Key witness in Daniel Perez murder trial testifies about plot to kill Patricia Hughes

The woman who, as a girl, phoned 911 the day Patricia Hughes drowned and later told law enforcement she helped stage the 26-year-old mother’s death said that she for years went along with a false story because Daniel Perez “told me to.”

The woman’s testimony came Friday during the third day of Perez’s first-degree murder trial in Sedgwick County District Court. He is being tried on 37 counts. The charges are related to Hughes’ death and to allegations of child sexual abuse and of directing false information to be put on car credit and life insurance applications, all of which prosecutors say occurred when he lived with his communal “family” at 20-acre compound in the 9500 block of North Oliver.

The family lived off life insurance proceeds from the deaths of other “family” members; the payout in Hughes’ death was $2 million. Perez, 55, has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The woman, now 23, is a key witness in the state’s murder case against Perez. In 2011 she told law enforcement that Perez gave her the false story to tell authorities about Hughes’ death and that she had waited 20 to 30 minutes to call 911 while the 26-year-old wife and mother’s body floated in the water.

The Eagle is not naming her because she claims she suffered sexual abuse, repeated rapes and sometimes violence from Perez.

The woman told jurors Friday she was 10 when her mother introduced her to Perez. She knew him as Lou. He immediately took interest in her.

“He always tried to make me happy,” she said. “He spoiled me. He thought I was the greatest kid ever.”

Her mother told her that Lou Castro, an alias Perez used, was a “seer” – “kind of like an angel” – who could foretell the future and would protect them.

Later, he convinced her that he was hundreds of years old and that it was her duty to have sex with him so he could stay alive. He would call her “mine,” she testified.

So when he and Hughes invited her to a dining room table to tell her it was Hughes’ “time to go,” she was upset. But she agreed to tell authorities Hughes drowned after Hughes hit her head in a rush to rescue her 2-year-old daughter from an outdoor pool on the property known as Angels Landing where she and others lived.

The reason, she said, was simple: “That’s what Lou told me to say.”

“It was one of those things where it was dangerous if I doubted,” she said. “And if I doubted, I wasn’t doing my job.”

Also on Friday, jurors heard from the woman’s former boyfriend, who said he saw Perez having sex with her in 2009 when the commune lived in Tennessee, and from a 33-year-old woman who said she met Perez in North Dakota when she was 15. She believed the man she knew as “Dan” – then later as Lou Castro – had special powers because once “he made it rain.”

‘Something big’

In court Friday, the 23-year-old woman who is the key witness told jurors that about a week before Hughes died, Perez foretold her death. According to her testimony:

Perez told her “something big” was about to happen and asked her if she would help.

“I was 11. Of course I wanted to take part in it,” the woman said. But she didn’t know what the event would be.

When Perez and Hughes later talked with her at the dining room table to plan the drowning, she got upset knowing that Hughes would die.

“I loved Trish. Trish was kind of like a surrogate mother to me,” she said. Hughes took her to school sometimes and was the matriarch of the family.

But Hughes comforted her and said it was OK.

“Trish said she had to go but that she would come back … to life,” the woman said.

Initially the girl questioned why she needed to help with the plan. She asked why Perez couldn’t do it by himself.

But he said, as a seer, “it would take him too close to death,” she said.

Hughes had been injured in a car accident earlier that year. Lou said that was supposed to have been her time to die. “He convinced me that she (Hughes) needed this. That she would come back, and she would feel better,” the woman said.

On June 26, 2003, the plan played out. She, Hughes, Perez and Hughes’ toddler daughter walked to the outdoor pool. Some cleaning supplies were outside, including a pool vacuum.

Then Perez told her to take the toddler into the pool house and wait. Moments later it happened.

“I remember hearing a small scream, a quick shriek. I think it came from Trish,” the woman testified.

She heard a splash. Then Perez came into the pool house with wet arms. He was panting and “looked sad and distraught.”

“He always looked sad when somebody died,” she said.

He instructed her to stay inside the pool house for 20 minutes so he had time to get to a car dealership in Wichita. He told her not to look outside. She complied but asked whether she and the toddler could wait in a bigger room of the building.

“We’d just had kittens and I wanted to take … (Hughes’ daughter) and play with the kittens,” she said.

After 20 to 30 minutes, the girl carried the toddler to the pool. Hughes’ body was floating in the shallow end near the steps.

While holding the toddler, she jumped into the water near the deep end and “then got out really quickly.” Then she grabbed Hughes’ cellphone from the deck of the pool, called 911 and relayed Perez’s story.

She maintained it for years.

“Why did you tell this version of events?” Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett asked the woman.

“That’s what Lou told me to say,” she replied, referring to Perez.

The woman testified that sometime after Hughes’ death she talked to Perez. He said “not to worry,” that Hughes would return from the dead, she said, adding that he reassured her the accident “really did happen” the way she had described it to 911.

Years later, after Perez’s 2010 arrest on federal identify theft and fraud charges, the woman said she visited him in jail and they argued. He looked healthy, even though he hadn’t had sex with her for months. That made her doubt his claims that he was centuries old and had special powers.

She later told other commune members and law enforcement of the years of sexual abuse and the truth about Hughes’ drowning, she said.

“That was it. I couldn’t do it anymore,” she told jurors.

“I was tired of being scared.”

The prosecution’s questioning of the woman is expected to continue Monday. Defense attorney Alice Osburn has not yet cross-examined her.

On Friday, District Judge Joseph Bribiesca dismissed a juror from service after he claimed he was having difficulty focusing on testimony due to a medical condition.

Also on Friday, Osburn moved for a mistrial for the second time after one witness described Perez using an obscenity when she was asked to identify him in in the courtroom.

The judge denied the motion.

This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 11:04 PM with the headline "Key witness in Daniel Perez murder trial testifies about plot to kill Patricia Hughes."