FREEHOLD, N.J. — Several jurors shed tears Friday as the confessed killer of Carol Neulander testified to how he and another man beat her to death with a lead pipe and fled with her purse to divert suspicion from Neulander's husband, whom prosecutors claim commissioned the paid hit.

Rabbi Fred Neulander, who could face the death penalty if convicted, partially covered his eyes as Jenoff described the Nov. 1, 1994, slaying of his wife of 28 years in chilling detail. This is the second trial for the rabbi; his first ended with a hung jury last fall.

Carol Neulander, 52, who was bludgeoned to death in her living room by Jenoff and an accomplice, had met Jenoff once before she answered the door of her Cherry Hill, N.J., home on that day eight years ago.

"I said, 'Hi, it's me. I'm back. Is the rabbi home?' " Jenoff, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, testified. "She said no, 'Why don't you come in?' "

Holding his hands in front of his face as if in prayer, Jenoff, 55, described following Carol Neulander into the dining room. She never saw it coming, he testified.

"I put my left hand on her shoulder. That way she couldn't turn around and look at me," Jenoff said. "With my right hand I grabbed my lead pipe, sir. I smacked her head in, sir, the back of her head. I struck her once that I remember. Everything was like a haze. I left like I was going through a time warp. I remember hitting her very hard once."

Jenoff, choking back emotion at times, said Carol Neulander never was told the reason he was there.

"I could see that her knees were buckling, as if she was going to fall. I heard her say, 'Why? Why?' — like why was I doing this," he continued. I then turned the door and [Paul Daniels] came in and I gave him the lead pipe."

Jenoff said he went and looked for the burgundy pocketbook that Fred Neulander allegedly assured him would be there.

"[Daniels] proceeded to again also to bash Mrs. Neulander's head in with the lead pipe. I heard the thumps of him hitting her," Jenoff related. "... I said, 'Come on, Paul, let's go."

Prosecutor James Lynch then showed Jenoff a photo of Carol Neulander's badly beaten body. A retired medical examiner previously testified that she choked on her own vomit after receiving numerous skull fractures and lacerations.

"Is that how you left her?" Lynch asked.

"Yes, sir," Jenoff said.

According to Jenoff, he dumped the pipe and windbreakers he and Daniels wore in a dumpster en route to his usual Tuesday night visit with a friend, an Evesham, N.J., police detective, Ed Brown. Jenoff said he arrived at the police station about 9:10 p.m. with coffee and cigarettes and Brown remarked that he was later than usual.

Fred Neulander arrived home from Temple M'Kor Shalom about 9:20 p.m. and found his wife's body and called 911.

In testimony, Jenoff claimed that Neulander orchestrated the entire homicide and threatened to kill Jenoff if he did not fulfill his agreement to kill Carol Neulander in exchange for $30,000.

The rabbi's friend

Jenoff testified earlier Friday that he met Fred Neulander in June 1993 when Jenoff, a recovering alcoholic, began questioning his Jewish faith. Neulander counseled Jenoff regularly for almost a year and agreed to allow Jenoff to lead an Alcoholics Anonymous gathering at the synagogue on Tuesday nights.

Jenoff told jurors that he lied to the rabbi about having worked for the CIA and having killed people in the past. He speculated that was why Neulander allegedly approached him in the late spring of 1994 and asked him if he would kill an enemy of Israel and Jews in Cherry Hill.

On another occasion, Jenoff testified, Neulander put his hand on his elbow and got serious.

"He said, 'Am I talking to the right person?' I was scared," Jenoff testified. "I was scared because I had told the rabbi a lot of lies about my past, about the CIA, that I was a tough guy. I said, 'Yes, you are, rabbi."

As time went on that summer, Jenoff said he hoped Neulander did not really want someone killed. But then one day he and Neulander took a ride in the rabbi's Accura.

"He took me to 204 Highgate Lane in Cherry Hill, which I later learned was his house," Jenoff said. "He indicated to me that that was the house where this evil person lived ... He said that was his house. I was taken aback. He said the person you would kill is my wife."

Best and worst witness

Jenoff is the prosecution's best, and worst, witness. Prosecutors had already indicted Neulander for murder when Jenoff stepped forward in May 2000 to claim that he and Daniels had carried out the killing on the rabbi's orders.

Neulander's defense claims that Jenoff knew that Carol Neulander often took large amounts of cash home from the bakery and killed her during a robbery — not a paid hit — and that Jenoff falsely implicated the rabbi to limit his liability to a charge of aggravated assault.

Jenoff, however, said it was Neulander's idea to make the killing look like a robbery gone bad. After rejecting New York, northern New Jersey and crime-ridden Camden as the potential locales for the obtaining a handgun, Neulander decided that the murder should be done in his home, on a Tuesday night, with a blunt object, Jenoff testified.

"He said it was the best time and the best place. Nobody would ever suspect anything and indicated that if did it right, it would like a botched burglary or robbery," Jenoff said. "It wouldn't look like a professional hit. He wanted it to look like a botched robbery."

Jenoff said he got the two or three-foot section of pipe from his apartment building. It was being used to prop open a door. The pocketbook that was taken during the murder was tossed in a Dumpster in an alley in Philadelphia.

Jenoff pocketed the $125 that was in it.

Jenoff is scheduled to be on the witness stand when the trial resumes on Wednesday. Neulander's lawyer will get a chance to cross-examine sometime Wednesday and is expected to take at least a day.

Prosecutors claim that as a rabbi of one of southern New Jersey's largest congregations, Neulander could not risk the scrutiny divorcing his wife might bring. He had affairs with at least three women, promising his mistress at the time of the killing that they would "be together" by her birthday that December, according to testimony.

The trial is being broadcast by Court TV.