Haun’s Mother Denies Daughter Confessed to Her

Diana Haun’s elderly mother fielded a battery of questions from lawyers at Haun’s murder trial Monday and emphatically denied that her 36-year-old daughter ever admitted to carrying out the brutal murder of Sherri Dally.

Although her testimony was confusing and at times contradictory, Kiku Haun told the jury that she never had a conversation in which her daughter confided playing a role in the Dally slaying.

That statement--among many others--was challenged by Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Frawley, however.

He played a brief excerpt from a tape-recorded phone conversation in which Kiku Haun, a native of Japan, is heard asking a woman in broken English: “You tell them you kill?”

The scratchy recording was played three times, in fact, and on each occasion Kiku Haun told the jury she could not be certain that those were the words she said.

“I think I have not said such a thing to Diana,” she replied, testifying in Japanese with the help of an interpreter.

Later during cross-examination, Kiku Haun testified that she could have said: “You tell them you tell,” instead of “You tell them you kill.” She couldn’t remember, she said.

*

So went much of Kiku Haun’s testimony Monday as prosecutors tried to pin down where Diana Haun was in the days before and after the slaying of Sherri Dally.

Diana Haun lived with her mother in Port Hueneme at the time of her arrest on murder and related charges last year.

Kiku Haun told the jury that for the year prior, her daughter was involved in a romantic relationship with the victim’s husband, Michael Dally. He came over to their house four or five days a week, she said.

At one point, Sherri Dally also arrived on Kiku Haun’s doorstep--angrily asking where Michael and Diana had gone. Kiku Haun offered an answer: Mexico, for a vacation.

Although Michael Dally’s two children had visited her house once, Kiku Haun said that was the first time she had ever met the wife of her daughter’s boyfriend.

She did not see Sherri Dally again, she said, until her picture was broadcast on television the day after she disappeared from a Target parking lot in Ventura.

*

For more than four hours Monday, Kiku Haun testified about her daughter’s relationship with Michael Dally, her prior testimony to the Ventura County Grand Jury and the phone call with her daughter, which was recorded by investigators.

For much of the day, Kiku Haun answered questions in a hushed voice, at times appearing flustered by the prosecutor’s persistent inquiries.

“Did you ever ask Diana if she ever killed anyone?” Frawley quizzed her at one point.

“I didn’t ask her,” Kiku Haun replied. She paused and then added: “I may have asked her once, but I never said that she killed.”

Frawley continued in a firm but steady voice.

“Do you understand that Diana has been arrested and charged with murder?” he asked. “Do you understand that she has been accused of killing Sherri Dally?”

“That I have heard,” the mother responded. “But I don’t believe it.”

Prosecutors charged Haun with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, saying she planned withlover Michael Dally to kill his wife of 14 years.

*

Haun’s trial comes more than a year after Sherri Dally was abducted on May 6, 1996. She had been missing for 26 days before a search party discovered her remains in a ravine north of Ventura.

If the jury finds Haun guilty of first-degree murder and decides that she planned the act, she could be sentenced to death.

Haun was arrested in May and released, and later rearrested and indicted by the grand jury in August.

During those proceedings, Kiku Haun testified that she saw Michael Dally and Diana Haun talking in the front room of her home on the night before Sherri Dally’s abduction.

But on Monday, Kiku Haun said that her prior testimony was inaccurate. It was May 18--the day of her daughter’s first arrest--that she saw Michael Dally at her home--not May 6.

But prosecutors questioned her over the revised testimony and asked whether she had consulted with anyone before taking the witness stand Monday.

“Did someone point out to you that you made a mistake when you said Michael Dally was at your house on May 6?” Frawley asked.

“I just remember clearly that it was the same day as when the police came to take Diana away,” she said.

*

“Ms. Haun,” Frawley then asked, “Did Diana tell you that you would have to change your testimony and say Michael Dally was not there in the early hours of May 6?”

“No,” she said, “Diana doesn’t know anything about this. I looked at this.”

Kiku Haun explained that she had recently read a transcript of her testimony before the grand jury with her son, James Haun, and made a note in pencil that the date was wrong.

In other testimony, Kiku Haun said she did not recognize her daughter in two pictures displayed in court.

Shown a poster board covered with her daughter’s modeling photos--pictures prosecutors argue show Diana’s ability to alter her appearance--Kiku Haun said she did not recognize two of them.

A petite woman with silver-streaked black hair, Haun told the jury that she preferred answering questions in her native Japanese although she speaks English.

Haun married an American naval officer and moved to the U.S. after her daughter’s birth in 1961, she said.

*

As her mother spoke, Diana Haun sat rigidly at the defense table. She would glance at the floor as the prosecutor framed his questions and then look up at her mother during the answers.

When Kiku Haun stepped down from the witness stand, she and Diana exchanged glances and smiled shyly but said nothing.