BARNSTABLE, Mass. — Christa Worthington's murder was the second crime that the garbage man standing trial for her slaying blamed on a friend, two police officers testified Friday.

The witnesses said that the day after the fashion writer was found dead on Cape Cod and long before he became a suspect, Christopher McCowen told narcotics officers that his friend, Jeremy Frazier, was selling marijuana and cocaine.

McCowen, who had been caught by a police detective with a small amount of marijuana, offered to help set up a sting operation to get evidence against Frazier, the officers recalled.

"He said he could make a buy easy off Frazier," said Sgt. John Santangelo of the Cape Cod Drug Task Force.

Three years later, after his DNA was matched to semen and saliva on Worthington's body, McCowen told homicide investigators Frazier was the killer.

Story continues

Prosecutors maintain McCowen acted alone and lied about Frazier to pin the crime on someone else. Over the past two days, the state has called a half-dozen witnesses, including Frazier, in an attempt to prove the 23-year-old had nothing to do with the killing.

Santangelo testified that, to his knowledge, the task force did not take McCowen up on his offer to set up Frazier. Although the interview occurred within 24 hours of Worthington's body being discovered, the narcotic officers did not question him about it.

A patrolman present for the interview, Lloyd Oja, said McCowen struck him as nervous and "fidgeting."

Jurors also heard Friday from three young men who attended a raucous house party with Frazier the night McCowen claimed they went together to Worthington's cottage.

Two of the men said they remembered seeing McCowen midway through the party, but not at the end, when the gathering of some 100 young people devolved into a drunken fistfight between Frazier and his friends and another man who had spilled beer on a female acquaintance.

"From what I can recall, I just saw [McCowen] enter the front door and I didn't really keep track of what he was doing after that," said Thomas Bilbo, the 17-year-old host of the party.

He testified that he did not see the trash collector as he tried desperately to keep his brawling guests from breaking his mother's furniture.

"I just told everybody to leave, and I proceeded to clean up the mess," Bilbo said.

Another partygoer, Christopher Bearse, said he walked out of the party with Frazier and another friend and saw them get into a car and drive away together.

"Frazier was with Mulvey, and Mr. McCowen was nowhere in sight?" assistant district attorney Robert Welsh III asked.

"Yes," Bearse said.

In the statement to police shortly after his 2005 arrest, McCowen said he and Frazier drove to Worthington's house together after attending a rap contest.

The 33-year-old's defense claims the statement is the result of coercive interrogation techniques and McCowen's DNA is at the crime scene because he had consensual sex with the 46-year-old victim before her death at the hands of an unknown killer.

The defense, however, has hinted that Frazier might have been involved in the murder.

Defense attorney Robert George cross-examined his alibi witness, Shawn Mulvey, Friday morning about his testimony that Frazier slept on his couch the  night of the murder.  George noted that Mulvey initially told police he did not know McCowen or Frazier and could not remember anything about that evening.

Mulvey said at a later police interview he acknowledged being at the party and with Frazier.

He said his father had told him not to get involved in the case, but he said he decided to come forward with what he actually knew.

George, however, suggested that Mulvey had changed his story so prosecutors would drop charges that he had dealt marijuana. The misdemeanor count was dismissed two months ago.

"The case was dismissed after you gave your second statement in this case?" George asked.

"Yes," Mulvey said. "But they weren't related."

He admitted mentioning the warrant "in, like, one sentence," but said the investigators brushed him off.

"They said, 'Well, you can get up there and take care of it yourself. It's a misdemeanor charge,'" he said.

McCowen is facing murder, aggravated rape and armed burglary charges in the January 2002 murder.

Testimony continues Friday afternoon. The trial is being shown live on Court TV Extra.