When Samuel Woodward decided to kill a gay high school classmate in January 2018, according to a prosecutor, he chose a weapon with symbolic significance: a knife with his father’s name etched on it.

During his murder trial in Orange County Superior Court, both sides portrayed the 26-year-old Woodward as a young man who struggled with his sexuality growing up in a conservative Newport Beach family, with a particularly disapproving father.

“Who better to prove to that you’re not gay than this homophobic father?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Walker told jurors. “‘I’m not gay, look what I just did.’”

Walker’s remarks came during closing arguments, last week and early this week, in Woodward’s three-month trial. Jurors began deliberating Woodward’s fate Tuesday afternoon.

Woodward is charged with first-degree murder, with a hate-crime enhancement, for stabbing Blaze Bernstein 28 times in a Lake Forest park.

Woodward’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Ken Morrison, acknowledged that his client was guilty of the killing, which he called a “hideous crime,” but said it was voluntary manslaughter, not murder.

“There’s no premeditation or deliberation,” he told jurors, arguing that Bernstein had provoked Woodward. He said the killing had no connection to his client’s interest in the Atomwaffen Division, an extremist group whose anti-gay, anti-Jewish propaganda was found on Woodward’s computer.

Bernstein was both Jewish and gay, but the hate-crime enhancement only applies to his sexual orientation.

On the night of the killing, Bernstein and Woodward exchanged flirtatious text messages. They had known each other casually years earlier at the Orange County School of the Arts, where Woodward had a reputation based on his far-right, anti-gay views.

Woodward, who kept a “hate diary” in which he bragged of pranking and frightening gay men, had dropped out of college and was living with his parents. Bernstein, an openly gay University of Pennsylvania student, was staying with his parents over winter break in Lake Forest.

Woodward suggested he was bi-curious. Bernstein texted his address. Woodward picked him up, and they went to a nearby park.

“Unfortunately for Blaze, curiosity killed him,” Walker said.

Taking the stand in his own defense, Woodward seemed nearly catatonic, his words halting and slow, his eyes cast downward, his face covered by a curtain of unkempt hair. His attorney had to keep reminding him to look up.

Woodward testified that he took two puffs on a strong marijuana joint, went into a haze and came out of it to find Bernstein touching his genitals.

By Woodward’s account, Bernstein told him he had been outed, called him a hypocrite and said something like, “I got you.” Woodward said he feared that Bernstein had taken a photo of his genitals and was texting it to someone.

Asked for details about the stabbing, Woodward repeatedly said he couldn’t remember.

Bernstein’s blood was found on the knife bearing Woodward’s father’s name, leading prosecutors to conclude it was the murder weapon. But Woodward insisted he had used a different knife.

No evidence surfaced that Bernstein took explicit photos of Woodward, and Walker, the prosecutor, called the defendant’s account “ridiculous” and “revisionist history.”

Deriding the notion that Woodward flew into a rage for fear of being outed, she said he had posted his own photo on a Tinder profile saying he was seeking other men and had sent out photos of his penis more than once.

She said that “taking a weapon with your dad’s name is very symbolic,” particularly since Woodward, an Eagle Scout, had multiple knives. The prosecutor said that by killing Bernstein, Woodward was hoping to raise his profile with the Atomwaffen Division.

“It will prove to Atomwaffen he’s not gay,” Walker said. “It will prove to his dad he’s not gay. It will prove to himself he’s not gay.”

When police searched Woodward’s belongings, they found a death’s-head mask — an emblem of the Atomwaffen — spattered with Bernstein’s blood, indicating Woodward had it with him during the stabbing.

“Why are you bringing a skull mask?” Walker said. “This is a ceremonial killing for him that is going to get him prestige and admiration, which it did. We heard Atomwaffen was proud of him for this.”

Woodward buried Bernstein in a shallow grave in the park, and, to divert investigators, sent texts to Bernstein’s phone asking where he was. Woodward’s initial account to police was that he had accompanied Bernstein to the park but that Bernstein had inexplicably wandered off.

After a weeklong search, Bernstein’s body was found when the rain washed away dirt concealing his body. No shovel was found. Dirt was discovered under Woodward’s fingernails, however, and Morrison said he had dug the makeshift grave with his hands, an argument that it was not a premeditated crime.

Morrison painted his client as a socially awkward young man who suffered for years with undiagnosed autism. He said there was no evidence that Woodward had actually pranked and terrorized gay men beyond the account in his “hate diary,” which Morrison characterized as empty boasting.

Morrison denied that Bernstein’s fatal stabbing was “a hate-fueled crime inspired by the likes of Hitler and [Charles] Manson.” He attributed his client’s attachment to the Atomwaffen Division to “his lifelong struggle to fit in, to make and maintain meaningful friendships,” which left him vulnerable to a group that offered fellowship and preyed on people like him. He said his client had a “starvation for human connection.”

Jurors will resume deliberations Wednesday morning. Woodward faces life in prison if convicted as charged.

An Orange County fertility doctor was convicted of second-degree murder Tuesday in the death of his 45-year-old wife, despite the defense’s suggestion that she had received her wounds by accidentally tumbling down the stairs during a migraine attack and then falling prey to the family’s rambunctious dogs.

Eric Scott Sills and his wife, Susann, ran a fertility clinic in Carlsbad, he as medical director and she as managing partner. They lived with their 12-year-old twins in a $1-million home in San Clemente.

On the morning of Nov. 13, 2016, Sills called 911 and said he had woken up to discover his wife unconscious at the bottom of a staircase.

“We’ve got a patient here who’s fallen off the stairs and I don’t have a pulse,” Sills told the emergency dispatcher, in a recording played for jurors in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana. “I think she tripped because it was dark.”

More than two years later, after an investigation by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, prosecutors charged Sills with her murder. Two pathologists identified strangulation as the cause of death.

“This man killed his wife and hid it, and he hid it pretty well, because it took a while to bring him to justice,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Walker told jurors. While the couple presented a facade of normalcy, she added, “people do not know what is going on in the privacy of relationships.”

Walker argued that the doctor had strangled Susann Sills during an argument and then, realizing his children were asleep in the house and he could not dump her body, scrambled to stage her death as an accident.

Walker emphasized the position of her body when authorities found it, supine below the staircase with her right foot splayed on a lower stair. The emergency dispatcher had instructed Sills to place his wife on a flat, hard surface to attempt CPR, but the prosecutor said he deliberately left her foot on the stair because “he wanted that connection to the stairway.”

Walker argued that as rescue workers were en route, “this doctor who helps people create life” burned time by pointlessly searching for his pulse oximeter rather than trying to save his wife.

“Oh Lord, where is my pulse ox?” Sills is heard saying on the 911 call, his distraught children audible in the background.

What Sills did not have time to do, the prosecutor argued, was to clean up the signs of a bloody struggle elsewhere in the house. In one room, the drapes were splotched with the defendant’s blood, a piece of evidence the defense suggested might have gotten there innocently at an earlier point due to an exposed nail on a nightstand.

Sills, 58, did not take the stand in his defense. His attorney, Jack Earley, sought to persuade jurors there was an alternate explanation for Susann Sills’ death.

“She’s had a migraine for two days, three days,” Earley told jurors, arguing that she had not eaten in a day or two and had the benzodiazepine Valium and the opioid painkiller tramadol in her system, which might have left her disoriented on the stairs. “We don’t know how she fell.”

The couple’s son, Eric, initially told police that his parents had been arguing in the hours before his mother’s death. Now 19, he appeared to retreat from that claim when he took the stand at trial.

The defense attempted to explain the signs of apparent strangulation on the victim’s body: As Susann Sills lay at the bottom of the stairs, one or both of the family’s dogs, somehow loosed from their overnight kennels, had tugged at a rayon scarf around her neck.

Walker, the prosecutor, pointed out that it would have taken minutes to kill her in this way, that the scarf had no tears or holes, and that Eric Sills had made no mention of dogs in his 911 call.

She derided the defense’s account that his wife had fallen down the stairs — as if “in a soundproof pinball machine” — without waking the family, and “then was strangled by her dogs.”

Prosecutors did not provide a motive for the killing, a weakness in the case the defense repeatedly emphasized.

According to the couple’s text exchanges, however, there were signs that they had fought bitterly in the months preceding Susann Sills’s death. There was friction about work, friction about her husband’s children from a prior marriage, and friction about his temper.

“I will never be free, ever,” she wrote at one point. “You are killing me, don’t you see? … I just want out.”

Another source of discord, the prosecutor argued, was his apparent chagrin that she had posted a topless photo of herself online after losing a bet.

“Is that the reason he killed her? I don’t know,” Walker said — but perhaps “he is done with her embarrassing him.”

The jury deliberated for a day before reaching its verdict of second-degree murder, rejecting the prosecutor’s argument that it was first-degree murder involving premeditation.

Sills, who had been free on bail, was taken into custody after Tuesday’s verdict. He faces 15 years to life in prison at his sentencing hearing, scheduled for March 15 before Superior Court Judge Patrick Donahue.