Arguments made in alleged OB wife murder
By Staff, City News Service
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 print page An Ocean Beach man followed through on his threats to kill his estranged wife if she didn’t drop her child support case, a prosecutor said Wednesday, but a defense attorney said evidence shows the woman hit her head while falling down steps at the defendant’s home and eventually died.

Deputy District Attorney Nicole Cooper, in her closing argument in the trial of Henry Lisowski, said the defendant had been threatening his estranged wife, Rosa, since November 2006 and killed her on March 24, 2008.

The defendant had told the victim, “If you don’t drop the child support case, I’ll kill you. The children will be without a mother and I’ll be in jail,” according to Cooper. The prosecutor said there was no body because Lisowski “threw her away like a piece of trash.”

The 50-year-old victim — a mother of four, including two young boys by the defendant — disappeared in 2008 after walking her 6-year-old son to school from her apartment in the Midway-Loma Portal District. “She was a devoted mother to her kids,” the prosecutor told the jury.

“Rosa would have never have left her kids unattended … would never have walked out on them.”

The day she disappeared, Rosa Lisowski was looking forward to the resolution of the child support case and was also anticipating a $30,000 disability settlement from a grocery store, Cooper said. When the victim didn’t return from dropping off her son, friends and family immediately suspected the defendant, Cooper said.

Lisowski, 69, had told his wife, “I’ll see you dead before I pay you child support,” according to Cooper. The victim had called 911 twice over the years, telling dispatchers her husband had threatened to kill her, the prosecutor said.

Friends and family members testified that she had told them that her husbamd told her “just one phone call and I can make you disappear,” the prosecutor told the jury. In February 2008, Lisowski was ordered to pay the victim $1,029 a month and started to search the Internet for poison to kill his wife, Cooper said.

The story was corroborated by the couple’s son “Junior,” who said his father gave him some green powder and told him to put it in his mother’s water, the prosecutor said. The child said he poured the powder into the carpet because he thought it was something bad, Cooper said.

The prosecutor said Lisowski was facing an April 2, 2008, hearing, at which he was going to have to disprove contentions that he had underreported his assets by $1.3 million, and an April 29 child support hearing.

After she went missing, police looked everywhere for the victim, eventually finding her blood on a kitchen counter in the defendant’s home and in the trunk of his vehicle, the prosecutor said. Lisowski’s blood was also found on the inside of his vehicle’s passenger side door, Cooper said.

After his wife disappeared, a friend testified that Lisowski had scratches on his face, arms, back and neck, which he said could have come from falling while trimming bushes or from his cats, Cooper said. The prosecutor said Lisowski went to Mexico after his wife disappeared, resurfacing in September 2008 with a letter sent to friends and family explaining his wife’s death.

In the letter, Lisowski said his estranged wife came to his house on March 24, 2008, fell down some steps and was knocked unconscious. Lisowski wrote that he revived his wife with water, and put her in the car to take her to the hospital.

On the way there, Rosa Lisowski went into seizures and died, according to his letter. Cooper said the victim’s injuries were consistent not with a trip and a fall, but rather a violent, bloody attack with a hammer or having her head slammed into something. Cooper said Rosa Lisowski was probably begging for her life and instead of letting her go, the defendant killed her in his home.

“How he did it? We won’t know,” the prosecutor said, urging jurors to convict the defendant of first-degree murder and murder for financial gain.

Defense attorney Richard Gates told the jury there was no evidence that his client picked his estranged wife up in his car and took her to his house that fateful day. Gates also said there was no evidence that Rosa Lisowski was begging for her life before she died.

The attorney said something bad happened to the victim, but what it was isn’t known. “They (prosecutors) don’t know how Rosa Lisowski died — other than what Mr. Lisowski said in the letter,” Gates told the jury. “If they don’t know how she died, they can’t prove murder.”

Gates said Rosa Lisowski went to her husband’s house on her own to talk about financial support. “Maybe she didn’t get what she wanted,” the attorney said. “This is a very odd relationship between these two … human through and through.”

The two lived apart, but Rosa Lisowski would come over to her husband’s house for “privacy time,” according to their young son. Gates told the jury to disregard “incredible” evidence that a father would give a then-5-year-old child poison that the child could possibly ingest himself.

The attorney said “Junior” most likely heard from friends and family the notion that his father killed his mother.

The jury began deliberating Lisowski’s fate about mid-afternoon. He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted of all charges.

City News Service staff wrote and edited this story.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Local News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Read more: http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2010-02-24/local-county-news/arguments-made-in-alleged-ob-wife-murder#ixzz0gZ6Qu8Cm

Posted by Thomas A. (Tad) DiBiase, No Body Guy