Jennifer Dalton called her husband 18 times and emailed him twice more in the six hours and 15 minutes before she killed him, but she insisted Thursday she had no idea he was in her garage just before she shot him.

"Isn't it true you invited him in that day?" Deputy District Attorney Chris Ore asked Dalton during his cross-examination, trying to undercut her testimony from the day before when she said she thought somebody was trying to break into her house when she went down to her garage with a gun in her hand.

Dalton, 42, denied she lured Craig Dalton over to her house on Rainbow Falls Way just before she killed him at 2 p.m. July 13, 2009. As for her conversations with her husband and the voice mails she left him, Dalton said she could not remember the details.

"We argued about our relationship the entire morning there," was all Dalton said she could remember.

She is accused of second-degree murder in the shooting death of her 39-year-old husband. The case is a retrial from earlier this year in which another Sacramento Superior Court jury acquitted her of first-degree murder that carried the added special-circumstance allegation that Dalton was lying in wait to kill her husband. The panel in May could not reach a verdict on the lesser-included second-degree murder charge.

Just before Thursday's noon recess, Dalton broke down in tears on the witness stand when the prosecutor played the 911 tape she called in to police after she killed her husband.

"My husband came by my house," she shrieked to the Elk Grove Police Department dispatcher. "I shot him."

Dalton said in the call that she and her husband had been fighting and that he came over and had said something to her about having sex with other women.

"He had no right coming by here," she said in the 911 call.

Sacramento Superior Court Judge Helena R. Gweon recessed the trial 20 minutes early before the lunch hour while Dalton sobbed into a handkerchief. Dalton testified Wednesday that she shot her husband after he had slammed her into a wall, called her a whore and demanded sex.

Her lawyer, Linda Parisi, has characterized the shooting as a case of self defense.

Although Dalton could provide little details on the phone conversations, two vitriolic emails she sent her husband the morning of his death suggested a tone of anger.

She said in them she feared the bank was going to foreclose on her house, and she expressed anger at Dalton – whom she criticized in her previous testimony for spending money on a BMW and a trip to Belize – for not providing her with more financial support.

"Congratulations," she wrote him. "I have lost my life savings for you … You are the biggest let down of my life. You would never take responsibility for your actions that destroyed us."

In her testimony under questioning from Ore, Dalton repeatedly refused to say she was mad at her husband at the time she shot him.

"I would only have fired the gun if I was scared he was going to kill me or hurt me," she said.

In a text message Craig Dalton sent to his wife about 9 a.m. the morning of the shooting, he told her, after several of their phone conversations, "I won't be cursed at. I asked for a plan going forward, not to be yelled at. I want a peaceful, secure future."

Dalton was followed to the witness stand by "intimate partner battering" expert Linda Barnard, a licensed marriage and family therapist. Barnard, called by the defense, based her testimony on interviews with Jennifer Dalton. Barnard said Craig Dalton exercised "coercive control" over his wife.

Jennifer Dalton reported that her husband stalked and sexually abused her, Barnard testified. The witness characterized Jennifer Dalton as "a trauma survivor."

"I thought she was being honest with me," Barnard testified.

The trial resumes Tuesday.

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