Page 39 - Eric Bechler News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Suspicion to knowing? >> yeah, it moved it all the way over. so we knew we had a homicide. >> reporter: but knowing it and proving it were two very different things. >> you didn't get to process that boat as a crime scene for, like, almost a week. >> right. right. so that -- that wasn't good. that hindered the investigation. >> reporter: the boat, said detective murphy, was pretty clean. crime scene did find blood, just one drop, under one of the cushions. but not enough to determine whether it was human blood. it could have come from a fish. not enough evidence to arrest eric for murder or ev...

Starting to set in. and it was painful. >> at this point, you didn't think she was alive anymore? >> i kept thinking that she was. but how could she, you know, that length of time? >> reporter: unless, of course, what appeared to be an accident was not. the coast guard conducted a reenactment at sea to try to understand how pegye could have fallen off the boat. and they couldn't do it. >> they said it just -- it doesn't appear to be feasible to them, given the sea conditions. >> reporter: that's when the coast guard called the orange county sheriff's office. detective sean murphy was put on th...

And it just got worse. the news report did not match the story eric had told her about pegye's disappearnce. >> and he told me there was three to four foot waves. it was really choppy out there. >> reporter: but on the report they said on the day pegye went missing, there were only two foot waves and the weather was described as ideal. >> he lied. he lied all this time to me. you know, and he was just really quiet. >> he's sitting right next to you. >> sitting right next to me. >> how does eric look at that point? >> flushed and stressed. i yelled at him and said, "why is this different than w...

And the boat kept going farther and farther away. and i couldn't see any other boat. i was screaming and looking around. it was my fault. if only i could see her right now. >> reporter: and so pegye bechler was simply gone. maybe even within sight of the same beach that had spawned her marriage. eric seemed devastated fearing his wife and business partner was dead,but eric's mother, linda, saw things quite differently. >> i was sure that they would find her, that it would all turn out well. >> reporter: not just because pegye was a strong swimmer. everyone knew that. linda knew more. a secret ...

And he lied to us, he said, because he panicked. and he was afraid. and he didn't know what to do. >> reporter: detectives convinced kobi to wear a wire and to meet eric at a restaurant in orange county. eric had no idea that police were listening in. even so, he stuck to his story that pegye's death was a terrible accident. >> i was there i know what happened, and i -- it's so hard for me to understand you know that there could be another -- people could think anything else. >> you never said, "hey look man, i don't know what the -- you guys are talking about, but i'm innocent." you never sai...