Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (42 page)

E R A S E D

Amber was so impressed by what she considered his genuine grief

that she took his hand and comforted him, assured him that she was

not mad. How could she be when he had suffered such a terrible

loss and made such a painful confession? When he saw that she

was buying his story, he quickly regained his composure. She asked

him if he was ready for another relationship, and his response was

emphatic: ‘‘God, yes!’’

Strangely, Scott claimed to have spent the previous weekend sailing

on the bay with some friends. ‘‘I just had a horrible weekend, and

it wasn’t fun for anybody because I had this on my mind,’’ he said,

although withholding any mention of Shawn’s confrontation and

ultimatum.

For their last date on December 14, the night of the Christmas

formal, Scott was back to his old practiced self. He showed up at

Amber’s door with three dozen red roses, then pulled off one bud

and began rubbing the petals around her breasts. During the week,

Shawn had confessed to Amber what she had learned about Scott, and

Amber interrupted Scott’s seduction to ask if he would have made

his confession to her if Shawn hadn’t forced his hand. He claimed he

had planned to tell her the truth when he returned from his business

trip to Europe at the end of January.

‘‘I live a certain lifestyle, and I can see you living that lifestyle, too,’’

Scott told her. He then cryptically added that he was in the process

of making some big decisions and hoped that when he returned

from his trip, she would say yes to whatever he asked of her without

question.

Scott rushed off the next afternoon, telling Amber he was headed

to Arizona and New Mexico on business. In fact, he had to get

home to have dinner with his wife and in-laws. The four of them

happened to have a long conversation that evening about fishing. Ron

Grantski is such a fishing fanatic that he keeps a pole in his car at all

times, just in case he happens to find himself near a good fishing spot.

Sharon hardly ever goes with him, but she had accompanied him that

morning, and they laughed at the description of her gamely trying to

pass the time reading the newspaper and ward off the morning chill

while Ron happily fished. Scott mentioned nothing about having

just purchased a boat. Neither did Laci, even though the defense at

trial would claim she knew all about the boat, had even been to the

warehouse to see it.

A Collision Course

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It was the last time Sharon Rocha would ever see her daughter.

Laci proudly showed her the nursery and wanted desperately for

her mother to feel the baby kick, mentioning how impatiently Scott

would always snatch his hand away when she asked him to feel

Conner move inside her. Sharon kept her hand on Laci’s stomach for

a long time, but never did feel the baby stir. She finally laid her head

against her daughter’s belly and spoke to the grandchild she would

never get a chance to know.

‘‘Hello, little Conner,’’ she said. ‘‘I can’t wait to meet you.’’

The lie Scott used to cancel plans with Laci the night before in

order to take Amber to the formal dance was that he had to pick up

his boss at the San Francisco airport. There had been very high winds

that night, and when Sharon asked him how the drive had been, he

quickly changed the subject, turning on his well-practiced charm.

Just as he had at their wedding, he raised his glass, toasting Sharon

for giving him her wonderful daughter.

C H A P T E R

T H I R T E E N

Sex, Lies, and Audiotape

Q Idon’tbelievethatScottPetersoneverlovedAmber

Frey. I doubt that he is capable of truly loving anyone. But he needed

her to love him, to believe in him in order to maintain the illusion

that even after committing an unspeakable crime he was still the

Golden Boy—the sensitive, chivalrous, rose-bearing knight.

For the first two weeks after the murder, before Amber let Scott

know that she was aware he had a missing wife, she was his refuge

from the maelstrom swirling around him. She was like a blank slate,

or so he believed, untouched by the horror he had set in motion, the

only person with whom he could carry on his pose of normality. With

Amber he could continue to play out his fantasies and be whoever he

wanted to be.

It was stunning to sit in court and listen to his tape-recorded

phone calls with Amber as the jury was hearing them. After two

and a half months of often confusingly presented testimony—one

of the inherent difficulties of putting on a circumstantial case—here

was Peterson himself speaking in a way he never would have had he

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Sex, Lies, and Audiotape

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chosen to take the stand. Until she forced him to give up his ruse by

leading him to believe a friend was about to tell her his true identity,

he regaled her with richly atmospheric tales of his fictitious European

revels: the quaint cobblestone streets, the magnificent churches, the

rich French cuisine that he fretted was turning him into ‘‘Pudge Boy.’’

In between the elaborate lies are moments of truth so revealing

they seemed like free association. He rhapsodizes about the book he

was reading at the time Laci disappeared, Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
,

a tale of the ultimate rambling man, commenting on ‘‘how I never

had a prolonged period of freedom like that from responsibility.’’ He

raves about what he termed ‘‘the best movie ever made,’’
The Shining
,

a Stephen King story about a man who goes mad and attempts to kill

his wife and young son. He quotes a line from the Ron Howard film

A Beautiful Mind
, in which a mentally disturbed and socially inept

math genius approaches a woman without any attempt at romantic

seduction and says exactly what is on his mind: ‘‘I don’t know what

I have to do for prevention, but I’m trying to get to the point of

intercourse as fast as I can.’’

‘‘That’s somehow appealing, just to, you know, cut the crap,’’

Scott says. ‘‘Just the clarity of saying, hey, screw the rest of it, let me

just tell you what I want.’’

‘‘Love doesn’t mean two people can be together forever,’’ he tells

Amber at another point. When she tries to insert a serious note into

Scott’s boyish babblings, suggesting it must be hard for him to be

spending his first holidays without his wife, Scott cuts her off curtly,

and perhaps with more honesty than he intended. ‘‘Well, I don’t

think about it,’’ he says. He is capable of compartmentalizing even

the act of murder.

Knowing when these tapes were recorded and what was really

going on in Scott’s life at that time induced a dizzying sense of

cognitive dissonance. What was most damning was what was clearly

not
on Scott’s mind: any sense of concern for his missing wife and

child. He was a man without a care in the world.

Curiously, Scott’s need for Amber seemed to grow into near

obsession
after
she let him know she was on to him. Rather than

breaking off contact with her—which he surely would have done if

she meant nothing to him and should have done if he had followed

his lawyer’s advice and the dictates of common sense—he subjected

himself to her relentless interrogation, hour after hour, day after day,

week after week. Why did he keep coming back for more?

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E R A S E D

I believe that in a strange way, Amber was the closest thing he had

to a confidant. I say strange because he remained to the end deceitful

and evasive with her. Yet as he became increasingly isolated by the

suspicion surrounding him, an odd intimacy developed between

them. He was desperate to make her believe him, to keep her on his

side, to win back her affection and approval, but he knew he was

not fooling her. Amber might have been working for the police, but

her feelings were raw and direct. There was a realness between them,

however painful, that Scott hadn’t shared with another soul.

Although Scott never admitted any involvement in Laci’s dis-appearance, he refused to answer even the simplest questions and

instead offered strange and cryptic deflections. A typical exchange,

from January 7:

‘‘Amber, you don’t know all the facts.’’

‘‘Well, then why don’t you share them, Scott?’’

‘‘I can’t.’’

‘‘Why?’’

‘‘I can’t tell you everything now.’’

‘‘Scott, from what I gather, the whole nation is wanting to find

Laci.’’

‘‘Definitely. She does not deserve, you know, she’s—’’

‘‘She does not deserve what?’’

‘‘She was abducted, disappeared, and she needs to be found . . .’’

‘‘. . .That all too familiar silence,’’ Amber interjects sadly after

Scott drifts off into silence. ‘‘I know why I’m silent, but why are you

so silent?’’

‘‘Because I said what . . . what I can say and what I need to say. . . .

And if that is not enough for you, it’s not enough for me, but it’s

right for now.’’

He uses bizarre logic and tortured, abstract syntax. At one point

he insists that he never cheated on Amber (apparently overlooking

the glaring fact that he was married). At another point he tells Amber

‘‘I have always told you the truth . . . with exceptions, obviously.’’ He

won’t say his ‘‘home’’ but ‘‘the house in Modesto’’ or ‘‘the house

where Laci disappeared,’’ won’t call Laci his wife but ‘‘the woman

I’m married to.’’ At times it seems as if he is choosing his words

carefully to leave open every possible avenue of defense. By refusing

to admit to Amber that Conner was his son, was he simply revealing

the lack of any human connection he felt toward his unborn child?

Or was he preserving his ability to argue that Laci may have become

Sex, Lies, and Audiotape

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pregnant by someone else who did her harm? In Scott’s mind, that

may have seemed like a viable argument for reasonable doubt, as he

was not expecting Conner’s body ever to be found and his paternity

established.

Rather than directly incriminating facts, most of the evidence

in the Peterson case pointed to what is known in legal terms as a

‘‘consciousness of guilt’’—that Scott knew his wife was dead and

was moving on with his life without her. The defense argued that

Scott sold Laci’s Jeep within weeks of her disappearance, trading it

in for a truck for himself, because police had impounded his own,

and he needed transportation, both for work and to look for Laci.

Besides, according to Jackie Peterson, Laci herself termed the car ‘‘a

piece of shit’’ and wanted something safer when the baby arrived.

The defense also came up with an excuse for why Scott attempted

to put his and Laci’s house on the market just as quickly, claiming

his wife would never want to live there again after such a traumatic

experience (although the kidnapping was supposed to have happened

at some location outside the house).

No one attempted an explanation, however, for why he offered to

sell their home furnished. Surely Laci would want her furniture, which

included expensive Tiffany lamps and other treasured heirlooms from

her paternal grandmother.

It is rare, indeed, for families of genuinely missing persons ever

to move or change their phone number while a loved one is still

missing—in hopes that the person will one day turn up or at least try

to call for help. Parents of missing children almost always preserve

their child’s room both for evidentiary purposes, to preserve articles

scent dogs can use for searches, and for sentimental reasons, as a way

of freezing time and hanging on to their memories of their lost child.

Marc Klaas and his second wife, Violet, who shared custody of

his daughter, Polly, with her mother at the time of her kidnapping,

didn’t change a thing in Polly’s room at their house for five years

after her death. ‘‘We just couldn’t,’’ said Klaas, who has since worked

with scores of other families with missing children. ‘‘That’s how it is

for almost every family whose child has been kidnapped.’’

Peterson did not merely seem as though he couldn’t wait to get

on with his life: nothing associated with Laci or Conner seemed

to hold any sentimental value for him. He continued to talk about

a future with Amber ‘‘after everything was resolved’’ with Laci,

while at the same time hitting on other women—from Anne Bird’s

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E R A S E D

teenage babysitter to the house sitter at the home of Anne’s adoptive

parents, where he went to lay low after looking for an apartment

in the Bay Area under an assumed name. When police served a

second series of search warrants six weeks after Laci disappeared,

they found wedding photos that had originally been inside his office

stuffed unceremoniously into a wastebasket in a rented storage unit.

Conner’s nursery had basically been turned into a storage room as

well, with furniture from Scott’s shuttered warehouse and piles of

linens crammed willy-nilly into the space.

A separate wiretap that police obtained to listen in on all Peterson’s

calls captured Scott in early February 2003 telling a supporter that he’d

spent the previous four days at a retreat for grief counseling, when

in fact he had traveled to Mexico for a fertilizer conference—where

detectives feared he might forever flee their clutches.

Scott also did not seem concerned about potential sightings of his

wife after she went missing. Around the time of the Mexico trip, a

clerk at a grocery store in Washington State reported that a pregnant

woman who looked like Laci came into the store claiming to have

been kidnapped. Jackie called Scott and left a message urging him to

go up and review the store’s surveillance tape, offering the name of a

relative with whom he could stay in the area. The wiretap picked up

Scott chuckling at his mother’s message and erasing it midstream.

He was concerned, however, when Modesto police reported in

early January that divers using sonar technology detected what they

believed might be a body in the bay waters near the Berkeley Marina.

Police were exceedingly tight lipped throughout their investigation,

but this information they purposely released, making a point of

saying that the weather would not permit them to return and attempt

to retrieve the possible body for a couple of days. They wanted to

turn the heat up on Scott, to see what he would do.

Rather than checking in with police or going to the marina to

see firsthand what they had discovered, Scott rented a car and hit

the road, covering more than thirteen hundred miles over the next

three days. It was one of the rare instances when he actually seemed

to be afraid. As when he was forced to ‘‘confess’’ to Amber that he

had been married, he wasn’t in control of the situation: he didn’t

know if police had indeed found Laci. Police later reconstructed his

movements, based on cell sites he used to make phone calls while on

the road. To each and every person he spoke to during that period

of time, including his own mother, he lied about his whereabouts,

Sex, Lies, and Audiotape

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giving everyone a different and apparently randomly selected location

hundreds of miles away from where he really was.

It was Sharon Rocha who inadvertently let Peterson know he was

in the clear. At that point still believing in his innocence, she called

his cell phone to pass along the good news: the murky image picked

up by sonar on the muddy bay floor was not a body but an old boat

anchor. The wiretap preserved his reaction. As Scott listened to his

mother-in-law’s message, he let out a whistle of relief. He was back

in control.

When the bodies washed up on their own in mid-April 2003—first

a baby’s and then a woman’s, a day later and a mile apart along the

East Bay shoreline—Scott once again took flight. During the several

days it took for authorities to identify the remains through DNA

testing, he never once called police to inquire whether they could

be his wife and child or came to the bay to see for himself, even

though he told his half sister that he was just forty-five minutes from

the scene when she called him with news of the macabre discovery.

Instead he drove as far as he could in the opposite direction, to San

Diego, where he was just minutes away from the Mexican border.

Scott had by now discovered the secret GPS transmitter police

had implanted on his truck. He left the truck with relatives, who

drove it around town while he used a car he purchased that week

under his mother’s name—telling the skeptical seller that the name

Jacquelyn Peterson was a ‘‘Boy-Named-Sue kind of thing.’’ After

several panicked days trying to locate him, surveillance teams finally

spotted Scott in his new car. They didn’t even recognize him at first,

as he had grown a goatee and lightened his hair, beard, and eyebrows

to an unnatural orange hue.

On April 18, 2003, the bodies were positively identified as Laci

and Conner. As an arrest warrant was being prepared, undercover

officers from the California Highway Patrol and the Department of

Justice struggled to keep Peterson in their sights as he led them on a

wild 170-mile trek over several counties using every evasive driving

technique in the book in an attempt to shake his tail—darting across

several lanes of traffic to exit the freeway, then pulling right back on;

making sudden U-turns in the middle of the street; abruptly pulling

over to the side of the road, then getting back on after the cars trailing

him were forced to pass. At one point he was driving so fast on a

winding road, seventy-five in a thirty-five-miles-per-hour zone, that

he caused one of the surveillance cars to fishtail and nearly wreck.

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