Murder Trial Opens With 911 Recording

A court hearing in the murder case against Jeffrey D. Peitz opened Tuesday with the playing of a dramatic 911 tape in which Peitz told an operator that an armed intruder had just killed his wife in the living room of the couple’s Palmdale home.

“A black guy came in and shot her in the head,” Peitz is heard saying on the tape in an emotional voice. “I came down and she was covered with blood.”

But eight days after the Aug. 12 slaying, it was Peitz himself who was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife, Teri, a 37-year-old Neighborhood Watch activist.

Jeffrey Peitz, a 38-year-old postal worker, had told investigators that he believed his wife was slain because of her crime-fighting work. He identified the killer as a man that Teri Peitz and other Neighborhood Watch members had confronted, saying that he was living as an illegal squatter in a vacant house.

But sheriff’s investigators decided that Peitz’s account was a cover-up after the African American man named by Peitz proved he was in Michigan at the time of the shooting.

During the preliminary hearing, scheduled to continue today in Antelope Municipal Court, a prosecutor is trying to persuade a judge to order Peitz to stand trial on the murder charge.

On the 911 tape, Peitz is heard at one point urging his wife to “Wake up! Wake up!” But minutes later, when the operator asks Peitz to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation to his wife, Peitz is heard to respond: “I know she’s dead.”

He later told investigators that the shooting occurred while he was upstairs folding laundry, and his wife was downstairs, watching her favorite television show, “COPS.” Jeffrey Peitz said he heard two “pops,” then hurried downstairs in time to see a black man leaving through the front door.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas Spaulding, the first officer to enter the house after the 911 call, said he saw Peitz kneeling beside his wife’s body.

But Spaulding said Peitz was not crying and did not look to him like a man whose wife had just been killed. He “just didn’t look upset enough to me,” the deputy testified.

Later in the hearing, James Thomas Shaw, whom Peitz had identified as the killer, testified that he flew to Lansing, Mich., the morning of Aug. 12 to spend the weekend with relatives. The slaying occurred that evening.

Shaw produced his airline ticket receipts and family photographs taken during that weekend as proof he was out of the state when the killing occurred.

He also testified that he had been involved in a financial dispute with the owners of the residence he was occupying and that he returned from Michigan to find himself locked out.

But he denied that he had threatened to harm the Peitz family or other neighbors who had put him under surveillance. “I didn’t threaten to kill anyone,” Shaw testified.

He insisted that he knew Jeffrey Peitz only as a man who once tried to “peep” inside his house.

Peitz’s 17-year-old daughter, Michelle Lee Peitz, testified that she was out on a date with her boyfriend when the shooting occurred.

She said her parents appeared to have a happy marriage and never engaged in physical fights or loud arguments. But after further questioning by attorneys, she also acknowledged that her parents underwent marriage counseling two years ago.

Also, Michelle testified that her mother learned earlier this year that Peitz was involved in an extramarital affair. Her father promised the affair was over, and her mother forgave him, the teen-ager testified.

Since the shooting, Michelle said she visits her father each weekend in jail and talks to him regularly on the telephone. “I feel that he didn’t do it,” she said.

After the hearing was adjourned, defense attorney Richard Plotin told reporters that the case against his client is flimsy. “They have no physical evidence against this man,” Plotin said. “I don’t think they even have sufficient suspicion (to justify a trial). They have speculation.”

But Deputy Dist. Atty. John A. Portillo insisted that prosecutors have “a strong circumstantial case” against Peitz.

Earlier, Portillo said investigators recovered a homemade silencer from the Peitz house. He also said Peitz appears to have waited at least 15 minutes between the time of the shooting and the 911 call, possibly to eliminate evidence.