Page 43 - Eric Bechler News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

That people can think anything else. >> you never said hey, look, man, i don't know what the [ bleep ] you guys are talking about. i'm innocent. you never said anything about anything. >> i have so. do i have to say it every week? >> reporter: kobe tried again. >> i protected you. i basically made you look like a saint in the interview i had with the detectives. >> reporter: a dead end. but detectives were now convinced that eric killed his wife. >> even though it didn't lead to anything, that conversation with kobe, that got you from suspicion to knowing? >> yeah, it moved it all the way over...

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 re-enactment at sea to try to understand how pegye could have fallen off the boat and they couldn't do it. >> they said 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 the case. >> the...

A neighbor called 911 after hearing yelling coming from tina's apartment. when police arrived, eric was gone but tina was angry and she still had the business card detective murphy had given her almost two years earlier. >> i grabbed my partner, we went out there in the middle of the night and we met up with tina. >> reporter: she told detective murphy and his partner, gary jones, what eric had said. a big break, yes, but not nearly enough for an arrest. remember, tina was pretty far from an ideal witness. detectives knew they would need more than her word against eric's. so they asked tina --...

Trial. the star witness, tina, a witness was, to be fair, compromised, not just by her waffling by eric's guilt and her own checkered past but the one detail and story tina says eric told her something the defense attorney says is critical. >> you'd expect, if pegye's head was caved in by 35 pound dumb bells, there'd be blood. >> quite a lot of it. >> everywhere. and there wasn't. >> on the stand, tina tried to defend herself. >> i'm a horrible witness when it comes to looking at me on paper? do you think anybody would believe you? >> no. i knew that i told exactly what he had said to me. and ...

And i said what do you mean, you can't find her? where is she? what are you trying to tell me? >> reporter: eric told june that pegye was driving the boat, towing him on a body board, when all of a sudden a wave wiped him out. when he came up from under the water, he said, he could no longer see pegye inside the boat. >> we thought they should be finding her because we really just thought she would swim out of it. >> reporter: you see, pegye was quite at home in the water. growing up, it was the only time she didn't have to wear that back brace. and she became a very accomplished swimmer. >> s...