Witness in Murder Case Doubts Suspect’s Guilt

A key witness in the case against a Newport Beach man accused of murdering his wife while on a boating trip two years ago said Thursday she regrets cooperating with detectives and believes the charges are unfounded.

Tina New, 29, last month helped Orange County Sheriff’s investigators tape record a conversation she had with her boyfriend, Eric Bechler, about the disappearance of his wife. New cooperated, she said, because she feared that deputies might otherwise arrest her for taking methamphetamines.

Sources familiar with the probe said Bechler never gave a full confession during the taped encounter at an El Torito restaurant in El Toro but made several incriminating statements about his wife’s disappearance. But New said Bechler never said anything to implicate himself.

“I tried to get things out about his wife [during the meeting], but there really wasn’t much to say,” she said. “I’m positive that he didn’t do it.”

Detectives promptly arrested Bechler after the encounter, and prosecutors have charged him with murdering his wife for financial gain. The Bechlers each had taken out $3 million life insurance policies a year and a half before Pegye Bechler’s disappearance in July 1997, New said.

Bechler, 32, has maintained that his wife was piloting a rented speedboat with him towed behind on a bodyboard when she fell overboard. The couple were about four miles off Newport Harbor, Bechler said at the time, when he was knocked off the board by a rogue wave. When he surfaced, he said he saw the boat circling in the distance with his wife gone.

New said Bechler alluded to killing his wife only once, under what she described as doubtful circumstances.

Bechler and New had taken the hallucinogenic drug Ecstasy at a party, and later New told Bechler that she was having visions of him killing his wife. Bechler went along with her story, she said. But he later told her during a phone call from jail that he had only been trying to impress her.

“He’s been devastated. He had a rope around his neck at one point. He wanted to commit suicide,” she said. “I feel this overwhelming feeling of guilt.”