While accused murderer Gary Marvin Repp Jr. told police that he wanted to save his marriage, his wife apparently had different ideas.

Prosecutors presented extensive audio and videotaped interviews between Repp and detectives during Tuesday’s continuing trial of the former Oregon State Police trooper, who is accused of killing his wife, Kerry. In the interviews, Repp gave lengthy accounts of his and his wife’s history, her alleged self-esteem issues and details of the week leading up to her death.

Repp agreed to the interviews, conducted before his arrest, and before police told him his wife had been murdered.

Kerry Repp was found shot to death in her bedroom on May 4, 2002.

"She didn’t think she was very pretty, but she was beautiful," Repp said of his wife in his first interview with police.

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Kerry Repp was a good wife and mother who kept the house clean, Repp said as he began to cry during the interview. Kerry worked numerous retail jobs and learned new sports with her husband, but she had confidence problems, he said.

The couple had always had their problems, Repp said, but Kerry started to withdraw from him when she heard the family would be moving to Lakeview once he graduated from the OSP training academy. The couple also was awaiting his overseas deployment with his Oregon Army National Guard Unit. Due to leave about a week after the date of Kerry’s murder, Repp would be gone about a year.

"We had a lot of things hit us at the same time," Repp told detectives.

Then Kerry Repp told her husband she had become pregnant with another man’s child.

Repp admitted that the news hurt him, but said he didn’t believe in abortion and wanted to patch up the relationship. He eventually came to be excited about the baby’s birth, he said. Kerry, he said, vowed that she wanted nothing to do with the father of her baby.

But friends and co-workers of Kerry Repp testified that she was never so happy as the week before her husband was to leave for Egypt with his National Guard unit.

"She had the biggest smile on her face. The smile actually went to her eyes," said friend Sheila Mapes, who worked with Kerry Repp at JC Penney.

"She was finally free."

With the help of her father, Ron Johnson, Kerry Repp first consulted a divorce lawyer in March 2002. The divorce papers were filed in court a month later. But Repp, who had been at the OSP training academy from December 2001 to April 2002, was never notified. Serving her husband with divorce papers at the academy might have made him angry, Kerry told her attorney, James Mueller.

"She described Mr. Repp as a very controlling individual," Mueller said.

Reach reporter Sarah Lemon at 776-4487, or e-mail slemon@mailtribune.com.