Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (30 page)

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away from Modesto and start a cool new life in the ‘‘happening’’ Bay

Area?

Q

Scott believed he could get away with murder. He still believes

that, even after his conviction, telling supporters how the defense

held back in
this
trial, how very soon he’ll be exonerated at a second

trial. In truth, it could take five years or more before any court begins

to review his case, more than twenty before his appeals are exhausted.

Yet truth, not to mention humanity, has little hold on a man who

could anchor his pregnant wife to the bottom of San Francisco Bay

with homemade concrete weights and then watch over his handiwork

like an omnipotent God.

Why would Scott Peterson want to gaze out on the bay, reminding

him every day of his ghastly act? Did he simply want a better way

to keep tabs on the progress of the investigation so that he could

head for the border if the bodies were found, as he appeared to be

doing when they were discovered? Or did he enjoy, like so many

spousal killers, the feeling of power and control he exerted over his

wife—knowing she was anchored to the bottom of that vast blue bay

in what he hoped would be her final resting place?

Peterson believed that with charm and guile and faultless manners

he would never be held accountable, never even be suspected of

killing his wife and child. After all, women ‘‘go missing’’ all the time.

And in many cases, without a body, without hard and compelling

evidence, police are not able to make an arrest, much less sustain a

conviction. That is a lesson he learned up close in his college days, a

sad fact he hoped to turn to his advantage.

Who would care about another missing woman? Who would really

bother to look for her? He figured that on Christmas Eve there would

not even be a detective on duty, that it would be days before someone

higher than a beat cop was assigned to the case of Laci Peterson. By

then the trail would be cold, or so he hoped. And there were always

the usual suspects on whom to cast suspicion: parolees, sex offenders,

and vagrants. There were certainly plenty of those around.

Scott Peterson greatly underestimated the Modesto Police Depart-ment, just as he would the prosecutors assigned to try his case, the

lover who would see through his lies, and the family and friends who

A Watery Grave

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would never stop looking for Laci or seeking justice in her name. He

believed that he could charm, control, and outwit everyone around

him because he had been doing it for much of his life.

San Quentin State Prison sits directly on the shore of San Francisco

Bay just seven or so nautical miles northwest of the spot where

Peterson sealed his fate. Ironically, barring a successful appeal, he will

have a bay view for the rest of his life—albeit only what he can make

out through the grimy, nearly opaque windows along his prison tier.

C H A P T E R

N I N E

Keeping Secrets

Q ScottPetersonwasraisedinablendedfamily,a

self-described ‘‘Brady Bunch’’ whose personal mythology masked an

unacknowledged river of pain. To Scott’s peril, and even more to

the peril of his victims, his family has never come to grip with its

secrets: a legacy of loss and abandonment that has played out over

three generations.

Just a few days before Christmas in 1945, when Scott’s mother,

Jackie, was just two years old, her father was murdered. John Harvey

Latham, thirty-six, was working late at the tire and salvage yard he

owned in downtown San Diego when he was bludgeoned to death

with a rusty pipe. An employee arriving for work the next morning

found him lying in a pool of blood just outside his office door.

Latham’s wallet was missing, along with the day’s receipts.

Latham had called his wife, Helen, around nine that night to say

he was on his way home. When he failed to show up, she did not

report him missing, however. As she later told police, he sometimes

‘‘stayed out with the boys.’’

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Keeping Secrets

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An autopsy determined that Latham died from a single blow to

the back of the head that fractured his skull. Police theorized that the

killer lay in wait for him as he emerged from his office and hit him with

the three-foot length of pipe found next to his body. They questioned

and briefly detained an African American employee Latham had fired

two days before the murder, Robert Sewell. But without any hard

evidence the case went unsolved for four years, until police received

a tip that Sewell had bragged to friends about the crime. He was

rearrested in 1949 and after three days of interrogation confessed.

Like Scott Peterson, Sewell had his defenders who believed an

innocent man was being railroaded. The case became racially charged.

The NAACP hired a lawyer to defend Sewell after friends alleged that

police had beaten the confession out of him, and held a defense rally

in his honor the night before the trial began.

Sewell was, nevertheless, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Two years later he died of natural causes at San Quentin.

Q

Jackie has no memories of her father. His death was so sudden

and traumatic that her mother refused ever to talk about him, and

it wasn’t until Jackie was an adult and found his school yearbook

that she learned what he looked like. At times, Jackie said, she felt as

though she had never had a father at all.

Her mother’s silence came at a terrible price, both for her children

and for herself. Helen Latham suffered from a painful, debilitating,

and incurable disease, scleroderma, a progressive hardening of the

skin and the tissue surrounding the internal organs. The condition is

sometimes known as ‘‘Lot’s wife disease’’ after the biblical character

who turned into a pillar of salt, because it feels as if the body is

turning to stone.

As with all autoimmune disorders, in which the body attacks itself,

stress can cause the condition to worsen. Jackie and her siblings

believe that the trauma of their father’s murder caused their mother

to suffer a long, slow death—a progressive imprisonment inside her

own body— that played out over the next fifteen years.

‘‘We were told it was because she didn’t release the feelings she had

when my father died, because she kept it all inside,’’ Jackie explained

in the penalty phase of her son’s trial. ‘‘She had four young children

to raise and could not . . . break down, and so her organs broke down.

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They calcified, basically, until she died a very horrible death [after]

years of being bedridden.’’

Unable to care for her children, Helen Latham placed Jackie and

her three brothers in Nazareth House, a Catholic orphanage in San

Diego that had once been the Spanish mission’s school for Indian

children. In her penalty phase testimony, Jackie gave only a faint

description of the harshness of life in the orphanage, and most of that

actually came in response to defense cocounsel Pat Harris’s questions.

The children subsisted on whatever food the Poor Sisters of

Nazareth, the English and Irish nuns that ran the orphanage, managed

to beg for them: outdated breads and cereal, with an occasional treat

of eggs from the chickens they raised. They learned ‘‘discipline’’ from

kneeling in prayer and cleaning toilets, were punished for misbehavior

in Mass with flicks to their ears. Jackie, who suffered from frequents

bouts of pneumonia as a child and today uses supplemental oxygen

for diminished lung capacity, was often kept quarantined from the

other children.

‘‘And every time I’ve tried to characterize that as being a rather

tough existence you’ve always told me ‘our needs were met.’ What

do you mean by that?’’ Harris asked her.

‘‘I felt fortunate I had a roof over my head and three meals a

day and was educated,’’ Jackie replied. ‘‘There was no hugging or

anything like that but my mother, somehow, got that through to us.

I don’t know how. But we knew that God loved us and that just took

over everything.’’

Jackie’s younger brother, Robert, described how the boys were not

able to spend time with their sister, as the sexes were kept strictly

separate except during church or class. ‘‘We would see each other

through the [playground] fence mainly and say hi. I can remember

one time when the boys were throwing dirt clods at the fence and

they were showering down on the girls and I saw my sister there. I . . .

reached through the fence and asked if she was all right. But it was a

good place. There was a lot of care.’’

The picture of Nazareth House related by former residents cur-rently suing the San Diego Archdiocese is much darker than that

related by the Petersons, one of Dickensian cruelty and deprivation.

Irwin Zalkin, an attorney representing close to one hundred victims

alleging clergy abuse in San Diego, says the Nazareth House cases are

the worst he’s seen at any single facility in the range and enormity of

physical and psychological abuse.

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‘‘It was an orphanage, where pedophiles and people with other

issues had easy access,’’ said Zalkin. ‘‘These kids were completely

unprotected and vulnerable, absolutely powerless. There was no one

they could go to.’’

One of Jackie’s brothers repeatedly ran away from Nazareth House,

only to be brought back by authorities every time he tried to go home.

Jackie’s middle brother, Patrick, the only Latham sibling not to testify

at Scott’s trial, has described the place as a ‘‘prison.’’

As each of the Peterson children reached high school age, they

left the orphanage and were reunited with their mother. Although

they were happy to be back home, life continued to be difficult. They

hadn’t seen much of their mom in years because it was difficult for

her to travel to the orphanage. Now they had to take care of her. That

role fell mostly to Jackie, as the only girl, who was also expected to

do all the housework and serve as de facto mom to her brothers. And

they only had a little Social Security money to support them.

Robert Latham recalls one Thanksgiving or Christmas when he

and Jackie split a TV dinner. As usual, Jackie put a happy face on

things, joking that it tasted good ‘‘if you put enough ketchup on it.’’

But her childhood had ended long ago, and she would never get it

back.

Helen Latham’s last outing was to attend her daughter’s high

school graduation. She died the following January. The children

began to disperse, first to work and then to the draft. Jackie got

a good-paying job with PSA airlines, but after she got pregnant at

eighteen her boss fired her.

‘‘If you weren’t married it wasn’t acceptable,’’ Jackie explained at

trial. ‘‘And you couldn’t draw unemployment if you were pregnant

in those days. So it was a very hard time but it was of my own making

and I got through it. My son was adopted by a very nice family.

My doctor had people waiting for a child and he talked to me and

counseled me and told me that was the best thing to do.’’

Jackie described the relationship that produced Don Chapman,

the first child she gave up for adoption, like this: ‘‘I was naive and

young and I got with someone that told you they loved you and

wanted to marry you, and it just wasn’t so. And I think I got involved

because I wanted a father and a family.’’

Just a year later she was pregnant again, this time by her brother’s

best friend. ‘‘He was someone I trusted and we went together for a

long time and we were in love,’’ Jackie explained, offering the court

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a sheepish apology for sounding ‘‘like a broken record.’’ But after he

moved to Los Angeles for a teaching job, he fell for a coworker. She

never even told him she was pregnant.

‘‘I knew he would have married me and I didn’t want to marry

someone that was in love with someone else,’’ she said. So the doctor

arranged an adoption for this child, too, a girl who would be named

Anne Grady by her adoptive parents. (After marrying, Anne would

take her husband’s surname, Bird.)

Three decades later, when Don and Anne found their birth mother,

Jackie would tell Anne that she went into hiding for the duration

of her pregnancy. Only her middle brother, Patrick, and the woman

she lived with knew of her condition until a month before Anne was

born, when Anne’s birth father somehow found out. He offered to

marry her, as she predicted, but she turned him down. Jackie was

shocked and dismayed that the news had gotten out. She described

her brother to Anne as ‘‘like a vault. He would never say anything to

anyone.’’

It was a strange and hurtful thing to tell a child she had given

away, and Anne wondered why her mother considered her birth such

an ugly secret. But it was revealing. Keeping secrets was a family

trait, one Jackie’s son Scott would perfect to a pathological extreme.

Scott may also have adopted the notion that children were a burden,

that children were disposable—at the very least, that to have or keep

a child was a decision one could make unilaterally, without consulting

the other parent.

A year after Anne was born, Jackie had a third child, whom

she named after her father. Jackie said she kept John because she

was finally happy enough in her life to be a parent. (Other family

members, however, say she considered putting him up for adoption

as well but was talked out of it by her doctor.)

She raised John by herself for five years until she married Lee

Peterson in 1971, a divorced father with three children of his own

whom she met in a community college history class. The nuns had

drummed into Jackie that she would not be able to go to college

because she would have to take care of her sick mother, which only

made Jackie more eager for an education. Lee Peterson was pursuing

a degree in transportation management thanks to the G.I. Bill.

‘‘She is the best thing that ever happened to me,’’ Lee said of Jackie

at trial. ‘‘I’m the grouch, and she wakes up happy every morning.’’

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Like Jackie, Scott’s father also seemed to be driven by a childhood

of deprivation borne out of a sudden, unexpected reversal of fortune.

Lee’s father, Arthur, the last of twelve children of Norwegian

immigrants, was raised in a Minnesota farming community that was

the setting for the television series
Little House on the Prairie
. Lee’s

mother, Marie, immigrated to Minneapolis from Lithuania by herself

at age fifteen to work in a factory making underwear. Arthur tried his

own hand at farming but failed. He moved to the big city of St. Paul,

where he first delivered telegrams by bicycle for Western Union, then

went to work for Royal servicing typewriters.

Arthur and Marie met at a dance. During World War II, they

owned a corner grocery store, one of the family’s more prosperous

times, which Lee recalls with a child’s enthusiasm.

‘‘It was great because we could bring our friends in once a day and

they could have a candy bar, or ice cream, whatever they wanted.’’

His parents managed to save enough money to own a home for the

first time and decided to build one. They bought a lot and, because

there wasn’t much lumber available right after the war, bought an

old farm to harvest wood for construction.

‘‘That’s when the family got derailed,’’ as Lee described it at trial.

The contractor, as well as Lee’s parents, failed to take into account

the extremely high water table in the ‘‘Land of 10,000 Lakes.’’ When

the first rains began, the basement filled up with three feet of water,

and there was no way to get it out.

‘‘So the house was essentially useless,’’ said Lee, who was seven

or eight at the time. ‘‘My folks lost the house and the farm they had

bought for the lumber, and just went totally broke.’’

It took the family years to recover. They lived in a series of cabins

and shacks without running water at old tourist resorts that had

fallen into disrepair. His mother, bitterly unhappy, cried a lot. Lee felt

ashamed of his tattered clothes and tiny homes and wouldn’t invite

other kids over. His father, who Lee describes as lacking in ambition

and business acumen, thought things were fine as long as they had

food to eat and a roof over their heads. His mother couldn’t stand

living the way they were. When Lee was twelve she started working as

a domestic, sometimes taking Lee along to the homes of her wealthy

clients.

‘‘It was a real treat to go along because [at one house] there was

a boy about my age and he had tons of toys, all the goodies,’’ Lee

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