While a jury will have to decide, probably later this spring, if Sgt. Scott Ansman is culpable in the battering death of JoAnn Crystal Harris last August at the National Guard Armory, prosecution witnesses at Thursday’s preliminary hearing characterized him as a “desperate” figure caught in an emotional vise.

The murder suspect’s problem was far simpler than the elusive solution:

When you are fathering babies with your wife and your girlfriend just months apart — and you don’t want your wife to know about the other woman — how do you cloak the non-marital indiscretion?

On June 9, Sgt. Ansman’s wife Flora, whom he met 10 years ago in Hawaii, gave birth to the couple’s third child, whom his grandmother said resembles his father.

On the day the baby turned two months old in August, 15 days before the crime, a co-worker from the Armory went to the Culver City police, at the urging of his superiors. He told police that Sgt. Ansman “was trying to get someone to do harm to Ms. Harris.”

Two Pregnancies in a Row

Based on yesterday’s testimony, several weeks after his wife’s baby was born, Sgt. Ansman, 35, learned to his horror that his girlfriend was in the early stages of pregnancy.

Sgt. Ansman’s closest colleague at the Armory in Culver City, Staff Sgt. Erik Hein, described the defendant as dissembling by the day last summer in the last six or seven weeks before Ms. Harris was killed.

The profiles of both the defendant and the victim that emerged throughout the day-long testimony were at odds with the way each was described by family members.

The auras of traditional lifestyles for both parties began to unravel.

Previously Unknown Slant

A woman named Rodriel Trammell, self-identified as a recovering drug and alcohol abuser, testified that she and Ms. Harris spent the last three months of the victim’s life living in what sounded like a Skid Row hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Ms. Harris’s family said that she had divided her time between two locations, her own apartment in Hollywood and her sister’s place in Leimert Park. No downtown hotel was mentioned.

Witnesses indicated that in the first days after Sgt. Ansman learned he was going to become a father again, he and Ms. Harris apparently considered abortion.

What was supposedly a tentative situation soon took a direction turn away from aborting, according to Ms. Trammell. She said the longer her new friend carried the baby, the deeper her attachment grew, and the more resolved she was to carry it to term.

A January Birth?

According to the timetable given by witnesses, Ms. Harris, who was single and never had been married, probably would have given birth sometime last month.

Martha Lou Harris, the mother of the victim, said yesterday at the Airport Courthouse during a break in the testimony that her youngest daughter was determined to enter the military a year and a half ago.

“JoAnn said she was fed up with all the politics in nursing,” said Mrs. Harris.

Speaking in her soft Southern accent, Mrs. Harris, who was residing in Texas at the time, said she tried to talk her daughter out of her decision.

“Going into the military, with all the fighting that goes on, I don’t like that,” she said. “We don’t do that. We are a peaceable people. Going into the National Guard was not something I thought would be okay. I told her so.”

A Disagreeable Occasion?

Last May 23 was Ms. Harris’s 29th birthday, and if the estimates are accurate, she had gotten pregnant not long before.

Ms. Trammell, from the downtown hotel, said Ms. Harris told her that the night she became pregnant, the sex was not consensual, that she was plied with booze and drugs.

Unaware of the gathering turmoil in her youngest daughter’s life, Mrs. Harris said the last time they spoke was the first week of June, or bout the time Sgt. Ansman’s wife was giving birth.

”Every time I called after that,” Mrs. Harris said, “I could not get her.” It is not clear exactly how much the victim’s family knew about the man Ms. Harris was seeing.

But her mother was positive about one thing: “JoAnn did not know that man was married.”

Unanswered also yesterday but highly curious is why Ms. Harris was living in a seedy, perilous neighborhood far from her family and her presumed homes.