Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (29 page)

E R A S E D

Before Scott left home on Christmas Eve morning, someone

logged onto his computer at 8:40 A.M., using his logon, and immedi-ately checked the weather forecast for San Jose, the largest city south

of the San Francisco Bay. Police believe Laci was dead by then. But

even if she were still alive at that time, she would have had no reason

to check the weather outside Modesto, as she had no plans to leave

town that day. This could only have been Scott, and the only reason

he would have been concerned about the weather in the South Bay is

that he was planning on driving in that direction.

Afternoon rain was predicted for both San Jose and the Central

Coast. Perhaps the forecast scared him off, or the longer drive—two

and a half hours each way, making it difficult for him to get back

in time to ‘‘find’’ Laci missing before their scheduled rendezvous

with his in-laws. If he had dumped his wife’s body at Moss Landing

instead of in the San Francisco Bay, he might very well be a free man

today. But Scott Peterson did not commit the perfect crime. No one

ever does. He made mistakes and decisions that ultimately gave him

away.

Q

After picking up the freeway, Scott climbed up and over the hills

that separate the valley from the Bay Area via the Altamont pass,

known for its surreal hilltop wind-generator farms and a 1969 rock

concert that ended in a fan’s senseless murder. He passed ‘‘Club Fed,’’

the federal prison in Pleasanton that once housed fugitive heiress

Patty Hearst and was the scene of an inmate’s daring 1986 escape

by helicopter. He continued past a Babies ‘‘R’’ Us store, where Laci

had registered for shower gifts, and a miniature golf course, where

he might have taken Conner for his first whacks. At a fork in the

highway marked by a hilltop church with three enormous crosses,

he headed the last few miles toward Berkeley. He exited the freeway

and drove down University Avenue toward the bay, following the

directions he’d gotten from the Internet to the public launch area at

the far northeast end of the marina complex.

The Berkeley Marina is usually a bustling place, the largest marina

in the Bay Area and, with a thousand berths, one of the largest in

California. On Christmas Eve, however, it was like a ghost town.

Fishing season was still months away. No one booked a charter trip

or party boat out of the Marina Sports Center that day. No one

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came into the waterfront manager’s office. Between December 23

and December 27, only three people paid to launch boats from the

public piers.

Scott Peterson was one of those three. He fed five $1 bills into

the ‘‘iron ranger’’ at the top of the ramp, and the machine spit

out a receipt stamped with the date and time: December 24, 2002,

at 12:54 P.M. That same day, Marina groundskeeper Mike Ilvesta

came upon a man with brown hair who looked to be in his thirties

struggling to back his trailer down the ramp.

There was only one other truck and trailer in the parking lot, but

it was situated in such a way that the two vehicles were lined up end

to end in front of the ramp, blocking Ilvesta’s path as he attempted

to drive through the lot. He had to wait about twenty seconds while

the embarrassed-looking driver tried several times to align his boat

trailer with the pier, bumping into the pier at one point.

‘‘I saw the truck and trailer mostly, and I caught a glimpse of

the guy’s face, smiling. But it was so brief I wasn’t able to identify

him to the detectives that came down, to pick him out of a photo

lineup,’’ Ilvesta told me several weeks later. But the truck and trailer

he described matched Scott’s: ‘‘A four-door Ford pickup, extended

cab, goldish in color. What made it stick out in my mind was that

the trailer was so much smaller than the truck. We usually see bigger

boats at the marina.’’

As is the case with most eyewitness descriptions, there are some

problems with Ilvesta’s recollection. He thinks the boat was already

off the trailer and that Scott was in the process of taking it out

of the water when he happened by, but places the time at about

12:45 P.M. That would match up with the time Scott was preparing

to launch his boat, but the incident he recalls matches Scott’s own

description of what happened when he was leaving. In any event,

there is little question that this was Peterson, as Scott himself told

Det. Craig Grogan of the Modesto police the next day that some

Marina maintenance workers ‘‘got a good laugh’’ when he backed

the trailer into the pier.

One of the biggest mysteries in the Peterson case, the ques-tion most often asked by those who argued his innocence, is why

Scott Peterson told police he went fishing in the bay on Christmas

Eve if he had dumped his wife’s body there. Such an argument

assumes, however, that killers are perfectly rational and logical, too

smart to make mistakes or do anything that might ever get them

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E R A S E D

caught. In reality, the fact that Laci’s and Conner’s bodies washed

up where Scott placed himself on Christmas Eve, ninety miles from

where his wife supposedly disappeared, excluded virtually any other

reasonable scenario for how they got there. Even his attorney, Mark

Geragos, concedes that this insurmountable fact is what got his client

convicted.

So why would a guilty man place himself at the ‘‘scene of the

crime,’’ or at least at his chosen disposal site, volunteering the launch

fee receipt to police that very night as proof of his whereabouts?

I think there are two explanations. Either he was so confident in

the measures he took to weigh down his wife’s corpse that he thought

it would never be found, or once he knew he had been seen at the

bay, he was forced to change his alibi.

Police believe that Scott was planning to say he spent the day

golfing at the county club just outside Modesto, which he joined

three weeks before Laci disappeared. That’s what he told Laci’s sister

he planned to do on Christmas Eve when she cut his hair on the night

of December 23 and he offered to pick up the gift basket she and Laci

had ordered from Vella Farms, which is very near the country club.

And when the search began for Laci, he told two different people that

he had been golfing, apparently not having the new alibi quite fixed

yet in his mind.

Q

Being seen at the bay was his first mistake, the slip-ups on his alibi

another.

As fate would have it, Mike Ilvesta was not the only person to have

seen Scott that day at the bay. This other sighting, something that

has never before been reported, was by Heather Hailey, a caretaker

on Brooks Island, a small island in the central bay about two nautical

miles northwest of the Berkeley Marina, near where Scott Peterson

said he did his fishing that day. This second eyewitness, who got

a much better look at Peterson than Ilvesta, posed an even bigger

problem for Scott. The fact that she could place him at a specific

location on the bay may be the reason Scott was forced to incriminate

himself even more damningly—admitting that he was in the exact

area of the bay where a tides expert later calculated that Laci was

dumped, on the basis of where the remains of Laci and Conner

washed ashore.

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Very few people, even lifelong Bay Area residents, had ever

heard of Brooks Island before the arrest of Scott Peterson. Unlike the

much-visited destinations of Angel Island and Alcatraz, Brooks Island

is restricted to visitors as a designated bird sanctuary, inhabited only

by the couple who serve as its caretakers, Hailey and her boyfriend,

Roy Tedder. No one else is allowed to step foot on Brooks Island with-out a permit from the regional parks department, which administers

the island in conjunction with the federal Department of the Interior,

in order to protect the habitat of marine birds that nest there.

The Spanish originally named the island Isla de Carmen—eerily,

the name of a famous, if fictional, woman who was murdered by her

lover. For a while it was inhabited by people who raised fruit, grazed

cattle, and fished for oysters. It later became a private hunting reserve

where swells like Bing Crosby came to shoot pheasant. For many

years early in the twentieth century, the island was quarried for stone

used for, among other things, constructing one of the cellblocks at

San Quentin, the prison that houses California’s Death Row.

Some 373 acres of rock and sand half a mile long, Brooks Island

is shaped like a gun, with the main part of the island making up

the handle and a long sandy spit extending due west forming the

barrel. The caretaker’s residence and private pier are located where

the ‘‘hammer’’ on the gun would be. Near the base of the handle is

another much smaller island called Bird Island, basically a large rock

that juts up out of the bay, on which sea birds rest.

If one wanted to drop a body overboard, Brooks Island would be

a pretty good place to do so. The water is shallow enough there to

navigate safely in a boat the size of Scott’s, but too shallow for most

other boats on the bay. And the island provides a curtain of security,

blocking the view of any prying eyes from the nearby Richmond

shore.

Here Scott, due to unforeseen circumstances, made another mis-take. Heather Hailey was out on the island Christmas Eve afternoon,

looking for shorebirds in distress from oil residue that gets kicked up

on top of the water after storm surges, when she suddenly noticed a

small aluminum boat close to shore.

‘‘The windward side of the island is pretty much riddled with rocks

and boulders,’’ explained Hailey, who was not called to testify and

whose sighting has never before been made public. ‘‘It’s too rough

because it’s shallow in there and catches the current bad. Fishermen

don’t go over there. I only see two or three boats a year in that vicinity.’’

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E R A S E D

The boat she says she saw that day matches the description of

Scott’s boat—twelve to fourteen feet, she estimated, with a black

outboard motor. She couldn’t see the pilot’s face well, but could tell

he was white, with brown hair and a medium build. When she locked

eyes with him, something strange happened.

‘‘As soon as he saw me, he pulled his boat around Bird Island and

made a dead stop,’’ Hailey told me. ‘‘I thought maybe he was going

to try to land and go camping because of all the stuff he had piled in

the boat. So I sat down on the beach, and we had like a ten-minute

staring contest.’’

The man didn’t wave or smile or shout a greeting. And he wasn’t

fishing. ‘‘He just kind of kicked back and was looking at me as I was

looking at him,’’ she said. After she decided he wasn’t coming onto

the island, she headed back toward the caretaker’s residence. By the

time she got home, the boat was no longer in sight.

A month went by before Hailey realized that what she saw on

Christmas Eve might be important. ‘‘We can’t get a newspaper out

here, and we don’t watch much TV news because it’s so depressing,’’

she said. ‘‘So it wasn’t until sometime in January that I saw a picture

of Scott Peterson’s boat. That’s when I called Modesto police.’’

There is one problem with Hailey’s recollection, like Ilvesta’s. She

believes she saw the boat about an hour before sunset, which occurred

at 4:55 P.M. on Christmas Eve. Scott appears to have left the marina by

2:15 P.M., when activity on his cell phone resumed. Hailey conceded

she could be wrong about the time. It was overcast that day, so it may

have seemed darker and later than it was when she saw the boat. But

she is certain she saw it on Christmas Eve.

With so little activity on the bay that day, and with Scott admitting

to being near Brooks Island, it is hard to believe there could have

been anyone else in a boat that small in the same place on the same

day. I believe that the fact that Heather Hailey got a good long look at

Scott, that she seemed suspicious enough to report him to someone,

made Scott realize that he had to admit not only to being at the bay

but also to being in a part of the bay that the police otherwise would

probably never have searched.

However unforeseeable, getting spotted near the place where he

dumped the body was perhaps the single biggest mistake Scott made,

and one that would potentially prove fatal for him.

Q

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The San Francisco Bay covers sixteen hundred square miles and

holds five million acre-feet of water at mean tide. One could never

search it all, and police would have had no reason to look around

Brooks Island, an unlikely place to dump a body or even to pretend

to be fishing. In fact, it initially seemed much more likely to the

detectives investigating the case that Scott would have dumped his

wife into the deeper waters of the shipping channel, a designated

transit lane for major ship traffic that cuts through the center of the

bay west of Brooks Island and out the Golden Gate.

Although police never did find Laci’s body during their searches,

the months they spent scouring the waters near Brooks Island put

pressure on Scott that caused him to make more mistakes. At the

same time that Scott was insisting that police were wasting manpower,

that there was no reason Laci would be in the bay, he compulsively

revisited the scene.

On at least six occasions in the month after Laci’s disappearance,

Scott returned to the Berkeley Marina, each time in a different car,

often one he rented just for the trip. He never spent more than

five or ten minutes at the marina, never checked in with the scene

commander, never spoke with the dive teams. He just observed from

afar, driving out to the lookout points and cruising up and down the

frontage road that looks out on the bay.

By mid-January, Scott began staying on and off at the home of

his half sister, Anne Bird, in the Berkeley hills, in an attic bedroom

with a view of Brooks Island. In late February, after police served

a second search warrant on his home, Scott began looking to move

secretly to the Bay Area, hoping to live incognito in a room with

a bird’s-eye view of his wife’s watery grave. Using the name Cal,

Scott answered ads on the Internet bulletin board Craigslist and

checked out several apartments in the Berkeley and El Cerrito hills,

raving to his sister about the ‘‘spectacular view.’’ Although both cities

have a view toward Brooks Island, the El Cerrito hills look directly

down on the Pt. Isabel shoreline where Laci’s body would eventually

wash up.

‘‘One day he told me he and Laci were going to name the baby

California and call him Cal for short,’’ Anne Bird explained. ‘‘Then he

started leaving all these messages for people from my house, and they

returned his phone calls asking for Cal. He said he didn’t want his

name on a lease, he just wanted to rent a room.’’ Anne was shocked.

Did Scott think he would not be recognized, that he could just slink

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