CAMDEN, N.J. — A confessed hitman who says a prominent New Jersey rabbi hired him to kill his wife stuck to his story Tuesday, even as defense lawyers portrayed him as "a successful, compelling and convincing liar" who tried to recoup payment for the murder by investigating the very crime he had committed.

"Your client was paying me cash because I killed his wife at his behest," Len Jenoff, 56, told defense lawyer Dennis Wixted. "It was payment for the murder. If I would have submitted a bill to you for $12,000, you would have wondered what the hell that was for."

According to Jenoff, Fred Neulander, the defendant in this Camden County, N.J., capital murder trial, paid just more than half of the $30,000 he promised for the death of his wife of 28 years, Carol Neulander. After the murder made further bulk payments difficult, Neulander allegedly hired Jenoff, a licensed private investigator, as a way to continue paying the hitman.

Jenoff and his roommate, Paul Daniels, confessed to bludgeoning Carol Neulander, then 50, to death in the living room of her Cherry Hill home on Nov. 1, 1994. The two men pleaded guilty to manslaughter and are still awaiting sentencing.

Prosecutors say that Neulander, founder of the successful M'Kor Shalom synagogue in Cherry Hill, wanted his wife dead so that he could continue a two-year affair with former Philadelphia radio personality Elaine Soncini.

But Neulander's lawyers say their client has been wrongly implicated as the mastermind of his wife's brutal murder by Jenoff, a practiced liar.

On Tuesday, defense lawyer Wixted tried to show the jury that everything from Jenoff's career to his version of the murder was culled from mob movies, associates' credentials and detective novels or fabricated wholesale.

Wixted presented a large placard of the curriculum vitae that Jenoff used as an investigative consultant, asking the former alcoholic to account for the various credentials he had listed. Jenoff's falsified accomplishments included attending the FBI academy in Quantico, Va., and the CIA intelligence officer program, testifying before Congress, working as a consultant for the presidential commission on organized crime, and serving as vice president at the Playboy Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., where his CIA-assigned task was to mix with terrorists to glean information about their activities.

Some of Jenoff's credentials, Wixted added, weren't stolen from the pages of Tom Clancy novels or borrowed from acquaintances but were of his own invention. "Would it be fair to say that some of this stuff you just created ... just made it up?" the lawyer asked.

"Yes," Jenoff admitted.

Jenoff's identity was so elaborately constructed, Wixted implied, that the confessed hitman had begun to believe it himself. The lawyer noted that in a May 5, 2000, statement, Jenoff said, "It was a reality, I became that person. I believed it. I believed it, and I got the whole world to believe it."

Using transcripts, the lawyer tried to show the jury that if Jenoff was capable of lying to a 23-member grand jury in 1997 (three years before confessing to the murder), his testimony on behalf of the state last Thursday and Friday could also have been fabricated.

In particular, Wixted attacked three claims Jenoff made last week: that Neulander had provided a diagram of his house to aid in the murder, that Carol Neulander had screamed "why, why" when Jenoff first struck her with a solid metal barbell, and that Neulander and Jenoff discussed killing the rabbi's friend Myron "Pepe" Levin with a stun gun. Jenoff had revealed none of these details before his recent testimony, Wixted said.

"Would it be fair to say that your version gets better and better?" the lawyer asked. "You're not embellishing this story to make it sound better in front of a jury, are you?

"No sir, I swear to God I'm not," Jenoff replied.

"We know you swear to God. But you swear to God a lot of times," Wixted shot back, pointing out Jenoff's many admitted instances of perjury.

Jenoff maintained that he had been telling the truth since he confessed to the crime, at the urging of Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Nancy Phillips, in May 2000.

The defense lawyer further suggested that Jenoff had orginally provide a toned-down version of the murder (in which he said that Daniels alone struck the victim) because he was smitten with the reporter.

"I was infatuated by her," Jenoff admitted. "She was single. I was single. And I thought she was an attractive woman. I was impressed by her journalism as well." But Jenoff denied that was the reason he gave the story he did.

The trial, which is being broadcast live by Court TV, continues with more cross-examination of Jenoff at 9:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday.