Santiago Pedroso's Daughter Testifies Against Him In '92 Slaying

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Rachel Pedroso had not seen her father since a bloody night at a crowded restaurant in 1992 until she swiveled Wednesday in a Philadelphia courtroom and eyed the graying defendant.

"This is my first time seeing him in 23 years," she testified in her father's murder trial. "(There's been) no talk, nothing." Santiago Pedroso, 73, is accused of a Father's Day rampage that left his ex-wife's dinner companion dead. The self-described spiritualist, who ran a religious goods store in Philadelphia, fled to start a new life in the Philippines with a new wife and family, according to prosecutors.

Pedroso suspected his ex-wife was having an affair with her best friend, Delores Alvarez. The Pedrosos — long divorced, but reunited for a time — had split again the month before when Alvarez came from California for a visit.

"He was angry about the rumors that this was a woman, that Delores wanted to take my mom away from him," Rachel Pedroso, 40, testified.

She was 17 at the time and did not know if that was true. But she said the rumored lesbian lifestyle did not fly with her father, whose globe-trotting life began in conservative Cuba in 1941.

Santiago Pedroso's passport shows trips to Venezuela, Spain, Sweden and elsewhere before he landed in New York in about 1980. And he visited several more far-flung spots after the crime before settling in the Philippines.

For reasons that will remain unclear — Pedroso decided Wednesday not to testify — he walked into a U.S. Embassy in Manila in 2013 to try to get a U.S. passport. The June 22, 1992, warrant for his arrest turned up, and he was soon on his way back to Philadelphia in handcuffs.

The jury could start deliberating Wednesday afternoon on first-degree murder and other charges. His attorney hopes to mount a crime-of-passion defense so the jury could also consider manslaughter.

"There's no way the defendant could have known that Ms. Alvarez and his wife were going to show up there that night. They show up unexpectedly, and his demeanor immediately changes," defense lawyer Richard Giuliani argued outside the jury's presence.

However, the judge seemed skeptical that the mere act of seeing the pair at a restaurant amounts to "provocation" required for a voluntary manslaughter charge.

Pedroso may have feared the pair would take his 17-year-old daughter back to California, where Alvarez worked for Hughes Aircraft.

"He was just very upset, and hurt and distraught, and kind of didn't know what was going on, like me. But he suspected something was going on," Rachel Pedroso testified.

She said she moved to the West Coast and long ago put the shooting out of her mind.

She broke down at the start of her emotional testimony, when a prosecutor asked about her recently deceased mother, Maria Jesus Gomez. But she said she stayed on the witness stand "to get it over with."

In a disquieting moment for the prosecution, she told jurors Wednesday that she had not witnessed the shooting because she was by the front door.

But she acknowledged that her police statement that night said otherwise. And she recalled how she and her father immediately left the restaurant when the women walked in, and how she tried to stop him from returning from his nearby home with a gun.

"Poppy, please no. Don't do this," she told him as he raced down the street, according to her police statement.

"I wasn't able to stop him," she recalled anew Wednesday. "He just kept going."

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