Crime Beat

her.
    “If I was guilty, why wouldn’t I just go on with my life and thank God I had gotten away with it?” she asked in an interview last week. “Why would I go through with this trial? It’s like a murder trial. If I was guilty, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
    The lawsuit focuses on what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 31 at the Sophiea family’s Orcas Avenue house and whether detectives assigned to the case correctly and honestly interpreted the evidence left by a killer. Kellel-Sophiea claims they did not.
    “They threw this woman on a freight train to hell, and they still are trying to shovel coal on the fire,” said Ken Clark, one of her attorneys.
    According to testimony at the trial, Gregory Sophiea and his wife argued on the last night of his life.
    The couple had separated after 10 years of marriage but had agreed to meet at the house they owned—and where Gregory, a salesman and caterer, was staying—to discuss its sale.
    Death Followed Quarrel
    Kellel-Sophiea, a former advertising executive, testified that the couple argued over furniture she needed for her new apartment in Long Beach, and related financial matters.
    Later, Gregory went to sleep in the master bedroom while his wife slept in another bedroom and their 6-year-old daughter, Kristen, slept in a third room.
    In a tape-recorded interview with police on the day of the murder, Kellel-Sophiea said she was awakened shortly after 3 a.m. by a noise and heard a gurgling sound. Knowing her husband was asthmatic, she rushed to his bedroom and saw him lying on his back on the water bed gasping for breath.
    She said she saw blood on the sheets and assumed he had injured himself—something that had occurred once before during a morning asthma attack. She did not notice the stab wounds on her husband’s chest and neck, she told the detectives.
    Though there was a phone on the nightstand Kellel-Sophiea ran to another phone in the house, dialed 911 to report her husband could not breathe and then ran to a next-door neighbor’s house for help. While the neighbor, Larry Rotoli, went into the bedroom to try to aid Sophiea, Kellel-Sophiea remained at the front of the house to direct paramedics inside.
    When the paramedics arrived moments later, they found Gregory Sophiea dead, with seven stab wounds in the upper body.
    Kellel-Sophiea was taken to the Foothill Division police station to await questioning while several detectives gathered at the scene of the crime. Among them were Parks, who had eight years’ experience as a homicide detective, and Milligan, who was working his first case as homicide detective trainee. They would be the lead detectives assigned to the case.
    Among the pieces of evidence awaiting the detectives was a bloody butcher knife on the bedroom floor. They found the window in one of the bathrooms open to the backyard and an undamaged screen leaning on an outside wall. There was dirt on the toilet seat and the bathroom floor.
    Bloodstains were found in other parts of the house, and there were bloody fingerprints on a backyard fence. They also found pry marks on the outside of a rear door.
    On the surface, evidence seemed to indicate that someone had broken into the house through the bathroom window, and escaped through the window and over the fence after stabbing Sophiea. But the detectives, after conducting a routine preliminary investigation, came to a different conclusion.
    No Footprints
    Parks and Milligan testified that they found no footprints in the dirt below the bathroom window. The detectives determined the window screen could not have been removed from the outside without being damaged. And using an oblique lighting technique, they determined that dust on the stone pathway that led to the bathroom window had not been disturbed—indicating no one had walked there that morning.
    They also found chemical traces of what could have been blood in two sinks and a bathtub in the house.
    The detectives developed the theory that the break-in had been staged to throw the investigation off course.
    “We were all in unanimous agreement that this was not a burglary,” Milligan testified last week. “I don’t believe anyone went in or out of that window.”
    Burglary eliminated, their suspicions turned to the widow. The detectives testified it was their opinion that the victim had been dead at least an hour before Kellel-Sophiea said she saw him struggling for breath and dialed 911. Also, a chemical test of her