Tape of Slaying Suspect’s Denial Played : Trial: Carole Evelyn Mellinger tells detectives that she had no financial motive for killing her millionaire husband.

Jurors on Wednesday heard a tape recording in which a Tarzana woman accused of slaying her millionaire husband told police investigators that she loved him, didn’t mind that he had a mistress and had no financial motive for killing him.

“I had no intention of killing my husband,” Carole Evelyn Mellinger told detectives Jan. 24, a few hours after allegedly shooting her husband of 23 years. “I do not think you could find two people in the United States who . . . loved each other more than my husband and I did.”

The tape of Mellinger’s interrogation was played for jurors in Van Nuys Superior Court, where Mellinger is on trial for the slaying.

Her husband, Brainerd Lee Mellinger, 69, was shot four times with a pistol in the den of his hillside residence. Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Korban, who introduced the tape as evidence, contends that Carole Mellinger was angry because her husband had been having an affair for 12 years and because Mellinger feared that her husband’s plans to sell his import-export business would decrease the value of his estate.

But Mellinger told police that her husband’s mistress “was nothing” and that she would get only “a very small amount of money” from her husband’s death--a contention disputed by prosecutors.

“It wouldn’t be worth me killing him,” Mellinger told the detectives. “I could probably make more money going out and getting a job than I will from his estate if he dies.”

The 48-year-old Mellinger, her hair primly upswept, sat quietly in a black and white dress as the tape was played. Her composure was in contrast to the slurred speech, sobbing and profanity that pepper the tape recording. She had repeatedly begged officers for a cigarette.

Mellinger told police that she consumed only two glasses of white wine before the shooting but her attorneys contend that she had much more.

Sobbing, she said on the tape that her husband had told her he was not coming home the night of his death.

“I got this weird feeling like somebody’s watching me,” she said on the tape. She said she had armed herself, fearing she was being stalked by a former employee of her husband’s.

She contended that the ex-employee was “an ex-mass murderer” who had made obscene phone calls to her.

But Korban said there is no evidence to support the allegation and said Mellinger did not mention the employee when she called her mother, brother and sister after the shooting and said, “I killed Brainerd.”

Mellinger told police that she does not remember shooting her husband.

“I think that I was looking at the gun or something, and then I just looked up and it went off,” she said on the tape.

Korban said she played the tape to highlight inconsistencies in Mellinger’s testimony.

In court, Mellinger testified that she was asleep, thought someone was in the house, and had a radio turned on at the time of the shooting.