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America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
Scott Peterson: $15,000, Bleached Hair, and Four Cell Phones Pt. 2
00:32:35
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- [00:00]
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Foreign. This is Crime House. On Christmas Eve 2002, Lacey Peterson vanished from her home, and almost immediately, suspicion turned to the person closest to her, her husband. At first, Scott Peterson said it was a normal morning breakfast, fishing, then home to an empty house. But the deeper investigators looked, the more his story started to unravel. An affair, a secret boat, and a timeline full of coincidences that felt harder and harder to explain away. Today I'll break down the day Laci disappeared, the search that followed, and the evidence that led investigators to believe Scott Peterson was responsible for the deaths of both Laci and their unborn son, making millions of people wondering, how well do you know the person you love most? Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us today. I want to thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes wherever you get your podcasts and to get all episodes at once ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's get into the disappearance of Lacey Peterson and why investigators thought her husband was behind it. There's never been a better time to get outside and experience the benefits of nature, discover nearby trails and explore the outdoors with alltrails. Download the free app today and find your outside.
- [02:07]
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- [02:38]
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On the morning of Christmas Eve 2002, Lacey Peterson was eight months pregnant. She and her husband, Scott, had already chosen a name for their son, Connor, and by all accounts, Lacey was deep into the nesting phase. That settles in during those final weeks. She'd been cooking more, reconnecting with old friends, and spending long afternoons getting the nursery ready. She seemed happy and ready to welcome their baby boy. According to Scott, Christmas Eve morning was perfectly normal. He and Lacey watched an episode of Martha Stewart together. Then after breakfast, he headed out to go fishing. Scott kept his boat at the warehouse office for his fertilizer company. So he knocked out a couple of work emails, then hooked the boat up to his truck and set off on the 90 mile drive north to Berkeley Marina on the San Francisco Bay. He was out on the water for about an hour and a half, and when he left the marina, he grabbed his parking receipt. Once Scott got home, and again, this is all according to him, he realized the house was empty. Lacey's car was still in the driveway, her purse was in the house, and their dog was in the backyard with his leash still on. But she was nowhere to be seen. Scott wasn't worried, though. He figured Lacey's mom, Sharon Rocha, had picked her up and Lacey had forgotten to let the dog in before she left. So Scott took a quick shower, started a load of laundry, and had a quick bite to eat before he called Sharon to see if his wife was there. But she wasn't. Sharon hadn't seen or heard from Lacey at all that day. And the moment Scott explained the situation, she immediately knew something was wrong. Lacey wouldn't just disappear without telling anyone where she was going. And she absolutely didn't take off while eight months pregnant without her car, her wallet, or her phone. So less than a half an hour after Scott's call, Lacey's stepfather, ron Gransky, dialed 911. Detective Alan Brochini was dispatched to the scene and found Scott at the nearby park where Lacey typically walked their dog. Detective Brocchini decided not to interview Scott there. Instead, he suggested they head back to the house. It was a deliberate move. He wanted to see how Scott carried himself inside the home he shared with his missing wife, in the home where she may have been kidnapped or worse. From the start, something about Scott nagged at Brokini. On the surface, he was perfectly cooperative, polite even. He answered every question without hesitation and was happy to walk the detective through his timeline of the morning. And although he seemed helpful, Scott's behavior just seemed off. Because while the rest of Lacey's family and friends who came over were visibly devastated, Scott was calm. Maybe a little too calm. Some people saw that as shock, but Brookini thought it could be something else. Before long, Detective John Bueller joined them. He seemed to agree with Brocchini's suspicions because the two of them asked Scott if he'd be willing to come into the station and take a polygraph test. According to both detectives, Scott initially agreed. But by the end of that first night, he quietly changed his mind and declined. He would never take a polygraph. I do Want to point out, however, that polygraphs are not admissible in court as evidence because they are unreliable and even if you are innocent and any good lawyer will pretty much always advise you not to take one. That said, there is a stigma and air of guilt around denying a polygraph. I can see why most people find it suspicious. Because if you're innocent and don't have anything to hide, why not do everything you can to clear yourself? As the hours ticked by, there was still no sign of Lacey. Christmas Day came and went, and there was no word from her. On December 26, Detectives Brokini and Bueller came back to the house. They had a search warrant in hand, but they kept it in their pocket at first. Again, they wanted to gauge Scott's reactions. So instead of knocking the door down, they just asked Scott if they could come in and take a look around. He said yes, but that he had to call his lawyer. It was another red flag. But the search didn't turn up anything incriminating. If there was any evidence of what happened to Lacey, it wasn't in the house. Throughout it all, Scott still had that weird sense of calm around him. There was no frantic energy, no search parties, no sense of a man trying to do whatever he could to find his pregnant wife. The cops definitely thought it was a red flag. But Lacey's family wasn't going there just yet. The Scott they knew, the charming, loving guy, was not someone who could do this. There was no way he would hurt Lacey. But there was a lot about Scott they didn't know. And he was carrying a massive secret that would turn their worlds upside down.
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- [08:00]
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Six days after Laci Peterson disappeared, the Modesto police department received a phone call that fundamentally changed their entire investigation. The woman on the other end of the phone was amber Frey, a 27 year old massage therapist from Fresno and who'd been following the news coverage of Lacey's disappearance. But Amber wasn't just a concerned citizen. She had something to tell the Investigators. She was Scott Peterson's girlfriend. Or at least that's what Amber thought she was, right up until she saw Lacey's face on her TV screen and the pieces started falling into place. Remember, Amber and Scott's relationship had started In November of 2002, after they were set up through a mutual friend named Sean Sibley. From the beginning, Scott had presented himself as a single man looking for something serious. He told Amber he'd lost his soulmate. It was a way of hinting that his wife had died without ever quite saying the words out loud. Of course, Lacey was very much alive. And when Shawn later found out that Scott was actually married, she confronted him about it. Tell Amber the truth, or I will. He promised he would, but he just piled on the lies. On December 9, 2002, exactly 15 days before Lacey disappeared, Scott called Amber and officially told her he was a widower, that Christmas would be his first one without his wife. When Amber told that to the police, it gave even more reason to think Scott had done something to Lacey. But it wasn't proof. If they were going to go after him, they needed more, and Amber was willing to help them get it. She agreed to record every phone call she had with Scott going forward, and he still had no idea she knew the truth about him. In total, she would collect over 29 hours of conversations between them. The first recording came the very next day, New Year's Eve. Scott called Amber and sounded perfect, perfectly at ease. He said he was in Paris, ringing in the New year with friends and that he'd be home soon. In reality, Scott was standing at a candlelight vigil in Modesto, and a crowd of people gathered and praying for his missing wife and unborn son. And then there were the photographs. A reporter at that vigil captured two images that would be reprinted everywhere as the case gained traction. In one of them, Scott was leaning to set down a candle with this wide, relaxed smile on his face. It almost kind of reminded me of a toned down Grinch smile. In the other, he was standing with a group of people, laughing. Again, people experience grief and stress in all sorts of ways. I've been to funerals where people have said things to remember their loved ones and make each other smile and laugh. I will say, this felt a little different. Yes, it's one frame. But his wife, who is eight months pregnant with their child, is missing and supposed to still be alive at this point. And he looks genuinely joyful, dare I say jolly. And when those pictures came out, the court of public opinion moved fast. The story Jumped from local news to national headlines almost overnight. Anderson Cooper, Diane Sawyer, every major network, all of them were covering the missing pregnant woman and the husband, who didn't seem all that bothered by it. Meanwhile, investigators were still looking into other potential leads. Around Christmas Eve, a home in the Petersons neighborhood had been burglarized, which made both Lacey and Scott's families wonder if maybe she'd seen something connected to the robbery and the thieves had taken her to keep her quiet. It was worth checking out, and the police did pursue it. They tracked down the suspects and put them through intensive questioning. But in the end, they concluded that the burglars had nothing to do with Lacey's disappearance, leaving just one viable suspect. Scott. On January 5, 2003, divers searched the Berkeley marina and the surrounding waters of the San Francisco Bay, looking for anything Scott might have dropped or discarded from his boat when he was supposedly going fishing on Christmas Eve. But they came up empty. For the authorities, it was a frustrating dead end for Lacey's family. It still felt like a reason to hope, because if Lacey wasn't in the marina, maybe she was still alive. But that hope was becoming harder to hold onto. In mid January, investigators learned that the National Enquirer had gotten hold of a story about Scott's affair with Amber, and they had pictures of the two of them together at a holiday party in Fresno. If that story was published without warning, Amber's credibility as a witness could take a serious blow. So the police decided they had to get ahead of it. On January 24, 2003, Amber held a press conference. She told the world that, yes, she had been in a relationship with Scott Peterson, but she had genuinely believed from the very beginning that he was a single man. She had absolutely no idea that Lacey Peterson even existed and no idea that she was due to have Scott's baby in a matter of weeks. For Lacey's family, this was the moment the floor dropped out. They'd been defending Scott, standing beside him at every turn, and now they were learning he'd been looking them directly in the eye and lying for months. It made them wonder if he could lie so easily about that. What else had he been hiding? Meanwhile, Scott was trying to get ahead of the story as well. With the walls closing in on him, he agreed to sit down with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. Surprise, surprise. It did not go well. On air. Scott claimed that the police had known about Amber from the very first day and that he, in fact, told them about the affair himself. He also claimed that Lacey had known about Amber and Wasn't necessarily happy about it, but was okay with it and they were going to get through it. I'm not sure what he was thinking here, but that was definitely not true. And not one person in Lacey's life came forward to back him up. But that wasn't the most shocking part of Scott's interview. The part that really caught the world's attention was that Scott referred to Lacey in the past tense. He said she was amazing, not is, was. Sure, it could have been an innocent slip, but with millions of people watching, that one word carried a lot of weight. By March of 2003, more than two months after Lacey disappeared, and with no credible alternative explanation emerging, the Modesto police made it official. The case was reclassified from a missing persons investigation to a homicide, and Scott Peterson was their primary suspect. Reclassifying Lacey's disappearance as a homicide was a major step, but it also increased the pressure on the investigators working on her case. Because now it wasn't just about finding her. They needed to build something that could actually hold up in court. And so far, even after a second search of the Petersons house that turned up close to 100 pieces of evidence, everything they had was still mostly circumstantial. At this point, the most striking thing was what investigators didn't find. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere in the house. No indication of forced entry, no trace evidence suggesting that a stranger had come through the door and taken Lacey against her will. The house looked the way a married couple's house is supposed to look. Ordinary, undisturbed and quiet. Investigators were working with a theory they called soft kill, which is a method of murder that leaves very little physical evidence behind. Something like strangulation. And a soft kill implied someone Lacey trusted. Someone she wouldn't have been alarmed to find in the house in the middle of the night. Someone she knew. And in their opinion, that person was Scott. There wasn't a smoking gun they could point to, though. Throughout it all, Scott's alibi hadn't changed. Having breakfast, watching Martha Stewart, then getting the boat from the warehouse before making the 90 mile drive to Berkeley and spending an hour and a half on the water before driving home and finding the empty house. Scott's phone records were consistent with his story. But detectives kept circling back to one specific detail. And the more they examined it, the harder it was to walk away from. Scott had bought his boat on December 9, 2002. It was 15 days before Lacey vanished. Not to mention the exact day Scott called Amber Fry and told her he was a widower that his wife was dead. Then there was the fact that after buying the boat, he never took it out once between December 9 and December 23. Not to test it, not for a quick trip to a nearby lake, not even to check if everything was in good shape. The very first time he launched, it was Christmas Eve, the day Lacy disappeared, and he didn't go to one of the reservoirs a few miles from their house in modesto. He drove 90 miles on Christmas Eve to the Berkeley Marina on the San Francisco Bay, which happens to be known for its powerful currents and low underwater visibility, meaning anything dropped overboard would be extremely hard to locate or retrieve. For the detectives on Lacey's case, that was an awful lot of coincidences. They knew something in Scott's story wasn't going to hold up. And on April 13, 2003, almost four months after Lacey went missing, they finally made a breakthrough. That afternoon, the remains of a small baby boy washed ashore on the beach along the Richmond shoreline on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. The next day, about a mile away, near Point Isabel, a woman's body was found on the shore. It was badly decomposed, with duct tape attached to what remained of her torso, and the location was very close to the spot where Scott had told investigators he'd spent Christmas Eve on the water. It definitely seemed like they found Lacey and her baby, Connor, although DNA testing would be needed to make it official. While they waited for those results, investigators kept Scott under close surveillance. And what he did in the days that followed made their job considerably easier. The day after the news broke about the bodies washing ashore, Scott got in his car and drove south, over 400 miles away to San Diego, where Scott had grown up and some of his family still lived. On the surface, it looked insanely suspicious, but there was some context to it. Scott had been spending a lot of time there since Lacey went missing to get some space from the relentless media swarm. It was the perfect place to get away with the support of his family, not to mention the incredible weather. But there was a looming threat there, too, because San Diego is right on the border with Mexico. If Scott wanted to, he could make a run for it and try and disappear. And with the discovery of what seemed to be Laci and Connor's bodies, that seemed a lot more likely to happen. The detectives on Lacey's case, Alan Brokini and John Bueller, weren't leaving that to chance. They followed Scott down to San Diego and decided to tail him for a bit. When Scott spotted the car behind him, he thought it was the paparazzi. So he started driving erratically, weaving and accelerating through the lanes. But he couldn't shake them, and the detectives pulled him over on an exit ramp near the Torrey Pines golf Course. When Brokini and Bueller walked up to Scott's window, they barely recognized him. He'd bleached his hair to a reddish blonde, and he'd grown a beard. Scott told them it was to avoid the paparazzi, and he said the erratic driving was because he thought they were the paparazzi, not the police. The detectives weren't about to take his word for it, though. They searched the car, and what they found inside came off like a checklist for someone who wasn't planning to come back. Four cell phones, a rope, knives, a shovel, camping supplies, hiking boots, a fishing pole, a dozen viagra, his brother's ID, and about $15,000 in cash. Scott had explanations for that, too, or at least for some of it. The cash was from selling his truck to his brother. The idea was to get a local resident discount at the golf course for the rest of it. He didn't have much to say about it. It wasn't exactly the most convincing argument. Brocchini and Bueller were able to arrest him for reckless driving, then put him in the back of their car and started the long drive back to Modesto. Somewhere along the way, the DNA results came back, and the detectives gave Scott the news. The bodies were officially Laci and Connors, according to Detective Bueller. When Scott found out, he made a muffled sniffling sound, then bowed his head and went quiet. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here with how people react differently to trauma. And Scott would later say he was in complete shock, that he didn't even believe them. But you can see why the detectives would find his muted reaction suspicious. And it wasn't just that. About 15 minutes later, they made a quick pit stop at an In N Out burger for a bite to eat. Scott, who had just gotten confirmation that his wife and baby were dead, had the appetite to put back a double double fries and a shake. And Brocchini and Bueller were far from the only ones who thought Scott was responsible. By the time they got to Modesto, the news had spread. About 250 people had gathered outside of the county jail to watch him be brought in, and more than 5 million people watched the coverage on television. Three days later, Scott Peterson was formally charged with first degree murder of Lacey Peterson and the second degree murder of their unborn son, Connor. He pleaded not guilty on both counts. The district attorney's office made their intentions clear from the outset. They weren't looking to negotiate. They were confident the evidence was solid and they were going for the maximum penalty available to them. And for Scott Peterson, that punishment was the death penalty. At the end of each episode, I like to take a moment to answer any questions you may have about the case and share my thoughts. So make sure to comment below.
- [22:45]
D
There's no wrong way to grieve, but man, Scott sure did look guilty in the weeks and months after his wife's disappearance. Is that something he could have worked on regardless of whether he was innocent?
- [22:55]
A
I want to start by saying that in no way am I defending him, but as we've seen in many cases, it's hard to be the spouse in these kinds of situations. If you don't grieve perfectly. When there's this much media attention, you are constantly under a microscope and most of the time, no matter what you do, you will look guilty. If you're not crying, you're guilty. If you're crying a little too much, you're putting on an act. If you live your life outside of grieving, you don't care about your partner. But I will say something about Scott did seem off to me, and I would have probably given him more leniency on laughing at the candlelight vigil. It's obviously not a good look, but people try and cheer others up at these kinds of things. And if he was laughing, I'm guessing the people with him were probably laughing as well. But the smile when he was standing alone I found a little more sinister. It gave the vibe of kind of like a duper's delight smile. And when I heard the call he made with Amber at the vigil, it made chills go down my spine because he was telling her he was looking at the Eiffel Tower when he was at his wife's candlelight vigil. It is just so sinister and disconnected. Also, in the Diane Sawyer interview, a lot of people point to the fact that he referred to Lacey in the past tense and that that was a sign of guilt, which is true. But what I thought was more interesting that some people don't really mention is that he corrected himself at that moment. He said she was and then said is. And to me that shows that he was aware that was a slip up and that he was very calculated in all of his actions. He corrected himself and was aware how to cover his tracks, especially when he slipped up. Lastly, regarding some of the legal things like not Taking a polygraph or not letting the police in right away for a search, those do look sketchy and aren't great optics. But there are also things that most good lawyers will advise against. And to be completely honest, if I was in the same situation, I would obviously want to comply because I know how bad it looks if you don't. But at the end of the day, I would also trust and listen to my lawyers. And many people don't realize this, but in these situations, the cops are not your friends.
- [25:24]
D
Did the cops have tunnel vision on this one? They certainly seem to latch onto Scott as a suspect pretty quickly and let the neighborhood thieves go fairly fast.
- [25:33]
A
They definitely had tunnel vision. I mean, hearing those calls with Amber, though, who wouldn't think that he was 100% guilty? That said, as an officer, your number one duty is to follow every single lead. And there were a lot of things that they didn't really follow up on that have been brought up in Scott's appeal. And they ruled out any involvement with the guys from the robbery, even though they gave them the wrong date and immediately said when they confronted them, the robber said, we had nothing to do with that pregnant lady. And so that is obviously sketchy and I think probably should have been looked into more. The robbers also said that it happened on the 27th, but the family who reported it got home on the 26th, so that's impossible. So they changed the date to the 26th. But then also every reporter that was outside the Petersons house said that if the house across the street was getting burglarized, that they are pretty sure they would have seen it. So those dates don't check up, and they didn't really follow up on that. They kind of just accepted that it happened on the 26th. But they also gave the robbers polygraph tests, and they passed the polygraph test. So that is one advantage of taking a polygraph. If you pass it, then you look not guilty, but at the same time, they're unreliable, so it's not the best thing to do. But also, one of the neighbors said that she was driving and did see some sketchy guys in the neighborhood the day Laci went missing. And to be honest, I wouldn't 100% rule out that something could have happened with these robbers. Like a lot of people argue, she could have confronted them and something had happened to her. But I still think Scott's the guy. And the last thing is that the cops also didn't really follow up with the guy who said that he saw a pregnant lady being thrown into a van or most of the eyewitnesses who saw Lacey with the dog that day. But that said Mark Garagos, the lawyer didn't even call a single one of the eyewitnesses in the trial because there were around 20 or more people that came forward seeing they saw Lacey that day, and a lot of them had conflicting stories, so it's obviously not strong evidence. Also, a lot of the eyewitnesses said that they saw a pregnant woman who was wearing black leggings and a white shirt walking a dog. But when Lacey's body was found, she was wearing khakis. So again, those don't all line up.
- [28:05]
D
Let's talk about the media's role in all of this. Did the coverage of the case, like the villain saint narrative built around Scott and Lacy, make a fair trial impossible?
- [28:14]
A
This case was definitely a trial by media, and there was pretty much a consensus that Scott was guilty. One thing I found interesting was that the jury actually wasn't sequestered in this case, which was pretty crazy to me because this case was everywhere. And if any of the jurors went to even the grocery store, I'm sure they saw details of this case on the front page of almost every magazine at checkout. So I definitely think the media played a big part in framing his guilt.
- [28:46]
D
Similarities between this case and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl are kind of uncanny. Although Flynn has said she wasn't directly inspired by the Lacy Peterson case, how did the coverage of her disappearance seep into our collective subconscious in the early years of the 21st century?
- [29:03]
A
That's an interesting question, because I personally don't see a lot of similarities in the cases. I think Gone Girl's obviously more intricate on her setting up her husband, but also for me, I've covered endless cases on husbands who have killed their wives and murdered their families just because they wanted a fresh start with a mistress. It's kind of a tale as old as time. But I do think that this case did seep into our collective conscious more as a realization that there can be very dark sides to these seemingly perfect couples. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Make sure to rate, review and follow America's most infamous crimes so we can keep building this community together and to get all episodes at once. Ad Free. Subscribe to Crime House Bless on Apple Podcasts. Come back tomorrow for our next episode on the murder of Lacy Peterson.