Wife Pleads Not Guilty in Dual Slaying : Courts: A weeping Lisa Peng nearly collapses. She is held without bail in deaths of her husband’s lover and their infant son.

A trembling Li-Yun (Lisa) Peng wept uncontrollably and nearly collapsed before pleading not guilty Tuesday in Municipal Court here to charges of murder in the deaths of her husband’s lover and their infant son.

Clad in dark blue prison garb with a denim coat, Peng, 44, a Taiwanese national who maintains a home in Rancho Santa Margarita, was ordered held without bail in the grisly August slayings of 25-year-old Ranbing Jennifer Ji and her 5-month-old son, Kevin.

Their bodies were discovered by Peng’s husband, Tseng (Jim) Peng, on Aug. 18 at the Vista del Lago apartments in Mission Viejo after he returned from a business trip to Taiwan.

At Tuesday’s arraignment, Municipal Judge Pamela Iles set pretrial and bail hearings for Peng for Jan. 18. On grounds of double homicide, prosecutors filed additional charges of special circumstances in the case, which could carry the death penalty.

Jim Peng, 50, a wealthy businessman and chief executive officer of San Diego-based Ranger Communications, attended the proceedings and insisted that his wife of 21 years is innocent.

Talking outside the courtroom to a horde of reporters, including television crews from Taiwan and China, Peng said his wife knew of his relationship with Ji, a former employee, but claimed his wife only learned of the child produced by their relationship after the killings.

“My wife never knew she had a baby,” said Peng. She was “shocked” when he telephoned her immediately after first calling police and told her of the killings, he added.

Prosecutors claim to have a crucial piece of evidence--a DNA sample from a bite mark on Ji’s left arm--that directly links Lisa Peng to the slayings. Investigators collected the DNA from saliva around the bite mark and, in a series of tests, matched it with Lisa Peng, according to Ronald Cafferty, a deputy district attorney.

Lisa Peng was arrested Saturday, five months after the slayings.

“My understanding of the DNA in this case is that it is her . . . or something like an identical twin,” Cafferty said Tuesday.

However, Marshall M. Schulman, who is representing the defendant, said the reliability of the DNA testing will be at the center of the case. Schulman, who was retained by Jim Peng, said a DNA match would make Lisa Peng only one of millions of suspects.

“All it shows is that she can’t be excluded, but so can millions of other people,” Schulman said. “I’m not impressed by DNA as a reliable piece of evidence.”

Based on the “slim” evidence, Schulman said, “she shouldn’t have been arrested.”

Prosecutors say that authorities found two buttons apparently belonging to Lisa Peng at the scene of the slayings in an apartment complex just off Marguerite Parkway near Lake Mission Viejo. According to a police report, Jim Peng was holding one of the buttons when he knocked on a neighbor’s door to telephone police after discovering the bodies.

Orange County sheriff’s deputies found Ji just steps inside the doorway, slumped over on the couch with her back to the front door, her brown and white housedress covered with blood. She had been stabbed 18 times in the chest with a knife large enough to go all the way through her body, Cafferty said.

No murder weapon has been found.

The baby was found suffocated in a crib in an adjoining bedroom, according to police reports.

The child’s death is another crucial piece of evidence against Lisa Peng, Cafferty said.

“You don’t kill a 5-month-old baby because it was a witness,” Cafferty said, adding that there was no evidence of burglary or robbery.

But Cafferty said there is evidence that Ji and her baby had chanced to meet Lisa Peng at a shopping center on the day of the killing. He also said Lisa Peng knew about the child and the 3-year-old affair between her husband and Ji, and in 1992 found some of Ji’s clothes at their Rancho Santa Margarita home.

“She found them and cut them up,” Cafferty said.

Investigators believe Lisa Peng arrived at Ji’s apartment at least 12 hours before the bodies were discovered and immediately attacked Ji after she opened the door, driving her back across the family room to the couch, where she collapsed.

It was during the frenzied attack that Lisa Peng allegedly tried to bite Ji, who managed to rip the buttons from Peng’s clothing, Cafferty said.

Jim Peng, whose company is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of citizens band radios with factories in Taiwan, Malaysia and China, said Tuesday that he hired Ji in 1990 to help start a new manufacturing company in China, where she was a citizen. He said his affair with Ji began in China and that she came to California on her own.

He said that since Ji’s arrival in Mission Viejo, he had seen her only once every three months or so and knew little of her life here.

He acknowledged having a passion for Ji, but divorce from his wife and marriage to Ji was out of the question, he said, mainly because of the difference in their ages.

“I loved her and she loved me but there is a certain point (when one must) face the facts,” he said.

Jim and Lisa Peng have two boys, ages 16 and 20, who are students in the United States. They are aware of the slayings and their mother’s arrest, Jim Peng said.