Nearly 40 years after her 3-year-old daughter went missing, a former Huntington Beach woman -- her gray hair pulled back in a ponytail -- listened as a prosecutor told jurors Monday that the 61-year-old mother spent decades covering up her daughter's murder, even as the child's father and brother searched futilely for answers.
Her own lawyers, though, said Donna Prentice was a loving mother who was abused by her then-boyfriend and forced to repeatedly change the story of what happened to her daughter.
Prentice, who left Huntington Beach in 1969 with her boyfriend after her daughter disappeared, is accused of helping to kill the girl. Prosecutors say Prentice's role in the crime was to bury the body in a canyon in south Orange County.
The body of the toddler, Michelle Pulsifer, has never been found. Prentice's ex-boyfriend, who had also been arrested in connection with the girl's alleged murder, has since died.
On Monday, Prentice listened in Orange County Superior Court as the prosecution and defense presented two different portraits of the woman: a calculating woman who helped kill her own child or a woman so "paralyzed" with fear that she couldn't bring herself to find out what had become of the girl.
"With her arrest, 35 years of lying about Michelle's whereabouts went up in smoke," Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Yellin said. "She got away with it for 35 years."
Prentice's attorney portrayed the woman's former boyfriend, James Michael Kent, as the probable killer. Kent had been charged with the girl's death but died in custody of kidney and liver failure at age 63 in 2005.
In a confession taped before he died, Kent denied killing Michelle, saying that the little girl was found lifeless in her bedroom after Prentice came out of the room. But he admitted to helping bury the toddler in Williams Canyon, deep in Orange County's backcountry.
The tape was played during Prentice's first murder trial in 2007, in which the jury deadlocked 10 to 2, leaning toward conviction.
After leaving Huntington Beach, Prentice broke up with Kent and remarried, starting her life anew in Wisconsin. Her husband, Noble Prentice, was in the courtroom Monday.
Prentice and Kent were arrested in 2004 after Michelle's father, Richard Pulsifer Sr., launched his own investigation, saying he had been unable to get straight answers from his former wife about their daughter's whereabouts.
Yellin said Monday it remains unclear how Michelle was killed.
