Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (34 page)

E R A S E D

Around the time of his engagement, Scott learned something

about his mother that must have rocked his already fragile sense of

identity. Don Chapman, the first child Jackie had given away, had lost

both of his adoptive parents and grown estranged from his adoptive

sister. Craving a familial connection, Chapman searched for his birth

mother and managed to locate her address in Morro Bay. He sent

her a certified letter, which Jackie opened in front of her family,

completely unaware of its contents.

The secret she had kept for more than thirty years was suddenly

revealed, and Jackie was left utterly shaken. Although she would later

contend to Anne Bird that she had confided in her husband early in

their marriage, other relatives say absolutely no one in the Peterson

family knew that Jackie had given up two children for adoption.

Whatever Jackie’s initial feelings might have been, by the time

she met Don they had a warm reunion, and he soon met Lee and

the other kids. But even then Jackie apparently didn’t tell her family

about the second child she gave up for adoption, until Don made

contact on his own with Anne and encouraged a reunion with her as

well.

Anne had never felt any great need to connect with her birth

mother. She had been mildly curious in high school and had gone

as far as researching Jackie’s name in county records. But when she

discovered that her mother had married and had other children, she

didn’t pursue it any further. She felt very loved and secure in her

adoptive family, but after giving it some thought agreed to let Don

give Jackie her number. Jackie called the next day, and a few weeks

later they met in a San Diego hotel.

They had a somewhat awkward first meeting. Jackie asked a series

of odd questions—‘‘Do you like mushrooms? Colorful clothes?’’— as

if the bond between mother and child came down to a simple list

of shared tastes. She offered no real explanation for giving Anne up,

much less an apology, other than saying, ‘‘the nuns never talked to

me about sex.’’

The details she did give Anne were somewhat gratuitous and

painful: how she hid out for the duration of her pregnancy and

couldn’t remember much about Anne’s birth at all. Conversely, she

waxed rhapsodic about her Golden Boy from that very first meeting.

Anne’s relationship with her birth mother remained superficial,

if pleasant, for a while, but it eventually deepened. After Laci disap-peared, Jackie would come to depend on Anne as a sounding board

Too Good to Be True

2 1 7

and would entrust Scott to his new sister’s care when the investigation

heated up, asking Anne to provide Scott with a safe harbor at her

Berkeley home away from the prying eyes of the police and media

back in Modesto.

Just as Jackie adamantly insisted, right up to trial, that she had had

a happy childhood, the Petersons claim not to have been the least

bit ruffled by the revelation that Jackie had given up her first two

children.

‘‘We had a bigger family now and they were such nice folks that it

was just easy to take them into our family,’’ Lee Peterson contended

under oath. On the family tree he drew for the jury in court, however,

he misspelled Anne’s name as Ann. Interestingly, she only knew Lee

as ‘‘Pete’’ until the case hit the news, a name she was told by other

relatives he assumed after the family got into financial straits.

It is hard to believe that Scott, who enjoyed such a place of primacy

in the family pecking order, was not thrown by the news that he now

had two more siblings with whom he had to share his mother’s love.

If it is true that his mother persuaded him to get rid of his own first

child, the impact may have been even more severe. If so, he kept

those feelings buried, as he would so many others. By the time he met

Anne, he embraced her like a long-lost friend.

‘‘This better not be a one-time thing,’’ he said at their first meeting.

‘‘I have plenty of brothers, but I’m kind of short on sisters.’’ In fact,

Scott seemed to be enthralled with Anne, as if he were recognizing a

missing part of himself.

Q

Scott and Laci were married on August 9, 1997, in a spectacular

garden ceremony at Sycamore Mineral Springs resort, an historic

hotel and spa tucked into the hills between San Luis Obispo and

the coast. It was an incomparably serene setting, with open-air hot

tubs dotting the hillside and suites bearing names like Excellence

and Virtue. A babbling brook, fed by a waterfall, ran underneath the

gazebo where they exchanged vows. Laci planned everything to the

last detail, from the flower arrangements, which she designed herself,

to the sugar-coated lemons and limes decorating the tables, to the

flower petals marking the aisle.

Laci was pretty as a princess in a wedding gown with train,

hip-length veil, and silk opera gloves, Scott dashing in white tie and

2 1 8

E R A S E D

tails. Laci’s brother and sister were in the wedding party along with

several of Laci’s girlfriends, and Scott’s nephews and nieces served as

ring bearers and flower girls. Oddly, Scott asked none of his brothers

to be in his wedding, even though he had served as his brother John’s

best man. Instead, he asked Mike Richardson to stand up for him, a

college friend with whom he had only recently become acquainted.

In wedding photographs, Laci is the picture of poise and grace,

smiling broadly as Scott looks at her with the adoring gaze her friends

recall so often seeing. Scott, always a suave speech maker, toasted his

new in-laws for entrusting him with their ‘‘perfect daughter.’’ (Scott

had always been unfailingly polite to Sharon and Ron, asking for

their blessing at the time he and Laci got engaged.) At the end of

the day, Scott literally swept Laci off her feet and carried her upstairs

to their room. They honeymooned in Tahiti, and to everyone who

knew them seemed destined for a lifetime of happiness.

‘‘Laci was in love; she had met the man of her dreams,’’ said Renee

Garza, a friend of Laci’s since kindergarten. ‘‘At her bachelorette

party all she talked about was how wonderful he was.’’

‘‘They were doing the things we always wanted to do,’’ said Ron

Grantski. ‘‘They were living our dream.’’

The dream was only an illusion. Scott’s dark side emerged even

on his wedding day. The groom drank heavily and was seen by resort

manager Roger Wightman before the ceremony sitting at the hotel

bar hitting on one of the waitresses.

Within months, Scott was engaged in the first of at least three

affairs police were able to confirm during the Petersons’ five-year

marriage. Scott told his sister Anne Bird that he had casual sexual

encounters during his marriage as well, claiming to have had sex with

two different women on a single airplane flight.

Just before trial, a relative told a reporter that Scott had had as

many as half a dozen extramarital affairs. Presumably that admission

was meant to boost Scott’s defense. If he didn’t kill Laci to be with

any of these other women, why would he have killed her for Amber?

No such ‘‘supercad’’ defense was ultimately mounted, however,

the risks of such a strategy being obvious. The only girlfriend to testify

was Amber. The defense acknowledged that Scott did have an affair

early in the relationship and that Laci found out about it but told no

one— a fact they used to support Scott’s astonishing assertion, first

to Diane Sawyer and then to other reporters, that Laci knew about

his affair with Amber because he told her so himself.

Too Good to Be True

2 1 9

At some level, however, Laci may have sensed even before they

were married that she was making a mistake. The night before

her wedding, Laci had called her mother around midnight in near

hysterics and said she didn’t know if she should get married.

Earlier that evening at the rehearsal dinner, Laci had been all

smiles. Now she was sobbing into the phone, claiming she didn’t

want to lose her ethnic surname. Laci was certainly proud of her

Portuguese heritage, but was this really what was upsetting her? She

didn’t have to change her name at all if she didn’t want to. It was as if

she somehow knew that by tying her fate to Scott Peterson she would

lose herself forever.

Q

Scott’s first affair, with Janet Ilse, began while he and Laci briefly

lived apart. Laci graduated four months after they got married, in

December 1997, and was offered a job with a wine distributor in the

Carmel area. Scott still had another semester to go at Cal Poly, so

Laci rented a mobile home in Prunedale, a small city just east of Moss

Landing and north of Salinas, and Scott drove up on weekends to see

her. Meanwhile, Scott moved into a house with three other Cal Poly

students—none of whom had any idea Scott was married until Laci

called one day and identified herself as his wife.

Just as he would with Laci and Amber, and as many eraser

killers do, Scott pushed his relationship with Janet to a serious level

very quickly. He lavished her with expensive gifts: jewelry, clothing,

fabulous dinners. (She provided police with a picture of herself,

looking pleased but a little startled, holding the dozen bouquets Scott

gave her on their first date.) He talked about taking a vacation with

her to Mexico and about moving in together. Janet and her roommate

even double-dated with Scott and one of his roommates.

After five months of dating, Janet showed up late one night

unannounced and found him in bed with Laci, who had herself come

for a visit. Distraught at his apparent betrayal, Janet lit into Scott,

but he just stared back at her unemotionally, uttering a meager ‘‘I’m

sorry.’’ One of Scott’s roommates finally intervened and drove her

home.

‘‘How could he cheat on me?’’ Janet asked. ‘‘He’s not cheating

on you with her; he’s cheating on her with you,’’ the roommate

explained.

2 2 0

E R A S E D

A week later Scott showed up at Janet’s and expanded ever so

slightly on his apology. ‘‘I’m sorry you found me in bed with Laci,’’

he said, but still showed no apparent empathy for her pain, nor

remorse for his deceit. How he dealt with the situation with Laci

no one knows. She never told anyone about it. But his cheating

continued unabated.

Q

Scott seemed to thirst not only for sexual conquest but also for the

romantic trappings of a relationship, however studied and artificial.

Psychologists refer to this as a sex and love addiction, and like all

addictions it is generally fueled by feelings of inadequacy. Janet Ilse

told police that Scott was insecure about whether he was sufficiently

endowed to satisfy a woman. She heard from one of his roommates

that after they broke up, Scott engaged in a strange bit of sexual acting

out, drunkenly exposing himself one night in a bar.

When police served a second search warrant on Scott’s home two

months after Laci went missing, they found him driving away with

an overnight bag. Packed inside were Scott’s wedding ring, a bottle

of wine, and a bottle of Viagra that Scott had ordered from an online

pharmacy in January 2002. Whether he truly needed the drug to

perform or simply used it to enhance his experience is unknown. But

the fact that he felt the need to carry a ready-made seduction kit, even

with no assignation planned (as far as anyone knows), is telling.

The overblown romantic gestures, the extravagant gift-giving, the

lies and exaggerations about his wealth and ambitions all seem like

overcompensation for low self-esteem—the flip side of narcissism.

He needed to dazzle women, to overwhelm them, to be idolized. Laci

worshiped him, but the love of one woman wasn’t enough.

Shortly after his relationship with Janet, or maybe even simulta-neously, Scott began seeing classmate Katy Hansen. Katy asked Scott

straight out if he had ever been married. No, he told her, just as he

would tell Amber.

The next day, however, he confessed to Katy that he had lied.

He then immediately lied again, claiming that he was divorced. He

then told a half-truth, saying his ‘‘ex-wife’’ lived in Salinas. As with

Janet Ilse, Katy had no reason to believe Scott was lying. He wore no

wedding ring when he was with her. She saw no photographs of Laci

or any of Laci’s things at Scott’s house.

Too Good to Be True

2 2 1

She was blindsided with the inescapable truth when Laci came

up and planted a lei and a big kiss on Scott at graduation. Scott

introduced the woman who kissed him simply as Laci and never

spoke another word to Katy, other than the written missive he sent

her a week later with the pink roses.

But a picture taken of Scott on graduation day, still wearing his

cap and gown and orchid lei, is chilling. It reveals what I believe to

be the actual face behind the mask: the fury of Scott denied. In the

photo, Laci smiles proudly at the camera, her arm clasped firmly

around Scott’s shoulder. Scott does not reciprocate her embrace and

stares grimly into the camera, his eyes masked by sunglasses but his

lips pressed together in disgust. Laci has spoiled his party, and he is

not happy about it.

I saw that same look of suppressed fury on Scott’s face only one

other time—on the third day of trial, when he looked over his

shoulder and glared for a long moment into the front row of the

gallery where the Rocha family was seated.

It was the only time during the entire trial that Scott ever looked

into the audience, other than the perfunctory smile and nod he would

make to his family on the other side of the courtroom each time

he walked in. I happened to be sitting directly in his line of sight

that day, and I stared back, astonished, trying to figure out to which

member of the family he was directing such rage.

After a while I could see that it wasn’t one of the Rochas Scott was

staring down but the detective seated next to them: Craig Grogan, the

lead investigator who had methodically built the case against him.

The testimony at that particular moment was exceedingly minor, but

the witness was saying that Grogan had misinterpreted something

she said.

Scott felt the same contempt toward the police that I believe he

felt toward Laci at his college graduation. They had ruined his game,

but now, at last, he had his day in court, and he believed absolutely

that he would beat them.

His rage against Grogan and fellow Modesto police detective Al

Brocchini, one of the other chief investigators, was ugly and personal.

Both men are short and stocky, and a year before trial Scott’s father

was characterizing the case against his son as a ‘‘pissing match’’

between a short stumpy cop and his tall handsome son.

Exactly which of the two detectives Lee was referring to with that

description is unclear. Yet his thinking betrays an incredible bit of

2 2 2