Marjorie Knoller finished testifying in her own defense Wednesday by crying and shouting out that she still cannot understand what came over her beloved pet that caused him to maul neighbor Diane Whipple to death last year.

"I saw a pet who had been loving, docile, friendly, good toward people, turn into a crazed, wild animal," the defendant said under questioning by her lawyer.

"I could never imagine this dog turning into what he turned into. It's still incomprehensible what he did in that hallway," she said.

Her voice broke, she began to cry and finally was shouting in the hushed courtroom.

"How could he turn into what he turned into in that hallway?" she sobbed.

After calling a forensic expert to analyze blood stains and holes in clothes Knoller wore the day of the attack, attorney Nedra Ruiz abruptly rested Knoller's defense.

Prosecutors planned to call two rebuttal witnesses before closing their case Thursday. The case is expected to go to the jury by Tuesday.

The last defense witness, criminalist Peter Barnett, said he did a limited examination of Knoller's clothing, found it was saturated with blood and that holes in the sweatshirt and pants could have been caused by dog bites.

On cross-examination he acknowledged that his analysis was very limited and that his report concluded that "any specific conclusions would be speculative."

Whipple was mauled on Jan. 26, 2001, outside her San Francisco apartment by Bane, one of two big dogs kept by Knoller and husband Robert Noel on the same floor.

Knoller, 46, is accused of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and keeping a mischievous dog that killed a person. Noel, 60, faces the latter two charges. Their trial was moved from San Francisco due to extensive pretrial publicity.

According to Knoller's testimony, Bane did the mauling and at some point her other big presa canario dog, Hera, began running loose in the hall.

Before leaving the witness stand, Knoller was asked by Ruiz whether she was ever warned by anyone before the attack that Bane was vicious.

"No, nobody had ever told me that," she said.

Prosecutor Jim Hammer ended a long cross-examination by playing an interview given by the couple to the TV program "Good Morning America" shortly after the attack.

"It's not my fault," Knoller said in the interview. "I wouldn't say I was unable to control them. I wouldn't say it was an attack. ... Ms. Whipple had ample opportunity to move into her apartment. She could have just slammed the door shut. I would have."

Hammer said Knoller appeared calm and collected, and got up at 3 a.m. to do the interview even though she claims to have been barely able to function then.

"You look fine," Hammer said to Knoller when the videotape ended.

"No, I look awful," she said.

She said she gave the interview because San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan had been giving out information putting her "in a false light."

"With all the publicity and the statements being made, there was so much misinformation and such an uproar," she said. "It was so horrible and so negative and so grotesque, not only how Robert and I were being portrayed, but what the nature of Hera and Bane had been. ... I wanted people to know that never in a million years did I think Bane was capable of something like this."

She said that for the same reason the couple voluntarily testified before a grand jury.

Hammer asked Knoller at one point whether she placed more value on the lives of her dogs or her neighbors.

"The neighbors," she said.

The prosecutor then pointed out that the couple spent a year in litigation trying to save Hera from being destroyed by city authorities. The dog was put down in January after the state Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Bane was destroyed right after the attack.

Ruiz, in redirect questioning, said she filed the lawsuits to preserve Hera as evidence.

The balance of Knoller's testimony was aimed at disputing some 30 witnesses who told of scary encounters with the dogs. She suggested that all were mistaken or inaccurate and that the incidents never occurred.

She identified a motel receipt which showed that on the date of one alleged encounter between a neighbor and their dogs the couple and the dogs were far away in Susanville.

©2002 Associated Press