Witness in murder trial tells of attack

A 53-year-old woman testified Wednesday that in 2002, accused serial killer Chester Turner grabbed her by the neck, dragged her behind a trash bin in a dimly lighted parking lot and raped her for nearly two hours.

Maria Martinez was homeless at the time of the attack in the skid row area of Los Angeles. Turner pleaded no contest to rape and sexual penetration by a foreign object that year. He was serving an eight-year prison sentence when genetic testing in 2003 tied him to the first of 10 women he is accused of killing.

Martinez said she had seen Turner, who worked as a security guard at the Midnight Mission, before the attack but did not know him. She was on her way to a restaurant when Turner asked to borrow a cigarette lighter, Martinez testified. He smoked a crack pipe and then grabbed her by the arm and throat, she said.

“He said that if I was to tell police and he was to do time, he’d kill me,” said the salt-and-pepper-haired Martinez, shaking and breathing sharply into a courtroom microphone. Turner looked down while Martinez first spoke and later lifted his eyes to her face. Martinez shifted in her seat.

Martinez’s testimony came in the third week of trial for Turner, 40, who is charged with strangling 10 women, one of them pregnant, in the 1980s and ‘90s, mostly along the Figueroa Street corridor. He has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney says the DNA evidence can be explained because the slain women were prostitutes who paid Turner in trade for drugs.

Portions of Martinez’s story were corroborated Tuesday by Carrie Gatlin, who worked for the mission in 2002. Gatlin said that after the attack, a bruised Martinez came “crying and visibly upset” to Gatlin’s office.

Defense attorney John Tyre said Martinez’s testimony does not prove that Turner is a killer. “They’re trying to bring that in to dirty up Mr. Turner,” he said. “But what does that have to do with the murders?”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Truc Do said the rape was “proof that none of the contact he had with the 10 deceased victims was consensual sex.”

Two of the victims’ sisters, Sheryl King, 48, and Bobbie Williams, 52, sat in the third row of the courtroom as Martinez spoke. “It gives you an idea of what he did to them,” said King, sister of victim Anita Fishman, 31. Said Williams, sister of Mildred Beasley, 45: “It turns your stomach.”

ashley.surdin@latimes.com