← Criminally Obsessed
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, I'm Ann Emerson and this is criminally obsessed. 23 years later, and the case that made so many of us absolutely obsessed with true crime is back. And this time the question isn't whether Scott Peterson was convicted, it's whether he was convicted fairly. A brand new two part Annie documentary. Scott, the new evidence is dropping now and it follows the Los Angeles Innocence Project as it argues there's new evidence that could exonerate Scott Peterson.
- [00:30]
B
It's one of the most famous cases in this country's history. And now the Los Angeles Innocence Project is putting forward new scientific evidence that suggests that Scott Peterson is absolutely innocent.
- [00:41]
A
Now let's rewind for a second. On Christmas Eve 2002, Lacy Peterson, eight months pregnant with her son Connor, vanished from her home in Modesto, California. Months later, the bodies of Lacy and Connor were recovered on the shores of the San Francisco Bay. Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering them and is serving life in prison. But he's never stopped insisting he's innocent. Joining me is Chris Pixley. He's a veteran defense attorney, ABC News legal analyst, and one of the experts featured in this A E documentary. Chris has followed this case since day one of Lacey's disappearance.
- [01:18]
B
This is the kind of evidence that changes cases.
- [01:21]
A
What's fascinating is he doesn't just sit in a studio and talk about it. He takes us back to the scene, retraces the investigation and starts poking holes in the case. Honestly, he had me questioning things that I thought I'd settled long ago about different timelines, 15 new witnesses, and groundbreaking technology that shows Lacy's body had to have been dumped from land.
- [01:45]
B
If any of them are right, then Scott Peterson had nothing to do with their disappearance.
- [01:49]
A
Does that mean Scott Peterson is innocent? No, but it does make you stop and ask whether every lead was followed by, every assumption was challenged, and whether the Los Angeles Innocence Project may have uncovered something worthy of taking another look. Be sure to like and subscribe. We're following all the cases that you're obsessed with. Now let's get into it. Chris, I have to say, like, this is. Can I use the word bombshell? I don't know. You know, it's amazing. Like, the work you're doing on this documentary is really, really impressive. So first of all, like, I really enjoyed it.
- [02:30]
B
Do I think that we'll be able to answer the question whether Scott Peterson is guilty or innocent? I think we're going to get a lot closer than anyone ever has.
- [02:40]
A
Do you think he did it?
- [02:42]
B
I think the evidence is, is really overwhelming against the state. No, it's a fair. Everyone wants to ask that question. I. You know, the lawyer's answer that no one likes is the fact that what's being tested here is whether he received a fair trial. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying to you that for the litany of reasons that we've been able to demonstrate, thanks to the work of the dedicated people at the Los Angeles Innocence Project, it's really undeniable. He didn't. His constitutional rights were violated. He was deprived of the right to a fair trial. On the question of did he do it? One third of all these crimes are committed by an intimate partner. That means two out of three times it happens somebody else is involved and responsible. There's a burglary that happened in the house across the street. These are tiny little homes with little front yards. You know, you can throw a baseball from your front front porch to your neighbor without any. Any difficulty at all. And Lacy's the kind of person that everyone says would have confronted someone if she saw them committing a crime across the street. So that. That's. That's enough for me to say that Scott's deserving of a new trial and the case is deserving of a complete reexamination. And that's. That's top. Top to bottom, looking at the state side as well as the defense side. And that's what we tried to do.
- [03:59]
A
What was it like to. To delve back into this? I mean, this is. This is a. This case. You had to really go into your file cabinet in your mind.
- [04:08]
B
I've been an ABC News legal correspondent all these years. I was. At the time of Lacy Peterson's disappearance. I. You know, I. Back then, I spent my evening on Larry King Live going toe to toe with Nancy Grace over this particular case. So I thought that I knew it. I really thought I knew the case. And what the Los Angeles Innocence Project demonstrated is that I didn't know the half of it. And we really wanted to look at all sides of it. So, of course, we went out and met with independent experts, some of the best in the country. And what was amazing about it is that as groundbreaking as we thought the new evidence was, when we would meet with independent experts who had no, you know, no involvement in the case, no dog in the hunt whatsoever, they would point out more things to us than even the laip had. Had. Had pled, we tried to look at it from. From the state's side. We tried to look at it from Scott Peterson's side. In almost every case, when we would sit with experts and they would point things out to us that weren't in the, in even in the filing. It supported what the Los Angeles Innocence Project, the case which is that, you know, the new evidence changes the narrative completely.
- [05:22]
A
How did the LA Innocence Project get involved? Do you know?
- [05:25]
B
First of all, they were contacted by the Peterson family. But the LA Innocence Project gets requests by the thousands on a daily basis from prisoners and prisoners families who want their cases reviewed. And they only take the most meritorious cases and they only take cases that they believe meet the California actual innocence standard. So they only take cases that they believe that they can prove actual innocence in. So for them, it's one thing that for them to get the request to take the Peterson case with this maligned figure, it's another thing for them to go out and do a two year investigation and come to the conclusion which they absolutely believe in his innocence.
- [06:08]
A
Just a fresh set of eyes looking at cases, at old cases can move the needle.
- [06:15]
B
When you talk about a fresh set of eyes, you're so right. Because one of the things that the series shows among many is that, you know, there's this burglary that occurs across the street from the Peterson home. People have from time to time heard a bit about it. What they don't know is how, how the evidence from that crime was physically destroyed by the police. What they don't know is that while the police said immediately from the jump it's unrelated to Lacy Peterson's disappearance, this burglary occurred on December 26, the day after Christmas. She went missing the day before. We're able to show live interviews being conducted by local media with news trucks up and down the street. The morning, early morning of in the dark of December 26th, you couldn't get a parking place across the street from the Petersons house because there were news trucks there. And if you came to haul out of that home safes with cash in them and all kinds of other household items that were stolen from the Medina home, you wouldn't have been able to do it in front of all the news crew. So that's the kind of thing that a fresh set of eyes brings out. And then everybody says, well, yeah, of course. Okay, so that crime didn't happen on the day after Christmas, it happened the day before Christmas. And that's the day Lacy went missing. You know, it's the same. The same is true with the eyewitnesses who we've heard about through the years. But the police didn't investigate because it didn't fit Their theory.
- [07:43]
A
And you have new information coming out in this documentary about how. How the. The eyewitness accounts specifically were handled, especially considering that there could have. There was a burglary across the street. Now we've got. We got new timelines, but now there's, like, a whole new way of looking at it.
- [08:05]
B
There were 15 eyewitnesses who saw her walking her dog on the day of her disappearance. Almost all of them place her walking her dog at a time after Scott Peterson had already left for the San Francisco Bay. If any of them are right, then Scott Peterson had nothing to do with their disappearance. One of the things that you learn immediately is that these eyewitnesses, they weren't looking for attention. Most of them recognized in the early days after a disappearance that witnesses who were stepping forward, who had seen her or had seen the dog, were getting really bad treatment in the media. It almost immediately didn't fit the media narrative. And that's because the Modesto police were giving a daily press conference, and they were talking about things like the search warrant that they were executing on the Peterson home, which they made sound in the very early days as though it was producing all kinds of evidence for them. It only came around at the time of trial that we. That we learned, no, they didn't get any evidence from any of the search warrants that they executed on the home. We were led to believe very early on the public, that this case is really pointing itself towards Scott Peterson. And so eyewitnesses weren't comfortable, and these are just salt of the earth people. So to go meet with them and to talk with these people about what they saw, it was fascinating.
- [09:32]
A
Well, so now we get to get into the nitty gritty of this a little bit, Chris, because these notes. There were notes that when Scott Peterson actually launched his boat into the water and. And who knew about this boat and how this boat came into play for the prosecution, yet now you're going to be able to shine some light on who actually knew about this boat to begin with, which I guess was a major sticking point in the first trial.
- [09:58]
B
It is. And you've hit on something that not a lot of people are hitting on, which is the. This storyline that the prosecution maintained throughout the entire case. They talked about it in their opening, and they talked about it in the closing. They said, look, Scott Peterson secretly purchased this bo. It was not known to Lacey's family. It was not known to Lacey, and he kept it a secret because he intended to use it for the commission of this crime. And Only in the past couple of years, out of nowhere have these notes that were taken from the Peterson home during one of the executions of one of the search warrants. These post it notes with handwriting from phone calls to marine supply stores pricing things like anchors for a boat. The state, though they have no explanation for why they never turned that evidence over to the defense for all of these years argues that even if it's Lacy's handwriting on those notes, well, she had a nautical theme for Connor's bedroom and that's all that that is related to. She wasn't buying live weighted anchors to hang over the crib. It makes no sense to make that kind of of argument. Actual physical anchors, the 50 pound type, you don't, they don't belong in the corner of a toddler or baby's room. They don't have any place around children. They've got sharp edges and all the rest. But it was something that was needed for Scott Peterson's boat and that, that evidence of course was not shared with the defense. The state made this argument throughout the entire case. It was part of their mens rea argument that this, this was intentional and pre planned and that's just all blown up. But it takes forensic document examiners, which I've used many times in my cases to look at these notes and be able to make the comparisons in the handwriting. And the comparisons here are stark. The differences between Scott Peterson's handwriting, he writes in all capital little blocks, he writes in this tiny little print and Lacy Peterson's handwriting, which the hand our own independent handwriting analyst was able to compare to samples of her writing. They jump off the page. It's, it's, it's her writing and so it's evidence that she knew about the boat.
- [12:26]
A
The technology that you were able to use in this case, as far as where they believe Lacey would Lacy's body would have been put into the bay. Talk to me about why this is going to completely change the way we look at this case.
- [12:48]
B
We now have modern science. It didn't exist at the time. Delft 3D technology, we're able to analyze the wave patterns, we have historical information and ultimately the new science shows that Lacy Peterson's body was likely placed in the bay from a land based location, not anywhere near where Scott Peterson was. And so it demonstrates that the testimony was false. But it also wrecks the prosecution's theory that Scott took her out on a boat and dumped her. Expert testimony in criminal trials is critically important. One of the things that it does for the jury is it gives them permission to arrive at the conclusion that they're their guts telling them to arrive at. So if you have great reservations about Scott Peterson on the basis of his. His short term, two and a half week relationship with Amber Fry, and if you actually think that that motivated him to murder his wife and his unborn child, an expert witness coming along and saying Lacy Peterson's body was placed in the bay at the exact location that Scott Peterson was south of Brooks island on the day of her disappearance. That matters to a. Of course, the state's expert was asked to look at where the bodies were found on the Richmond shoreline and reverse engineer it backtracked to where they would have been placed in the bay using tides. The state brought a hydrologist expert to that question. That's the right kind of expert. But in that space that he was asked to do that analysis with the technology that was available at the time, he couldn't.
- [14:27]
A
Well, so there was a level of this is our guy, this is the story we're going with. You believe that level of confirmation bias just never left the case.
- [14:39]
B
You saw it in this series. I think we, we talked to Mark Godsey and he's an expert in confirmation bias and he's written about this case. And I asked one particular question where he and I were sort of in a debate, which is at some point when you start destroying evidence and you're a criminal investigator who believes you wear the white hat, you believe you've got your man, you believe that confounding evidence that's inconvenient and doesn't and points away from your guy, it shouldn't be relied upon. But at some point when you start destroying that evidence or withholding it from. From the defense, which you know to be illegal, you have to be. You have to know what you're doing. And Godsey says no, this is how strong confirmation bias is. And they believe that they're doing the right thing, right down to withholding of exculpatory evidence. It was really fascinating to have that discussion that you can be that your mental approach to a case can really be hijacked by confirmation bias. And that seems to have really. And you have to remember, and in fairness to the Modesto police, they were under the spotlight. 2002 and early 2003 was nothing like it is. The world is today. Television news and print news was all that existed. What you do to your giant audience didn't exist at the time. And so they were under the spotlight with television cameras and newspapers reporting on their every move every day. And so that, that adds an enormous amount of additional pressure on top of the aggrieved family and everyone else wanting you to get your, your man so you understand how it happens.
- [16:15]
A
But is there any other evidence right now that you think is, is going to really move the needle and get, and possibly get Peterson a new trial?
- [16:23]
B
There's, there are two important pieces of new scientific evidence. One of them we talked about in terms of where Lacy Peterson's body was actually placed in the bay. The other one has to do with Connor Peterson's body. It separated from Lacy Peterson's body. There was a storm on April 14. Her body and Connor's bodies were found a couple of days later on the shoreline. The science that existed at the time with ultrasound and cross sectional studies that was used to try to date and age a child was so removed from the longitudinal studies. The gold standard science that exists today for determining the age of a child in utero. And what all of the experts say is that the likelihood is that Connor Peterson died, meaning that Lacy Peterson died sometime between four days and two weeks after Lacy went missing. If Connor Peterson is still alive after December 24th and Scott Peterson's not involved in Lacy's disappearance. And so these are, I mean, this is the kind of evidence that changes cases forever.
- [17:35]
A
Well, Chris, I mean, what is it going to take to get him a new trial? I mean, is that where we're headed? I mean, do you believe that, do you believe that that's possible?
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B
New science is critical to our fair trial rights. It will continue up the chain to the California Supreme Court or and potentially to the federal courts. This evidence, what I'm saying is it's going to be reviewed and it's going to be reviewed at the highest level. And the evidence that the Los Angeles Innocence Project has already brought to bear, it hasn't even been reviewed by a court yet. And it, it, it's going to change the narrative?
- [18:13]
A
Is it going to change the public opinion? I mean, and who, I mean, and who cares? I mean, like, I understand, like this was. We're not trying this in the court of public opinion, but I mean, you have to admit, like, this is. One of. This guy really became one of the most hated husbands in the world.
- [18:28]
B
I represented Eric and LYLE MENENDEZ For 10 years of my career. And one of the things when I was handling Eric's habeas petition, one of the things that he and I talked about consistently was the fact that it was going to be very hard to get relief without changing the narrative surrounding his case and Lyle's case. Fast forward a decade later, and Ryan Murphy in his Monsters series covers Eric and Lyle Menendez's case, changes the narrative. And now they're parole eligible. So it's, I think it does start. What lawyers do is incredibly important, but it's ultimately human beings, it's the public, and it's judges and members of the public that make the final decision about these cases. And so that's why this series, I think, is the first step in really changing the narrative. It happened in the Menendez case. I worked that case for a long time. I think this series is the first step and it's all based on the work of the Los Angeles Citizens Project. But I think it's, it's going, I think the narrative is changing.
- [19:42]
A
Do you believe that whoever is responsible, if it isn't Scott Peterson, will be held responsible for what happened to Lacy and her son?
- [19:52]
B
Yeah, I think that the new science is pointing all of us more and more narrowly toward what actually happened in that, that 12 to 24 hour period of time. So I, I, not only do I think that Scott Peterson's rights are going to be fairly reviewed, but I, and the evidence in this case, fairly reviewed. But I think that what's happening here matters for all of us. It, it matters that we can count on police and prosecutors to turn over every stone in their investigation. The idea that in this case evidence was excluded and withheld and in some cases destroyed is something that doesn't just matter for Scott Peterson. It matters for all of us. Because, you know, but for the grace of God, any one of us can find ourselves in that situation. So whether you like Scott Peterson or you don't like Scott Peterson, whether you think he's guilty or not, the larger question of whether he got a fair trial, whether this was a fair investigation, whether confirmation bias invaded all of it, you know, whether police destroyed and withheld evidence that they should not have is something that everyone should be interested in.
- [21:10]
A
Drop a comment below. I want to hear what you're thinking about this case. You know, we have been mulling it over and discussing it for 23 years. Do you feel like this new evidence is worthy of reopening the case? And before you go, be sure to, like, subscribe and turn on your notifications. I don't want you to miss any of these cases that you're obsessed with.