how it is possible that Americans are interested in such a small case.”

For the Dykstras and Allred, it’s not a small case.

“He’s basically destroyed our life as we knew it,” said Milt Dykstra, a retired engineer living in Riverside County.

Milt Dykstra isn’t sure how long Toni Dykstra and Ventre had been dating when she announced she was pregnant. Though the couple was not married, the grandfather said, “the birth of a child was always a happy occasion.”

The couple broke up soon after Santina, now 9, was born. Toni Dykstra was awarded custody, but Ventre took Santina to Rome in 1998.

Before Toni Dykstra traveled to Italy that year to bring the child back, she told people close to her that she feared Ventre would kill her, Allred said. After her body was found inside Ventre’s home, he told authorities that he had shoved Toni Dykstra against a fireplace in self-defense after she attacked him with an ax.

Ventre was arrested immediately after Toni Dykstra’s July 1998 death, but authorities released him two days later. The Italian judge said he had doubts about the circumstances of the murder, according to Giancarlo Capaldo, an Italian prosecutor.

Allred pressed Italian authorities to prosecute Ventre for murder, commissioning an independent autopsy.

The second autopsy said the first one had failed to examine evidence that could have cast doubt on Ventre’s claims of self-defense.

“There is no examination of victim’s hands to see if she had contact with the alleged weapon, the hatchet,” said the independent autopsy report, which was obtained by The Times. “Suspect’s wounds are precisely measured while the victim’s wounds are not measured.”

In a December 1999 letter to Allred, prosecutor Capaldo said the criminal investigation against Ventre was still “in the preliminary investigation phase.”

That year, Italian officials -- who initially had placed Santina in foster care -- allowed the girl to return to California to live with Milt and Betty Dykstra. A month later, Ventre followed -- so he could get Santina back, the Dykstras believe.

At Los Angeles International Airport, Ventre stepped off a plane and was arrested by federal agents for felony parental kidnapping. He pleaded guilty in 2001, served a year in federal prison and upon his release was detained for three more years as he waged an unsuccessful legal battle against deportation.

The Italian indictment charges Ventre with planning and intentionally killing Dykstra, according to Capaldo.

“This woman was killed in Ventre’s house. She was killed with an ax ... not with the sharp part, but the flat side of it,” said Giulia Barrera, a consulting investigator in an unrelated case who acted as an impromptu interpreter for Capaldo. “She was killed the day before she was going to leave Italy with their child, and he absolutely did not want to lose the child.”

If convicted, Ventre faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Under Italian law, criminal defendants don’t post bail but either remain in custody or are released if prosecutors believe there is no flight risk, so Ventre has been released, Italian authorities said.

Toni Dykstra’s twin sister, Teri Dykstra Martinez, expressed outrage that he could be at a beach, “on vacation” right now.

A few months after Santina returned to live with Milt and Betty Dykstra, a Los Angeles County Superior Court commissioner awarded physical custody of the child to Ventre’s brother in Las Vegas. The Dykstras were granted visitation rights.

The commissioner cited Milt Dykstra’s age -- mid-60s at the time -- as a factor in his decision.

Calls to the home of Santina’s uncle in Las Vegas were not returned.

Today, mementos of Santina -- whose bright beauty reminds them of Toni -- lie about the Dykstras’ home. Here is a doll the girl once played with. There, a dress and a backpack that Betty Dykstra bought for her.

Because the Dykstras live hundreds of miles from Las Vegas and Milt Dykstra has been in poor health, the grandparents have not seen Santina since last fall, they said. They try to speak with her on the phone once or twice a week. Santina is aware that her mother has died, the Dykstras said, but they don’t discuss it with her, nor do they talk about her father.

“It just tears at our heartstrings,” Milt Dykstra said. “It’s still an open wound that’s there.”

Ventre is scheduled to appear at a hearing in Italy on Sept. 30 to determine if he will stand trial for Toni Dykstra’s killing.

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Times staff writer Maria De Cristofaro contributed to this report.