By Peter Hecht
phecht@sacbee.com
With accused killer Steven Paul Colver on the witness stand, a prosecutor today put a gruesome photo of Joanne Witt's face and her knife-ravaged neck on a projection screen, aggressively challenging his version that he only arrived after she was dead.
A day after Colver testified he nudged the leg of Joanne Witt with his palm to check on her after the El Dorado Hills mother was stabbed by her then 14-year-old daughter, Tyar Marie Witt, prosecutor Lisette Suder bore into him in a blistering exchange over how he happened to touch the victim exactly where male DNA was later found on her body.
"You would admit that face is very obviously the face of a dead woman," the El Dorado County deputy district attorney sternly said to Colve as she gestured to the grim crime scene photo.
"Yes, ma'am," Colver replied.
"So you had to touch her body above the knee to make sure she was dead?" Suder continued.
"I did not see her face when I went into her room," he answered.
"So you had to touch her right ... where there was male DNA found," the prosecutor went on.
"No ma'am," Colver replied.
The pointed cross-examination challenged the version Colver offered of the crime on the witness stand in El Dorado County Superior Court after the prosecution had introduced evidence that male DNA was found beneath Joanne Witt's finger tips and amid bloody streaks on her thigh.
Colver testified Thursday that it was Tylar Witt who killed her mother and that the girl greeted him at her house carrying a blooding knife and telling him, "I did it. I finally did it."
Prosecutors say Colver murdered Witt by himself, stabbing her at least 20 times after Tylar summoned him to her house. Earlier Joanne Witt had given her daughter's diary to police as part of a statutory rape complaint against Colver, then 19.
Colver said Friday he touched Witt in the leg after the killing and also testified that he handled a bloody kitchen knife after he took it from her daughter. A day earlier, he testified at length of scratching and petting Joanne Witt's dogs in an afternoon visit to the house while Joanne Witt was at work - hours before her murder.
Defense attorney Robert Blaiser, a DNA specialist known for his work in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Thursday had challenged testimony of California Department of Justice senior criminologist Deanna Kacer over how male DNA - in quantities insufficient to determine it was Colver's - was found on Joanne Witt's body.
Blaiser argued that the DNA could have been transmitted to Witt without her having any direct contact with another person. Kacer testified that the DNA - taken from scrapings beneath Joanne Witt's finger nails - could only have been acquired through direct contact and was consisted with evidence of someone fending off an attacker.
Colver faces 25 years to life if convicted of first-degree murder in Joanne Witt's death and could be denied parole if a jury determines he was lying in wait before the murder and killed her as a witness in the statutory rape case. Tylar Witt, now 16, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a deal that could make her eligible for parole at 29 if it is determined she cooperated with authorities.
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