Tape of Interview Describes Murderer’s Threats : Trials: A victim told police hours after being shot that a drifter said he’d kill the defendant if she didn’t help him.

In a tape-recorded interview played in court Tuesday, a Chatsworth girl told police hours after being shot by a drifter, who fatally shot her best friend, that the assailant threatened to kill his alleged accomplice.

The statement is crucial to the defense in the trial of Marsha Lynn Ramos, 36, who is accused of luring two girls into a camper, where drifter Roland Norman Comtois tied and gagged them and sexually molested the girl, who was 13 at the time. He killed Wendy Masuhara, 14, the survivor’s best friend.

San Fernando Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen is expected to rule in the next several days whether portions of the interview, taped Sept. 19, 1987, can be admitted into evidence.

He said Tuesday that most of the statements appeared to be inadmissible because the girl has said in court that she no longer remembers anything about the interview. The tape was played outside the presence of the jury.

The girl was interviewed by police on tape from her hospital bed at Humana Hospital-West Hills about three hours after the ordeal.

In July, Coen sentenced Comtois, 60, to die in the gas chamber after a jury convicted him of murder, attempted murder, attempted sodomy, kidnaping and other charges. Ramos faces the same sentence if convicted of similar charges.

The girl said Ramos approached her and her friend and lured them into the camper by asking them to help start the vehicle, which Ramos said had stalled.

In the taped interview, Los Angeles Police Detective Sandy Palmer asked the girl: “Did you ever hear him threaten her that if she didn’t help him, he would kill her?”

“Yes,” the girl replied.

Later in the interview, Palmer asked: “Did she ever ask him not to hurt anybody?” The girl responded, “I think.”

In the taped statement, the girl said that as Ramos injected with her with cocaine at Comtois’ request, Ramos told her “that she had to because he would get mad otherwise.”

The girl testified Tuesday that she could not remember the interview because “I had just been shot and had been given a shot of cocaine and I wasn’t really with it.”

The girl, now 16, survived because her upraised hand deflected a bullet from Comtois’ gun. Seconds earlier, Comtois fatally shot Masuhara in the head after placing the two girls in an abandoned station wagon in remote Woolsey Canyon, near the Chatsworth Reservoir.