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
reductionism—as if the case against his son were no more than a state
conspiracy built on penis envy. In fact, it was Scott who seemed to
be sexually obsessed with the detectives, making derisive comments
about their size and potency.
Laci must have at least suspected something was going on between
Scott and Katy Hansen, but she probably had no idea until graduation
day. During the ceremony she told her friend Heather Richardson
that Scott was ‘‘acting single.’’ She didn’t elaborate, but later that
night, after a celebratory dinner, Heather overheard Laci yelling at
Scott in the bathroom. She heard no response from Scott.
Katy told police that her relationship with Scott had not yet
become sexual. Perhaps Scott convinced Laci it was just a friendship.
Maybe Laci blamed herself for their physical separation or attributed
his behavior to a period of adjustment. Or maybe, as the child of
divorce, Laci was determined to make her marriage work at all costs.
Other than her brief comment to Heather, she never told anyone
about this episode. Although the plan had been for Scott to join her
after graduation, she instead quit her job and moved back to San Luis
Obispo. Little did she know that Scott tried to win Katy back with
flowers and a note hinting that his wife was no longer in the picture.
Nor did she know that Scott had told Janet Ilse that he never wanted
to have kids because they would get in the way of his lifestyle.
C H A P T E R
E L E V E N
Seeds of a Plan
Q Theleastfortunateofallerasedpersonsfallintoa
black hole in the criminal justice system, a bizarre netherworld in
which they are considered neither alive nor dead. The investigation
into their disappearance is never officially closed, but as months and
then years go by, it remains neither active nor productive.
Contrary to the impression created by the popular TV drama
Without a Trace
, crack FBI agents are not sitting around waiting
to leap into action when someone files a vexing missing persons
report. In general, police departments are reluctant to jump into an
investigation, sometimes reluctant even to take a report, because of
the roughly eight hundred thousand Americans reported missing in
any given year, the vast majority turn up on their own within a few
days or weeks.
Over the last two decades, major reforms and safeguards have
been instituted nationwide regarding police handling of reports of
children abducted by strangers, a tiny subset within the much larger
number of children taken by one parent or the other in the midst of a
2 2 3
2 2 4
E R A S E D
custody dispute. There is now widespread recognition that children
abducted by strangers are in mortal danger, often murdered within
hours by their kidnappers, so time is of the essence.
The system often breaks down, however, with older teens or young
adults, whom police are more likely to treat as runaways or as people
who have simply dropped out of sight temporarily—say, to ditch
an exam they have not prepared for or to take a road trip without
informing mom and dad. It is a sad and little known fact that Ted
Bundy was able to kidnap and kill dozens of young college students
in several states before he was caught, in part because many of his
victims were initially deemed to be runaways.
While Scott Peterson was living and working and going to school
in San Luis Obispo, his normally sleepy little college town was hit by
an inexplicable crime wave. In a span of less than three years, three
young women, all college students, seemingly vanished into thin air.
It was perhaps the most baffling cluster of mysterious disappearances
anywhere in the country, considering the area’s otherwise exceedingly
low crime rate and the fact that none of the women was in any
high-risk category for criminal victimization.
The town was gripped by fear. For years you couldn’t go anywhere
in San Luis Obispo without seeing a young woman’s face on a missing
persons poster, couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV news
without hearing one of the girls’ names. Speculation and rumor ran
rampant. Many wondered if a serial killer was operating in their midst,
someone like Ted Bundy with a penchant for pretty coeds. Because
of San Luis Obispo’s proximity to the Pacific Ocean on one side and
the sprawling and sparsely populated coastal foothills on the other,
it was easy to imagine how bodies might go undiscovered forever.
Like everyone living in San Luis Obispo at that time, Scott Peterson
became well versed on the subject of vanished women and the inner
workings of a missing persons investigation. At a formative stage in
his life, as he was grappling uneasily with the strictures of marriage
and adult responsibility, he saw how easy it was to make a woman
disappear and for a suspect far less savvy than himself to avoid
being charged with murder. He learned how poor police work in
the early stages of an investigation could prevent a suspect from
being arrested, much less convicted, even when authorities were
absolutely convinced he was guilty. He heard investigators disparage
circumstantial evidence and proclaim that unless their suspect chose
to confess there was nothing they could do to him.
Seeds of a Plan
2 2 5
Before he had any desire or notion to erase someone from his
own life, he came to believe that murder cannot be proved without a
corpse.
Whereas the lack of empathy and conscience that leads someone
to feel entitled to take a life are believed to be the result of both nature
and nurture, the idea that one can carry out a ‘‘perfect murder’’ is
learned. In the abstract, the story Peterson would later spin to cover
his own wife’s murder, that a grown woman was snatched off the
streets just blocks from her home, seems ludicrous. In light of what
he learned in college, it makes perfect sense.
Q
The first disappearance to strike San Luis Obispo took place right
on the grounds of his campus. Kristin Smart, a nineteen-year-old Cal
Poly freshman, was last seen just a few hundred feet from her dorm as
she walked home from a fraternity party in the early morning hours
of May 25, 1996.
Rachel Newhouse, a twenty-year-old Cal Poly junior, disappeared
on November 12, 1998, while walking home from a party at a popular
downtown bar. Her blood was found the following morning on a
pedestrian bridge over a set of railroad tracks, the route she would
have needed to take to get home.
Just four months later, Aundria Crawford, a twenty-year-old
student at Cuesta College, the community college Scott Peterson also
attended before he transferred to Cal Poly, was kidnapped from her
apartment. A screen had been removed from a bathroom window,
and traces of Aundria’s blood were found inside the duplex.
Although thousands of dangerous men are incarcerated just a few
miles from campus at a state prison and a maximum-security hospital
that treats the criminally insane and sexually violent predators,
murder is almost unheard of in San Luis Obispo. During the last
decade, only three to seven murders a year have been committed in
the entire county, in most years none within this city of forty-four
thousand. Those that do occur generally fall into the typical range of
disputes over drugs or money or the escalating violence of domestic
abuse. Three young college students vanishing in the night was
something very different and extraordinarily alarming. Young women
began packing Mace, flocked to counseling sessions offered by the
colleges, and signed up for self-defense classes.
2 2 6
E R A S E D
‘‘Norman Rockwell doesn’t live here anymore,’’ a grim-faced
police sergeant told hundreds of anxious students who took time out
during finals week to attend a safety seminar at Cuesta College after
the third young woman disappeared.
Seeking to quell a growing sense of panic, police announced that
they did not believe there was any connection between the cases. Yet
they continually linked the first two victims by the fact that they had
been drinking on the night they vanished, as if they were somehow
complicit in their own disappearances. At a press conference three
days after Crawford vanished, Captain Bart Topham of the San Luis
Obispo police differentiated Aundria from Kristin and Rachel by
saying, ‘‘She doesn’t drink, she’s not a partyer.’’
In fact, it was the second and third cases that turned out to be
related. Rachel Newhouse, characterized by the police as a ‘‘partyer,’’
was in fact a straight-A student and student body officer in high
school who came to Cal Poly to study nutrition. Aundria Crawford
had to give up her first love, ballet, due to constant pain, switching her
passion to horseback riding and barrel racing. She was working hard
to qualify for transfer from Cuesta College to Cal Poly, where she
wanted to study interior design, and hoped to own a ranch one day.
All the hopes and dreams of Rachel Newhouse and Aundria
Crawford were extinguished when they had the misfortune to catch
the attention of Rex Allan Krebs, a sex offender paroled to the area in
1997.
Krebs, who was eventually abandoned by an alcoholic mother
after years of violent abuse from her husband, admitted to police
and a psychiatrist who examined him that he hated women and felt
the need to completely dominate them. He fits the classic profile
of the sexual sadist, taking a step up from rape to sexual homicide.
Although his victims were not his intimate partners by choice, he
used the same kind of thoroughness and cleverness in erasing their
bodies and covering up his connection to their disappearances.
Rex Krebs was leaving a bar just after midnight on Friday the
13th of November 1998, when he noticed a pretty young woman
walking toward the Jennifer Street Bridge, which was the only way to
cross the railroad tracks in that part of San Luis Obispo. A winding,
mazelike staircase leads up to the enclosed pedestrian bridge, which
is essentially a steel cage suspended three stories above the street.
In the eyes of a predator like Rex Krebs, it was a perfect place to
trap his unsuspecting prey. By the time Rachel saw the man lying in
Seeds of a Plan
2 2 7
wait for her, a terrifying Halloween skull mask obscuring his face,
there was no way to escape his clutches. He knocked her unconscious,
dragged her down to his pickup, and drove her to an abandoned cabin
near the home he was renting in a remote canyon just a few miles
from the beautiful resort where Scott and Laci were married. There
he raped and killed her—although he would insist she accidentally
strangled herself while struggling against her bindings.
A few months later, when Krebs caught sight of Aundria Crawford
entering her apartment as he drove by on the way home from one
of his other favorite watering holes, he knew he’d found his next
victim. He cased her duplex on four different occasions, peering in
the windows and watching her undress, before he worked up the
nerve to break in.
On March 11, 1999, he decided to take her. He had a hard time
squeezing through an unlocked bathroom window, injuring his ribs
in the process. Aundria heard a commotion and went to investigate.
But he quickly overpowered her, beating her, as he had with Rachel,
until she lost consciousness. Then he transported her to his house,
where he raped her and then strangled her to death.
Krebs might very well have gotten away with his crimes. Much
of California’s central coastline is undeveloped. A few miles away
from the picturesque coastal highway and its resortlike towns, the
pavement turns to dirt and gravel and the terrain to steep canyons
and inhospitable brush. Krebs took advantage of his isolated sur-roundings, burying both girls near where he was living, in an area
so remote that neighbors often went months without seeing each
other, and accessible only by a treacherous unpaved road. In one of
the graves, which was farther out into the woods, he took the extra
precaution of placing wire mesh over the body to prevent it from
being dug up and exposed by wild animals.
He burned his victims’ clothes and threw away the shoes and
clothing he had been wearing when he kidnapped them. He washed
their blood out of his truck and carefully cut out carpeting and a
seatbelt he couldn’t wash clean. There were no eyewitnesses to the
abductions. He left behind no fingerprints or other forensic evidence
linking him to the crime scenes. They were close to being perfect
murders.
He was caught, however, thanks in large part to an astute parole
officer who followed his intuition—just as Modesto Police Detective
Al Brocchini would follow his gut instinct when he was assigned to a
2 2 8