CAMDEN, N.J. (Court TV) —The feisty racquetball partner of a New Jersey rabbi testified that three months before his wife was found murdered the religious leader threw down his racket in disgust after a game and asked for help in killing her.

"Fred said 'I wish I could get rid of my [expletive] wife and have her killed on the ground when I go home some day,'" Myron "Pepe" Levin, 76, told the jury. "I says 'What are you [expletive] crazy? What are you nuts?' He says 'Do you know anybody good?' I say 'Get the [expletive] out of out of my head.' 'I says you're [expletive] nuts, stay away from me, you got a lovely wife, stick with it.'"

But on cross-examination defense attorney Jeff Zucker suggested that Levin, a member of Neulander's congregation and former convict didn't mention the incident until his third interview with police and only did so because he was angry over the quality of an expensive Torah he had donated to the synagogue.

Fred Neulander, 60, is facing capital murder charges for the November 1, 1994, slaying of his wife, Carol, who was beaten with a pipe-like object and left for dead on her living room floor.

Prosecutors say the one-time Jewish leader, who began the successful M'Kor Shalom synagogue in Cherry Hill, N.J., with his wife, hired two men to carry out the execution and disguise it as a robbery attempt. His motive for the killing, says the state, was Elaine Soncini, a former Philadelphia radio personality with whom he had conducted a two-year affair. Soncini testified Tuesday that she told the rabbi to divorce his wife by the end of the 1994 year or she would leave him.

Neulander's lawyers admit their client wasn't faithful to his wife, but claim that he had nothing to do with the murder. They say the two men that confessed to the murder and implicated Neulander, Len Jenoff and Paul Daniels, are not reliable witnesses and have wrongly fingered the rabbi as the figurehead in their plot.

Levin, who had a number of run-ins with the law himself, including a racketeering bust for a food stamps operation and a Baltimore arson charge that netted him 24 months in prison, was reportedly known by many, including the defendant, for being in touch with the seedy underbelly of New Jersey. His testimony was hindered by intermittent bouts of memory trouble and a racy temper, but Levin stayed true to his message: Fred Neulander asked for help in killing his wife.

On cross-examination, defense lawyer Zucker seemed to catch the witness — who recently suffered a stroke following a heart valve replacement operation — phasing in and out of lucidity. He asked Levin why it wasn't until his third interview with Cherry Hill police, on March 5, 1995, that he mentioned the racquetball incident.

Levin was unable to explain why his story changed, saying only "I cannot clarify that."

Zucker suggested that Levin was angry at Neulander because of an incident involving a Torah, (a religious scroll of great import to the Jewish faith) that Levin had donated money to help purchase. Levin said he donated between $18,000 and $20,000 to have the Torah purchased in his wife's name, but when he saw the Torah at Neulander's home, it didn't seem to be worth his donation. "I thought I was had," Levin said.

The Torah incident happened after Levin's second interview with police, on February 28, 1995, and before the third, when he told the story of the post-game conversation, Zucker noted. "Of course that would have nothing to do, Mr Levin, with the fact that you felt you had been swindled by Mr. Neulander on the Torah?" the lawyer asked.

Levin paused, stared blankly ahead, and muttered "What's the point there?"

Zucker also locked horns with Levin later when he pressed him as to why his second retelling of the racquetball conversation included an extra expletive.

Anita Hockman, a cantor at Neulander's M'Kor Shalom synagogue who worked with the Neulanders for 13 years, also testified Wednesday, telling the jury about assisting the family with shiva, the Jewish mourning period in which families welcome guests into their home to bring their condolences. The service was held in the family's home, and Hockman said that the rabbi seemed uncomfortable being in the sanitized living room where his wife had been murdered.

Hockman also said that Neulander made a conspicuous appearance during her choir practice the evening of the murder, interrupting as if to make sure he was seen. "It was rare, very rare, to see Rabbi Neulander in the choir rehearsal," the cantor said. "I hadn't seen him for a very long time in rehearsal at all. He kind of stopped the action in the room. It was very unusual to see him enter the room that way."

Hockman then revealed that Neulander admitted his affairs to her. "He came to tell me that he had had two 'indiscretions,' in his words," Hockman said. "He felt it best that I hear it from him." Hockman said the rabbi admitted to having an affair with one woman in particular, Robin Gross, (who she reluctantly named) but not the other, possibly Elaine Soncini.

Earlier on Wednesday, Rebecca Neulander-Rockoff, the daughter of the defendant, testified about two conversations she had with her mother that were interrupted by a stranger, the second of which came immediately before the murder.

On cross-examination, Zucker asked Neulander-Rockoff to detail her late mother's habit of bringing the day's receipts from her bakery business home from work. "I told her I didn't think it was the most prudent idea. It's not safe to travel with that kind of money, to keep it in the house."

The defense claims that a robbery-gone-wrong may have been perpetrated by thieves who knew that Carol Neulander often brought home large amounts of money.

Zucker also asked Neulander-Rockoff how her father was acting when she arrived at the home after the murder. "I would describe him as quiet, just very quiet. A quiet sort of hurting."

Dr. Robert Segal, medical examiner in Camden County, testified about the autopsy he performed on Neulander the morning after the rabbi found her dead in their living room.

Segal said that Carol Neulander was beaten with an object similar to a tire iron at least seven times in the right rear of her head, most of the blows coming while she lay on the ground protecting herself with her hands. He said that, while the blows were heavy enough to crush her skull, she actually died from inhaling her own vomit.

On cross, defense lawyer Dennis Wixted suggested that the physical evidence would not be consistent with Jenoff and Daniels' account of the murder. He noted that the weapon Seigel thought caused the murder, a tire iron, was not the weapon that Jenoff and Daniels eventually said they used, a portion of a weightlifing bar. Wixted also added Segal initially judged a substance found left on Carol Neulander's scalp from the blunt object to be grease, and therefore might further suggest a tire iron.

The trial, which is being broadcast live by Court TV, continues Thursday at 9:00 a.m.