Jury finds O.C. woman was sane during teen’s murder

After deliberating less than two hours, jurors Thursday determined that a Mission Viejo woman was legally sane when she attacked her boyfriend -- a prominent chef -- and stabbed his teenage son to death.

Tamara Bohler, 48, will be sentenced Feb. 23 and could face life in prison without the possibility of parole, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Murray.

Bohler was convicted a week ago of attempted murder and murder, and the trial moved into a sanity phase during which jurors were asked whether she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Public Defender Shelly Aronson told jurors that Bohler committed the crimes but urged them to consider that she suffered from paranoia, mental illness, stress, alcoholism, anxiety and other problems partially fueled by her “dysfunctional relationship” with Jean-Marc Weber.

An appeal is planned, Aronson said.

The stabbings followed more than three years of on-again, off-again dating between Bohler and the French-born Weber, who has worked as executive chef at the California Club, a private establishment in downtown Los Angeles, and Hotel Le Meridien (now Fairmont) in Newport Beach, among others.

What swayed the panel, said juror Eddie Alvarez, 40, of Santa Ana was Bohler’s own words in a taped interview by sheriff’s investigators. In it, “she was oriented, she knew what the date was and where she was,” he said. “Then she asked: ‘May I ask, which one survived?’ ”

“That was it,” he said. “That was the big one,” the statement that convinced jurors that she was cognizant of her surroundings and, by her question, left no doubt she “was legally sane.”

Although incidents of mental illness in the Bohler family were stressed at trial, the defense offered no evidence that Bohler had been professionally treated before the stabbings, jurors noted.

Instead, Bohler suffered from “anger management problems,” which, Alvarez and other jurors said, were fueled in part by alcohol.

According to trial testimony, on July 3, 2003, after Weber and his son, Alex, 13, had gone to bed, Bohler took a knife and attacked Weber as he slept. He managed to disarm her and then fled to a neighbor’s house and called police.

Bohler returned to the kitchen where she took another knife and went to Alex’s bedroom and stabbed him 13 times.

He later collapsed at the top of the stairs.

Holding back tears in the corridor after the hearing, Weber gave each juror an emotional thank you as he took out family photographs depicting the handsome, blond-haired Alex, and proudly showed them to jurors.

“He was a lover of life,” Weber said. “He didn’t know anything about hate.”

david.reyes@latimes.com