FREDERICK, Md. (AP) - The defense rested in Erika E. Sifrit's double murder trial Friday after their reluctant star witness testified the defendant's "out of control" husband apparently shot and killed a Virginia couple in an Ocean City penthouse.

But Melissa Seling later testified under cross-examination by Worcester County prosecutors that she wasn't sure whether a gun-waving Benjamin Sifrit said that he, his wife or both of them were the killers as he raved about the slayings four days afterward in the same luxury condominium.

The distinction could make all the difference for Mrs. Sifrit, 25, whose lawyers maintain her husband killed Joshua E. Ford, 32, and Martha M. Crutchley, 51, both of Fairfax, Va.

Closing arguments are scheduled for Monday.

The Sifrits, of Duncansville, Pa., near Altoona, both were charged in the May 26, 2002, killings. Police say the victims were dismembered in the master bathroom and their body parts placed in a trash bin in Rehoboth Beach, Del. Partial remains were recovered from a Delaware landfill.

Benjamin Sifrit, 25, was convicted April 9 of second-degree murder for Crutchley's death but acquitted of killing Ford. The former Navy SEAL testified at his trial that he was sleeping in a vehicle outside the condominium when the two were killed, implying his wife did it.

Seling, 24, was a state's witness at that trial. She testified Friday she was coached by Assistant State's Attorney E. Scott Collins before taking the stand in Mrs. Sifrit's defense on the fifth day of the trial.

The Delaware surf shop manager spent 21/4 hours on the witness stand, mostly sparring, sometimes tearfully, with defense attorney Arcangelo M. Tuminelli as he tried to make her repeat statements she made to police 21/2 weeks after her ordeal that Benjamin Sifrit had said he was the killer.

Seling testified she went to the condo with a male friend on the night of May 29 after meeting the Sifrits earlier that day. She said she was fairly sober but the others were drunk.

Shortly after they arrived, she said, Mrs. Sifrit's red leather Coach purse apparently disappeared and Benjamin Sifrit turned threatening. He started waving a gun and told Seling that "people who are going to go out and rip off other people don't deserve to walk the earth."

She said Sifrit showed her an apparent bullet hole in a door and said "the same thing was going to happen to us that happened to the other people."

Defense attorney Arcangelo M. Tuminelli asked her what people she thought he meant.

"The people that were murdered," she said.

"And Ford and Crutchley were two people who what? What did he do to them?" Tuminelli asked.

"Apparently he shot and killed them," Seling replied.

She also testified that she never saw Mrs. Sifrit with a gun. She said Sifrit put his gun away after Seling told Mrs. Sifrit he was scaring her.

Another witness, a former Navy buddy of Benjamin Sifrit testified that Sifrit had joked in 1999 about killing and dismembering someone three years before the Ocean City slayings.

Michael McInnis said they talked over beers at a strip club about killing McInnis' wife, from whom he is now separated.

"It was a joke. I said, 'Send you down there to get rid of her, and I'd be up here for a good alibi,'" McInnis said.

McInnis, another state's witness at Benjamin Sifrit's trial, said his friend also described how he would dispose of a body by covering the floor with plastic, cutting off the arms, legs and head, packaging the pieces in plastic bags and placing them in one or more trash bins.

Earlier Friday, prosecutors announced they were dropping several charges against Mrs. Sifrit, including being an accessory after the fact. They wouldn't explain the decision, but they apparently hoped to prevent the defense from introducing a statement Sifrit made at his own trial.