SURVIVOR TELLS OF KILLINGS AT RETRIAL.

Byline: Jesse Hiestand Staff Writer

Nearly 19 years after Marie Pruett Tyler helped send a North Hollywood man to prison for the murder of her father and brother, she recalled her grisly testimony Wednesday at his new trial.

Now 34, Tyler told a Van Nuys Superior Court jury how she found her father and 14-year-old brother shot to death in the family's one-bedroom North Hollywood home July 6, 1980.

As she did before, Tyler pointed in court to Kenneth Crandell as the murderer. His Jan. 15, 1982, conviction was overturned because a court found he had been represented by an incompetent public defender.

Crandell, 66, is again charged with kidnapping, assault with the intent to rape and two counts of murder with the special circumstance of multiple murder, which could send him to prison for life without parole if convicted.

Crandell insists he shot and strangled Ernest Pruett in self-defense after Pruett killed his own son, defense attorney Michael White told the jury.

But Tyler told jurors that Crandell, a family friend who was staying there, admitted to shooting both people and then tried to rape her. She said he demanded she help him both bury the bodies in the desert and flee the country.

``So I told him I'd help him knowing in my mind that was the furthest thing I wanted to do,'' Tyler said, describing how she first gave Crandell soap and a scrub brush to clean blood stains.

``I kept pointing out other stains because I wanted to find a way to hit him so I could get out of there with my sister,'' she told jurors, explaining how at that point her sister Kathy, 7, was still asleep and knew nothing of the killings.

At the first opportunity, Tyler, then 17, said she hit Crandell over the head with a skillet, but it only cracked the skillet.

``Soap suds flew and he didn't fall over as I had expected,`` Tyler said. ``He said, 'Now I have to keep my eye on you and if you do anything like that again I'll shoot you.' ''

Still armed with a .38-caliber revolver, Crandell dragged the bodies to the back porch and then drove Tyler and her sister around Los Angeles in a quest to borrow money from friends, she said.

When Crandell started to drive to Salinas, Tyler said she had to think fast.

``I knew if we lasted to the evening and if he went back and got those bodies he'd kill my sister and I and bury all the bodies,'' Tyler said.

Tyler said she convinced Crandell to stop at her aunt's house in Newhall where she and her sister escaped and called police from a neighbor's house.