Prosecutor Calls Bechler ‘Ice Man’

A prosecutor urged an Orange County jury Tuesday to convict a Newport Beach man of murdering his wife during a 1997 boat cruise, calling him an “ice man” who saw the woman’s death as a ticket to riches.

But the man’s attorney assailed the evidence as unreliable and noted that a lack of blood in the couple’s rented boat casts doubt on the prosecution’s theory that the woman was bludgeoned to death.

Jurors are expected to begin deliberations today in the murder trial of Eric Bechler, the man prosecutors say dumped his wife’s body at sea and then unsuccessfully tried to collect on her $2-million life insurance policy.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Debora Lloyd told the jury that Bechler wanted the insurance money to continue funding an affluent lifestyle.

“That was a taste he liked, like a shark,” Lloyd said. “He wasn’t going to give it up.”

Sheriff’s deputies spent 2 1/2 years investigating the case before arresting Bechler last year on suspicion of killing his wife, Pegye, during a July 6, 1997, cruise off Newport Beach. Her body was never found.

The prosecution built its case against Bechler around an alleged admission to his girlfriend, former “Baywatch” actress Tina New. According to New, Bechler said he bludgeoned his wife with a dumbbell and then dumped her body, anchored with weights, into the ocean.

Defense attorney John Barnett told the seven-woman, five-man jury that criminalists would have found Pegye Bechler’s blood in the boat if she had been clubbed to death with heavy weights.

“The prosecution has a problem they can’t get rid of: This boat wasn’t wiped down, and there’s no human blood on it. That means it couldn’t have happened the way Tina says Eric said it happened. And it didn’t.”

Bechler, 33, maintains that his wife vanished while driving the boat with him in tow on a bodyboard.

Lloyd told the jury that Bechler showed little interest in the search for his wife while aboard the rescue boat, even dozing off during the hunt.

The prosecutor also argued that Bechler’s sob-filled interview with sheriff’s homicide detectives after his wife’s disappearance was not believable, particularly considering the couple’s marital problems.

“He’s blubbering. He’s crying without tears. Wasn’t that a little overboard? Wasn’t that a little too much?” Lloyd said. “Is that the reaction you’d get from a person reading a book on divorce?”

As Lloyd described Bechler’s alleged plot, his wife’s mother buried her face in her hands and then dabbed her eyes with tissue. She sat in a rear row of the courtroom between two of her surviving daughters.

Bechler, meanwhile, frequently shook his head in disbelief as Lloyd spoke. His mother, seated two rows deep in the audience, listened intently with a yellow legal pad in her lap.

If convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances of murder for financial gain and while lying in wait, Bechler faces a possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors decided not to pursue the death penalty.