SAN DIEGO — The judge who will decide whether there is enough evidence to try Richard Tuite for the murder of Stephanie Crowe spent Wednesday afternoon listening to another man confess.

Judge Gale Kaneshiro screened a grainy, five-year-old videotape in which teenager Joshua Treadway told a police interrogator Stephanie's brother, Michael, and another friend, Aaron Houser, stabbed the girl to death and he helped by hiding the 5-inch knife used to kill her.

"I asked [Houser] what went down and he told me Michael went in and kept her quiet, held her mouth and he took care of the rest," Treadway told a detective on the Feb. 10, 1998 tape.

Tuite, a 33-year-old drifter, is facing murder charges in the 12-year-old's death, but her brother and two friends are also under fire in Kaneshiro's preliminary hearing. Tuite's lawyers say they will prove his innocence by implicating Treadway, Houser and Michael Crowe.

Crowe, like Treadway, initially confessed but then recanted, saying investigators coerced the boys' statements after hours of intense grilling. A year later, on the eve of the teens' trial, DNA tests ordered by Treadway's lawyer revealed the victim's blood on the shirt of Tuite, a methamphetamine addict and schizophrenic who was seen wandering in the Crowe's Escondido neighborhood the night of the murder.

The revelation shook the credibility of local law enforcement and raised serious questions about reliability of confessions. Ultimately, the teenagers filed a federal civil suit against the district attorney and police department, and county sheriffs and state prosecutors stepped in to retackle the murder investigation.

The result was Tuite's arrest last year. Kaneshiro is expected to determine this month whether the prosecutors' case is strong enough for trial.

Joshua Treadway, now a 20-year-old community college student, came to court for the tape viewing Wednesday and sat at the prosecutors' table. It was the first time Treadway had seen the interview unedited.

On the tape, Treadway, then 15, hunched over his jeans and sweatshirt, giving the low-quality camera a blurry view of the top of his head. In court, dressed in a red oxford, black cardigan and black pants, he stared intently at the TV monitor and often scribbled long notes to prosecutors David Druliner and Gary Schons.

During the videotaped interview, Treadway initially told officers he knew nothing about Stephanie's murder. She was found stabbed nine times in her bedroom doorway the morning of Jan. 21, 1998. Her parents, sister, brother and grandmother told police they had heard no unusual noises during the night.

But as the Escondido police detective Chris McDonough questioned Treadway, he added to his story, first saying that Houser only told him about the killing afterwards. Later, he said Houser and Michael Crowe plotted the killing for two or three weeks and told him from the start his job would be to get rid of evidence.

"I knew Mike kinda had a grudge against [Stephanie] and Aaron was obsessed with killing," he told the detective. He described Houser as "cunning" and manipulative and said Michael Crowe was interested in "the Gothic torture deal" and liked to dress in black.

Defense lawyer Brad Patton said the tape showed "the maturation of lies" by Treadway, but prosecutor Schons said he plans to introduce hours of other interrogation footage to put the confessions "in context."

"We believe those statements are coerced and unreliable," Schons said outside court.

At one point on the tape, Treadway complained about the pressure police were asserting on him, saying, "As a kid coming in to the police station and talking, it really scares me."

The prosecutor's condemnation of the police work is only one of the counterintuitive stances in the case. Tuite's defense is also relying heavily on the early police investigation. And Wednesday, an Escondido police detective seemed to bolster the defense case. Detective Barry Sweeney, the first detective at the crime scene, testified for the defense that there were no signs of an intruder at the Crowe home. He also questioned Michael Crowe's behavior immediately following his sister's death. The detective said the teen sat stonefaced and apart from his family while they huddled on a living room couch sobbing.

Much of the remainder of the hearing will involve taped interviews with the teenagers. Kaneshiro watched more than two hours of Treadway's confession Wednesday and will view the remainder Thursday morning.