NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Ten years to the day since Janet March was last seen alive, prosecutors rested their murder case Tuesday against her husband, former Nashville attorney Perry March.

One of the state's final witnesses was a police official who told jurors March considered accepting a plea bargain in exchange for admitting that he killed his wife and mother of his two children.

"He said he wanted to close this chapter in his life," Nashville Metro Police Det. Pat Postiglione testified Tuesday. (VIDEO)

"He said that he intensely loved Janet [but] prior to the Janet incident, he was not involved in any type of criminal activity," Postiglione said.

Postiglione described his conversation with the defendant on a flight from Los Angeles to Nashville, after March was arrested in California on Aug. 12, 2005, for second-degree murder, evidence tampering and abuse of a corpse.

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March claims he last saw his 33-year-old wife on Aug. 15, 1996, when she left their West Nashville home with her bags packed after an argument.

But Davidson County prosecutors contend March killed his wife in a rage after she told him she wanted a divorce. Her body has not been found.

Postiglione testified that even though March denied killing his wife, he said he was "scared s---less" and would be willing to serve "no more than seven years and no less than five" in a possible plea deal with prosecutors.

But lawyers for March claim the 45-year-old defendant only raised the possibility of a plea to avoid the maximum sentence.

"He told you that even though he wasn't guilty, to avoid the possibility of being convicted and sentenced to 30 years, he would consider taking a plea deal?" defense attorney William Massey asked.

"He said that if he could get a deal, he would consider it," Postiglione said, adding that throughout the three-hour flight, March asked him about the evidence against him.

Prosecutors called 46 witnesses over seven days to bolster their contention that March killed the children's book illustrator after she found out about a $24,000 settlement that March was paying out in a sexual harassment claim from a paralegal.

On Saturday, the six-men, six-women jury panel viewed a videotaped deposition from March's father, Col. Arthur March, in which the 78-year-old witness described transporting Janet March's remains from a plot of land near the March home to Kentucky

The elder March testified that some time after Yom Kippur, which fell on Sept. 23 in 1996, the pair moved the body after his son found out that her initial burial plot was about to become a construction site.

As their last witness, the state called residential developer Sharon Bell, who testified that Perry March was her corporate attorney during negotiations to buy an 100-acre plot of land about four miles from the March home, near the area where Col. March claims the body was buried.

Bell testified that in September 1996, March was involved in the sale of one the lots, and knew that construction on the land would probably be starting soon thereafter.