couldn t take it anymore. he was tired of it. reporter: about seven months before pegye vanished, kobe says he and eric had a conversation that kobe describes as haunting him ever since. eric asked me about what he thought what i thought of the idea of him killing his wife. and i was pretty much shocked. i didn t know what to say. he told me that he was thinking of taking her out to the ocean and dumping her in a barrel. he said when he saw there was a boating accident and eric s wife was missing, he knew right then and there, he saw it on tv, he knew that he had killed his wife. and he lied to us. he said because he panicked and was afraid and he didn t know what to do. reporter: detectives convinced kobe to wear a wire and to meet eric at a restaurant in orange county. eric had no idea that police were listening in.
i understood why. reporter: all they saw was this hot young woman who had been brought in to replace their missing daughter. right. right. exactly three months to the day. i can t even imagine what they were thinking. reporter: pegye s family wasn t alone. detective sean murphy had also noticed the new woman in eric bechler s life. she was ostentatious. she was just a hot number as they say. she was cohabitating with him right after this horrible boating accident with his wife. reporter: so murphy arranged to bump into tina. said hey, if you have any information about this boating accident involving eric, your boyfriend, just give us a call. i gave her my card with my number on it. reporter: nothing came of it. tina didn t call. but someone else did. coming up, the best friend has second thoughts. kobe laker goes under cover. i basically made you look like a saint.
he said his marriage was good, there was no problems with it. reporter: you didn t take his word for it? no. in our game we don t take anyone s word for anything. we look into it. that s what we did. reporter: they met with the improbably named kobe laker. eric s best friend. and kobe backed up eric. they had a terrific marriage and there was no problems whatsoever. reporter: but if the marriage seemed solid, there were questions about pegye. at least according to linda bechler, eric s mother. linda says pegye told her something in confidence just before she disappeared. she stopped me on the stairway as i was leaving and said, came up and said i have to talk to you. she said i m afraid i m going to jail. reporter: according to court documents, about a year before pegye disappeared, the couple sold their physical therapy business to another company but they stayed on as employees. then just four months before
extra. with a new live-in girlfriend, eric bechler seemed to be recovering quickly from losing his wife pegye and that didn t sit well with quite a few people. certainly not the police or pegye s family. but eric s best friend, what exactly did he know and how far would he go to get proof? reporter: to detective sean murphy it sounded more than suspicious. eric bechler taking up with a gorgeous redhead just three months after his wife was lost at sea. but murphy didn t have much more than a gnawing in his gut until his phone rang. we got a call from kobe s lawyer, said he wanted to arrange an interview again with kobe. reporter: kobe laker, eric s best friend and volleyball buddy. he told sheriff s detectives that the bechler marriage was great. now he had a different story. eric s told me on several
were listening in. even so, he stuck to his story that pegye s death was a terrible accident. i was there. i know what happened. i tried so hard to understand that people can think anything else. you never said hey, look, man, i don t know what the [ bleep ] you guys are talking about. i m innocent. you never said anything about anything. i have so. do i have to say it every week? reporter: kobe tried again. i protected you. i basically made you look like a saint in the interview i had with the detectives. reporter: a dead end. but detectives were now convinced that eric killed his wife. even though it didn t lead to anything, that conversation with kobe, that got you from suspicion to knowing? yeah, it moved it all the way over. we knew we had a homicide. reporter: but knowing it and proving it were two very different things. you didn t get to process that boat as a crime scene for almost a week. right.