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DA: Wife prepared for killing husband

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In the months and weeks before she fatally shot her husband, a Carlsbad woman had disengaged emotionally from her marriage and began putting together the tools she would need to make her exit, a prosecutor said Monday.

“This case is very much about the deterioration of Julie Harper,” Deputy District Attorney Keith Watanabe told a jury Monday during his opening statement.

“She had checked out of this family and checked out of the kids’ lives,” the prosecutor said in Vista Superior Court. “This deterioration very much had an effect on their marriage.”

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The prosecutor said Harper, 41, forged checks in her husband’s name about a week before the Aug. 7, 2012 shooting, allowing her to withdraw $9,000 of Jason Harper’s money. She filed for divorce a couple days later.

Watanabe said the evidence would show that Julie Harper also filled a “getaway bag” with several items, including Social Security cards, passports for herself and her children, her husband’s will and $39,000.

He said the bag served as evidence that Harper “knew she was guilty” of murder.

But Harper’s lawyer said the bag — a blue backpack that was found later at Harper’s father’s home — was not evidence of a woman who tried to escape, but of one who was preparing to start a new life after splitting from an abusive husband.

Paul Pfingst told the jury that Jason Harper “hated” his wife, a stay-at-home-mother who he believed was not contributing financially to the marriage. Pfingst said Harper would yell and curse at his wife in front of their three children, and had repeatedly threatened to divorce her.

“The nature of his cruelty will be discussed when Julie testifies,” Pfingst said, adding that it was his client who tried for years to keep the family together.

Eventually, she had enough and filed for divorce. The shooting happened five days later.

Indicating self-defense may become an issue in trial, Pfingst asked the jury to consider why a woman would file for divorce and then take the life of the person she is divorcing. He said the panel would be asked to determine, after hearing all the evidence, whether the killing was lawful.

Police found Jason Harper’s body in the master bedroom of the couple’s Carlsbad home, lying face down beneath blankets and other items. They discovered the body after receiving a call from Pfingst, the county’s former district attorney, who asked them to check the house on Badger Lane.

He had been shot once in his left side with a .38-caliber handgun. The gun was never recovered.

Watanabe told the jury Monday that Julie Harper shot her husband between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., while the couple’s children were watching cartoons downstairs. The two older children — ages 8 and 6 — said later that they heard a thump and went upstairs to see what had happened.

Harper told them their father had fallen off a chair, the prosecutor said.

Watanabe told the jury that the defendant then carried out a “day of deceit,” during which she took tried to arrange play dates for her children, dropped them off with her sister, sent a text message posing as her husband to a relative’s phone, and then went to her father’s office in Normal Heights.

She and her father retained Pfingst, who arranged for her to surrender to police.

Watanabe painted a very different picture of Jason Harper than was described in court by the defense attorney. “Everybody loved Jason,” he said.

He said the defendant made only a brief mention in divorce filings that her husband had been verbally abusive, used profanity, had pushed and shoved her, and twisted her arm on one occasion.

“This is the extent of Julie Harper’s description of their ‘abusive’ marriage,” Watanabe said.

If convicted of murder and a gun-use allegation, Harper faces a possible sentence of 50 years to life in prison.

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