Man Killed Wife With Friend’s Help, Juries Find

VAN NUYS —  The plan was to make it look like a natural death, as if Winnie Aguinaldo Hoffman’s time had come as she sat at her home computer.

Her husband, Glendale businessman Pierre Lebon Hoffman, hatched the plot as a quick way to cash in a $500,000 life insurance policy and avoid sharing assets in a divorce. That tidy sum would come in handy as Hoffman started a new life with his girlfriend in Lebanon, authorities said.

But his attempts to cover up the murder were so inexpert they were laughable. Winnie Hoffman looked anything but natural when investigators responded to her husband’s 911 call on Aug. 23, 1996.

Makeup had been smeared on her face by an obviously inexperienced hand in an effort to cover up nail marks and cuts-- evidence of a struggle. She was wearing a dress, but the buttons were in the wrong holes. Underneath, she was wearing a bra and it was snapped shut, but it rode up to her armpit, leaving the lower half of her breasts exposed.

“Stupid,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathy Cady said, shaking her head, as she described the scene. “Usually when it’s planned, it’s not this bumbling.”

On Friday, two separate juries convicted Hoffman and a friend who helped of first-degree murder.

Not only was the crime poorly covered up, the greed that motivated it was based on a lack of information and a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Gary Miller said.

“They had some very unreasonable expectations,” he said. “If they’d only researched it a little, he would have known he wasn’t going to get that money.”

Miller said Hoffman expected to walk off with nearly $400,000 in insurance proceeds, but was entitled to only $30,000. The rest was tied up to benefit the couple’s daughter.

The victim died of a combination of asphyxia and damage to her spine and head from a blow or other pressure in her home in Covina, Cady said.

Miller said the condition of the body--the pair had apparently even brushed the victim’s teeth and changed her soiled undergarments before calling police--told him that Winnie Hoffman had died at the hands of another. Her husband’s demeanor told him who did it.

Hoffman’s defense at trial was that he simply found his wife’s body in the morning and called police. He heard nothing and did not know how she died, Deputy Public Defender Tamar R. Toister said.

But he told an emergency operator he could not administer CPR because he was “injured.” Cady said Hoffman had recently had moles removed from his thigh, and the stitches would not have prevented him giving his wife assistance.

Hoffman claimed the insurance the next business day after her death and began calling his wife’s employers to collect commission checks, Cady said. In the week that followed the slaying, Hoffman gave friends and acquaintances a series of inconsistent explanations of why his wife died: too much salt, too much work, diet pills and the Vietnamese mafia.

Hoffman was arrested the day before his wife’s funeral.

Police didn’t even know about David Rudd, Hoffman’s friend who was also to be convicted of murder, until his suspicious wife called authorities after the killing.

Rudd later asked a friend for an alibi for that night and she turned him down, Cady said. He eventually admitted to police that he was in the house and saw Hoffman suffocate his wife with a pillow, but he insisted he did not participate.

“To me, this was the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” juror Darrel Presnell, 75, said. “It was just insane. The mere craziness of two people believing this fantasy and setting out to make it happen.”

The victim’s brother, Angel Aguinaldo, wept in court Friday as the verdicts were read. He said it made him sick to his stomach that she was killed over money, but he always knew the kind of guy his brother-in-law was.

“I wasn’t surprised. He always wanted money. I had a bad feeling about him since the first day I met him,” he said. “But on one side, I thank God that they’re stupid murderers . . . at least they got caught.”