A Deadly Game (48 page)

For one thing, Geragos conceded, "I think he's already universally convicted in the court of public opinion. I don't think there's anybody that you can talk to that doesn't just assume his guilt." But the attorney noted that "part of why people go into criminal defense is to defend the underdog and to try to make it a truly adversarial system. And that is definitely intriguing in this case."

"So what's the downside?" King asked.

"Well, the downside is that it's a monumental undertaking, in terms of time, number one, and effort, and I suppose, as well, the other clients and the impact of the other lawyers in my practice.

And there's a whole lot of other factors, others that I won't even get into on the air."

When pressed, Geragos did claim that he was "tremendously impressed" by Scott. "And obviously, that's something that leans towards me taking the case as well."

At one point in the program, the show was opened up to callers. To the surprise of many, Lee Peterson phoned in to confront legal analyst Nancy Grace, a passionate believer in Scott's guilt. The exchange was heated, with a lot of cross talk.

"Nancy Grace," he said, "I've watched many programs. I don't like to watch them, but it kind of keeps me informed, and I can feel the public sentiment. And I just have to say, for some reason you seem to have a personal stake in this, a personal vendetta against my son and I do not understand it. ... It is so obvious that you are just caught up in this thing and there's no room for, you know, innocence until proven guilty. And I'm just appalled by that. I don't think that's your place, to be a spokesman for ... the district attorney ..."

"I know he may not believe it," Grace responded, "but my heart goes out to [Lee] and the pain his family's having. But I am speaking on behalf of what I believe to be true, on behalf of Laci Peterson, neither against Scott, for Scott, for the state, against the state, but what I believe to be true regarding her murder."

"You are speculating on these facts as much as I am," Lee Peterson argued.

"And you are believing what your son is telling you."

As Peterson began to respond, Grace interjected.
  
*

"Please don't interrupt me," Peterson asked. "You've had your say here for months, and you've crucified my son on national media. And he's a wonderful man. You have no idea of his background and what a wonderful son and wonderful man he is. You have no knowledge of that and you sit there as a judge and jury, I guess, and you're convincing him on the national media, and you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself."

"Sir, I think he should be ashamed of himself, as whoever is responsible for the death of Laci Peterson," Grace responded. "I am simply stating [what] has been leaked or what has been put in formal documents, and if you find them disturbing, I suggest you ask your son about some of them, sir."

"There you go, Nancy. Look at this look on Nancy's face. You absolutely hate my son. I don't know what it is."

"No, I don't hate your son. I don't know your son."

The argument went on for a while, but Lee continued to defend his son. "You don't have any facts," he told Grace at one point. "All you have is your anger and your speculation. I think you hate men."

On May 2, Deputy District Attorney Rick DiStaso asked Investigator Kevin Bertalotto to contact Kirk McAllister and ask if he had any information that might clear Scott of the murder charges. Three days later, Bertalotto encountered McAllister in the hallway of Stanislaus County Court Building. He knew McAllister from past cases, and approached him with an extended hand.

"Good morning," Bertalotto said, shaking the lawyer's hand. He then asked McAllister if he "wanted to share any information" that could clear Scott to the district attorney's office.

"Go fuck yourself," McAllister responded.

"Don't shoot the messenger," Bertalotto replied. "We've always got along good."

"Yeah, I know," McAllister shot back, patting the investigator on the arm. "Well take this message to whoever-Go fuck yourselves."

The battle was on.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SUMMER 2003

On May 4, 2003, thousands of friends and family members packed into the First Baptist Church in Modesto to bid farewell to Laci and Conner. Everyone in attendance was fully aware that it would have been Laci's twenty-eighth birthday. Scott had requested permission to attend. Not surprisingly, he was turned down. The jail arranged to beam the services into his cell.

As the ceremony proceeded, it was reported that Laci's accused killer was meeting with his attorney instead of watching the services, although defense sources tried to dismiss this as just another attempt to portray Scott as a heartless killer. In fact, they said, he and his family had their own quiet service inside the jail.

Scott's brother, Mark, expressed a desire to attend Laci's funeral, but was angrily admonished by his father. "We'll disown you if you do," Lee Peterson reportedly warned his son.

Scott was under high security and in isolation because of rumored death threats. Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department spokesperson Kelly Huston confirmed this on April 21. "Some of the inmates in our facility that have nothing to lose with [the] three strikes [law] in California have made some mention of 'taking care of him,'" Huston said, venturing that some inmates "would love the notoriety of having done something or have some attachment to this case." The fact that Scott also was charged as a "baby-killer" increased the chances that he would be the target of violence. In the prison hierarchy, those charged with crimes against children were on the lowest rung. His six-by-nine foot maximum-security cell, outfitted with nothing but a metal bed with a three-inch mattress and a stainless steel sink and toilet, would be his home for many months.

In June 2003, Amber Frey, her lawyer, Gloria Allred, and Detective Buehler went to the Stanislaus County District Attorney's office to meet with Deputy District Attorney Dave Harris for the first time. Harris, serving with Rick DiStaso as the trial prosecutors in the Peterson case, first showed Amber a courtroom so that it would seem familiar if she was called to testify at the upcoming preliminary hearing.

Later in the meeting, Amber gave Buehler a photocopy of a two-page penciled letter from Scott dated April 25, in which he wrote that he would be acquitted of the charges, and that while in custody he would use the time to "do the work of the Lord." He thanked Amber for leading him to God, and apologized for the fact that she'd become embroiled in such media frenzy. He said that he was looking forward to getting the preliminary "trial" over with, as if he believed that the proceeding would end any suspicion that he'd been involved in Laci's death. May 4 was Laci's birthday, and he was asking friends to fly a kite in her memory. He ended the letter by saying that children are "miracles and gifts."

Only a few months earlier, Scott had told his devout girlfriend that his failure to attend church could jeopardize their relationship. During their affair, however, Scott had realized how effective a dose of religion could be in manipulating Amber-and he continued to do so from his jail cell.

Amber also gave Buehler two e-mails from Scott, whose address was now [email protected]. She'd received both of them before his arrest, but in hindsight it seems that Scott was trying to lay some "good character" groundwork. In the first, dated April 3, Scott said that he'd just flown a kite with his two nephews. In the second, received five days later, Scott explained that he was helping to rebuild a deck at a home for battered women. While there, he said, he noticed a young man staring at him, and recognized him as someone he had tutored at the St. Vincent de Paul Center for Homeless Children while he was in high school.

On June 4, the district attorney announced that the brown van rumored to belong to the "real killers" was not connected to the Peterson murders. Several days later, a judge issued a gag order to all parties in the case, but he also unsealed the search warrants as the press had requested.

In mid-June, district attorney investigator Kevin Bertalotto arranged to meet a man named Harvey Kemple at a McDonald's in Modesto. Related by marriage to the Rocha family, "Uncle Harvey" was the second person who heard Scott claim he was golfing, not fishing, on Christmas Eve.

Kemple remembered remarking to his wife, "What was Scott doing golfing on Christmas Eve?" His wife, Gwen replied, "Scott told me he went fishing." Later, the couple's daughter overheard them discussing the discrepancy, and mentioned that Scott told her he'd been at work that day.

A colorful character, Kemple became one of the better-known witnesses during the trial when he related a story about Scott burning the chicken he was barbecuing at a July 4 pool party. "Scott was more upset over burning the damn chicken than finding Laci," Kemple griped.

On June 26, 2003, Judge Girolami ordered that 176 recently discovered wire taps of Scott Peterson's phone calls be handed over to the defense as part of discovery. The recordings turned up on a computer hard drive on June 13, 2003. Five days later, prosecutors revealed their existence when they asked the court to review them for relevance. Prosecutors maintained that no one-not even the investigator in charge of the wiretaps-had listened to the recordings. Ultimately, the judge denied the defense's request to throw out those and nearly three thousand other secretly recorded conversations. On March 3, 2004, Delucchi ruled that the tapes would be admissible at trial. That same day, Delucchi also ruled to exclude the dog-tracking evidence gathered around the couple's home and inside Scott's warehouse, striking a partial blow to the prosecution's case. Despite calling it "at best iffy," the judge did allow the trailing dog evidence from the Berkeley Marina search.

The ruling was a partial victory for Geragos, who had argued that the dog-gathering evidence was "complete voodoo" and "utter nonsense."

In late September, investigators returned to the San Francisco Bay to continue their search for additional evidence. In particular, they were looking for other body parts and concrete anchors.

After countless delays, the preliminary hearing in the Stanislaus County Courthouse got underway on October 29, 2003.

As expected, it was a huge media event. It was the first time the public and the press got a firsthand look at many of the people they had been hearing about for months: Scott and Laci's friends and family members, detectives, forensics experts, even the couple's housekeeper.

Among those who garnered extraordinary attention was Scott's high-profile trial lawyer, Mark Geragos. Known as Susan McDougal's attorney during President Clinton's travails, he also handled Winona Ryder's shoplifting case. Ironically, Geragos represented Gary Condit during the investigation into Modesto resident Chandra Levy's disappearance and murder in Washington, D.C. Perhaps his most notorious client was pop star Michael Jackson. Geragos had been the first attorney to represent the singer in his 2003 child abuse investigation, although Jackson would soon dismiss him, reportedly because of the attention he was giving the Peterson case.

Before Scott hired Geragos, the attorney had appeared regularly on Larry King Live to talk about the case. While he now took the role of defense attorney on the shows, Geragos still made note of critical evidence such as the computer tidal charts, the cell phone records, and, of course, what he called the "enormous coincidence" that "the very place that he put himself, the very alibi, if you will, turns out to be the exact place where the body is recovered. That is either an incredible coincidence or damning piece of evidence."

"Is it a slam dunk?" King asked his guest Mark Geragos.

Geragos didn't sound terribly bullish. "Even though it's a circumstantial evidence case, the most damning piece of circumstantial evidence comes out of his own mouth and his own hands, when he hands the police that receipt from the very location where, two miles away, she's found," Geragos said. "I mean, that is just a devastating thing.

"If Scott Peterson did this crime," he went on, "and everybody's, you know, innocent until proven guilty, and as I've said, it's a damning, circumstantial case-the man is a sociopath if he did this crime. I mean, there's no other way to put it," Geragos told King. "This is his wife, his unborn baby boy. If he's the one who took the two of them up there and put concrete around them and threw them into the ocean and concocted this story and went out onto Diane Sawyer and gave that impassioned plea with the tears-I mean, that's not somebody that generally you're going to want to give a manslaughter [conviction] to."

Even though the case had first broken nearly a year earlier, public interest was escalating rather than fading. The initial fascination was understandable. The Christmas Eve disappearance of a beautiful young mother-to-be, the family's heartbreaking pleas for help, and the reticent husband with a dubious alibi all made good copy for the press. While most were skeptical of Scott's story, he was still a good-looking, white, middle-class suburban husband who'd seemed to have a wonderful marriage and a happy life.

Interest surged when the affair with Amber Frey was revealed, and again when the breaking news reports announced that two bodies had washed up along the shoreline. When Laci and Conner were identified, rumors began to circulate that Scott had slipped away from the police; his dramatic pursuit and arrest on April 18, 2003, closed one phase of the case and opened another.

Despite what even Geragos acknowledged-that Scott had all but hanged himself in the court of public opinion-the State was nevertheless saddled with an almost purely circumstantial case.