One time in 1990 at the Hamburger Stand, David Bush told Trudy Summerford, "I could always kill my wife," she testified Wednesday.

Summerford, then 19, known as Trudy Dooling and having an affair with Bush, said she responded by saying, "Whatever."

"Did you take it seriously?" Natrona County District Attorney Michael Blonigen asked her during the second day of testimony in the first-degree murder trial of David Bush.

"No," she said.

A similar occurrence happened during a drive to Riverton. Again, she said he said it in a funny voice.

Not this time, she said, not on Dec. 7, 1990.

"This was very serious," she said.

During nearly two hours on the witness stand, Summerford said that David Bush never admitted to killing his wife, Lynn Bush, not even when he was drinking or stressed out.

But a conversation between Summerford and David Bush that Friday, Dec. 7, and a phone call the following day are some of the reasons why authorities arrested Bush about 16 years after his wife went missing that weekend.

Bush's defense team on Wednesday asked Summerford why she didn't report either conversation to police until March 11, 2006.

On the day the world outside of David Bush lost contact with Lynn Bush, Summerford drove to Casper and spent the day with David Bush.

She said she drove to Washington Park that Friday morning and met David Bush there. They went to a car dealership, an art museum and Arby's before driving up to Casper Mountain. They drove past a "road closed" sign, she said, and parked at a clearing.

Blonigen asked what Bush said to her in the car at that time.

"My only recollection of that conversation is that he was talking about killing his wife," Summerford said.

About a month earlier, Lynn Bush had learned of the affair, and had called Summerford and said she would always be with her husband. That night, Summerford and David Bush met at a Douglas hotel, where Summerford told Bush she was thinking of leaving him. An argument followed, but Summerford said she decided to stay with him. As family members of David and Lynn Bush have testified, the married couple's relationship grew even more strained up until the point of her disappearance.

No one aside from David Bush has claimed to have seen Lynn Bush after the evening of Dec. 7. That day, on the mountain, Summerford said she tried to dissuade him from talking about killing his wife.

"I said, 'They'll find her and they'll know it was you,'" Summerford said.

They won't be able to identify her, she said he told her. Summerford said she talked to him about a newspaper article she'd read about DNA evidence being used in court.

She said his response was, "That was a bunch of crap and wasn't admissible in court."

She told him they could tell from her hip bones that she'd had a child, that he'd have to scatter her teeth so they couldn't locate them. She said she told him he couldn't get away with it, that he should drop it.

He wouldn't.

"He was pretty insistent on staying on that train of thought," she said. "He kept talking, (so I) tuned him out. Started singing a song in my head."

All 15 members of the jury trained their eyes on her as she told this story in court Monday. Bush, wearing a burgundy dress shirt and a silver- and black-striped tie, looked on without emotion at Summerford, as he has done with all nine witnesses who have testified so far. He occasionally rocked back and forth a little in his chair.

Summerford said they drove down from the mountain at dusk, and he dropped her off at her car at Washington Park.

Before she left, she said he told her: "Don't tell anyone. Don't go to the police. I will kill you."

The next day, Saturday, she received a call at the Douglas Pizza Hut, where she worked, from David Bush. That wasn't unusual, she said, but it was strange that he called the payphone instead of the main line.

"It's done," she said he told her.

She responded, "What?"

"She's gone," she said he said next.

"Where'd she go?"

Bush told her she went to the grocery store to pick up some food for a party, and she didn't come back, Summerford testified.

So, defense attorney Vaughn Neubauer asked, why tell detectives about this on March 11, 2006? Why did Summerford wait more than 15 years to detail these conversations when she'd been cooperative with Casper police in the years following Lynn Bush's disappearance? Why did she withhold the information even though she told investigators that David Bush once encouraged her to go to police?

Neubauer reminded her of the frequent opportunities she had to tell police about the two conversations, during interviews immediately after Lynn Bush disappeared, and during interviews in December of 1992, when she was about to end her relationship with David Bush.

Summerford said she didn't remember the incident on Casper Mountain until she drove up there on her due date, July 4, 1993, because her mom told her the bumpy roads would help induce labor.

Up on the mountain, she said, something clicked.

"It was like getting punched in the stomach," she said.

As for the "It's over" phone call, Summerford said she was afraid she would get in legal trouble for knowing about it. Neubauer reminded her that she hadn't gotten in trouble after admitting to police in 1992 that she'd signed Lynn Bush's name on a car title transfer.

Blonigen asked her if the statement she made last March 11 came before she received a letter of immunity, and she said yes. He asked if she was threatened with charges if she didn't testify or compensated for the testimony, and she said she wasn't. When asked what she got in return for the March 11 interview, she said, "A day in court."

Then, Blonigen asked, "Why now?"

"It was time," Summerford said.

"Time for what?"

"It was time to be able to get this off my chest," Summerford said.

Contact reporter Cory Matteson at (307) 266-0589 or cory.matteson@casperstartribune.net.