Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (31 page)

E R A S E D

recalled. ‘‘He let me dress up in his cowboy suit and just experience

things I had never seen before.’’

When Lee wanted a baseball mitt, his mother told him he had to

earn the money for it. So he began doing yard work for neighbors

in the warm months, shoveling snow in winter. ‘‘It was a good life

lesson,’’ Lee said, and the establishment of a strong work ethic he

would try to pass along to his own children.

Lee described his parents as loving, but they showed their son

little if any physical affection. Even when Lee left for the Navy

after graduating from high school, they didn’t send him off with a

hug or kiss; they shook their son’s hand. At trial, Lee would try to

attribute Scott’s lack of emotion after his wife and child went missing

to an inherited family stoicism, what he termed a ‘‘Scandinavian

trait.’’

‘‘When something happened you were supposed to pick yourself

up, figure out what was wrong, and go fix it . . . do whatever needed

to be done,’’ Lee said of his upbringing.

That description contrasted sharply with excuses Lee and Jackie

had given for why Scott steadfastly refused to grant media interviews

or make public pleas for his wife’s return for the first month

she was missing—until his affair with Amber Frey became public

knowledge and the Rocha family turned against him. He was simply

too emotional, they said, too distraught to stand before the cameras.

Jackie had even claimed that Scott was suicidal in the wake of his

wife’s disappearance.

Five months before the end of his enlistment, Lee married his high

school sweetheart, Mary Kaminski. They settled in Minnesota and

had three children: a daughter, Susan, and two sons, Mark and Joe.

Lee worked in the electronics field for several years before switching

to sales for a series of trucking firms, largely because it afforded him

the opportunity to play golf with customers. Lee picked up the game

at age twenty-five after a coworker invited him to play, and it quickly

became his abiding passion.

The family relocated to San Diego in 1967 in search of better

weather and better opportunity for advancement. After a few years,

the marriage faltered and the Petersons divorced. The children went

to live with their mother and spent weekends with their father, but

they say that Lee found an excuse to drop by and see them as often as

he could.

Keeping Secrets

1 9 7

‘‘I had a great deal of guilt over not being there for them every

night tucking them into bed and that kind of thing so I tried to make

up for that by being there a lot,’’ he said. The college he was attending

three nights a week was just a few blocks from where the kids were

living, so he’d stop by and play with them for a while or take them

out to eat. It was at that college that he met Jackie.

Like Jackie, Lee had a big investment in the future of their

union, a need for their blended family to be one big happy Brady

Bunch, everybody working together and playing together, living out

a communal dream.

When Scott Lee Peterson was born on October 24, 1972, almost

a year to the day after Lee and Jackie married, his arrival seemed to

cement the connection Jackie had longed for. At last she was married,

to a man who truly loved her, and now they had a child together, a

living embodiment of that bond.

In her eyes Scott was the perfect child, the golden boy who could

do no wrong. She even called him that, the Golden Boy, a title Scott

seemed to relish. Both she and Lee would lavish on Scott the rewards

and privileges they had not been able to offer their earlier children,

when their personal and financial situations were less secure.

Jackie was determined to put the pain of the past behind her.

According to Anne Bird, none of the Petersons knew anything about

the children Jackie had given away. They did know she had grown

up in an orphanage, but Jackie gave few details. All the pain of the

past was locked up, buried away. From now on, everything would be

perfect. It had to be.

Q

A favorite Peterson family legend is that Scott didn’t learn how to

walk until he was two years old because someone was always carrying

him. Never was a child more wanted. ‘‘He was a joy from the moment

he was born,’’ says Jackie. ‘‘He was perfect,’’ says Lee. ‘‘He woke up

smiling and went to bed smiling.’’

Susan, Mark, Joe, and John were twelve, ten, nine, and six when

Scott was born, but even they seemed to recognize his exalted status.

Susan treated him as though he were her own child, vying with Jackie

to feed him, change his diaper, push his stroller. She even bathed him

twice a day when she was visiting because, she says, she enjoyed it so

much.

1 9 8

E R A S E D

‘‘He was like a live baby doll to me,’’ she said. When Joe saw

his baby brother for the first time through the nursery window, he

squealed to everyone within earshot, ‘‘He’s mine.’’

Just two weeks after he was born, Scott almost died. He came

down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized in an incubator.

According to the Petersons, doctors feared he might not pull through,

but he recovered. John’s first memory of his brother was in the

hospital, Lee lifting each of the kids up so that they could peer

through a window at their sick brother.

Yet for all their love and adoration, Jackie and Lee once forgot

their young son in a restaurant. As Jackie described the incident

to Anne Bird, Scott was such a good, quiet baby that they forgot

they had brought him with them and had to be chased down

outside by their waiter. ‘‘Ma’am, you left your baby,’’ he called after

Jackie.

With the exception of the restaurant incident, Scott’s parents kept

their son exceedingly close to them—to the point of enmeshment,

some might say. Their happiness, their identity was in many ways

derived through him.

Jackie once told a reporter that she and Lee were ‘‘enslaved’’ to

Scott. It was a startling and bizarre choice of words, uttered without

any rancor or resentment. Rather, it seemed to be an expression of

some immutable family hierarchy, of what Jackie felt they owed Scott.

At trial, the Petersons’ exacting recall of the most minor details of

Scott’s life—his golf scores, his stint as a school crossing guard, his

perfect attendance award in grade school— seemed almost fetishistic

at times, especially when their idealized image of Scott was so at

odds with the man captured on the Amber tapes and other police

wiretaps.

It became clear over the course of the trial that the Scott everyone

thought he or she knew did not exist. Or there were two very different

people inside one man: the perfect son, brother, and friend who

couldn’t harm a flea, never got angry, was kind and generous to a

fault; and the man behind the mask, a black-hearted monster, who

used charm and cunning to get what he wanted and didn’t care who

he hurt in the process, who went through the motions of life without

ever really feeling anything.

Jackie owned a designer dress shop called The Put On when Scott

was born, and she set up a crib for him in the back room. As he

Keeping Secrets

1 9 9

learned to crawl, he had the run of the shop— until he bit a customer

on the toe. Jackie served as den mother to Scott’s Cub Scout troop,

and mother and son studied piano together.

When Scott was still a toddler, Lee started his own business on the

side, building customized wood packing crates for hard-to-ship items

like computers. After a few years, San Diego Crating and Packing

began to take off, and Lee was able to quit the trucking business.

Jackie came aboard as bookkeeper, and set up an area in the shop

for Scott and his toys. Eventually all the children would work for

the family business at some point, including Scott. (Son Joe runs the

company today.)

The business did so well that the family was able to move to pro-gressively nicer and nicer areas around San Diego as Scott was growing

up, from the posh lakeside Scripps Ranch to Rancho Santa Fe, an

ultraexclusive development dotted with private golf courses, eques-trian trails, polo fields, fashionable shops, art galleries, and gourmet

restaurants. Lee described the move to Rancho Santa Fe, reportedly

the richest community per capita in America with multimillion-dollar

homes on minimum two-and-a-half-acre lots, as the culmination of

a dream come true.

‘‘It was like the very pinnacle,’’ he said. ‘‘You have made it once

you got there.’’ Other aspects of their lifestyle improved as well. Lee

got his pilot’s license and bought his own plane. At one point, Lee

was driving a Ferrari and Jackie a Rolls Royce.

Lee was still fairly young, only thirty-three when Scott was born,

but he treated him like a late-in-life child, a little buddy with whom

he could pal around, a near constant companion. Joanne Farmer, a

longtime friend of Jackie’s, recalls Scott following his dad around like

‘‘a shadow, wanting to do everything Lee did.’’ Jeffrey Cleveland, who

worked at the Peterson crating company for nine years, said Scott

seemed to have just ‘‘sloughed off from Lee.’’ John, the only other

child living in the house while Scott was growing up, described his

half-brother as a ‘‘little miniature dad,’’ who even as a boy dressed

like Lee in khaki pants and golf shirts.

Lee took Scott along with him on sales calls, saying Scott’s mere

presence ‘‘gave [him] confidence.’’ When Scott was appointed a

school crossing guard in the fifth grade, Lee would park and watch

his son from a distance, marveling at how seriously Scott took the

responsibility. By the time Scott was in high school, his father made

2 0 0

E R A S E D

it a point to be home by the time Scott got out of school. Lee would

have snacks waiting for him, then the two would play golf together

nearly every day.

Lee endeavored to instill his children with his passion for hunting,

fishing, and especially golf, believing that the family would spend

more time together if they all shared the same interests. All the kids

took golf lessons, but Scott showed the most talent, beating his dad

by the time he was a teenager.

One wonders, however, how much Scott really enjoyed the game.

As a young boy he preferred fishing, bringing his pole along and

bailing after a few holes to go fish in the river that ran through the

golf course. Even as a teen, Lee seemed to feel the need to motivate

Scott, promising to buy him his own Ferrari if he shot par. He

accomplished that feat at sixteen, but Lee bought him a used Peugeot

instead—‘‘because it was safer,’’ said Jackie.

Where other parents display a bronzed baby shoe or their child’s

handprint preserved in clay, Lee has a place of honor in his den

reserved for Scott’s first golf club: a sawed-off 3-wood they referred

to as his ‘‘slugger.’’

While his family enjoyed the fruits of his success, Lee, as a self-made

man and something of an adventurer, set a high standard to follow.

Just as he had to work for the baseball glove he wanted as a kid, he

expected his children to earn their own spending money. When he

was still in the trucking business he would take the kids in with him

on weekends and pay them to wash trucks, clean bathrooms, sweep

up, and perform other odd jobs.

‘‘We didn’t go for lunch or get ice cream or do anything until

we were done with the day’s work,’’ Joe Peterson recalled. Lee saw

business in a very straightforward way: you told people what you

were going to do, and you did it. He expected his kids to work hard

and be accountable. Scott tried to emulate his father’s entrepreneurial

streak. He always had some kind of little business going on in the

garage: assembling golf clubs, silk-screening T-shirts. But his real job,

as Lee saw it, was golf.

‘‘We told him ‘Your job is to get good grades and practice your

golf and become a professional golfer,’ ’’ Lee testified in the penalty

phase. In exchange, they would support him while he pursued his

that goal.

Lee also made his disappointment known when his children failed

to live up to his expectations. He fired his eldest son, Mark, from the

Keeping Secrets

2 0 1

family business, and the two had barely spoken for more than a dozen

years at the time Laci disappeared. As a teenager, John Peterson was

sent away to live with other relatives when he wrecked one of Lee’s

cars.

But Lee and Jackie seemed to have a different standard for Scott.

He could do no wrong in their eyes, and when he did they were always

there to bail him out. ‘‘Perfect’’ was the word they used most often in

describing Scott, even after he was charged with murdering his wife

and child. Mark was shocked to learn from police how financially

generous Jackie and Lee had been toward his half-brother over the

years. Even he had bought into the mythos that Scott was the family

success story, a self-made man like his father.

Q

From an early age, Scott seems to have developed a strong need

to please, to be whatever anybody wanted him to be. His brother

Joe called him ‘‘Trooper’’ because of how strenuously he would try

to keep up with the big boys. He took with good humor anything

they could dish out, be it John’s elaborately staged practical jokes

(like the time he convinced Scott that a giant marauding squirrel was

hiding in their backyard), or Mark and Joe’s using Scott as a target

for practicing their tennis serves.

With his parents and other adults, Scott displayed impeccable

manners. Joanne Farmer remembers Scott at age eleven or twelve serv-ing cookies at his parents’ holiday parties, a perfect gentleman con-versing with the grownups, expressing interest in what they had to say.

‘‘My kid was in the canyon lighting bonfires, but Scott wasn’t

that kind of boy,’’ recalled Joan Pernicano, another longtime friend

of Jackie’s, whose son, Andrew, was in Scott’s Cub Scout troop. In

eighth grade, Scott was voted ‘‘Friendliest Student’’ by his classmates.

That was quite an honor, according to his best friend at the time,

Britton Scheibe, because Scott wasn’t ‘‘in the upper echelon of what

you would consider the cool kids.’’

Apparently Scott was already becoming adept at charming people,

at making them feel, as his cousin Kelly Beckton described it, ‘‘like

the rest of the room melts away because he is paying attention to

you.’’ No one could ever remember Scott losing his temper, not even

when he missed an important shot in a golf tournament. He was

always even, steady, cool, in control— preternaturally so.

2 0 2