Defendant accused of waging 'vendetta'

By Sue Lindsay, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 24, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Tim Hussin / The Rocky

Nancy Bautista, left, puts a coat over her head before leaving the courtroom at the Jefferson County Courthouse on Monday.

Nancy Bautista's fury over her husband's request for a divorce raged on even after she stabbed him in the back, prosecutors said Wednesday.

On Aug. 27, 2007 - four months after the April 15 stabbing - she called police claiming that her husband had come to her apartment and stabbed her. The couple were estranged but not yet divorced at the time.

Bautista, 54, is on trial for attempted first-degree murder of Michael Bautista and making a false report in connection with the alleged Aug. 27 stabbing.

"The defendant's vendetta against him continued," said prosecutor Elly Peirson. "The defendant accused him of stabbing her in the back at her apartment. She is charged with false reporting for trying to frame him."

Michael Bautista, 56, an administrator for Community College of Denver, testified Wednesday that he was at a Starbucks at Wadsworth Boulevard and Jewell Avenue that evening waiting for a woman he met on an Internet dating service. He said he waited for an hour and a half and then went home when the woman didn't show.

There, he said he received a call from Nancy Bautista's daughter asking why he stabbed her mother and telling him that the police were looking for him.

"I was totally surprised. I was amazed," he said.

Bautista said he didn't even know where his wife's apartment was.

Defense attorney Michael Ferber suggested that Michael Bautista may have concocted his alibi at a Starbucks near his wife's apartment.

A juror asked whether Bautista thought his wife had posed as the Internet date. Bautista said he later suspected that may have been the case because the woman's message contained wording that his wife commonly used.

Ferber also said the couple was arguing over Michael Bautista's extramarital affairs - not a property list for their divorce as Michael Bautista testified on Tuesday - when Nancy Bautista, a nurse, stabbed her husband, puncturing a lung.

Michael Bautista denied the alleged affairs under cross-examination by Ferber but admitted he sent a co-worker an iTunes gift card because she was upset about breaking up with her boyfriend just before Valentine's Day 2007.

He also sent her an e-mail on Feb. 7, 2007, that said, "I know I'm crazy but you would make a great Valentine." The e-mail was found by his wife.

Bautista denied that a sexual relationship developed between the two and denied sending e-mails to the woman that indicated they were intimate.

Prosecutors fought defense attempts to introduce the e-mails into evidence.

"All this is going to do is make Michael Bautista look like a sleaze bag, and that's what they are trying to do," Peirson said.

Michael Bautista said he told his wife that she had "become your mother" because "her mother was very controlling" and would berate her stepfather.

"It seemed to me she did emasculate men fairly easily," he said.

• July 24, 2008

  8:30 p.m.

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