An Oakland man charged with murdering a federal defender's investigator, the mother of his child, was briefly jailed three months before she was killed after she called his parole agent and accused him of stealing her dog, according to court testimony Monday.

Sandra Coke paid $1,000 to Randy Alana, 56, after he promised to come up with information about her missing cocker spaniel. Then she called his parole agent after Alana vanished without producing any tips, Alana's nephew Angelo Gross, 39, testified at a preliminary hearing in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland.

The parole agent tracked down Alana, who missed his mother's funeral after he was arrested in May, Gross said.

Alana had been released from state prison last year after serving a lengthy sentence for robbery, the latest in a string of felony convictions. Coke, who had a teenage daughter with Alana, helped him out financially and allowed him to stay with her at her Oakland home and also paid for him to stay at a motel, Gross testified.

Tensions between the two flared, however, after Coke's cocker spaniel, Ginny, disappeared in May.

"He felt like she was nagging him about things" and she was obsessed about finding her dog, Gross testified under questioning by prosecutor Colleen McMahon. Coke, 50, refused to have anything to do with Alana unless he helped her find Ginny, he testified.

Coke thought Alana had something to do with the dog's disappearance, Gross said. She scrolled through Alana's contacts on his cell phone and called whomever she thought had information about Ginny, he said.

As an investigator for the federal defender's office in Sacramento, Coke used to talk about how she "tracked people all over the world," Gross said. She was confident she could find the cocker spaniel.

"Not finding her, in my opinion, was not an option for her," Gross said. He said Alana had groused that he was "pretty much chained to her" as she looked for the dog.

After Coke disappeared Aug. 4, their daughter told police that she had last seen her mother when she went to meet Alana to look for the dog, Oakland police Officer Bryan Glick told Judge Thomas Reardon.

Coke's body was found five days later in Vacaville. She had been strangled. Prosecutors said Alana had been filmed by a surveillance camera driving Coke's Mini Cooper and using her credit cards after she was killed.

A day after Coke went missing, Alana called Gross and another nephew, Carlton Duncan, 47, and asked them for money and a gun, they testified. Alana refused to answer Gross' questions about Coke, saying only that he didn't want to go back to jail and needed to "get away," Gross said.

Alana added that "for all he knew, she was somewhere with Ginny," Gross said.

In a jailhouse interview with The Chronicle in August, Alana denied he killed Coke, saying the two had planned to marry and calling her the "best thing that ever happened to me."

Reardon will decide at the end of the preliminary hearing whether there is enough evidence to try Alana for murder.
