SLO murder victim's skull looked like he jumped off a 200-foot building, witness testifies

Damage to Walter Vallivero's skull was so extensive after an alleged baseball bat attack by his roommate that a medical examiner last week compared the injuries to those he sees from people who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge and land on the rocks below.

"The devastation was immense to Walter's head," Dr. Joseph Cohen testified Wednesday, pointing to photographs of "eggshell fractures" in Vallivero's skull. "These are the (injuries) we see in a very high-speed motor vehicle accident."

Vallivero's former roommate, Charles Giese, is on trial for the alleged murder of 54-year-old Vallivero, who owned the manufactured home the two shared on Rancho Oaks Drive, a community of about a dozen homes on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo, on Nov. 16, 2015.

Giese, 42, is accused of beating Vallivero to death with a rock, a bottle and a bat following an argument over Giese's pending eviction.

The San Luis Obispo County District Attorney's Office also alleges that Giese dragged Vallivero's body to a bathtub and began to decapitate his corpse with a knife but abandoned the idea and instead turned himself in to police.

Opening statements in the trial began May 21, and testimony has since featured witnesses for the prosecution such as former neighbors of the two, sheriff's deputies who examined the scene and interviewed Giese and Cohen, who reviewed reports drafted by the county's former medical examiner at the request of the DA's Office.

Giese's attorney, Ilan Funke-Bilu, reserved his opening statement until the prosecution rests its case. But in cross-examination of witnesses, Funke-Bilu indicated he'll argue that Giese acted in self defense and will inquire about Vallivero's alleged methamphetamine and alcohol abuse.

If jurors agree with prosecutors that the alleged crime was premeditated and convict Giese of first-degree murder, he faces 26 years to life in state prison.

On May 23, jurors heard a recording of the 911 call placed by Giese's mother Nov. 16, 2015, after she convinced him to meet with her to "assess the situation" before he turned himself in to police. In the recording, Brenda Caves, tells a dispatcher that Giese got in a altercation with his roommate and hit him with a baseball bat.

"He thinks he may have hurt him severely," Caves said. "I want someone to go check on this man."

Sheriff's Det. Nate Paul, the lead investigator in the case, testified May 24 that he interviewed Giese at French Hospital, and he said he hit Vallivero with the objects because Vallivero began yelling at him to get out of the house and started punching him in the face. Paul testified that Giese told him he tried to "clean up" after Vallivero lay on the floor unresponsive.

"He told me he didn't think he had the right to do what he had done," Paul said.

Paul said, when he asked why Giese kept hitting Vallivero, "he told me that he was in overdrive."

"I didn't stop. I flipped out, and I kept going," Giese is heard telling Paul in a recorded interview. "He kept coming at me, just coming at me."

A coroner's detective also testified that when they examined Vallivero's body in the bathtub, he had a six-inch incision wound to the back of his neck that was 2 inches deep, exposing the spinal cord. The wound appeared to be inflicted post-mortem and was likely caused by a smooth, sharp instrument such as a knife, he said.

The prosecution had previously expected to call Dr. Gary Walter, the county's former contracted medical examiner who originally examined Vallivero's body and drafted the autopsy report. But following questions about Walter's past performance testifying in recent trials and his suspension from the Medical Board for a March 2016 DUI while on the way to an autopsy, the DA's Office has not called him to testify.

Instead, Deputy District Attorney Christopher Peuvrelle called Cohen, who reviewed Walter's reports and photos — some of which he called "shoddy" — and came to the same "bottom-line opinion" that Vallivero's died from blunt force trauma to the head and brain, and that the death was a homicide.

According to Cohen, Walter's work on the case was so bad that many of the photos he took of Vallivero's injuries were "useless" and of bad quality. Some injuries, such as the deep cut across Vallivero's neck, were recorded as being on the wrong side of his body in diagrams created by Walter.

In other cases, Walter referred to "incisions" as "lacerations" and noted body parts had no abnormalities when, as in the case of one of Vallivero's ears, they had extensive injuries.

"It's not a great report," Cohen said. "I have some gripes about it."

Cohen did note, however, that Vallivero was found to have had a blood alcohol content of 0.19, more than twice the legal limit to drive of 0.08.

This story was originally published June 2, 2018 at 10:49 AM with the headline "SLO murder victim's skull looked like he jumped off a 200-foot building, witness testifies."