Friends of El Dorado Hills slaying suspect Steven Paul Colver testified Thursday that he confessed to killing the mother of his then-14-year-old girlfriend and declared they needed to die in a suicide pact so they could live together in eternity.

Matthew Widman, 19, a friend Colver and his girlfriend Tylar Marie Witt knew as "God," testified in a Placerville courtroom that the pair met with him the morning after Witt's mother, Joanne Witt, was brutally stabbed to death in the master bedroom of her gated home on Tattinger Court.

Widman said the trio were alone at Colver's father's house, smoking marijuana and sharing lines of cocaine, when Colver, then 19, said he had something important to tell Widman – and then retrieved a bloody butcher knife from his car. Colver set down the knife in a shopping bag and said, "I killed Ty's mom," Widman testified.

He said Colver told him: "I stabbed her in the stomach and the throat."

Tylar Witt spoke little, Widman said, but told him she saw her mother die.

Joanne Witt, 47, died after at least 20 stab wounds, including to her chest, neck and shoulder. Her death came after she evicted Colver, a boarder in her house, and filed a statutory rape report against him over a sexual relationship with her daughter.

Prosecutors say Colver entered the bedroom and killed Joanne Witt with a knife taken from his restaurant job, after Tylar Witt, armed with a kitchen knife from the house, collapsed on the floor unable to continue.

Now 16, Witt accepted a plea bargain that could make her eligible for parole at 29.

Colver, now 21, faces 25 years to life if convicted.

Another friend, Matt Bogert, who heard about the crime from Widman, testified Thursday that he called Colver and angrily demanded to know what he did and why.

"He said that he killed his girlfriend's mom, that her body is in her bedroom covered with a blanket and that he's really sorry for bringing me into this," said Bogert, 21.

Bogert, nicknamed "Squishy," said Colver told him that he and Witt were driving to San Francisco where they intended to commit suicide. Bogert said he tried to talk Colver out of it, but Colver told him that it was their only recourse to be together.

"I can't really live without her," Bogert said Colver told him. "We need to do this."

Two days after Joanne Witt's body was found, Colver and Witt were arrested in San Bruno on June 17. Authorities found cereal bowls laced with rat poison in a hotel room the pair had occupied in San Francisco.

El Dorado County Sheriff's Detective Jeff Liekauf testified that Tylar Witt addressed her dead mother in a suicide note, declaring that Joanne Witt could no longer stand in the way of Tylar's "forbidden love" with Colver and that the teen lovers "can spend eternity together as death sweeps us away."

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee's Peter Hecht, (916) 326-5539.

• Read more articles by Peter Hecht