Defense Focuses on Dally’s Dark Side

While chatting from nearby jail cells, a Ventura prostitute and murder suspect Diana Haun realized that they shared something in common: Both women had had sex with Michael Dally.

That conversation, prostitute Tracy Bixler testified Thursday, stunned Haun and prompted her to turn against the lover she had tried to protect.

Bixler was among 10 witnesses to testify in the Haun murder trial as defense attorneys opened their case by painting an unsavory picture of Michael Dally while attempting to poke holes in the prosecution’s arguments.

Haun’s public defenders brought her younger sister, Mary Oliver, back to the stand to further discuss Haun’s whereabouts before Sherri Dally’s slaying on May 6, 1996.

And they introduced a witness who contradicted a woman’s testimony about seeing Haun in a car on the night of the kidnap-slaying about a mile from the gully where Sherri Dally’s remains were later found.

But it was Bixler, a streetwalker with a drug habit, who had the courtroom riveted Thursday, drawing occasional gasps from the audience as she described statements and actions she attributed to Michael Dally.

He and Haun are charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in his wife’s killing, and they face separate trials. If convicted, they could each receive the death penalty.

Bixler was led into court by deputies late Thursday afternoon wearing a conservative navy and brown suit.

In a polite, shy voice, she told jurors that she had slept with Michael Dally four times and knew at least two other prostitutes who had shared his company--a revelation that Bixler said left Haun stunned.

Bixler testified that it was in March while she was in jail on a drug charge that she started talking to Haun, and the pair realized they had slept with the same man.

“She was shocked,” Bixler testified. In opening statements a month ago, defense attorney Neil Quinn told the jury it was that initial conversation with Bixler that prompted his client to admit that she had played an unknowing role in Michael Dally’s alleged plot to kill his wife.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys have both said that the meeting between Bixler and Haun in jail was a chance encounter.

Although Bixler maintains an Ojai address, she told jurors she mostly lives at various motels along Thompson Boulevard in Ventura.

“I am a prostitute and I work down there and that’s where I get my drugs,” she said matter-of-factly during her testimony Thursday.

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It was on Thompson Boulevard, she said, that she first met Michael Dally in the winter of 1995.

“He did what all the men do,” she said, explaining that Dally pulled his van up alongside her and solicited a “date.” She got inside the van, they discussed a price and went to the nearby Silver Strand motel, she said.

That was the first time she had sex with Dally, whom she knew only as “Mark.”

Bixler identified a photograph of Michael Dally as the same man she knew by that name. “I don’t do last names,” she explained.

Several months later, in the summer of 1996, Bixler said she had sex with Dally again. As the two smoked rock cocaine together, she said Dally told her that his wife was dead.

The subject came up again during a later encounter--one in which she said Dally asked for a “reduced rate” because Bixler had previously stolen money from him, which she admitted to.

“He was non-feeling,” Bixler said of the way Dally talked about his dead wife. “I remember watching his face and there was nothing there.”

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Bixler said she saw Dally with at least two other prostitutes at different times, including one woman with long, blond hair. Other witnesses have identified Sherri Dally’s abductor as a woman with long, blond hair.

Prosecutors allege that Haun carried out the kidnap-slaying and disguised herself with a blond wig to do so. But no one has identified Haun as the woman they saw with Dally on the morning she disappeared from the parking lot of a Target store, and defense attorneys argue that it was another person.

The first defense witness Thursday testified about that exact point.

Margaret Gonzalez told the jury that on May 5, 1996--a day before Sherri Dally was reported missing--she saw a blond woman driving a blue-green car down Canada Larga Road toward the freeway between 1:30 and 3 p.m.

Dally’s skeletal remains were found at the bottom of a ravine along Canada Larga Road nearly a month later.

Haun’s sister has twice testified that on the afternoon of May 5, Haun was at her house for a birthday party. On Thursday, Mary Oliver again said that her sister left the party at about 2 p.m. because she had to be at work at 3.

The times and dates are significant because the defense wants to show it is possible that a blond woman--not Haun in a wig--was driving the blue-green car she rented and used it the following day in the kidnap-murder.

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But on cross-examination Thursday, prosecutors tried to show that there was a window of time in which Haun could have been behind the wheel of the car.

In other testimony, a high school friend of Michael and Sherri Dally’s testified that he used cocaine with Michael nearly 10 years ago.

Dale Core, who said he no longer uses drugs, also told the jury that Michael Dally arranged an escort for him once--a girl who would have sex for $40.

“Michael and I were friends,” he said. “He knew a girl who needed some cash and it basically got set up.”

During the prosecution’s case, which spanned the past 4 1/2 weeks, a witness testified that she saw Haun sitting in a blue-green car beneath a highway overpass at 1:30 a.m. the day after Sherri Dally disappeared.

Samantha Spencer picked Haun out of a police lineup and identified her in court as the woman she saw in the car that night. She testified that she remembered the defendant by “her eyes.”

But on Thursday, defense attorneys challenged Spencer’s testimony by calling her friend, Jennifer Sajonia, to the stand.

Sajonia was behind the wheel of her truck when she and Spencer, returning from Spencer’s grandmother’s home in west Ventura, noticed the woman in the car. Sajonia said she was unable to identify the person as Diana Haun.

“I couldn’t say if it was her or not,” she testified.

Sajonia did say that the woman in the car had distinctive eyes. But she didn’t think much about it at the time.

“We saw a lady parked on the side of the road in her car,” she testified. “I just thought it was a homeless lady just sleeping in her car. I didn’t give it much thought.”