Dally Niece Testifies in Haun Trial

Fighting back tears, Michael Dally’s 20-year-old niece told a jury Thursday about a dramatic confrontation in which she asked her uncle whether he was involved in his wife’s disappearance.

“I asked him, ‘Michael, please tell me you had nothing to do with this,’ ” Hannah Murray testified, biting her lower lip to maintain her composure. “He said, ‘Just promise me, no matter what, you will be on my side.’ ”

The soft-spoken woman, whose sister was called to the stand last week, was among nine witnesses to testify Thursday at Diana Haun’s murder trial.

The 36-year-old grocery clerk is accused of concocting an elaborate plan with Michael Dally, her longtime lover, to kidnap and kill his wife, Sherri.

Prosecutors allege that the pair wanted the 35-year-old homemaker out of the way so they could raise the Dally children and avoid a financially ruinous divorce.

Haun and Dally, who have both pleaded not guilty to murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges, could face the death penalty if convicted. Dally’s trial is scheduled to follow Haun’s.

Many of the witnesses called by the prosecution Thursday testified about actions and statements the co-defendants made after Sherri Dally’s disappearance on May 6, 1996.

They included:

* A customer at Baker’s Square in Oxnard who said she saw Michael Dally, a woman and two children sitting in a booth at about 11:30 a.m. on May 7, 1996.

* A moviegoer who saw Dally, a blond woman and two boys at Oxnard’s Carriage Square theater that evening. Juliann Castro, a manager at Home Savings bank in Ventura, said she recognized Dally as a bank customer.

“It seemed like a family to me,” Castro testified. “They were eating popcorn and drinking soda just like a family would.”

* A woman who took her children to Sherri Dally’s in-home day care testified that when she picked up her daughter on the evening of May 6, Michael Dally told her his wife had been “nabbed.”

Hannah Murray took the witness stand right after Thursday’s noon recess.

Like her sister, Heather, she testified largely about statements her uncle made after his wife disappeared from the parking lot of a Target store.

Murray lived with her aunt and uncle for about a month in 1996, including the period in which Sherri went missing.

She and Michael were close, she said, and he often confided in her.

*

One time, Murray said, he brought his girlfriend by the jewelry store where she worked so they could meet.

And she often answered the phone when Haun called for her uncle, she said.

“He said that he was in love with Diana,” Murray testified, “and he didn’t know what to do . . . with his family.”

For several months in the summer of 1995, Dally left his family and moved in with Haun. But Murray said that he had moved back home to be closer to his boys and because “he was running out of money.”

A few days after Sherri vanished, Murray told jurors that she went out to dinner with Haun, Michael Dally, and his sons, Devon and Max. Over pizza, she said, her uncle talked about his wife’s disappearance.

“He said that now that Sherri was gone . . . the boys were his,” Murray testified. She said Haun acted motherly toward the children and told Dally: “The boys are ours.”

In the weeks after Sherri Dally’s disappearance--and after police had launched a missing-person investigation--Murray said Michael became concerned about talking on the phone.

“He was afraid the phones were bugged,” she said. “He thought that the detectives were listening.”

Also during this time, Murray said her uncle lectured her about talking to the media as news reports focused on the search for Sherri Dally’s body.

Her beaten and stabbed remains were eventually found by a volunteer search party in a steep ravine north of Ventura 26 days after her disappearance.

In other testimony, a manager at the Department of Motor Vehicles said that Haun applied for a new driver’s license on May 9, 1996, after reporting her license missing.

An employee at Wells Fargo bank previously testified that Haun used her driver’s license on May 9, 1996, as identification to open a new account.

*

A Superior Court clerk also testified Thursday about a phony divorce filing that was discovered bearing Michael and Sherri Dally’s names.

It was not clear how authorities obtained the two-page document. Clerk Mary McFarlin said that it was crafted from an authentic court document bearing a case number and a judge’s signature but had been obviously altered in places.

“You can feel the white-out on the paper,” she said.

In his opening statement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Frawley said that Haun took legal documents from another person’s case, altered them to look like the divorce of Michael and Sherri Dally, then gave the documents to her lover as a Christmas present.

The Haun trial is in recess today. Testimony will resume Monday at 9:30 a.m.