Read Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives Online
Authors: Marilee Strong
Tags: #Violence in Society, #General, #Murderers, #Case studies, #United States, #Psychology, #Women's Studies, #Murder, #Uxoricide, #Pregnancy & Childbirth, #True Crime, #Social Science, #Crimes against, #Pregnant Women, #Health & Fitness
E R A S E D
Like so many others, Anne Bird was once charmed and flattered
by her brother’s myriad kindnesses and the laserlike focus that made
it seem as though he ‘‘hung on your every word and made you feel
as if you were the center of the universe.’’ Now she mourns for a
child she feels was ‘‘raised like some sort of puppet,’’ so busy pleasing
others that he never learned who he really was and what he really
wanted.
Scott attended University of San Diego High School, a Catholic
school that required students to complete one hundred hours of
community service in order to graduate. Scott volunteered as a
designated driver for the campus’s chapter of Students Against
Drunk Driving, tutored the homeless, and visited senior centers,
even ‘‘adopting’’ one particular woman and inviting her to school for
Grandparents Day.
He took particular interest in an orphanage the school aided in
Tijuana. Even after his service was completed, Scott continued to
visit the orphanage, volunteering to drive other students there and
deliver food and clothing.
Perhaps Scott was using good works as cover to get out of the
house, take a road trip to Mexico, sample a little freedom. Or perhaps
he was searching for answers, trying to understand something about
his mother’s life, about himself, about family secrets.
Q
At Uni High, as it was called, Scott played on the golf team with
future PGA star Phil Mickelson. After Mickelson graduated, two
years ahead of Scott, Scott became team leader and was twice named
most valuable player. Scott was so confident in his abilities—some
teammates would say arrogant—that he had the words ‘‘Watch for
me’’ printed as his senior statement in the school year book. (With
an unfortunate typo that took on a creepy significance after he was
charged with murder, his year book motto went on to say that ‘‘Great
things and good deads await all of us.’’)
As good as Scott was, however, he never played at the level of
Mickelson, who won the junior world title while still in elementary
school and the Masters in 2004. It is one of the sad ironies of this case
that while the man known as ‘‘Lefty,’’ one of the most beloved figures
in golf history, was exulting in winning the game’s most coveted title,
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his former teammate was in a courtroom picking the jury that would
condemn him to death.
Although the Petersons portrayed Mickelson as a good friend
whom Scott invited to play at the family’s country club, Mickelson
says he doesn’t remember Scott at all. And although Mickelson grew
up much more humbly than Scott, he now lives happily with his
wife and children in a luxurious Rancho Santa Fe villa, while Scott is
confined to a prison cell.
Scott followed Mickelson to golf’s collegiate mecca, Arizona State
University. Here the facts as related by the Petersons grow murky. In
the early days of Laci’s disappearance, Jackie told reporters that Scott
went to ASU on a golf scholarship. Even his high school teammates
believed that to be true. After school officials said that Scott never
received a scholarship, the story changed.
During jury selection Lee Peterson said that Scott was invited to
try out for the team and told that if he showed enough promise,
scholarship money might become available. At trial, the story mor-phed further. Lee testified that Scott boarded with team members
and played one match. However, both current ASU officials and
Steve Loy, who was the coach of the golf team at the time Scott was a
student there and is now Mickelson’s agent, maintain that Peterson
never played golf there.
Yet another version of the story emerged after the trial. The father
of professional golfer Chris Couch says that he got Peterson kicked
off the team. Couch, national junior champion at the time, beating
out Tiger Woods for that title, was being heavily recruited by ASU.
According to his father, Chip Couch, Scott was assigned to show
the seventeen-year-old around campus but instead took him out
drinking and skirt-chasing. Chip Couch says he was so upset to
find his son hung over when he picked him up at the end of the
recruiting trip that he complained to the coach. He says the coach
called him back and told him he threw Scott off the team. Chris
Couch ended up going to the University of Florida instead, where
he made the winning putt to win that school the national collegiate
championship.
Scott dropped out of ASU before the end of his first semester and
moved back home with his parents. Why he did so is another matter
of dispute. Scott told the Modesto police that he didn’t like the coach,
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E R A S E D
didn’t think his talent was adequately respected. Scott’s sister, Susan
Caudillo, told me shortly after Laci went missing that she thought
Scott was just not ready to make the break from his parents.
At trial, Lee testified that Scott realized he was out of his depth at
ASU, which won the NCAA golf championship in 1990 with players
like Mickelson and another future pro, Per-Ulrik Johansson from
Sweden. ‘‘They were unbelievably good. And I think Scott said, gee,
I’ll never be that good.’’
But why give up so easily, effectively abandoning his dream without
really giving it a shot? Scott didn’t even stay through the golf season,
which runs until June. And why drop out of college altogether? Even
if he didn’t make the team, or was booted off, a degree from Arizona
State would still be worth something.
Anne Bird has heard from some of Scott’s cousins a far different
explanation about why Scott left ASU so precipitously: that Scott got
a woman pregnant, an African American woman, and that ‘‘Jackie
was upset because she didn’t want him to shame the family.’’
‘‘I heard two different versions,’’ Bird said, ‘‘one that Jackie and
Lee went out and one that just Jackie went out and pulled Scott out
of school, paid this woman off, and had her get an abortion. Maybe
they just gave her a little money to move on with her life, or
maybe they didn’t pay her at all and just paid for the abortion. [But]
the reason I heard was that he was shaming the family so they pulled
him out of Arizona State.’’
While Scott was on trial, a seventeen-year-old boy contacted Bird
and some members of the media claiming that he believed Scott
was his father. The boy’s mother died a few years ago, but a friend
subsequently told him that she had gotten pregnant by Peterson
while visiting San Diego. Bird is skeptical, because the young man
has refused to get a blood test. And Scott would have been just fifteen
when the child was conceived.
‘‘Maybe he’s just trying to get some notoriety,’’ Bird says. But
in both pictures the boy sent her, he looks uncannily like Scott.
And when Bird wrote Scott in jail about the boy’s claims and
forwarded his letter, Scott’s only response was a low-key ‘‘that’s
weird.’’ No outraged denial, no ‘‘that couldn’t possibly be true.’’ If
either of the stories Anne Bird heard is true—an abortion in Arizona,
an unacknowledged child conceived in San Diego—it could help
explain how Scott came to believe that women and their children are
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expendable, that he bore no responsibility for a life that he helped
create.
Q
When he moved back home after dropping out of Arizona State,
Scott worked for the family company for about six months. Lee
retired, turned the business over to his sons Mark and Joe, and he and
Jackie moved to Morro Bay, a coastal town about halfway between Los
Angeles and San Francisco and just a few miles from San Luis Obispo.
Scott chafed at the ordinary laborer work he was hired to perform,
such as building crates. He had bigger ambitions; he wanted to go
out on the big jobs, bring in clients, and Joe, who was in charge
of the shop, didn’t think Scott was ready for that. So Scott left and
moved in with his parents in Morro Bay. Their house was just a few
blocks from the Morro Bay golf course and a restaurant called the
Pacific Café, both regular haunts of Jackie and Lee and both places
Scott would find employment. After eighteen months out of school
he enrolled at the local junior college, Cuesta College, where he once
again was a star on a golf team, a big fish in a little pond.
Jackie and Lee contend that one day when Scott was twenty he
surprised them by declaring out of the blue that his parents had
done enough for him and that from then on he was going to support
himself.
‘‘You don’t owe me anything,’’ Jackie says he told them.
He moved into an apartment his dad characterized as an ‘‘Animal
House’’ with some of his Cuesta College teammates, a bachelor pad
with artificial turf laid out on the roof for practicing their golf shots.
The Petersons bragged after Scott’s arrest that he insisted on paying
his own way through school, working two, even three jobs at a time in
order to do so. The truth, as so often in Scott Peterson’s life, may be
more complex. Although he did sometimes work multiple jobs while
he was in college, graduating didn’t seem like much of a priority to
him. It ultimately took him eight years to get his bachelor’s degree.
(Oddly, when police searched his home after his arrest, they found
several phony diplomas on the wall, from schools Peterson never
even attended. One claimed he had earned a divinity degree, very
strange for someone who until he met Amber showed no interest in
religion. He claimed Laci had bought them for him as a gag gift, but
no one had ever heard that she had done such a thing.)
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E R A S E D
After the humiliation in Arizona, Scott likely craved more freedom
and independence from his parents. He may also have felt that he
could not expect their financial support, as he was no longer on
the path to becoming a professional golfer. Around this same time,
however, the Petersons began to suffer significant financial problems.
A relative said the family was living far beyond its means, with
creditors calling night and day attempting to repossess their home
and cars. The mortgage on the Morro Bay house went into default
in 1992, and tax liens were filed in 1990 and 1992. (The debts were
eventually satisfied and the default rescinded in 1994.)
Lee testified that about two years after he turned the reins of the
crating company over to Mark and Joe, the business began to suffer,
and he had to go back to San Diego for about eighteen months ‘‘to
get it cranked back up again,’’ which apparently included firing his
eldest son. He then returned to Morro Bay and started a similar
business, Central Coast Crating, with Scott. They each put up $3,500
as partners and started finding clients. This could partially explain
why it took Scott so long to finish college.
Yet despite his surface industriousness, Scott seemed to be going
through the motions: halfway continuing to pursue golf, halfway
following in his father’s footsteps, halfway trying to be his own man.
But he would always fall back on his parents’ help when he really
wanted something—a house, a golf club membership, money to
survive on the lam. Scott would, ultimately, do almost everything
in life halfway. Half in, half out, no real commitment—that is
certainly how he approached marriage and fatherhood. He had no
clear purpose because he had no true sense of himself.
But he sure could fake it: the perfect son, the perfect husband. He
could be whoever anyone wanted him to be.
C H A P T E R
T E N
Too Good to Be True
Q LaciDeniseRochawasbornonMay4,1975.She
grew up with one foot in the country, one foot in the city, in a loving
family but one also riven by divorce. Laci was just a year old when her
parents, Dennis and Sharon Rocha, split after seven years of marriage.
A year later, Sharon’s cousin Gwen Kemple and Gwen’s husband,
Harvey, set Sharon up on a blind date with a construction worker
buddy of his. Although they’ve never actually married, Sharon and
Ron Grantski have been a couple ever since.
After Sharon and Dennis divorced, Laci and her brother, Brent,
lived with their mother in Modesto but spent every other weekend
with their father on their grandparents’ dairy farm, located about
twenty-five minutes outside the city. Dennis subsequently remarried,
and six years after Laci was born had another daughter, Amy. When
Dennis’s second marriage broke up, Amy, too, spent weekends at the
Rocha family dairy. To the children it was a magical place with barns
and horses and a coyote pup named Princess as the family pet.
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E R A S E D
‘‘It was a great place to grow up,’’ said Brent, who was four years
older than Laci. ‘‘We rode four-wheelers out there, went swimming
in my grandparents’ pool. There were tons of places to play. You kind
of create your own things to do when you’re out in the country.’’
At age nine, Brent went to live full-time with his dad, but he always
remained the protective older brother.
When the Rocha family came to believe that Scott had killed Laci
and publicly broke from him at a January 24, 2003, press conference,
it was heart wrenching to hear the sense of guilt and responsibility
Brent felt for not protecting his sister from a danger no one could
have perceived. It stood in stark contrast to the complete lack of
conscience and denial of responsibility Scott showed with regard to
his wife’s murder.
Laci was very close to her paternal grandparents, and Brent saw
his sister as a younger version of their grandmother: loving, centered,
thoughtful. Laci inherited her grandmother’s passion for cooking
and from both sides of her family an appreciation of the land and its
bounty. (Her maternal grandfather was a foreman on a fruit and nut
farm in the same small town of Escalon where the Rocha dairy was
located.)
Even as a child, Laci liked to work in the garden and dreamed
of one day owning her own flower and herb shop. One of Brent’s
fondest memories of his sister is as an earnest little girl trying to
help feed the cows while wearing her dad’s oversized rubber boots,
slipping and falling in the mud and manure. No one laughed harder
at moments like that than Laci herself.
‘‘She was always fun to be around,’’ said Amy. ‘‘I was the little
sister who wanted to tag along, and she let me.’’
Laci inherited her broad dimpled smile from her mother. Sharon
remembers Laci even as an infant smiling each morning when she
came to take her out of her crib. Once she learned to start talking, she
never stopped. One of her girlfriends nicknamed her Chatty Cathy.
Her stepfather called her J.J. for Jabber Jaws. Once on a car trip when
Laci was little, he made a bet with her to see if she could go thirty
seconds without saying anything. She agreed, then immediately asked
if the time was up yet. After she was killed, Ron was left with the pain
of wondering if his good-natured teasing had hurt Laci’s feelings.
Laci was good at just about anything she put her mind to. She was
popular enough to make the cheerleading squad, but was also a good
athlete and an excellent student. By the time she graduated in 1993
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from Modesto’s Downey High School, film director George Lucas’s
alma mater, Laci had developed the tight-knit circle of girlfriends
who would work so tirelessly to find her when she went missing. Just
as she and her siblings had done on the farm, Laci and her friends
created their own fun. They tee-peed each other’s houses, videotaped
themselves making mock commercials, and threw raucous slumber
parties in which the first person to fall asleep would have her bra
frozen. They shared everything together, even their first hangover.
When one of the girls sneaked a bottle of champagne into one of the
sleepovers, they all vowed to make it to school the next day, but Laci
was the only one who managed.
‘‘She would never let us forget that,’’ remembers René Tomlinson.
‘‘Laci was in all the smart classes, and she was so dedicated.’’ In Laci’s
mind it was simpler than that. They had made a pact. A deal was a
deal. When she set her mind to something, she was determined to
see it through. It was the same way she would one day embrace the
concept of marriage.
Q
Laci and Brent were the first in their family to graduate from
college. While Brent went off to law school, Laci chose California
Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, a state college
specializing in agricultural studies, where she majored in ornamental
horticultural. Laci’s passion and creativity stood out among her peers.
She won her department’s Outstanding Freshman award and was
one of just thirty students across the nation selected for an endowed
internship to train in the floral industry. She was elected president
of the horticulture honor society and hired to manage the campus
flower shop.
Laci had been involved in only one significant relationship
before meeting Scott Peterson. She was a fifteen-year-old high
school sophomore when she started dating William ‘‘Kent’’ Gain, a
seventeen-year-old senior who had recently moved to Modesto from
the Bay Area.
From the outside looking in, they made a picture-perfect couple:
he dark-featured and handsome as a soap star, Laci gorgeous and
magnetic. He moved to San Luis Obispo with her when she went
away to college, and they shared a cottage during her freshman year.
While Laci studied, he worked in a warehouse and surfed. They dated,
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