Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (43 page)

E R A S E D

At other times he couldn’t resist a display of bravado, flipping the

bird at his pursuers, clapping his hands in glee at a particularly clever

maneuver, or pulling up alongside one of the unmarked cars and

smirking at the driver.

When they finally pulled him over at the entrance to Torrey

Pines Golf Course, where he was scheduled to play a round a golf

with his family earlier that morning, the officers found evidence that

seemed to indicate that Scott was planning a run for the border or

some attempt to live off the grid. The car was packed with a huge

amount of survival gear, including a tent, water purifier, camp ax,

hunting knives, folding saw, cooking implements, and fishing gear.

They also found four cell phones, his brother John’s driver’s license,

credit and gas cards belonging to several relatives, and nearly $15,000

in cash. The cash came mostly from Jackie Peterson, who gave a

convoluted explanation, claiming that Scott’s brother was actually

buying the truck from Scott and that she was advancing the money,

‘‘accidentally’’ making a large withdrawal from Scott’s account and

then a duplicate withdrawal from her own to reimburse him.

He also had with him a stash of Viagra. It seems amazing that

Scott could contemplate a game of golf while waiting to find out if

life as he knew it was over for him, but the fact that sex was also

on his mind at a time like that is probably even more revealing

of his ability to compartmentalize and the compulsiveness of his

narcissistic drives. Two weeks after his wife went missing, Peterson

called his cable company and added the Playboy channel to his

subscription. However, that apparently was not enough for him. Four

days later he called back, switching to two harder-core pornography

channels—which he abruptly had disconnected while police were in

the midst of searching his home in mid-February.

Perhaps the most disturbing discovery on the day of his arrest was

a map inside the car with directions to Amber’s workplace, the result

of a MapQuest search Scott had performed that very day. At trial, the

defense claimed that Scott was simply planning to return a book to

Amber,
The Purpose-Driven Life
, a spiritual book she had sent him

in February just before asking him to stop calling her. The gift was a

last-ditch attempt on her part to elicit some kind of self-examination

from Scott. She had tried to get him to confess to her, had tried to

talk him into submitting to a polygraph. With this final gesture she

hoped to provoke his conscience.

Sex, Lies, and Audiotape

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Unfortunately, psychopaths have no conscience. Scott did try to

exploit this last ray of hope from Amber, shape-shifting himself once

more in a way that he hoped would impress her. He immediately

began using a new e-mail address—[email protected]—and writing her claiming he had discovered his life’s purpose. He

would dedicate himself to his family, which he said would include a

wife and child, and strive ‘‘to be positive in people’s lives.’’

If Scott was simply planning to mail the book back to her, as

the defense contended, why did he print out driving directions? And

why did he suddenly decide to do so two months after she broke

off contact with him, during what had to be the most stressful week

of his life? Police believe he may have been planning to see Amber,

perhaps even to do her harm.

Modesto detectives had been so concerned for Amber’s safety that

they refused to let her meet with him in person. In response to her

demands that Scott take a polygraph to prove his innocence, he had

finally agreed, but only if it was not administered by the police and if

she accompanied him. On the day of the scheduled test, even before

he realized that Amber was not coming, he fled after spotting Det.

Al Brocchini in a parking lot near the polygrapher’s office. He called

Amber, angrily accused her of betraying him, of working with the

cops to set him up.

In their final conversations, Scott had begun to sound desperate,

begging to see her in person. A week after the aborted polygraph, he

tried to talk her into meeting him at a remote cabin in the mountains

outside Los Angeles. The cabin belonged to Anne Bird’s parents, and

he had been staying there increasingly since the news of his affair with

Amber had broken. He became very emotional, saying he needed to

look into her eyes, say things he could not say over the phone.

‘‘There’s so many things I want to tell you—God, it’s unbeliev-able,’’ he said, and for once his crying sounded genuine. Worried that

his phone was being tapped, he began calling her from pay phones.

He offered to send her on a vacation, presumably somewhere he

could then show up. On her February 10 birthday, which was also

Laci’s due date, he left a shopping bag full of presents for her in

the parking lot of a children’s hospital near her home: a necklace

with an amber stone, a decorative box with a moon-and-stars motif

reminiscent of their night of stargazing, and the Norah Jones CD

Come Away with Me
.

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E R A S E D

Was Scott, on his very last day of freedom, going to surprise Amber

and try to talk her into ‘‘coming away’’ with him? Or was he planning

to make her disappear, too? Other items found in his car at the time

of his arrest—rope, duct tape, and a shovel—made detectives worry

that he may have had the latter scenario in mind.

Q

The words of Scott Peterson himself on the tape recording were

the most emotionally powerful part of the case against him. Even

though Scott Peterson never took the stand it felt as if he had, and he

had only offered lies and obfuscations. But there was also powerful

physical and scientific evidence pointing to his guilt.

From the moment Al Brocchini arrived at the Peterson home to

investigate a report of a missing wife, he feared that something very

bad had happened to her. A mop and bucket propped outside the

kitchen door made him wonder if someone had attempted to clean

up a crime scene. Scott’s explanation that his nearly eight months

pregnant wife was mopping the kitchen the day after the maid’s visit

only made him more suspicious, as did Scott’s account of showering

and laundering the clothes he had worn that day before reporting his

wife missing. Scott’s claim of having spent the day fishing in a boat

about which none of the dozens of friends and family gathered at the

house that night knew anything set his gut on edge even more, as

did Scott’s showing more concern about the detective’s accidentally

dinging his car door than he did about his wife and child’s being in

peril.

Following his instincts, Brocchini asked to see the boat, a task

Scott purposely made more difficult by pretending that the power

was out in his warehouse where the boat was stored. Forced to use

his headlights and a flashlight to illuminate the space while he took

some photographs, Brocchini was nonetheless able to preserve two

critical pieces of physical evidence.

Unlike the Peterson home, which was neat as a pin, the warehouse

was a mess, with white powdery residue spilled all over the top

of a flatbed trailer Peterson used as a work surface. When police

returned with a search warrant two days later and took a better

look at the residue, which turned out to be quick-dry cement, they

could make out numerous circular voids or rings that matched up

perfectly in circumference with the pitcher Peterson said he used

Sex, Lies, and Audiotape

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to mold a cement anchor for his boat, then shook out onto the

flatbed top. Although he was insistent that he made only one anchor,

the rings indicated that he had made at least five—weights that the

prosecution argued he used to sink his pregnant wife to the bottom

of San Francisco Bay.

Equally significant, the photographs Brocchini shot that night

revealed a pair of yellow-handled pliers wedged beneath one of

the seats in the boat. This was important because a hair matching

Laci’s was collected from inside the teeth of those pliers during the

search two days later. Laci was never supposed to have been in

that boat, so how did some of her hair wind up there? In a tactic

reminiscent of the O.J. case, the defense implied that an overzealous

Detective Brocchini planted the hair months later after coming to

a dead end in the investigation. But photos taken during the search

of the warehouse clearly show the hair sticking out of the nose of

the pliers.

The victims themselves, however, provided the most unimpeach-able evidence of guilt. That their bodies were found within a mile

and in the tidal path of where Scott Peterson told police he had gone

fishing the day his wife disappeared was so damning that before he

was hired to represent Peterson, Mark Geragos declared on Greta van

Susteren’s
On the Record
that ‘‘it would just be the most phenomenal

coincidence of all time’’ if Scott was not their killer.

Two days later, on the day Peterson was arrested, Geragos went

even further in an appearance on
Larry King Live
, using words

that would come back to haunt him after he decided to mount an

all-or-nothing innocence defense.

‘‘The man is a sociopath if he did this crime,’’ Geragos said.

‘‘There’s no other way to put it. This is his wife, his unborn baby.

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 and

went onto Diane Sawyer and gave that impassioned plea with the

tears—that’s not somebody that generally you’re going to give . . .

manslaughter to.’’

The only other possible explanation for the bodies ending up in

that precise location was for Peterson to have been framed. Who

would have a motive to pin the crime on the victim’s husband, not

to mention the knowledge of exactly where he claimed to have gone

fishing, and the means to get her body not only to the bay but out

into the water? The defense put forth no viable suspects.

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E R A S E D

Geragos seemed to rest his entire defense on the scientifically

specious theory that Conner had been born alive. If so, Scott was

innocent, as he was under near-constant surveillance at the time

Laci was scheduled to give birth. He based his contention on a few

cobbled-together facts: bone measurements of the corpse, which fell

within the range of full-term fetuses, and the pathologist’s inability,

due to the wet and decomposing condition of Conner’s lungs, to rule

out that the child had ever taken a breath.

For such a theory to hold up, however, Conner would have had to

have been cut out of Laci’s womb and kept alive for at least a month

and a half until he reached full term, or Laci had to have been held

somewhere for a month and a half until she gave birth. Then both

mother and son were killed and transported to the bay, even as police

divers were searching it on a nearly daily basis, for the sole purpose

of pinning the crime on Scott Peterson.

But judging from the markedly more intact condition of Conner’s

remains as compared to Laci’s, Brian Peterson (no relation), the

pathologist who performed the autopsy, firmly believed that Conner

had been released from his mother’s womb only a day or so before

he washed ashore. ‘‘If he would have spent substantial unprotected

time in the water as Laci did, he would have been eaten,’’ Peterson

testified. ‘‘There simply wouldn’t have been anything left.’’

Laci had been in the water so long that every organ in her body was

missing except for her uterus. She had protected Conner from the

elements as long as she could, even after death. Her uterus remained

enlarged from having been pregnant, but the cervix was still closed,

proving that she never gave birth naturally. There were no cuts

indicating that she had undergone a cesarean section. Over time,

however, animal feeding and tidal action had eroded an opening at

the top of her uterus through which, Dr. Peterson believed, the baby

emerged.

Furthermore, the pathologist also found meconium in the baby’s

bowels, a substance that is expelled within a day or two after birth in

the child’s first stool.

The forensic anthropologist who calculated the fetus’s age based on

bone measurements conceded that it was difficult to get an accurate

measurement, as the marine environment had partially liquefied the

corpse.

By the time Geragos put on his own expert, OB-GYN Charles

March, the defense was no longer pushing the contention that

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Conner had been born at full term, simply that he had lived at least

five days past Christmas. March, however, proved to be a terrible

witness. After he was eviscerated on cross-examination for basing his

methodology on unsubstantiated assumptions about the earliest date

Laci could have gotten pregnant, the defense seemed to implode.

It was a shocking reversal of fortune, considering that for the first

several months of the trial, most of the media and legal analysts

were predicting a defense victory, or at the very least a mistrial.

Mark Geragos dominated the courtroom as though he owned it,

neutralizing witness after witness with his superb cross-examination

skills. He seemed to think that he could bulldoze the prosecution’s

case by knocking down their witnesses like cascading dominoes. But

when it came time to put on his own case, to back up all the allegations

and assertions he had gotten in through questions and hearsay, he

had nothing to present.

Mark Geragos was one of the most media-savvy attorneys in

the country, having represented pop star Michael Jackson, actress

Winona Ryder, President Clinton’s brother Roger, Whitewater scan-dal figure Susan McDougal, and former Modesto-area congressman

Gary Condit— the latter when he was being investigated regarding

the disappearance of a Washington intern he had been secretly dating,

Chandra Levy.

Geragos tried the Peterson case as much outside as inside the

courtroom, waging criminal defense like a political campaign geared

to shaping the news and planting doubt in the minds of potential

jurors. When he first assumed the case, he held a press conference

outside the Modesto courthouse at which he vowed he would not

only ‘‘prove’’ his client’s innocence but also find the ‘‘real’’ killer. It

was a foolhardy bit of showmanship. The defense doesn’t have to

prove anything. Why would he offer to take on that burden?

He called a later news conference asking a ‘‘mystery witness’’

to come forward, who he claimed held information that would

exonerate Scott, and another to announce adding two of the nation’s

foremost forensic experts, Henry Lee and medical examiner Cyril

Wecht, to the Peterson defense team.

He floated numerous theories in the press about who might

have killed Laci: from a Satanic cult to a ring of methamphetamine

tweakers, from dark-skinned men seen near a van in the Petersons’

neighborhood (who may simply have been a team of gardeners) to

a pair of burglars who robbed a home across the street from the

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