Prosecutor suggests accused teen threatened boyfriend with suicide

Rachael Mullenix watched her boyfriend kill her mother, then helped him clean up the crime scene because she was in shock and afraid of what he might do to her, she testified during her murder trial Wednesday.

But the prosecution hammered away at her assertions she meant no harm and that then-boyfriend Ian Allen was the one in control.

In her cross-examination of Mullenix, prosecutor Sonia Balleste repeatedly asked the defendant if she manipulated people—which Mullenix denied—then asked her to confirm various actions in her past.

“’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 said 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 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 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 saying, “We have only 2 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 cell phone and had her demonstrate that the “r” and “n” letters were on different keys.

Earlier that day, Mullenix testified that Allen, also charged in the killing and soon to face a separate trial, arrived at her house that September 2006 night to go through with their plan to run away to Florida.

Instead of waiting outside in his truck for her, he showed up in the hallway of the house, outside her bedroom door, only feet away from Mullenix’s mother’s room, she testified.

“It scared me at first because I wasn’t expecting to see him inside my house,” she testified.

When Mullenix’s mother opened the bedroom door and confronted them, a heated argument between Allen and her ensued, Mullenix testified. When Mullenix’s mother went back in her room, Allen followed her in, Mullenix testified.

Mullenix told jurors she heard her mother cry for help and when she went inside, she saw Allen stabbing her. When she tried to stop him, he pushed her away and continued the attack, until the mother was dead, she testified.

“I was shocked. There’s nothing else to describe what I just saw. This was somebody I loved and he just did that. It just ... was like I was paralyzed mentally. It was unreal. It was completely unreal,” she testified.

Mullenix told jurors she was numb and not fully conscious of her actions when she helped Allen clean up the blood and remove the body.

The two of them took it to the Back Bay, where Allen dragged it in a box to the water, Mullenix testified. She said that while she had countless opportunities to call for help, she was afraid of Allen and the reality of the situation had yet to sink in.

Mullenix will take the stand again Thursday in what may be the final day of testimony.

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at michael.alexander@latimes.com.