Out of Spotlight, Man Guilty in Ex-Wife’s Slaying : Courts: There were no TV lights or dream team lawyers. Despite some parallels to Simpson case, jurors said it never entered their deliberations.

An admitted wife killer whose case bears some similarities to that of the allegations against O.J. Simpson was convicted of first-degree murder Friday after a weeklong trial as routine as the proceedings against the former football star have been bizarre.

The jurors knew all about the similarities, but they said the publicity tidal wave that has engulfed the Simpson trial never came up during their three days of deliberations.

James and Maria Foster had a stormy marriage that finally ended in divorce amid allegations of stalking and threats.

In both the Simpson and Foster cases, women were stabbed to death and two young children were left motherless. James Foster is black. Maria Foster was white.

But there were also differences, with the Fosters’ final drama played out not in the glare of live television coverage but in the obscurity of Superior Court Judge Robert T. Altman’s half-empty courtroom in Santa Monica.

Neither a world-class athlete nor a media figure, James Foster made no more than $35,000 a year working for IBM. His 29-year-old wife worked as an airline clerk.

Instead of prosecutors with highly publicized cases under their belts, the state was represented by a lone deputy district attorney running her first murder case as lead counsel.

Instead of a high-priced defense team, Foster was represented by a veteran public defender whose previous murder cases had been settled before trial.

And unlike Simpson, who has pleaded not guilty in the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, Foster, 48, admitted that he killed his ex-wife Nov. 22, 1985.

Two witnesses placed him at the scene, a parking structure at Los Angeles International Airport, and one of them saw him holding a bloody fishing knife.

The job of the jury, which included young and old, men and women, blacks, whites, Latinos and Asian Americans, was not to decide whether Foster killed his wife but to weigh his state of mind at the time.

The case went to trial because the prosecution contended that it was first-degree murder while his attorney contended that it was manslaughter.

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Foster said that his ex-wife provoked him by quoting her mother as using a racially charged epithet in reference to him. Previously, “we never said anything about color as long as we’d been married,” he testified.

His ex-wife also told him that he would never see their two children again, he said. Then she slammed her car door on his finger, he said.

When he reached into a coat pocket for a rag to staunch the bleeding, he said, he felt the knife. “I went wild. I just lost it,” he said.

Maria Foster suffered half a dozen wounds to her chest and back, including one that went in six inches deep, the full length of the blade.

The racially charged aspect of Foster’s account initially won him some sympathy among white jurors, panel members said, but the four blacks urged them to concentrate on the facts instead.

“When the defense came out with that (racial) stuff, that sealed it with me,” said one African American juror, Robert Knox, 48, of Inglewood. “I told them: ‘Don’t let that be stuck on your conscience.’ ”

After some loud debate about the difference between first-degree and second-degree murder, they decided that Foster was lying in wait on the morning of the killing and that he showed premeditation, two requirements for a finding on the more serious charge, jurors said.

The testimony that he brought the foot-long fishing knife with him in an inside coat pocket without realizing that it was there was not especially persuasive, they said.

“He claimed he used it to cut cocaine the night before and that’s why he had it in his pocket,” said juror Claire Kelson, 58, of Santa Monica. “That was not believable.”

In his closing argument, Deputy Public Defender James R. Bendat emphasized that the killing came after years of breakups, reunions and more breakups, followed by Maria Foster’s move from the family home in San Jose to her parents’ house in Torrance, and finally, the divorce, which was granted shortly before their last argument.

“We’re talking about love. We’re talking about obsession. This is something far different from premeditation and deliberation,” Bendat said.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Loni Petersen charged that Foster was lying in wait for his ex-wife when she came to work that morning.

“To suggest anything else is ludicrous,” she said. “This case is about a woman who was trying to regain her life. . . . If he couldn’t have her, nobody could.”

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A conviction of first-degree murder generally carries a prison sentence of 25 years to life. Sentencing was set for Oct. 28.

“We are happy, we are very pleased,” said Virginia Fitzgerald, the victim’s mother, who testified that James Foster threatened in her presence to kill Maria Foster three weeks before the fatal stabbing.

Foster vanished shortly after the killing. A broad-shouldered man of medium height, he was caught when police arrested him on charges of attempting to break into a girlfriend’s residence in Jackson, Miss.

Sent back to California this year, he was originally scheduled for trial in July, shortly after the media spotlight hit the Simpson case.

“It’s not a great time to be on trial for killing your wife,” Altman said at the time.

Now, however, with the Simpson case still in the preliminary stages and his defense taking a radically different direction, Foster’s case was allowed to come to trial.

“(Simpson’s) name was never mentioned in the jury room,” said juror John Toombs, 37, of Venice. “It didn’t come up at all.”