Judge Allows Tape of Murder Suspect : Courts: Peng suggests her husband’s mistress fell on a knife, recording shows. The victim was stabbed 18 times.

SANTA ANA —  A judge ruled Friday that prosecutors may present to jurors a potentially incriminating conversation between murder suspect Li-Yun (Lisa) Peng and her husband, whose mistress Peng allegedly stabbed to death.

In the conversation, taped by sheriff’s investigators, Peng tells her husband that she bit the victim, Ranbing (Jennifer) Ji, and suggests Ji fell on a knife as the two women struggled. Peng, 45, of Rancho Santa Margarita, is charged with killing Ji and suffocating Ji’s 5-month-old son, Kevin, on Aug. 18, 1993.

Prosecutors charge that Peng stabbed Ji 18 times because she was jealous of the woman’s extramarital relationship with Peng’s 52-year-old husband, a manufacturer who fathered Ji’s baby.

The taped remarks could help prosecutors show Peng was at Ji’s Mission Viejo apartment and bolster a case that rests on DNA evidence linking Peng’s saliva to a bite mark on Ji’s left arm.

The conversation with Peng’s husband, wealthy Taiwan businessman Tseng (Jim) Peng, took place at sheriff’s headquarters Jan. 8, 1994, just after she was arrested in connection with the double slaying.

Peng never admitted killing Ji, 25, during the conversation or in an interview with police. The defendant, who was not in court Friday, has pleaded not guilty to both murder charges.

Peng’s defense lawyer, Marshall M. Schulman, argued the conversation, in Chinese, was inadmissible because the couple believed they were talking privately.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Kathleen E. O’Leary approved use of the couple’s conversation during trial, but rejected portions of Lisa Peng’s videotaped interview with police that day, ruling authorities violated her right to an attorney.

O’Leary previously cleared the way for the DNA evidence, which Schulman derided as “voodoo science.”

Jury selection is set for July 17.