Killer says that the former lover had no role in the killing of his husband

To listen to the convicted murderer Robert Baker, say it from the witness position, his former lover Monica Sememilli was never part of a conspiracy to fatally stabbed his famous stylist husband and make it look like an invasion of the house that went wrong.

“I killed it because I loved her,” Baker told the jurors recently in the Los Angeles high profile murder judgment. “She had nothing to do with that,” the witness of the defense of the stars testified before a court of the court of the center of Los Angeles.

Monica Sememeli declared himself innocent of murder positions with special circumstances and conspiracy.

The reason he killed his former lover’s husband, Baker said, was because he was fed up with sharing and living a life of secret links. Baker is now fulfilling life imprisonment without the possibility of probation for murder.

More than eight years after Fabio Sememeli was stabbed to death in the courtyard of his house of Woodland Hills, Baker did everything possible to reinforce the defense of his lover of his only lover.

But under interrogation by deputy dist. Atty. Beth Silverman, Baker struggled to explain why he has provided multiple versions of the murder, including statements in a seven -page letter that gave Monica Sememeli after he agreed not to declare any contest to the murder of January 23, 2017.

“You have repeatedly changed your story to adapt to evidence in this case, right?” Silverman said.

Baker acknowledged that he had deliberately tried to cover up the identity of an accomplice, Christopher Austin. “I lied about the second person,” Baker told the prosecutor.

The convicted murderer insisted that he lied in the letter, and initially to the Monica Sememeli defense team, because those accounts were “unofficial.” He said he always told the truth under oath: “When I swore.”

In more than 50 days of judgment, prosecutors have argued that Mónica Sémmeli “was the master mind” of the plot to kill her husband, a Canadian stylist and executive of the German giant of hair care, Wella. Its objective was to embolize $ 1.6 million in life insurance and avoid complications to obtain a divorce, according to prosecutors.

Baker, 62, is a convict sexual offender and former porn star who met Monica Sememeli as a racquetball coach in West Hills La Fitness and became her lover.

Silverman asked to explain why, on the day of the murder, he and Monica Sememeli eliminated the VIBER application encrypted on their phones, Baker replied: “It was brilliant.” After their arrest, the couple was heard discussing the phone and the messaging application, and if the authorities could enter and read their messages after the murder.

Baker also admitted to having bought burner phones, one of which was in Monica’s bag when the LAPD arrested them in her Ford Mustang GT six months after the murder.

Tauces without date of Monica Sementelli and Robert Baker.

(LAPD)

In the court on Friday, Silverman showed a photo taken in the wake of Fabio Sémmeli, where you can see Baker sitting in the area where the murder occurred. Monica Sememeli looks just meters away in the image. Silverman asked Baker if he slipped the burner’s phone to the wake and he denied it.

But Silverman said that Monica Sememeli had used the phone only a few days later in Canada, during the funeral procedures in Toronto: the hometown of Fabio Sémemeli.

Baker also admitted that the widow sent her naked photos of herself with her wedding ring still on her finger. “Everyone lament differently,” Baker said.

The version of Baker’s events contradicted the testimony given by Austin, the star witness of the Prosecutor’s Office. Austin had fled the murder with Baker in the Porsche of the dead man: a detail that the authorities did not discover until October, when they arrested Austin, a Oregon probation officer.

Austin declared himself guilty of second degree murder in the death of Fabio Sémmeli and obtained 16 years of life. He recently told the jury that the stylist’s widow “wanted him dead.” He testified that he and Baker stabbed the stylist until death after Mónica Semelli left the door of the unlocked couple, and that they had previously been in the house and knew the design. “He told me … she will get out of the unlocked door,” Austin said.

Austin said he never listened directly to the defendant, but Baker told her that she wanted her husband “to” and then told her that it was for the insurance money.

“Everything he did after receiving a text message, which told me he was talking to her through a text message.” Austin testified. “I didn’t hear him talk to her by phone … but everything happened in sequence.”

During the interrogation, defense lawyer Leonard Levine made Austin explain how his history had changed since he was initially arrested and told the police that they only intended to mistreat the stylist.

Baker said the couple found the stylist in a patio and stabbed him several times with an eight -inch hunting knife. Baker said at that time, he did not realize that Austin also stabbed Sememilli. Then they fled in the hair of the hair magnate and he threw the knife into a hole and threw his clothes near a bowling alley.

A minute after the men left, his daughter Isabella Sementelli discovered her father’s bloody body and called 911, where an operator guided her through a desperate but failed attempt to save him.

Baker said he tried to create a alibi appearing in the fitness before buying cleaning supplies to scrub the Porsche. He left the vehicle in an area without cameras, and took Austin to a bus station to be able to take a flight outside the city.

At home, Baker said he “got rid of everything that belongs to him” to hide his relationship with the defendant. He said they didn’t talk for a while, but they resumed the relationship after gathering in a Glendale bar. “I never told her that we kill her husband,” he said.

Separated and behind bars, the couple continued their relationship through three -way calls using a third -party number that connected them and encoded “comet” messages. Baker acknowledged that in a secret message he sent him in prison, Monica Sememeli asked him to send him something personal.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff agents then took a toothpaste tube containing Baker’s semen, and prosecutors say he intended to deliver it to the defendant.

During his testimony, Baker described his relationship as one in which he had control. When they were in visible cells with each other, Baker said he told Monica Sememeli to partially undress and perform a sexual act, which said she. Baker said the defendant also shaved his initials in his pubic hair and called him “teacher” and “teacher.”

He later told the court that he had also performed sexual acts for the defendant while he was in his cell, calling him “imprisoned.”

Baker, however, said they did not discuss the murder over the years despite numerous conversations in jail. Finally, her former lover discovered that she killed her husband, she said. He realized this “the day she called me af – murderer,” he said.

Before he had not advocated, he said the prosecutors told him that he could obtain a much lower sentence, as did Austin’s, if he involved his former lover. He said he told prosecutors: “I can’t do that. That would be a lie, “but granted under an interrogation that never saw an offer of paper supplication.

During the opening statements, Blair Berk, co-defense advisor, said there was no evidence that his client conspired to kill. “There is no statement, or text messages, or a recorded phone call,” he said. Berk said his client was “deceived to believe that Robert Baker” did not.

Initially, when the police responded to the bloody scene, the investigators considered that the murder was the work of the call Knots purgadores that affected parts of the San Fernando Valley. Sememeli had seven sharp wounds on the face, jaw, neck, chest and thigh, along with two minor wounds in the left arm.

While the main room of the house was looted, the Rolex clock of $ 8,000 of the hair magnate remained in his wrist, aroused the interest of the detectives, approximately one month after the crime, Lapd Det. Ryan Verna testified that Baker’s DNA was linked to blood evidence in the crime. Baker’s DNA had been previously captured after being convicted of committing six sexual crimes with a minor in 1993.

Baker, in the witness post on Friday, got angry and refused to answer questions about that conviction, who saw him fired from the United States Army, where he was a staff sergeant, and sentenced to two years in prison.

The judge withdrew the jury from the courtroom and then ordered Baker to answer the questions under the threat of hitting all his testimony and ordering the jury to ignore him. He admitted that he was restructured twice for not registering as a sexual offender.

As the investigation of death continued, the detectives noticed that the murderers had eliminated the video recording system from the house, which was not easily found. While the researchers joined the widow and the former porn star, a forensic technology expert declared that he recovered the instructions for Baker on how to access the home security DVR.

LAPD Det. Mitzi Roberts testified that Monica Sememeli was so distracted that she almost lost an objective, showing jurors a security video on a large screen of the courtroom.

For weeks before the arrests, LAPD researchers examined the widow and the baker when they became suspects, seeing them together in cars, bars, a comedy club and on a luxury trip to Las Vegas.

After the detectives arrested the couple in the Black Mustang of Monica Sémmeli, with Baker at the wheel, the officers placed them in the back of a policeman. The video recording system captured Monica supposedly telling Baker: “Diega everything and not speak.”