Trial’s Tale of Murder Is Talk of Town

It was the height of Newport Beach’s yachting season, the last day of a long Fourth of July weekend, and eight passengers on the Greene Machine were pursuing a school of playful dolphins off the Orange County coast.

Then they heard the screams.

“My wife! My wife! My wife!”

They spotted a shirtless man floating on a body board behind an empty power boat spinning circles in the surf. Quickly, they tossed him a life jacket and summoned the Coast Guard via radio.

After they pulled him aboard, the frantic man explained that his wife had vanished from a rented power boat while towing him. At first, authorities believed it was a tragic accident. But that afternoon’s events soon sparked a lengthy homicide investigation.

Now, 3 1/2 years later, Pegye Bechler’s disappearance at sea is the center of one of Orange County’s most sensational murder trials. Her husband, Eric Bechler, is the suspect in a case that is expected to go to the jury this week.

Prosecutors contend that Eric Bechler killed his wife miles out at sea. The motive: to cash in on a $2-million life insurance policy and begin a fast and free lifestyle. Their star witness is a former “Baywatch” actress and model who dated Bechler and later secretly taped a confession.

The defense questions whether Pegye is even dead.

The trial is the talk of the town across Newport, from the beach volleyball courts where the defendant once played to cocktail parties on the bay. The courtroom has been packed since the trial began last month.

“It’s a local buzz,” said Corey Weber, the tongue-studded 25-year-old who leased the Bechlers the boat from which Pegye Bechler vanished. “You don’t get too many people showing up dead at Newport Harbor--or not showing up at all.”

On the surface, the Bechlers appeared to fit the Newport Beach stereotype, with their Armani suits and a pair of German sports cars. But in the months before Pegye’s disappearance, they struggled with money problems and keeping up appearances in a town awash in wealth and status.

“It’s perfectly emblematic,” said author T. Jefferson Parker, who has written eight novels set in Orange County including a 1991 Newport Beach murder mystery. “You couldn’t make up something like that. I tried . . . but it wasn’t this good.”

The Perfect Couple

The way Pegye Bechler was raised, a farmer’s daughter in Dexter, N.M., it would have been hard to imagine her making the supermarket tabloids, as this case has. She was the fourth of five children, and a star athlete at Dexter High School.

She earned a degree in physical therapy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, then left for California in 1988, attracted by the weather and the prospect of an athletic, outdoor lifestyle.

On Easter Day 1991, Pegye and Eric Bechler met on the sand at Newport Beach, introduced through mutual friends. Eric, then 23, was eight years younger than the 31-year-old Pegye.

Unlike Pegye, Bechler was a California native who spent much of his teen years along the coast.

He graduated from Long Beach Poly High School, where he ran on the track and cross country teams. He attended Northwestern University on a Marine Corps Reserve scholarship, but later explained that “culture shock” and homesickness led him to drop out during his freshman year.

Bechler was working temporary jobs, sometimes as a secretary, when he and Pegye started dating. When they went out, she often paid the tab, said Pegye’s closest friend, Glenda Mason, the woman who introduced Pegye to Bechler at the volleyball courts that day.

But something clicked between them right away, Eric would later explain. They were an attractive couple, he buffed from weightlifting, she an accomplished triathlete.

Within 17 months, they were married. For the Bechlers, not one ceremony would do. They exchanged vows at the county courthouse, on the beach before friends and, finally, at a castle in Germany.

The Bechlers worked as hard as they played. They went into business together, Eric managing the books and Pegye the staff of a physical therapy business in the Fashion Island shopping center that generated an estimated $6 million a year in revenue. Eric also earned a bachelor’s degree in history at UC Irvine.

In 1996, the couple paid $795,000 for a brown-shingle house on Cliff Drive in the neighborhood that Angels first baseman Mo Vaughn chose for his estate.

The Bechlers’ home had a rooftop deck with a panoramic view of Lido Isle, Newport Bay and the Pacific. They converted the basement into a disco for parties. They bought two Porsches and a sport utility vehicle and dressed in designer clothes.

The couple had three children within four years. To outsiders, they appeared to have it all.

They’d work together 12 hours a day, play with their kids together, even exercise together at a Family Fitness center in Newport Beach.

“We were together 24 hours a day,” Eric Bechler told sheriff’s deputies after his wife’s disappearance. He described their relationship as “very strong, wonderful.”

“Just like anybody, we had fights. But we never went to bed angry. We always talked it out,” he told detectives.

But in the months before Pegye’s death, a strain was showing.

The couple squabbled at work about the business, according to the testimony of co-workers. Twice, the couple called police to intervene in domestic quarrels.

Many of the couple’s battles focused on the sale in 1996 of the physical therapy business. As part of the sale, the Bechlers were hired on as managers at a combined salary of $250,000. But in March 1997, the new owners fired them, leaving the family without an income. They began bouncing checks and depleting their saving accounts, according to financial records.

It was obvious to Mason that her best friend was pained by her marriage. Pegye cried virtually every time they talked in the months leading up to her disappearance, Mason testified.

Bechler had an affair with a topless dancer, he later admitted in court, and a friend bought him the book “Divorce for Dummies.”

In March 1997, Eric allegedly approached his best friend, Kobi Laker, with an idea.

“What do you think about the possibility of killing my wife?” Laker says Bechler asked him.

Laker, now 36, broke down in sobs last month as he testified about the encounter, saying he is overcome with guilt because he didn’t warn Pegye about his friend’s intentions. He said Eric described his plan in detail: He would kill Pegye and dump her body at sea, perhaps in a barrel. Laker testified that he told Bechler to never again raise the subject in his presence.

“‘Have things really gotten that bad?’ ” Laker remembers asking his friend. “His reply was, ‘Yes.’ ”

The Birthday Cruise

Sunday, July 6, 1997, was the finale to a busy Fourth of July weekend at Balboa Boat Rentals in Newport Beach. And the conditions couldn’t have been better. The sky was clear, the sea calm and the water a balmy 70 degrees.

Only four days earlier, Pegye had celebrated her 38th birthday. A few months before that, the couple had marked six years together since their first meeting at the beach.

“Her favorite thing was to surprise people. I wanted to do something special for her,” Eric explained later. He had secretly called ahead and reserved a rental boat.

That morning in front of their home, Pegye playfully led her two older children in a front yard parade, marching while pretending to play a musical instrument, recalls neighbor David Grant, a retired president of Orange Coast College.

“The next day she was simply gone,” Grant said.

At the docks a few hours later, boat shop employee Weber gave the couple the standard safety instructions and off they went, the white-and-teal boat leaving no wake as it slowly eased through the harbor.

The next time anyone recalls seeing the 19-foot Seaswirl was nearly 3:45 p.m. when the occupants of the Greene Machine heard Eric Bechler’s cries.

Rescue vessels and helicopters searched the ocean off the Orange County coastline for 15 hours over two days before giving up hope of finding Pegye Bechler.

“This accident had all the ingredients of a boating tragedy,” Coast Guard Cmdr. Ken Keane said at the time. “Unfortunately, we see it too often.”

But soon, sheriff’s homicide investigators were wondering whether this was really an accident. They wondered why the woman’s body never floated to the surface and how a strong triathlete could drown in such calm water.

Six days after her disappearance, deputies put Eric through a grueling two-hour questioning, asking intimate details about the Bechlers’ finances, sex life and the $2-million life insurance policy he would collect if his wife was presumed dead.

Eric Bechler said he did not kill his wife, maintaining that he wiped out as Pegye towed him on his body board, emerged from the water and noticed that his wife was no longer in the boat. Perhaps she hit her head on the boat and was knocked out, he explained.

The Grieving

Relatives had no body to bury, so they held a memorial for Pegye Bechler on the beach. A flutist played while Eric and other relatives tossed rose petals into the ocean from a rocky bluff.

About 100 friends and relatives attended the ceremony. Pegye’s father would later describe the memorial as a touching and fitting goodbye to a woman who so loved the outdoors, especially the ocean.

It did not take long, however, for a rift to develop between Pegye’s family and her husband. Within three months, Eric had invited his new girlfriend, an actress and model named Tina New, to live with him in the house he once shared with Pegye.

New, who appeared on “Baywatch,” “Married . . . With Children” and “Silk Stalkings,” turned heads at Newport-area nightclubs. She’s also a part-time nude model whose winning bikini contest video is posted on a Web site in her name.

At the same time, Bechler sent his three children to New Mexico to live with his wife’s parents. Two of the children still live with their grandparents. A third lives with one of Pegye Bechler’s sisters.

Pegye’s parents hired an attorney to help them fight Eric’s attempt to gain control of the missing woman’s estate, estimated at $450,000 in cash and stocks. Unable to pay the mortgage without his wife’s income, Eric Bechler sold the Cliff Drive home at a loss, according to probate court records.

A judge appointed a third-party conservator to control the estate until it was resolved in court. The insurance company refused to pay Bechler the $2 million while the case was under investigation.

The Investigation

For sheriff’s deputies, the case was not so much a whodunit as a how-do-you-prove-it?

The Coast Guard ran tests on the rental boat and concluded it was unlikely that a person operating the boat could be accidentally thrown into the water. The boat company’s owner was equally suspicious.

“I’m absolutely certain it could not have happened the way he said,” Balboa Boat Rentals owner Ralph Rodheim said recently. “I’ve rented it hundreds of times since then. We haven’t had any other problems with it.”

Sheriff’s deputies didn’t get anywhere with their early investigation. Laker told deputies that Bechler had earlier proposed killing his wife. But when he approached Bechler while wearing a hidden recording wire, Bechler denied any role in his wife’s disappearance.

The case stagnated for several months. Then, in October 1999, sheriff’s investigators got what they considered a big break.

Garden Grove police officers called them to say they had responded to a loud argument at Tina New’s apartment. Though Bechler was not there when they arrived, she had a tale to tell.

New told investigators that Bechler had confessed to killing his wife. Bechler said he hit his wife in the head with a dumbbell, then threw her body overboard, anchored with 70 pounds of weights, she said.

“He said she didn’t feel a thing,” New told investigators. New agreed to work with detectives, wearing a hidden wire while the two went on a dinner date. He is recorded on tape making what his attorney described as a “false admission.”

When New asked him why he killed his wife, Bechler answered: ‘Partly for money, partly it’s about the kids. . . . That’s how I justified it in my mind. I felt like I was backed in a corner. Like she was gonna steal the kids away and I’d never see them again.”

New expressed concern that Bechler might one day hurt her. He tried to reassure her by saying: “All I know is that I would never, ever do anything to harm anybody ever again.”

At the restaurant, Bechler told New that he was considering moving to Nevada and starting a new life with a new identity. New dropped off Bechler near Seal Beach, where sheriff’s deputies arrested him on suspicion of murder.

The Trial

The trial of Eric Bechler, entering its sixth week in the Santa Ana courthouse, took its most dramatic turn when Bechler himself took the stand.

Dressed in a sky blue, button-down dress shirt and tan slacks, Bechler answered questions in a soft, polite tone, emphatically denying that there was any murder.

“I did not kill her. I never harmed her,” Bechler said.

He admitted telling New that he did commit the murder after she prodded him in a seductive tone after a night of drinking and drug use.

“I felt she was attracted to that type of person. I wasn’t enough of a risk for her,” Bechler said. “It was a sick thing to do. I just agreed to satisfy her fantasy.”

Veteran criminal defense attorney John Barnett, whose long list of successes includes the 1992 state court acquittal of Los Angeles Police Department Officer Theodore Briseno in the Rodney G. King beating, told jurors that Bechler lied to feed New’s desire for “bad boys.”

He also assailed a lack of physical evidence to support the theory of a bloody bludgeoning on the boat.

Investigators found a few specks of possible blood on the boat but were unable to confirm that it was Pegye Bechler’s. The lack of a body only adds to the doubts about Bechler’s guilt, Barnett said.

New took the stand for four days--three of them under a withering cross examination by Barnett. He focused on her past accusations of violence and wrongdoing against men she’s dated.

For example, New filed a civil lawsuit against former basketball star and Newport Beach resident Dennis Rodman, claiming that he sexually assaulted her. That case is pending.

New admitted lapses in her own veracity. She pleaded guilty last year to impersonating an Orange County woman to withdraw money from her bank account.

She also said she believes she has psychic abilities that were strongest when she was a child. She also said she sounded frustrated during her conversation with Bechler in part because of her concerns about a leaking breast implant she wanted him to pay to fix.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Debora Lloyd maintains that the taped admission is but one strong piece of evidence in her arsenal. Besides statements Bechler made to friend Kobi Laker, there are a pair of missing weights from Bechler’s home gym that prosecutors allege were used in the murder. Additionally, prosecutors introduced testimony that Bechler repeatedly asked his insurance agent about his wife’s policy even before her death.

From the witness stand, Bechler resembled the tan and fit husband and father smiling from family pictures. But at the end of the day, he was shackled by deputies as his mother watched from the courtroom gallery.

Bechler then went home, not to cliffs overlooking Newport Harbor, but to a cell at the Orange County jail in Santa Ana.

As the trial’s end draws near, “you want to laugh because it involves things like falsies and beach volleyball and those kind of hedonistic and self-absorbed things you associate with a place like Newport Beach,” said novelist Parker. “But that’s a real woman who died, somebody’s daughter. You wouldn’t want that to happen to anybody.”