← America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
Scott Peterson: His Case Isn't As Closed As You Think Pt. 3
00:33:56
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Uncle Number One
Foreign.
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Crime House Announcer
This is Crime House.
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Katie Ring
Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and sentenced to death. But years later, new evidence and unanswered questions have people asking, did the system get it right? Because while the jury saw a cold, calculated killer, the case against Scott was built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence. No murder weapon, no DNA tying him directly to the crime. And now potential new leads from a mysterious van to untested evidence are forcing a second look. Because if the wrong person was convicted, then the real truth about what happened to Lacey and her unborn son is still out there. Today, I'll break down the trial, the verdict, and the new developments that could reshape everything we thought we knew about the murder of Lacey Peterson and whether this case is really as closed as it seems. 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. Before I get started, please be advised that this episode contains descriptions of physical and sexual assault and murder. So please listen with care. This is our final episode on the murder of Laci Peterson. Today, I'll cover the trial in depth. The strategies Scott Peterson's defense attorney used to try and introduce reasonable doubt while the prosecution worked to paint him as a cold, calculating killer who planned everything in advance. Then I'll look at what happened after the verdict, including a series of developments in the last few years that have raised serious questions about whether this case is really as closed as it seemed to be.
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Crime House Announcer
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Katie Ring
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Katie Ring
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Katie Ring
On May 4, 2003, the City of Modesto held a public memorial service for Lacey Peterson and her unborn son Connor. Almost 3,000 people came. It would have been Lacey's 28th birthday. I think the details matter. The size of that gathering on that particular day tells you something about the kind of person Lacey was and how much her death impacted the community. The people of Modesto, really the whole country by that point, wanted someone to answer for it. And the general consensus was that Scott Peterson was that person. The district attorney was seeking the death penalty and there were plenty of people who thought that was exactly right. Backed into the most serious corner of his life, Scott brought in the biggest name he could find, LA based defense attorney Mark Garagos. Garagos was about as high powered as they come. His client list at the time included Winona Ryder and Michael Jackson. So he was clearly someone who knew how to work a high profile, high pressure case with the cameras rolling and he didn't waste any time. The day after Laci's memorial service, Garrigo stepped in front of the press and made a statement that raised a lot of eyebrows. He said he wasn't just going to raise reasonable doubt, he was going to prove that Scott Peterson was innocent and he would find the real killer. That's a bold thing to promise in any case, and in One this high profile, without much direct forensic evidence. It was definitely a high bar to set. But all he needed to do was create reasonable doubt that Scott had murdered Laci. And Garagos seemed to think he could do it. Scott spent the next six months in county jail while Garagos worked on his defense. In a lot of instances, a defendant in a capital case like this will request additional time. These things are complex and the defense teams need as much Runway as possible to build their arguments. But Scott was miserable sitting in that cell. And he seemed confident enough in his own innocence that he told Garagos to skip the delay request and move things along. Whether that decision came from genuine confidence, impatience, or something else entirely, Scott got the speedy trial he asked for. The first preliminary hearing began in late October of 2003, just six months after his arrest. It gave both sides a chance to see signal what the actual trial would look like for the prosecution. One of their early reveals was the full scope of Scott's phone records with Amber Fry. The numbers were hard to process. Hundreds of calls between them over the course of their relationship, including seven on Christmas Day, just the day after Lacy went missing, and 16 on December 26th. Notably, there weren't any calls at all on the day of Laci's disappearance. Christmas Eve, when detectives believed Scott killed Laci and drove her body to the Berkeley marina. As for the defense, Mark Garagos big reveal was that he was going to focus on the burglaries on the Peterson street around the time she went missing. Remember, the police had looked into the possibility that the robbers had taken Laci and ruled it out. But Garagos wanted to revisit that. He also intended to challenge one of the central findings of the autopsy report, which said that Connor had left Lacey's womb after she died. But Garagos was going to argue that she could have given birth before she was killed. And that would be massive because Lacey was eight months pregnant when she disappeared. A few more weeks would have passed before Connor was due. If Garagos could prove that Connor was born then it could mean Lacey was alive for a while after Christmas Eve. And there's no way that with all of the attention on Scott, that he could have been her killer at that point. The preliminary hearing also made one thing abundantly clear. The media firestorm was massive, even for a high profile murder trial. Over 100 journalists and camera crews descended on the courthouse from across the country. With that much attention on it, Garagos was able to get the venue moved to redwood city about 90 miles away. Once everything was lined up, jury selection started about four months later, in March of 2004. In a capital case, which is when the government is asking for a death sentence, jury selection can go on forever. Under all of that extra scrutiny, it took two full months to seat the final 12 jurors and six alternates. With the trial officially starting in June of 2004, the prosecution's theory was the one that the public had been hearing over a year by that point, that Scott Peterson didn't want to be a father or a husband. He wanted freedom. Freedom to travel, to pursue other women, to live the kind of life he'd been carrying on in secret. So he killed Lacey, dropped her body in the San Francisco Bay, and went right back to calling his girlfriend. The narrative all lined up, but the prosecution's biggest problem was getting enough forensic evidence to back it up. Everything they had was circumstantial. The most tangible piece of physical evidence was a single strand of Lacey's hair that was tangled in a pair of pliers on Scott's boat. On the surface, that sounds like maybe it could be enough, especially since Christmas Eve was the first time Scott even took the boat out. But Scott did like to fish, and the pliers weren't necessarily new. So it's entirely possible that her hair had already been on the pliers or it got transferred onto them from Scott's clothes or all sorts of other ways. So it was definitely suspicious, but again, not definitive proof of wrongdoing on Scott's part. So instead of building their case on physical evidence they didn't have, the prosecution took a different approach. They set out to prove that no one but Scott could have done this by eliminating every other possibility one by one. The first thing they needed to rule out was Mark Garagos birth theory. So they brought in a forensic pathologist who walked through the physical evidence step by step. The first point was that Connor's umbilical cord appeared to have been torn, not cut or clamped like in a standard birthday. The second point, Lacey's uterus hadn't contracted back down like it normally does in the hours after delivery. And third, Connor's bowels still contained meconium, a waste product that's typically expelled shortly after birth. Taken altogether, the pathologist's conclusion was that Connor had almost certainly died while still in the womb, which meant that Laci hadn't survived long enough to deliver him. With that theory effectively neutralized, the prosecution turned to Amber Fry. On the stand, she repeated exactly what she'd already told investigators that Scott had called her on December 9, 2002, and told her he was a widower, that he'd lost his wife, and that this coming Christmas would be the first one without her. And again, the prosecution reminded the jury that this was the same day Scott bought his boat. That pairing of facts was the spine of the prosecution's timeline that on the same day Scott started erasing Laci from his life, he also acquired the vessel he'd used to dispose of her body. To add to that argument, they also pointed out that Scott had been researching tidal currents in San Francisco Bay online. He'd also told Amber that he was planning to sell his Land Rover, which actually belonged to Lacey. None of it was a fingerprint or a murder weapon. But the prosecution argued that it all pointed to a man who'd been planning the end of his marriage long before Christmas Eve, and he took drastic measures to do it.
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Katie Ring
when it was the defense's turn to make its case, Mark Garagos was already behind the eight ball. The prosecution had gotten ahead of the birth theory, and the judge had already said his argument about the burglary known as The Medina burglary was inadmissible before the trial started, and here's why. When the police first caught the thieves, they initially said they'd committed the robbery on December 27, three days after Lacey disappeared. Although that wasn't quite right, because the Medina family had come home on the 26th and then immediately reported the break in. After that, the thieves revised their story and said they'd come in early on the 26th. So could it be they were lying and they'd actually broken in on Christmas Eve Eve than taken Lacey? That's what Mark Garagos had wanted to argue. But the judge was convinced enough that the burglary was on the 26th that he said it was an entirely different case and couldn't be brought up in Scott's trial. That left Garagos without his two most powerful arguments, and he knew it. In his closing argument, Garagos worked with what he had. He told the jury that, yes, Scott Peterson had been a terrible husband. He was a cheater, a liar, and he treated his pregnant wife with a cruelty that was hard to excuse. The jury could find him morally reprehensible. Garagos was practically inviting them to. But he argued that being a bad husband is not the same as being a murderer. And despite everything the prosecution had laid out, there was not one piece of direct physical evidence connecting Scott Peterson to Lacy or Connor's deaths. No weapon, no DNA, no witnesses. The entire case rested on inference and circumstance. And that, Garago said, wasn't enough to sentence a man to death. It seemed like maybe his argument landed, because after the jury started deliberating on November 3, 2004, it took them nine days to reach a verdict. But when it came back, it came back guilty. Scott Peterson was convicted of first degree murder for killing Lacey and second degree murder for killing Connor. The difference being that the jury agreed that Scott had planned Lacey's murder in advance, but Connor's death was a consequence of Lacey's murder rather than an independently targeted act. When the verdict was read, Lacey's family broke down in tears, while Scott's family sat in stunned silence. Meanwhile, Scott showed no visible reaction at all. The sentencing phase began shortly afterward, and the outcome was the same as the verdict, the worst available. The judge sentenced Scott Peterson to death by lethal injection. He was transferred to San Quentin State Prison and placed on death row, where he'd spend the next 15 years fighting to have the decision overturned. For the first decade or so after his sentencing, Scott's appeals didn't go anywhere. His family never stopped believing in his innocence. And they never stopped pushing for someone outside of their circle to take a serious look at what they thought were significant gaps in the original investigation. But for a long time, the wider world had moved on. That started to change in the mid 2010s when an investigative journalist named Mike Gudgell decided to take a closer look at the case. Gudgell had been covering the story since the beginning, and something about the jury's verdict had always nagged at him. Not necessarily because he was convinced that Scott was innocent, but because he didn't feel like every lead had been properly pursued. So he started digging. And the more he found, the more he felt like he was right. The thread he kept pulling on was the Medina burglary. The same one Mark Garagos had been blocked from raising at trial. Gudgell felt like the authorities had been too quick to accept the thieves revised timeline, Even if they had broken in early on the 26th. The street was crawling with media and law enforcement by then. Gudgell thought that didn't quite add up. And that wasn't all. He did some more digging and found something that nobody had really noticed before. On Christmas Eve, the day Laci went missing, a neighbor had reported a brown or tan van parked outside the Medina's house and also noticed men on the lawn. The neighbor described the van as brown or tan. And at that time, the police apparently hadn't followed up on that report. As Gujil looked into it more, he found something that really caught his attention. In 2015, he learned that the morning after Lacey disappeared, a van had burst into flames in a nearby neighborhood. Firefighters had been called to the scene, and when they put out the blaze and looked inside, they found the remains of a mattress in the back. Part of that mattress had survived the fire, and on that surviving section, there was a rust colored stain that looked like it could be blood. The fire investigator on scene had performed a luminol field test on the stain. Luminol is a chemical that produces a glow reaction in the presence of blood. And the test came back positive. After that, the investigator had done exactly what he was supposed to do. He flagged the result and sent the information to the detectives working the Peterson case. When those detectives passed the stain onto the crime laboratory for more sophisticated testing, the results came back inconclusive. At that point, the lead quietly died. To Mike Gudgel and to Scott's family. That felt like an abandoned thread, not a closed one. If the van parked outside of the Medina's house on Christmas Eve, Was the same one that burned the next morning. And if the stain in the back of the van was Lacey's blood, then the whole case looked completely different. What they did to your family. You're lucky to make it out alive. Streaming on Peacock. These men are going to come after me. Taking them out. It's my only chance.
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- [19:36]
Katie Ring
From the co Creator of Ozark.
- [19:39]
Legal/Case Analyst
Looks like a family was running drugs.
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Katie Ring
Execution style killing. It's rare for the Keys. Any leads on who they might have been running for? The cartel killed my family.
- [19:47]
Legal/Case Analyst
I'm gonna kill them. All of them.
- [19:49]
Katie Ring
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- [19:54]
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- [20:26]
Katie Ring
While Mike Gudgell kept investigating the lead on the van, Scott made some inroads in court. In 2020, the California Supreme Court reviewed his case and found procedural errors in how the jury had been selected, specifically issues with the way certain jurors were dismissed. As a result, the court reduced Scott's sentence from death to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was a meaningful change in terms of what his daily reality looked like, and it removed the immediate possibility of execution. But the court stopped short of ordering a retrial.
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Legal/Case Analyst
Scott.
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Katie Ring
Scott was alive and off of death row, but he was still convicted, still behind bars, and still fighting. In the summer of 2023, he took his most significant step yet, when Scott was accepted as a client by the Los Angeles Innocence Project. It's not the same as the larger Innocence Project, which is actually a different organization, but the LAIP has the same goal. To free wrongfully convicted people. And they thought Scott's case was worth taking seriously. Like Mike Gudgell, the laip's investigation focused on the van and the mattress. And they had a lot more resources to tap into. Which allowed the LAIP to formally request that the mattress stain be retested using modern DNA techniques that didn't exist in 2002. If it turned out to be Lacey's, it would turn the entire case on its head. The laip's case was also boosted by a new witness who came forward around this time. A Modesto resident named Tom Harshman told investigators and reporters that when Lacey disappeared, he'd Personally told the police that he'd seen a pregnant woman being forced into the back of a van. He said the police had never followed up on that tip. Detective John Bueller, one of the two lead investigators on the original case, didn't dismiss this outright. He acknowledged that when Lacey disappeared, a lot of what he called phantom sightings came in, but he didn't remember getting a tip specifically from Tom Harshman. He was also careful to say that if he had heard such a report, he would have looked into it. Bueller said that while he remained confident in Scott's guilt, if genuine exonerating evidence existed, he was all for it. But he also noted something that's worth taking seriously. Eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, especially in high profile cases like Lacey's. It can be subjective, and people sometimes see things they are primed to or they don't quite remember right. But Scott's legal team wouldn't need to rely on witness testimony if the DNA testing came back in their favor. And In May of 2024, a judge ruled on the Laip's DNA testing requests, but they mostly denied it. The mattress cloth had been tested in 2019. The judge ruled that it hadn't shown any indication of blood, and they didn't feel like there was enough justification to spend more time and resources on testing it again. But the judge did grant one major request to test the duct tape that had been found attached to Lacey's remains when her body washed ashore in April of 2003. If someone else had killed her, their DNA might be on it, which could be enough to get Scott a new trial. As of this recording, those results have not been made public. But on April 28, 2026, there was another new development, or lack of one, depending on how you see it. The judge overseeing his case declined to review the evidence that Laip submitted and denied their petition for a new trial, finding the evidence was procedurally barred or lacking merit. Scott's team isn't giving up, though they say they'll appeal the decision to a higher court. So here's where things stand. Scott Peterson is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at Mule Creek State Prison. He's consistently denied any involvement in the deaths of Lacey and Connor. His case is being actively pursued by the Los Angeles Innocence Project. There's a DNA test outstanding on potentially key evidence. And a journalist who spent years working this case believes that the original investigation left serious, consequential questions unanswered. The question is, do those questions leave enough doubt that Scott killed his Wife and unborn son. Is it possible that everything Scott did in the lead up to Lacey's murder was pure coincidence? That he told his girlfriend he'd lost his wife that then bought a boat the same day, but didn't take it out for two weeks the day Lacey disappeared?
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Legal/Case Analyst
You tell me. But in my opinion, there's a whole
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Katie Ring
lot of smoke here, and the jury thought it was the sign of a fire. We may never get the smoking gun that gives us a completely definitive answer on Scott. But here's what I do know. Laci Peterson was a real person. She was warm and funny and stubborn and deeply loved by the people in her life. She was eight months pregnant with a son she'd already named and was already imagining a future for. And whatever really happened that fateful Christmas Eve, she and Connor left a void that will never be filled. 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.
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Audience/Listener
Okay, straight up, do we think Scott did it, or is there enough reasonable doubt here to acquit?
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Legal/Case Analyst
I'm still convinced Scott did it. I've seen identical cases over and over again with men who fit the exact
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Katie Ring
same profile as Scott. Luckily, in those cases, there is a
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Legal/Case Analyst
lot more direct evidence. But even without direct evidence, the case lines up. That said, with everything that has come
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Katie Ring
out recently, I do think there is the tiniest bit of reasonable doubt, but not enough for me to exonerate him.
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Legal/Case Analyst
A lot of people point to the
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Katie Ring
fact that there was no blood at the crime scene as something that exonerates him.
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Legal/Case Analyst
But knowing what I know about domestic violence, strangulation is very common in these crimes.
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Katie Ring
In fact, if an abuser strangles their partner, the chances of them murdering them go up by 750%.
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Legal/Case Analyst
Some other pieces of evidence that the defense brought up that they say challenged
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Katie Ring
the story was that someone searched up
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Legal/Case Analyst
a sunflower umbrella online at 8am but this could have easily been Scott, especially around Christmas time. So that is not a solid at all for me. Another thing is that people witnessed him launch the boat, and the boat was
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Katie Ring
very small, so it would have been
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Legal/Case Analyst
hard to hide a body on it. But again, not impossible. They also had some assistants take the boat out and practice throwing a body overboard. And they fell into the water most of the times. But also when Scott came home, he threw all of his clothes in the laundry, and he said it's because he was around chemicals and his wife was pregnant. And so when he would get home from the boat, he'd always wash his clothes. But again, it could have been because he fell into the ocean. Who knows? Another thing they challenged was that the dogs that found Lacey's scent at the dock actually had failed their tests. So a lot of people thought that was one of the big things that proved that Lacey was in that boat. But the dogs weren't very consistent in their results. And there was also most likely cross contamination in the clothing or whatever they used to show the dogs to find her scent.
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Katie Ring
They also tried to argue that Lacey gave birth to the baby before she was killed.
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Legal/Case Analyst
But their defense expert completely fell apart on the stand in that testimony and even said, cut me some slack. So that obviously didn't go well for them. People also point to the fact that he sent those emails and assembled the woodworking tool and say, you know, why would he stop and do those things
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Katie Ring
if he had a dead body in his trunk?
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Legal/Case Analyst
Which could be argued either way. Some make the argument that he's a psychopath and that this behavior and dissociation could actually be in line with what he did and pausing before throwing away the body. But if anything, the one thing that could give me pause was that seven pregnant women went missing within a few miles of Modesto between 1999 and 2002. And one named Evelyn Hernandez was also eight months pregnant and went missing within six months of Lacey, but wasn't really
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Katie Ring
covered because the trial was so big.
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Legal/Case Analyst
And there was also a story from a woman that I saw in the documentary who said she owned a boutique, and she was in her boutique, and these guys were parked outside of it, and they were just staring at her. And she got this very weird vibe from them and ran into the back. And she talked about it later and said that if she didn't do that, she thinks that she could have maybe been lazy. So if anything, there could be something to that. But I don't know. I still think Scott did it.
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Audience/Listener
Was there any way Scott was ever going to get a fair trial in that media environment? And does the venue change to Redwood City tell us something about how extreme the coverage really was?
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Legal/Case Analyst
I definitely think it would have been hard for Scott to get a fair trial with all of the media attention. I think most of the jurors knew who he was, and they asked the jurors when they were selecting jurors immediately if you knew who he was or if you thought he was guilty. The ones who said yes, they would throw out one of the other pieces in this case that got some scrutiny Was that they asked anyone who didn't believe in the death penalty to leave. And so that left a bunch of jurors who were more likely to convict someone. So that was part of their appeal. I don't know. I think a fair trial would have been hard no matter what. Also, they weren't sequestered. So again, like I said, they could have been checking out at the grocery store and seen all the magazines with their faces on the front cover. In terms of moving it to Redwood City. Redwood City is a pretty big city. It's not like this unknown town. And so I think people had the same exposure, if not more media exposure to this case there. So I don't think that really helped very much.
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Audience/Listener
What do we think the duct tape DNA test could tell us? And why was the mattress testing denied when it seems like it could hold the key to so many of the lingering questions in this case?
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Katie Ring
After being in the water so long,
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Legal/Case Analyst
I don't know if the DNA on duct tape would really even come up, let alone be evidence that will give him a retrial. Also, the DNA on the mattress, again, they tested it first, and it came up inconclusive. So I think it makes sense that the judge didn't want to waste more money and resources towards that testing when it already came back inconclusive.
- [31:35]
Audience/Listener
Police tunnel vision is a pattern we keep seeing across this whole series. How do we feel about the fact that investigators were so focused on Scott that other leads may have gone cold? And to be fair to the detectives, is there a point in any investigation where you have to commit to your strongest theory and pursue it, even at the risk of missing something?
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Legal/Case Analyst
I think, for the most part, tunnel vision with investigators is a bad thing and that they have an absolute duty
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Katie Ring
to pursue every lead.
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Legal/Case Analyst
So I think they should have pursued some of the eyewitness testimonies more, the testimony about the van. Although they say they don't remember that, I think maybe they should have looked into the robbers more. Although they do say that the robbers passed polygraph tests, and so that's part of the reason why they discounted them as suspects. But overall, Scott was by far the strongest suspect. This isn't a Karen Reed style thing where the cops didn't even go in the house. They didn't even really investigate the other people. There was so much more evidence in a case like that. There wasn't very much evidence in this case. And so if you're building a case off of. Off of a murder like her body was found, so it was a murder and there's a suspect you got, you kind of have to narrow it down to the person who looks the most guilty. And I think after those Amber Fry calls you, you realize that this man is more dangerous than just a bad husband. He's capable of lying with such an ease that is eerie. And he's definitely just not the person that you think he was. And I think he's obviously capable of bad things and I think he did this. So, yes, tunnel vision is a bad thing. But in an investigation, at some point you do narrow down the suspect pool school. And as we all know, if a woman is murdered, the most likely suspect is her husband. So again, with other cases with these exact same dynamics, it has turned out to be the husband. So those are my thoughts on this.
- [33:46]
Katie Ring
Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Make sure to rate, review and follow America's Most Most Infamous crimes so we can keep building this community together. And to get all episodes at once. Ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Come back next week for another deep dive into a true crime that changed America.