A 22-year-old woman testified Wednesday that she heard gunshots, then saw her father return home in a truck and hastily pack his clothes before he vanished on the day two neighbors were slain 18 years ago.

Josephine Jurcoane was almost 4 the day authorities say her father, Josif Jurcoane, fatally shot an Antelope Valley rancher and the rancher's girlfriend. Lloyd William Bryden, 67, and Alice B. McCannel, 39, were killed July 4, 1984.

Immediately after the killings, Josif Jurcoane fled to Mexico, where he lived for the next 17 years. He used the alias Jose Lopez Rodriguez.

At his murder trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Jurcoane's daughter testified that she was at a picnic table outside the family's trailer and her mother was preparing dinner when her father got into a truck and drove off. Next, she recalled, she heard gunshots and saw her father return home.

"I remember him walking down the stairs with clothes in his hands ... he and my mother were arguing ... and [I remember] him leaving," Josephine Jurcoane said.

She said she had no further contact with her father until he was arrested in Mexico in April 2001 and returned to Los Angeles County to await trial. She said she has visited him at the North County Correctional Facility in Saugus, where he is being held without bail.

Through tears, Josephine Jurcoane told jurors in the San Fernando courtroom that she was overcome with emotion when she learned of her father's arrest and extradition to the United States. "I didn't know whether to defend him," she said. "I did not know what to do."

In February or March of this year, Josephine Jurcoane provided Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies with an account of some key events on the day her neighbors were killed. She said it was the first time she had given any statement to authorities about the crimes.

After the daughter's testimony, Jurcoane's attorney, Arnold M. Notkoff, told jurors during his opening statement that the evidence against his client is "very circumstantial."

Last year, prosecutors lost a bid to force Josif Jurcoane's estranged wife, Susan, to testify against him at the preliminary hearing. Despite their long separation, Susan invoked her marital privilege. A state appellate court ruled in November that she could not be compelled to testify about statements Jurcoane allegedly made to her before he left the country.

On Wednesday, another prosecution witness, a Mexican immigration official, testified that Jurcoane told her during his deportation hearing that he fled to Tijuana because a man he called "El Loco" used Jurcoane's 12-gauge shotgun to kill Bryden and McCannel.

He said "he took his things to Tijuana because he was afraid that he was going to be charged with the crimes," Sonia Luz Jimenez-Vargas testified.

Earlier, Bryden's daughter, Nancy Roebuck, said in court that her father bought the 450-acre Mountain Brook Ranch in Valyermo, near Palmdale, in 1964 and lived on the property until he was killed two decades later. She said Jurcoane worked as a mechanic and helped manage the ranch, with its cherry orchard, horses and alfalfa fields.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Rouman Ebrahim said Jurcoane and his family lived on the ranch until around Memorial Day 1984, when Bryden fired him and ordered him to move off the ranch. The Jurcoanes then moved into a trailer on adjoining property.

Jurcoane, 52, is charged with two counts of murder with the special circumstance of multiple murders, and faces life in prison without parole if convicted. Prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty as a condition of Jurcoane's extradition from Mexico. Trial testimony is set to continue Friday before Superior Court Judge Shari K. Silver.