Accused teen says she was abused, planned on running away

The woman accused of murdering her mother in Huntington Beach and dumping her in Newport Beach waters at the age of 17 told jurors Tuesday that her only plan for the fatal night was to run away, not kill anyone.

“I was gonna wait until my mom was asleep,” defendant Rachael Mullenix said. “In the middle of the night, probably one or two. I had a backpack. He was going to pick me up. We were going to go to Florida, we were going to drive all the way there.”

Prosecutors say Mullenix, now 19, got boyfriend Ian Allen to help her stab mother Barbara Mullenix to death with multiple knives, following an incident in which Barbara Mullenix grounded her for breaking curfew and forbade the two to date.

But Mullenix said on the witness stand that her alcoholic mother’s history of abuse — pulling hair, shoving her, making threats to call police, embarrass her and stop loving her – was far worse than anything that happened the night she was grounded.

“Was it unforgivable of your mother to do that [ground you]?” Mullenix’s lawyer David Cohn asked.

“That [punishment was] nothing compared to the things that have happened,” she replied. “This is absolutely nothing.”

At the same time, however, her divorced parents drank and fought more and more, and Barbara Mullenix became so unpredictable, from threats the couple could never see each other again to promises that the two could get married, that the only choice was to run, Rachael Mullenix said.

“It literally went from one extreme to the next with her,” she said.

Allen had his dark side as well, Mullenix said. She described him as obsessed with her, constantly saying she was “his,” and pushing her to have sex with him whether she wanted it or not.

“There were times Ian hit me, shoved me, threw me on the bed, threw me into walls,” Mullenix said. Asked why she didn’t complain to police, she replied, “After talking to Veronica [Thomas, a psychologist] I realize now that the reason I didn’t was because I’m used to – I guess you could say being abused.”

Mullenix’s testified that mere hours before her mother died she only planned to escape.

“Running to me would mean I could just escape from everything,” Mullenix said. “I could just go somewhere and no one would know me. My life could be different from what it was.”