Murder Defendant Cites Jealousy Toward Husband’s Mistress : Hearing: In videotape, Li-Yun (Lisa) Peng tells of her spouse’s affair with young woman who was slain with her baby in Mission Viejo. But she denies killing rival<i> .</i>

In an interview videotaped by police, Li-Yun (Lisa) Peng, who is charged with killing her husband’s mistress and their 5-month-old son, said she had numerous confrontations with her husband’s lover but denied killing her.

The interview, videotaped Jan. 8, was shown during Peng’s preliminary hearing before Laguna Niguel Municipal Judge Arthur G. Koelle, who must weigh whether two taped interviews from Jan. 8 are admissible.

Peng’s attorneys have argued that she was under extreme duress and was denied counsel, although she had asked sheriff’s investigators five times to have an attorney present before her arrest. Her attorneys also contend that an audiotape made by investigators after Peng was arrested violated her right to privacy.

The prosecution rejects both arguments.

The victim, Ranbing (Jennifer) Ji, 25, died of 18 stab wounds, and her son, Kevin, was suffocated on Aug. 18, 1993, in Ji’s apartment in Mission Viejo. Peng was linked to the crime in part by DNA evidence, which investigators took from a bite mark on Ji’s arm.

In the videotape, Peng, 44, repeatedly says she did not kill anyone. She has pleaded not guilty to two murder charges.

In the videotaped interview, Peng tells of confrontations with Ji, a statuesque beauty whom Peng’s husband, Tseng (Jim) Peng, 51, had met at an electronics convention in China.

Peng told sheriff’s investigators that she had telephoned Ji on several occasions and said Ji had promised to leave her husband.

But in a confrontation with Ji in China, she said, “Jennifer told me that the only way to get her to leave my husband alone was to have her move away,” Lisa Peng said on tape. “Otherwise, she said, my husband was going to continue pursuing her.”

Lisa Peng’s obsession with the extramarital affair escalated when she found a woman’s T-shirt among her husband’s clothing.

Ji “said the T-shirt was given as a gift to my husband,” Peng said. “But that was impossible I said, because my husband body’s is very huge and this was a smaller, woman’s T-shirt.”

Suspicious of her husband’s word that he would end the affair, Peng, who was in Taiwan, called the Rancho Santa Margarita home she and her husband owned.

“Someone answered the phone. They didn’t say anything. But no one was supposed to be living there and I . . . I was just suspicious,” she said.

She got on an airplane and flew to Orange County and entered her home, where she found another woman’s clothing in her bedroom closet and her bed slept in.

She said that with a pair of scissors she cut all the woman’s clothes.

“There were a lot of new clothes, all name-brand clothes,” Peng said. “I was really jealous and angry. . . . Jennifer had promised me that she was going to leave my husband, and I was waiting” for it to happen.

Peng said her husband repeatedly told her to “give him time” and he would end the affair. But in a conversation that was recorded on the Jan. 8 videotape, Peng tells her husband, “I gave you months to separate from (Ji) but you didn’t. You hurt everybody.”

Peng said she felt pressured by Ji to get a divorce, “because my husband had committed adultery.”

“At the time, I lost all hope. I said to myself, ‘Fine. I’ll grant your wish and hope you live happily ever after.’ I just wanted to sleep.”

Peng said she started to commit suicide with pills but stopped.

“I was thinking why should I grant their wish? So, I changed my mind and didn’t take any more pills. But I slept for two days.”