NASHVILLE, Tenn. — When Martha Freeman moved back in with her estranged husband in January 2005, she didn't return home alone.

Instead, she secretly brought Rafael Rocha-Perez, her lover and the man who would ultimately kill her husband with her assistance, a Nashville prosecutor said in the pair's first-degree murder trial Tuesday.

"The evidence will show you she had Mr. Perez there secluded away in another bedroom," Davidson County prosecutor Katy Miller told jurors in her opening statement Tuesday. "It took two people to orchestrate this, and it will be clearly shown that those two people were Martha Freeman and Mr. Rocha-Perez."

Miller promised the panel that DNA and fingerprint evidence would prove that no one but the defendants could have brutally beaten and strangled Jeffrey Freeman to death on April 10, 2005, in the couple's upscale Nashville home.

The next day, police found the body of the 44-year-old victim wrapped in a sleeping bag with a black plastic bag tied around his bruised and bloodied head.

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The prosecutor also said that personal items found in a spare bedroom, including clothing, food and a Spanish-English translator, would prove that Rocha-Perez stayed in the home.

The reluctant co-defendants, who avoided eye contact with each other as they sat at the same defense table, face life in prison.

Although Martha Freeman's lawyer acknowledged Tuesday that she kept the undocumented Mexican immigrant hidden in a closet, he denied that she encouraged or participated in the violent death of her husband of 10 years.

"Two men fought over one woman and one man died," defense lawyer Glenn Funk told jurors in his opening statement. "We will not hear any evidence, we will not hear from any witnesses who will testify that Martha Freeman ever intended for her affair with Mr. Rocha-Perez to lead to her husband's death."

Funk blamed Martha Freeman's chronic depression for her decision to wait almost a day to notify police about her husband's dead body in the upstairs bathroom. Even so, he insisted that her decision to do so showed a lack of involvement.

"She did not hide the body, she did not flee, she did not help Rocha-Perez flee," Funk said. "She does in fact delay making her own decision, but she never does anything to assist Mr. Rocha-Perez."

In the time between the slaying and the 911 call, Freeman picked up a anti-depressant prescription at Walgreen's and called her in-laws to say that their son was too sick to make his weekly phone call, according to Miller.