Rape defendant heard on tape telling teen to ‘deny everything’

A Cayucos man accused of repeatedly raping a 17-year-old Los Osos girl told his alleged victim in a phone conversation to “deny everything,” including that the two met through a Craigslist ad promising sex for $150, according to an audiotape played before a jury Friday.

Oscar Higueros Jr., 40, testified in San Luis Obispo Superior Court on Friday that he stopped having sex with the alleged victim after he discovered she lied to him about her age. But under cross-examination, when asked how that jibed with the teen’s comment during the phone conversation that they continued having sex after he knew of her age, he replied that the phone conversation was taken out of context.

Higueros, a former Cayucos volunteer fire captain, has pleaded not guilty to 35 charges including multiple counts of forcible rape, for his relationship with the girl in July and August of 2014.

Prosecutors allege that Higueros responded to an ad on Craigslist in late July 2014 and paid $150 to have sex with the girl, referred to in court as Jane Doe, who was being pimped out by Richard Scott Brooks of San Francisco. A day after they had sex, Doe moved in with Higueros after a falling-out with her mother.

Brooks, 40, has already been convicted of pimping the teen and was sentenced in a separate trial last month to 61 years and eight months to life in prison.

The teen previously testified that Higueros wanted her to enter into a “master-slave” contract and compelled her to sell marijuana and make sex videos with him, which she said he planned to sell for money. She also testified that he told her he committed the unsolved 1990 murder of his father, Oscar Higueros Sr., in order to intimidate her and keep her from talking to authorities.

On Friday, under questioning by his attorney, Higueros said he and Doe shared marijuana and cocaine, although Higueros denied dealing the drugs. Asked about the alleged “master-slave” contract, Higueros said that as a joke he downloaded a digital contract, created by friends who also partook in what he called his “alternative lifestyle,” but never asked Doe to sign it.

“She had talked about getting kinky,” Higueros said on the stand. “(When we) got to the fifth line (of the contract), we both started laughing. It was pretty absurd.”

His attorney, Jay Peterson, asked about an iPhone video Higueros took of the two having sex with a belt around Doe’s neck. Higueros said she willingly wore it and that he never choked her with it.

“If you look at (the video) carefully, her hair is out of the way so it wouldn’t get pulled,” Higueros said, following a screening of the video for jurors. “It’s (the belt) a cheap man’s prop.”

He testified that he discovered Doe was 17 on Aug. 24, when Doe and Doe’s friend were at his house looking at Doe’s browser history on her computer. Doe’s friend made a comment about Doe viewing 18-and-over websites.

“It turned into, ‘So, he doesn’t know?’” Higueros said.

Asked by Peterson why he didn’t kick her out of his house then, Higueros said he tried.

“That was met with a lot of emotion about independence and abandonment, and she brought up that she was emancipated,” Higueros said. “The agreement was that we could be roommates.”

He testified that the teen received a phone call from a San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s deputy on Aug. 27 requesting a meeting about the teen’s well-being. She went to meet with the deputy, he testified, and that was the last time he saw her until she testified in his trial late last month. He said the day after the teen left, police arrived at his house with a search warrant.

Peterson asked Higueros if he was scared.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “Everything just started snowballing, and I wasn’t really sure where it was going.”

While under a heated cross-examination by Deputy District Attorney Greg Devitt, Higueros was admonished by Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Duffy for combative and non-responsive behavior.

Devitt began by citing the Firefighter’s Code of Ethics, which Higueros agreed to for his volunteer position. It states that firefighters must “always conduct (themselves), on- and off-duty, in a manner that reflects positively on (themselves), (their) department and the fire service in general.”

“At what point did your oath kick in when you were smoking marijuana off-duty?” Devitt asked.

Devitt questioned Higueros about keeping the videos he took of having sex with Doe once he allegedly learned Doe was a minor.

“You kept this child pornography you created, yes?” Devitt asked.

“I kept the videos Ms. Doe and I made,” Higueros replied.

At the end of the afternoon hearing, jurors heard the recorded phone call in which Doe, while investigators listened in, pretended to be in protective custody at a foster home. During the conversation, a seemingly shaken Doe tried to get Higueros to admit the relationship.

“You lied to me until last week, (Doe), that’s true,” Higueros says in the recording.

“No, it’s not,” Doe responds. “... I might not have been fully truthful with you at the beginning, but once you found out, things still kept going on the same.”

Higueros is heard repeatedly telling Doe to tell officers that the two met on the beach as she walked her dog after she had an argument with her mom and needed a place to stay.

“Because that’s what the world needs to hear — that there was never anything between us,” Higueros said on the phone. “Everything is going to be OK with us, but you have to deny everything.”

Asked by Devitt why he told her on the phone to lie, Higueros said: “I knew the situation could be taken out of context.”

Higueros is expected to take the stand again when the trial resumes Tuesday in San Luis Obispo Superior Court.

This story was originally published February 19, 2016 at 9:17 PM with the headline "Rape defendant heard on tape telling teen to ‘deny everything’."