Alumnae pleads self-defense

Paul Worthman's body was lying face-down in the spare bedroom of the rented home in Long Beach he shared with his estranged wife, Carol. On Halloween night 1985, five bullets had pierced his body and ended his life.

According to the Los Angeles Coroner's reports, four of the bullets had entered his back, while the final bullet entered the left side of his neck, exiting through the right side. When Long Beach police detectives arrived, they found a ski mask secured over Paul's head and a lipstick- smeared pillow with blood stains was laying on the floor near his body. The bedroom's window overlooking Monlaco Road in Long Beach was shattered.

The weapon responsible for discharging the fatal bullets was a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver; the hand that pulled the trigger, each time, belonged to Carol Worthman, who testified she had fired in self-defense.

Next-door neighbors had heard the shots that evening, telling police 8:56 p.m. was the exact time, according to their digital clock. They had estimated that 20 minutes had passed be fore Carol ran into their home, explaining that she had just shot her husband, 33, an Orange County family practitioner. Her neighbors, arriving late to the scene after the final shot was fired, failed to revive him.

The recent drama generated f rom the O.J. Simpson arrest and murder trial has breathed new life into husband and wife tragedies such as the Worthmans, despite their grim circumstances. The Worthman trial in Long Beach was highly-publicized and offered one of the first self-defen se cases in the city.

Carol, a former Cal State Long Beach journalism major, was arrested by Long Beach police shortly after the murder. In fact, little did she realize, she would remain behind bars, laboring through three trials and several attorneys before being sentenced in Torrance Superior Court in 1989 to serve 17 years in state prison on charges of second-degree murder.

Carol, 37 at the time of her arrest, had moved to Long Beach with her husband in 1982 and began attending CSULB. She served as an editor for the University Magazine and eventually wrote for the Daily Forty-Niner. Carol, however, was a photojournalism major and also served as an unpaid intern for six weeks at the Claremont Courier in 1985.

Paul, who earned a USC degree in 1979, worked on the teaching staff at the USC School of Medicine before taking a position at the Bristol Park Medical Group Inc. in Santa Ana.

The Worthmans, despite their well-concealed facade, had many internal problems within the ir marriage that few others realized. Carol's testimony in Long Beach revealed that Paul and she had a dark, kinky sex life, often manipulating one another into having sex in semi- public places. The Worthmans, however, seemed to have kept their secre ts locked inside the two-bedroom home that would ultimately separate them forever.

They filed for divorce May 9, 1985, and had been separated since July 14. Some of the Worthmans' friends had testified that the couple was considering a reconcilia tion, a topic they were alleged to have discussed on the night of the murder. Others believed the two were going to celebrate Paul's belated Oct. 28 birthday. Nobody expected murder.

"It was a scandalous crime," said Jenny Cardenas, who had cover ed the Long Beach trials (Municipal and Superior courts), which ended in a hung jury, for the Press- Telegram. "She was a middle-class student who people would not consider capable of killing someone."

The jury in Long Beach Superior Court had rea ched a roadblock in determining malice, although they had agreed that Carol was guilty of murdering Paul. A mistrial was declared on Nov. 3, 1986, just over a year after the shooting. Carol, however, remained jailed at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles because she was unable to post $250,000 bail. The orignal bail was set at $500,000.

Carol testified in Long Beach Superior Court that she had been a victim of abuse, citing that she feared Paul had come to her home in an attem pt to execute her Halloween night. She said that her husband was obsessed with war games, and she testified that he put the gun under her chin and said: "Your brains are going to be splattered all over this room in a minute."

Carol said she was a ble to get the gun away from Paul in a struggle and told him to face the window, with his back to her. (The jury had re-enacted the struggle, concluding that Carol, 5 feet 2 inches tall, was capable of wrestling the gun free from her husband, who stoo d 6 feet 2 inches.)

It was then, she testified, that Paul plunged his hands through the glass window, producing a number of superficial cuts on his hands and forearms that had originally left the Los Angeles Coroner's office without an explanatio n.

Carol told the court she thought he was preparing to attack her - so she she said she "just started firing the gun."

Carol, now 45, is at the California Institute for Women at Frontera in Corona. In a letter to the Daily Forty-Niner , Car ol wrote that she is pursuing a fourth trial and that she is not in a position to discuss the murder.

"Things are really changing rapidly for me and are a bit uncertain right now," she wrote. "I am overturning my conviction and will be bailing out again. There will be a fourth trial, maybe. . . I have to hold off until after my next (and hopefully last) trial. Even then, being a writer myself, it would be crazy for me not to do any articles on myself."

Cardenas, now a writer for the Press Enterprise in Riverside, said she had never established a relationship with Carol because of the prison restrictions during the trial, but added that Carol was "never not willing to tell her side of the story."

Cardenas said the case was so unusu al because it was one of the first in Long Beach to use self-defense as a legitimate excuse for murder. The trial, however, was moved to Torrance because of its sensational appeal and the fact that a potentially tainted jury was unavoidable.

The police who investigated the murder scene still contend that Carol cleaned up the crime scene before asking her neighbors for help on the fateful night, regardless of the Torrance decision. Tim Cable, a Long Beach homicide detective who assisted in the investigation of the shooting, said the 17 years Carol was sentenced to serve was "a hell of a deal."

"My problem is that I will always believe it was a premeditated murder," Cable said. "She had a number of good battered wife stories about her husband's abuse. She was very manipulative." Cable suggested that Paul was not capable of violent behavior and that the prosecution in the Long Beach trials had dismissed valid evidence.

"He was very docile, he couldn't even raise a voice," Cable said. "He was going to dump her because of her obvious delusions about their life."

Paul's friends, co-workers and family had maintained, throughout the trial, that he wanted no further involvement with Carol and that he went to visit her Hallowee n night to finalize the details of the divorce.

Verona M. Worthman, Paul's mother, had written a letter to Long Beach Municipal Court Judge Sheila Pokras, asking that the $500,000 bail remain. "Carol has expressed great hatred for all of us and I'm terrified that she will kill again if released," Verona Worthman wrote.

Cable painted a similar picture of Carol, as an obsessed killer who murdered Paul without regret.

"The prosecution didn't do as much as they could have," Cable said. "T he way she set up the crime scene with the ski mask, the pillow - all of that should have been looked into further."

The pillow, Carol had testified, was used by Paul in an attempt to suffocate her. Cable said that the lipstick markings on the pi llow were smeared, rather than pressed, suggesting that Carol's attempt to manipulate the crime scene had failed.

The dividing lines between the estranged Worthmans were deep, as passionate efforts by either family or friends attempted to produce the small edge that would produce guilt or innocence. As police and Paul's family pushed for Carol's first-degree murder conviction, former CSULB professors and co-workers couldn't believe she was even capable of it.

Steve Ryan, a former radio/te levsion associate professor at CSULB, offered the court his personal property as collateral for Carol's bail, fully convinced of her innocence.

Ryan's efforts finally paid off, allowing Carol several months of freedom in 1989 prior to her sentenc ing of second-degree murder charges in Torrance.

Martin Weinberger, editor in chief of the Claremont Courier, said Carol had never exuded any tendency toward violence during her internship and even vaguely recalled receiving a letter of appreciati on from her some time after the murder.

"She seemed very attentive," Weinberger said. "She served very well as an intern. She called one day and told Peter [Weinberger's son, who was managing editor] that she wouldn't be into work. She said she wa s in jail. It was a surprise to us, because we didn't [see] any of the tendencies that [eventually] lead to the shooting."