“‘You know it’s funny how you can control men with sex,’” she read from a letter Mullenix wrote to a friend this year. “‘It’s like one of their worst fears.’ You remember writing that?”
An apparently frustrated Mullenix responded with a sullen “yes.”
It was the third day the jury heard witnesses called by the defense, as Mullenix’s lawyer, David R. Cohn, attempted to convince jurors his client didn’t conspire to kill her mother, and the blame lay instead with her then-boyfriend Ian Allen.
Prosecutors say she manipulated Allen into helping her stab mother Barbara Mullenix to death with multiple knives in the Huntington Beach condo where they lived.
Balleste suggested that Mullenix might have influenced Allen the week of the slaying with a threat of suicide.
The text message in question read, “I have 60 trazodone [prescription antidepressants] in my hand.”
“You were contemplating it [suicide] enough that you wanted to let your obsessed, in-love boyfriend know you were contemplating it,” Balleste said. “You text him. That was your choice.”
The next text message sent, Balleste said, was one reading, “We have only two options if you want to be with me. Run or Tuesday. Or the last option, you come over tonight and apologize to my mom.”
While Balleste suggested in opening arguments that “Tuesday” was a code for a murder plan, something “unspeakable,” Mullenix said the message had a typo. It should have been “Run on Tuesday,” she said.
Balleste then walked up to Mullenix with a cellphone and had her demonstrate that the “r” and “n” letters were on different keys.
