Sacto 9-1-1

However, Dain Weiner, Colver's attorney, said Tylar Witt, then 14, committed the killing and that Colver, then 19, only showed up after the fact.

He said Colver was so in love with the girl that he even showed the bloody knife to his friends and confessed to the crime.

"It was a brutal, vicious murder but it was not committed by Stephen Colver; it was committed by her daughter, Tylar."

He said when Colver arrived at the house the girl had a "knife in her hand ... covered with blood" and "she told him that she had killed her mother."

Colver, a young man whom friends said had a fascination with Japanese anime and once dreamed of becoming a math teacher, looked on as a prosecutor described him killing Witt.

Tylar Marie Witt is scheduled as a witness for the prosecution in exchange for a plea deal that can free her from prison at 29.

Colver faces 25 years to life if convicted in a murder case heavily woven from the teens' lurid journals describing love and a quest to kill after Joanne Witt kicked Colver out of her house and reported him to authorities for alleged statutory rape.

Earlier authorities said Joanne Witt agreed to take Colver in after her daughter said he needed a place to say, while asserting he was a platonic "big brother" figure and gay. But events spiraled into anger, then violence, prosecutors allege, after Joanne Witt discovered that Colver and her daughter were in a sexual relationship.

Witt threw him out after finding her daughter undressed in a utility closet in his room and filed a statutory rape complaint against him with the El Dorado County Sheriff's department.

Authorities said Tylar wrote in her journal: "My mother is driving me insane. I can't stand her company for more than five minutes. I hate here. She is bipolarly (sic) insane and is turning me into the same thing. I just wish she would die, somehow, some way...and leave me the (expletive) alone."

Deputies responded to a service call at Joanne Witt's spacious house on Tattinger Court in a gated El Dorado Hills community for a report on a 14-year-old girl assaulting her mother.

Authorities say events became deadly after she gave her daughter an ultimatum to tell the truth about their relationship to detectives.

When Tylar refused to do so, her mother gave detectives the girl's journal graphically describing the teens' sexual relationship.

Prosecutors say that Colver, in his own journal, wrote that he was so devoted to Tyler Witt that he would "travel through the pits of hell" and "take the life of another" to be with her.

The girl allegedly later penned a story, "The Killer and his Raven," set in medieval times and teens who had to free themselves from an oppressive mother. Suder contends the story details the teen's anger after her mother handed over her real-life diary.

"That is when there dreams shattered," the Raven story reads. "That is when their hope vanished, and that is when this man, this 19-year-old man, became a killer," Suder said.

The story went on to say the girl "spiked her mother's whisky with herbs from the forest" and that "at round one in the morning the girl snuck the boy into her house. He stabbed her in her sleep, killing her and freeing themselves."

Authorities say Witt told a friend she spiked her mother's brandy with Vicodin so she would pass out and then called Colver. A toxicology report revealed normal prescription levels of Valium - not Vicodin - in her mother's system.

El Dorado County detective Richard Fitzgerald testified in a preliminary hearing that Colver told a friend later that he killed "Tylar's mom," stabbing her in the chest, neck and throat after scaling a back fence to bypass a neighborhood security gate. The detective said Colver then went to his car and retrieved a shopping bag containing a bloody knife.

Joanne Witt's body was found in her home June 15 after co-workers at the El Dorado County Department of Transportation, where she worked in the engineering unit, reported her missing.

Authorities say Witt and Colver dyed their hair black and fled to the Bay Area in what they told friends was a suicide pact. Detectives searching a San Francisco Holiday Inn room, where the pair stayed, found bowls containing cereal and rat poison.

After days on the run, the tens were arrested outside a San Bruno cell phone store June 17. Investigators said they found Colver's journal in his car.

"I would go to hell and back for her. I would bear eternal damnation just to be with her," read an entry introduced during the preliminary hearing.

KCRA: Trial of 'forbidden love' begins - May 17, 2011