SANTA ANA – The 39-year marriage began blissfully.

But the ups and downs of the relationship took their toll on a Rancho Santa Margarita man who “exploded” the night “he struck his wife in a heat of passion” with a one-pound nightstand figurine, not realizing he was hitting her head, the man’s attorney told an Orange County jury Wednesday.

Defense attorney Calvin Schneider said Richard Gustav Forsberg, 63, killed his wife Marcia Ann Forsberg, 60, in the early hours of Feb. 9, 2010, after the couple argued – but that it was not murder.

“He exploded when Mrs. Forsberg shuts him off” by dismissing her husband and turning away from him, Schneider said, telling the jury in Superior Court Judge William Froeberg’s court that his client is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not of murder.

After finding his wife had no pulse, Schneider said Forsberg wrapped her bloodied head in a towel, put her body in a bed sheet, placed her in an upstairs bathtub and put ice in it. He cleaned blood from the walls and the bedpost.

Deputy District Attorney Ebrahim Baytieh told the jurors what followed, events that Forsberg eventually described in police interviews months after the killing: He decapitated his wife, dismembered her body, kept her frozen parts in freezers he bought, rented an RV and then incinerated her body parts at a campground in Ventura County.

“He acted in the most gruesome and inhumane manner. He didn’t want to be married anymore” to a woman who had suffered from cancer and other medical issues, the prosecutor told jurors in his opening statement. “She was murdered by a man who was supposed to protect her.”

The childless couple had stopped having sex for a decade and Richard Forsberg frequented massage parlors to have sex with prostitutes, Baytieh said.

After the couple argued on the night of the killing, the defendant thought Marcia Forsberg went to sleep, the prosecutor said.

Then, “in the most cowardly way, he murdered her,” he said.

“He didn’t just murder his wife, he didn’t just decapitate her, he didn’t just dismember her, what he left of her is this,” Baytieh said, showing jurors a blank overhead screen. “Nothing.”

Richard Forsberg left nothing of her body because he did not want to be held accountable for the slaying, the prosecutor said.

Baytieh showed jurors a picture of the shiny aluminum walls of the inside of a freezer in which Forsberg is accused of stuffing his wife’s body parts.

“This is as close to a coffin this murderer gave his wife of 39 years,” he said.

Investigators did not find any remains of Marcia Forsberg after searching a fire pit at Lake Piru in Ventura County.

Her husband took her ashes and bones and threw them away, the District Attorney said.

Schneider, the defense attorney, said his client decided to cremate his wife, saying Richard Forsberg took some of her ashes and placed them on a tree in Ojai, where she grew up. The defendant talked with his wife and apologized to her when he dispersed her ashes, the lawyer said.

Prosecutors said Forsberg hit her in the head multiple times with the small statue on Feb. 9, 2010. He kept her body at home and decapitated and dismembered it over the next few days, they said.

Prosecutors said that he then rented an RV, bought two freezers and drove to Lake Piru to burn the body parts. When friends asked about Marcia Forsberg’s whereabouts, the defendant told them they were having marital problems and she had left town to be on her own.

In August 2010 concerned friends reported the victim missing.

If convicted of one felony count of murder, Forsberg faces a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in state prison. If found guilty of the lesser voluntary manslaughter charge, he faces a maximum 11 years in prison.

When police checked on Marcia Forsberg’s welfare Aug. 15, 2010, and later that month began asking her husband questions, the defendant checked into a spa hotel in Palm Springs and sent a confession letter to detectives before attempting suicide, prosecutors said.

“There’s lots of feelings of dread … the jig is up … I’d rather kill myself than be caught,” he told detectives in one interview.

Much of the evidence against the defendant comes from his own statements to police, Schneider said.

Baytieh played snippets from the hours-long interviews Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigators conducted with the defendant.

In one taped scene, Forsberg clinically described how a bone saw caught his eye at a Huntington Beach hunting store and it was what he needed to saw a cold body.

“It is way difficult to cut through frozen bodies,” Forsberg said. The bone saw was just the right tool, he said.

Was it gruesome to decapitate?

“I was surprised at how easy it was for the most part,” Forsberg said. “She had been dead for more than 12 hours … conceptually, it was gruesome.”

You did all the cutting at one time?

He did some on Feb. 9 and the rest the next day.

“I took the saw with me in the RV to make pieces smaller to put in the fire,” Forsberg said.

Forsberg made hand sawing gestures for detectives and motioned with both his hands when describing the cuts he made: two for each arm, one for each foot, one for the head.

Contact the writer: 714-834-3773 or vjolly@ocregister.com