Redwood City, Calif. ? In one of the last recorded telephone calls between Scott Peterson and his mistress, she confronted him about the disappearance of his wife, and he confessed he had been lying about his marital status and whereabouts.

“The media has been telling everyone that I had something to do with her disappearance,” Peterson told Amber Frey in the Jan. 6, 2003, call. “So the past two weeks I’ve been hunted by the media. … I know that I am, you know, I’m destroyed.”

Later in the conversation, Frey said, “So, you know, you and I…”

“Are destroyed,” Peterson said.

Prosecutors in Peterson’s double murder trial resumed Thursday playing tapes of phone calls between Peterson and Frey that were recorded as authorities searched for Laci Peterson in late December 2002 and early January 2003.

The audio tapes are an effort by authorities to show jurors that Peterson’s motive to kill his wife and their unborn child was to be with Frey.

Frey, a massage therapist who has become the government’s star witness, did not take the stand Thursday and sat in the courtroom audience only briefly. In earlier testimony, she told jurors that she called police after discovering that her lover was not only married, but suspected in the disappearance of his pregnant wife.

At the request of police, she began recording her calls with Peterson with a device bought for her by the Modesto Police Department. Ultimately, more than 300 calls between Peterson and Frey were recorded.

In a Jan. 6 call heard by jurors Thursday, Peterson, who had pretended for weeks to be calling Frey from Europe, confessed to her that he had been lying.

“I am so sorry I’m going to hurt you in this way. I don’t want to do this over the phone,” Peterson said. “I want to tell you this, I want to be there in person to tell you this.

“During the last couple of weeks I have lied to you that I’ve been traveling.”

Instead, Peterson said that he had spent the past weeks helping authorities search for his wife.

“You’ve been calling … having conversations with me when all this is happening?” Frey asked.

“Yeah,” Peterson said, and Frey responded, “Really? Isn’t that a little twisted, Scott?”

He answered, “It is.”

In a call later that day, Frey asks Peterson why she shouldn’t be afraid of him. He responded, “I am not an evil person. … I would never hurt anyone.”