A Deadly Game (51 page)

"And then your conclusion is there is no meringue mentioned on the show on 12/24, correct?"

"That's what I wrote. But I was wrong." Brocchini conceded.

Adding to the tension, Geragos then played the December 24 Martha Stewart show on the courtroom's large video screen for a third time-just to force the issue regarding Brocchini's negligence. "Now, apparently when you watched this video, you missed that?" Geragos asked.

"I missed it."

"Okay. . . . The absence of that was something you thought was suspicious, and part of the . . . the 'puzzle' is the way you said it?" "Objection, your Honor,"
 
Prosecutor DiStaso
 
said, rising from his chair.

"No, overruled," Delucchi ordered. "He can answer that. You can answer that, detective."

"Well, I thought it was suspicious that it wasn't in there, but I also think it's better that it is," Brocchini replied, keeping an even tone.

"Now, I'm still on the same interview, the one that we played for the jury yesterday, the next portion of that, you have that in front of you?"

"I have it here. I don't know what the next portion is that you're going to talk about."

"I just want to make sure you've got it there to refresh your recollection." "I do." "Okay. Then you asked him, 'When did you realize you were going to go fishing?' Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"And he said. 'Well, that was a morning decision.' It's either- and then going on to the next page-That's a morning decision is what you said, correct?"

"Yes."

"Go play golf at the club or go fishing, right?"

"Right."

"Now, at any point did you know that Ron Grantski had gone fishing that same day?"

"Objection, your Honor. Relevance?" DiStaso said, jumping up for a second time.

"Overruled," the judge declared.

"Maybe I'll ask it better," Geragos began again. "I assume you know now Ron Grantski went fishing virtually the exact same time."

"I do know now."

"Okay. When did you learn that?"

"After this trial started."

The barrage of questions continued, as Geragos hammered away at the obvious discrepancies between Brocchini's testimony and actual police reports. The defense attorney cited Brocchini's earlier testimony that he had not seen a pair of white sneakers Scott claimed he'd pulled from a duffel bag and placed on the dining room wet bar the day Laci went missing. Waving a police photograph, Geragos pointed out that members of the Modesto Crime Scene unit had in fact, captured the tennis shoes on film.

Geragos effectively demonstrated the detective had made numerous errors in his investigation. As Brocchini's second day of cross-examination progressed, Geragos interrogated him about a witness statement that had been expunged from his police report. Brocchini had to admit that he had removed a statement by a woman named Peggy O'Donnell, whose company, Adventures in Advertising, was located near Scott's in the same industrial park.

"Did you go out and interview Peggy O'Donnell?"

"No. Somebody else did, though."

"Did you follow-up to see what the information was?"

"No, but I ... it was done."

"Okay. Now, specifically one of the things that you thought-I think you told the jury yesterday it was an exciting moment for you, if I'm not mistaken-is when you found the hair in the pliers; is that correct?"

"Yes."

"Okay, did you think it was significant or would be important information to your report to have people know that Peggy O'Donnell saw Laci at the warehouse on 12/23? Did you think that's something that would be significant since there was a hair that got you excited on a pliers at the warehouse on 12 ... what was the date that the pliers was recovered?"

"12/27. The date I saw it was February 11-----And that was important information. I didn't know it was Peggy McDonald [sic] but I did know we had to send somebody out there to interview Peggy, and it was done."

"Oh, so after you got this information you sent somebody to interview Peggy?"

"No, I don't know when. I just know she was interviewed."

"You don't know when it was done because, until I brought it up, you didn't realize that you had excised it and somebody would catch it; isn't that correct?" Geragos asked accusingly.

"I don't know."

"Can you tell me how that particular piece of information got excised out of your police report?"

"I excised it."

"You did it?"

"Yes, I did, if it's not in there ..."

In the report, O'Donnell claimed that Laci visited the warehouse complex on either December 20 or December 23, and asked to use her bathroom. O'Donnell's testimony was important to the defense because it was evidence that Laci had been to Scott's office after he bought the boat. This visit might account for the hair found inside the craft.

Brocchini did not think much of O'Donnell's report. He had been inside the warehouse on December 24, and again on December 27, and was certain that a woman in Laci's condition could not have climbed over the pallets stacked floor to ceiling to get to the bathroom in the rear of the storage space. In fact, based on the cluttered condition of the warehouse, he was confident that Laci had not gone inside that day. She might never have seen the boat.

Brocchini knew that O'Donnell never saw Laci inside Scott's warehouse. He also knew that another officer had followed up on the tip and logged the interview with O'Donnell into his report. Yet Geragos was insinuating that the detective had done something sinister. Brocchini did not interview the woman, so he did not leave the information in his own report, but the other officer's report was always available.

I later learned that Detective Brocchini was quite concerned about the way he was portrayed in the press. He feared for his job- as did his mother, who became the target of nasty comments by friends at the beauty parlor and her bingo game.

Before convening court the next day, Judge Delucchi angrily reprimanded the Modesto Police Department for violating his gag order. A department spokesman had commented on the Peggy O'Donnell controversy, apparently telling an AP reporter that the report was not hidden or expunged, but was available in another officer's report. The judge was furious.

Later that morning, Brocchini again fell under attack. Geragos began by quizzing the detective about Scott's neighbor Kim McGregor and her role in the burglary of the Peterson home. He pressed for details about McGregor's alibi for December 23 and 24, and then waited to pounce as the detective explained that she had visited an ex-boyfriend and his two Hawaiian roommates on the twenty-third. Producing a flier about the burglary across the street at the Medina residence, Geragos noted that police were looking for three dark-skinned, non-African American men. The lawyer drove the point home when he got Brocchini to confirm that he had not investigated McGregor's Hawaiian friends. Brocchini insisted that McGregor was investigated, and that police had eliminated her as a suspect. Nevertheless, the attack continued.

Geragos finally wrapped up his cross-examination by criticizing the detective for not following up on three witness accounts that might have placed Laci in the park on the morning of December 24.

He referred to a woman named Victoria Pouches, who claimed to have seen a woman walking a dog that was barking furiously, and a man named Chris Van Zandt, who also claimed to have seen a pregnant woman walking one of the park trails.

Geragos pointed out that the detective never brought Van Zandt to the park to show officers where he made the sighting. "Wouldn't it have been the prudent thing to do, when you got forty or fifty officers out there looking in the park, to have actually driven to the guy's house and shown him a picture of Laci, shown him a picture of McKenzie and say, 'Hey, is that the dog?' So you can eliminate that lead?"

"No."

"No? Okay. Now?"

"Prudent thing to do is, as soon as we got the information, we went there, we did a search of that area, a thorough search. We contacted people. We searched the bushes. Went to the area he described. . . . He said he couldn't ID her. He said he couldn't tell us if it was Laci or not. He saw a pregnant lady walking with a golden retriever. So going to where he was and showing him a picture would not-that would not have been prudent at the time."

After three days of cross-examination Geragos finally passed the witness, and on June 30 DiStaso began his redirect. Brocchini was again caught in a snafu when he was asked about the tip he received from Miguel Espidia, Scott's former college classmate. According to Brocchini, Espidia had told police about a 1995 conversation in which Scott observed that if he wanted to "get rid of a body" he would bag the head, wrap it with duct tape, and then dump it in the bay. When Geragos got Brocchini to concede that Espidia had never actually mentioned duct tape, the detective was left looking like he'd intentionally embellished the story. Later he would explain that he had not reviewed the tip information in a long time when asked about it in court and was simply mistaken about the duct tape.

After concluding his testimony, the detective made himself scarce throughout the remainder of the trial. Some reporters tried to suggest that Brocchini had lied about evidence to claim credit for solving the notorious murder. Every story needs a villain, and for a time this hard-working detective was unfairly cast in the role. A few ardent commentators even labeled him the "Mark Fuhrman of the case." Yes, he made some mistakes along the way, errors in judgment and even questionable omissions in his reporting. But there was no falsification or suspected planting of evidence. Nothing he did wrong would have changed the outcome of the case. Nevertheless, the media portrayed him as a zealot focused entirely on one person, Scott Peterson.

It wasn't until Amber Frey took the stand on Day 34 of the trial that the pundits changed their tune about the progress of the trial. During six days of testimony, which included the recorded phone conversations, Amber introduced a very different Scott Peterson to the jury. Those conversations didn't prove that he was a killer, but they offered motive, innumerable lies, and plenty of incriminating statements.

To the surprise of many, Amber came across not as a wicked home-wrecker but as a naive, honest young woman who was truly in love with Scott Peterson. She was entirely credible. Critically, in the time she was working with the police she'd managed to get Scott to repeat several damning statements he first made long before the recordings began. In early December he told Amber that he had "lost" his wife and this would be his first holiday without her. Several times before Laci disappeared, he talked of a future with Amber and her daughter. He told her there would be a window of time when he would be absent, but that by the end of January he would be home and free to expand their relationship. He told her on several occasions that he did not want his own children. In fact, Scott wanted a vasectomy and told Amber that her daughter Ayiana would be the only child he needed. Amazingly, Amber was able to get Scott to repeat all of this information after she began taping him on December 31. It would have taken an ogre to shrug off the story of Scott attending the emotional candlelight vigil for his missing wife just

after he'd been concocting stories about wild Parisian parties for his lover's amusement.

Later, it emerged that the jurors were particularly repulsed by this behavior. "That spoke [volumes]," juror Greg Beratlis later told journalists. "You know, here's a guy [whose] wife was abducted ... yet he's romancing his lover or girlfriend, for lack of a better term, at her vigil," jury foreman Steve Cardosi agreed. "You know, when you think about that his wife, pregnant with his baby, you know, he at some point in there had to have loved her, and for him to be romancing another woman while she's missing was a pretty big topic for us."

"That's part of the twisted mind of Scott Peterson," added juror Mike Belmessieri, a former police officer. "His wife is missing and he's on a love affair in Paris and Luxembourg or wherever . . . and the whole time he's talking from Modesto, USA."

Testimony from Shawn Sibley and Scott's employees Eric Olsen and David Fernandez had set the stage for Amber. Visibly nervous, Olsen told jurors about "inappropriate" conversations he'd witnessed between Sibley and Scott at a business dinner they attended in October 2002. David Fernandez, a fertilizer salesman, followed with more details, including Scott's questions about "favorite sexual positions."

Sibley testified that Scott described himself as a "horny bastard" that night. He also told her he had "lost" his soul mate, and feared that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone.

Amber's testimony began on August 10, 2004. Dressed in a dark suit, her long blond hair falling around her face, Amber rode the escalator to the second floor courtroom. Surprisingly, her own testimony was very brief. It was Scott's own words on tape that had the real impact. Because she was one of the few people left who was still listening to Scott by mid-January, he couldn't stop talking to her. Even though much of what she told him was accusatory and berating, he often stayed on the line for hours at a time. While he never confessed, he made countless remarks that would sound particularly incriminating at trial.

During Amber's three days under direct examination, the jurors heard hours of recorded conversations while Amber sat in the gallery with her attorney, Gloria Allred. Amber's long-awaited appearance had been hyped in the press as the linchpin of the prosecution's case, yet jurors later reported that her testimony, and the hours of recorded phone conversations, constituted only a small piece of the whole. "It was all too clear that Scott had been planning Laci's murder even before he met Amber Frey," as juror Richelle Nice later reported.