Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (32 page)

E R A S E D

Like so many others, Anne Bird was once charmed and flattered

by her brother’s myriad kindnesses and the laserlike focus that made

it seem as though he ‘‘hung on your every word and made you feel

as if you were the center of the universe.’’ Now she mourns for a

child she feels was ‘‘raised like some sort of puppet,’’ so busy pleasing

others that he never learned who he really was and what he really

wanted.

Scott attended University of San Diego High School, a Catholic

school that required students to complete one hundred hours of

community service in order to graduate. Scott volunteered as a

designated driver for the campus’s chapter of Students Against

Drunk Driving, tutored the homeless, and visited senior centers,

even ‘‘adopting’’ one particular woman and inviting her to school for

Grandparents Day.

He took particular interest in an orphanage the school aided in

Tijuana. Even after his service was completed, Scott continued to

visit the orphanage, volunteering to drive other students there and

deliver food and clothing.

Perhaps Scott was using good works as cover to get out of the

house, take a road trip to Mexico, sample a little freedom. Or perhaps

he was searching for answers, trying to understand something about

his mother’s life, about himself, about family secrets.

Q

At Uni High, as it was called, Scott played on the golf team with

future PGA star Phil Mickelson. After Mickelson graduated, two

years ahead of Scott, Scott became team leader and was twice named

most valuable player. Scott was so confident in his abilities—some

teammates would say arrogant—that he had the words ‘‘Watch for

me’’ printed as his senior statement in the school year book. (With

an unfortunate typo that took on a creepy significance after he was

charged with murder, his year book motto went on to say that ‘‘Great

things and good deads await all of us.’’)

As good as Scott was, however, he never played at the level of

Mickelson, who won the junior world title while still in elementary

school and the Masters in 2004. It is one of the sad ironies of this case

that while the man known as ‘‘Lefty,’’ one of the most beloved figures

in golf history, was exulting in winning the game’s most coveted title,

Keeping Secrets

2 0 3

his former teammate was in a courtroom picking the jury that would

condemn him to death.

Although the Petersons portrayed Mickelson as a good friend

whom Scott invited to play at the family’s country club, Mickelson

says he doesn’t remember Scott at all. And although Mickelson grew

up much more humbly than Scott, he now lives happily with his

wife and children in a luxurious Rancho Santa Fe villa, while Scott is

confined to a prison cell.

Scott followed Mickelson to golf’s collegiate mecca, Arizona State

University. Here the facts as related by the Petersons grow murky. In

the early days of Laci’s disappearance, Jackie told reporters that Scott

went to ASU on a golf scholarship. Even his high school teammates

believed that to be true. After school officials said that Scott never

received a scholarship, the story changed.

During jury selection Lee Peterson said that Scott was invited to

try out for the team and told that if he showed enough promise,

scholarship money might become available. At trial, the story mor-phed further. Lee testified that Scott boarded with team members

and played one match. However, both current ASU officials and

Steve Loy, who was the coach of the golf team at the time Scott was a

student there and is now Mickelson’s agent, maintain that Peterson

never played golf there.

Yet another version of the story emerged after the trial. The father

of professional golfer Chris Couch says that he got Peterson kicked

off the team. Couch, national junior champion at the time, beating

out Tiger Woods for that title, was being heavily recruited by ASU.

According to his father, Chip Couch, Scott was assigned to show

the seventeen-year-old around campus but instead took him out

drinking and skirt-chasing. Chip Couch says he was so upset to

find his son hung over when he picked him up at the end of the

recruiting trip that he complained to the coach. He says the coach

called him back and told him he threw Scott off the team. Chris

Couch ended up going to the University of Florida instead, where

he made the winning putt to win that school the national collegiate

championship.

Scott dropped out of ASU before the end of his first semester and

moved back home with his parents. Why he did so is another matter

of dispute. Scott told the Modesto police that he didn’t like the coach,

2 0 4

E R A S E D

didn’t think his talent was adequately respected. Scott’s sister, Susan

Caudillo, told me shortly after Laci went missing that she thought

Scott was just not ready to make the break from his parents.

At trial, Lee testified that Scott realized he was out of his depth at

ASU, which won the NCAA golf championship in 1990 with players

like Mickelson and another future pro, Per-Ulrik Johansson from

Sweden. ‘‘They were unbelievably good. And I think Scott said, gee,

I’ll never be that good.’’

But why give up so easily, effectively abandoning his dream without

really giving it a shot? Scott didn’t even stay through the golf season,

which runs until June. And why drop out of college altogether? Even

if he didn’t make the team, or was booted off, a degree from Arizona

State would still be worth something.

Anne Bird has heard from some of Scott’s cousins a far different

explanation about why Scott left ASU so precipitously: that Scott got

a woman pregnant, an African American woman, and that ‘‘Jackie

was upset because she didn’t want him to shame the family.’’

‘‘I heard two different versions,’’ Bird said, ‘‘one that Jackie and

Lee went out and one that just Jackie went out and pulled Scott out

of school, paid this woman off, and had her get an abortion. Maybe

they just gave her a little money to move on with her life, or

maybe they didn’t pay her at all and just paid for the abortion. [But]

the reason I heard was that he was shaming the family so they pulled

him out of Arizona State.’’

While Scott was on trial, a seventeen-year-old boy contacted Bird

and some members of the media claiming that he believed Scott

was his father. The boy’s mother died a few years ago, but a friend

subsequently told him that she had gotten pregnant by Peterson

while visiting San Diego. Bird is skeptical, because the young man

has refused to get a blood test. And Scott would have been just fifteen

when the child was conceived.

‘‘Maybe he’s just trying to get some notoriety,’’ Bird says. But

in both pictures the boy sent her, he looks uncannily like Scott.

And when Bird wrote Scott in jail about the boy’s claims and

forwarded his letter, Scott’s only response was a low-key ‘‘that’s

weird.’’ No outraged denial, no ‘‘that couldn’t possibly be true.’’ If

either of the stories Anne Bird heard is true—an abortion in Arizona,

an unacknowledged child conceived in San Diego—it could help

explain how Scott came to believe that women and their children are

Keeping Secrets

2 0 5

expendable, that he bore no responsibility for a life that he helped

create.

Q

When he moved back home after dropping out of Arizona State,

Scott worked for the family company for about six months. Lee

retired, turned the business over to his sons Mark and Joe, and he and

Jackie moved to Morro Bay, a coastal town about halfway between Los

Angeles and San Francisco and just a few miles from San Luis Obispo.

Scott chafed at the ordinary laborer work he was hired to perform,

such as building crates. He had bigger ambitions; he wanted to go

out on the big jobs, bring in clients, and Joe, who was in charge

of the shop, didn’t think Scott was ready for that. So Scott left and

moved in with his parents in Morro Bay. Their house was just a few

blocks from the Morro Bay golf course and a restaurant called the

Pacific Café, both regular haunts of Jackie and Lee and both places

Scott would find employment. After eighteen months out of school

he enrolled at the local junior college, Cuesta College, where he once

again was a star on a golf team, a big fish in a little pond.

Jackie and Lee contend that one day when Scott was twenty he

surprised them by declaring out of the blue that his parents had

done enough for him and that from then on he was going to support

himself.

‘‘You don’t owe me anything,’’ Jackie says he told them.

He moved into an apartment his dad characterized as an ‘‘Animal

House’’ with some of his Cuesta College teammates, a bachelor pad

with artificial turf laid out on the roof for practicing their golf shots.

The Petersons bragged after Scott’s arrest that he insisted on paying

his own way through school, working two, even three jobs at a time in

order to do so. The truth, as so often in Scott Peterson’s life, may be

more complex. Although he did sometimes work multiple jobs while

he was in college, graduating didn’t seem like much of a priority to

him. It ultimately took him eight years to get his bachelor’s degree.

(Oddly, when police searched his home after his arrest, they found

several phony diplomas on the wall, from schools Peterson never

even attended. One claimed he had earned a divinity degree, very

strange for someone who until he met Amber showed no interest in

religion. He claimed Laci had bought them for him as a gag gift, but

no one had ever heard that she had done such a thing.)

2 0 6

E R A S E D

After the humiliation in Arizona, Scott likely craved more freedom

and independence from his parents. He may also have felt that he

could not expect their financial support, as he was no longer on

the path to becoming a professional golfer. Around this same time,

however, the Petersons began to suffer significant financial problems.

A relative said the family was living far beyond its means, with

creditors calling night and day attempting to repossess their home

and cars. The mortgage on the Morro Bay house went into default

in 1992, and tax liens were filed in 1990 and 1992. (The debts were

eventually satisfied and the default rescinded in 1994.)

Lee testified that about two years after he turned the reins of the

crating company over to Mark and Joe, the business began to suffer,

and he had to go back to San Diego for about eighteen months ‘‘to

get it cranked back up again,’’ which apparently included firing his

eldest son. He then returned to Morro Bay and started a similar

business, Central Coast Crating, with Scott. They each put up $3,500

as partners and started finding clients. This could partially explain

why it took Scott so long to finish college.

Yet despite his surface industriousness, Scott seemed to be going

through the motions: halfway continuing to pursue golf, halfway

following in his father’s footsteps, halfway trying to be his own man.

But he would always fall back on his parents’ help when he really

wanted something—a house, a golf club membership, money to

survive on the lam. Scott would, ultimately, do almost everything

in life halfway. Half in, half out, no real commitment—that is

certainly how he approached marriage and fatherhood. He had no

clear purpose because he had no true sense of himself.

But he sure could fake it: the perfect son, the perfect husband. He

could be whoever anyone wanted him to be.

C H A P T E R

T E N

Too Good to Be True

Q LaciDeniseRochawasbornonMay4,1975.She

grew up with one foot in the country, one foot in the city, in a loving

family but one also riven by divorce. Laci was just a year old when her

parents, Dennis and Sharon Rocha, split after seven years of marriage.

A year later, Sharon’s cousin Gwen Kemple and Gwen’s husband,

Harvey, set Sharon up on a blind date with a construction worker

buddy of his. Although they’ve never actually married, Sharon and

Ron Grantski have been a couple ever since.

After Sharon and Dennis divorced, Laci and her brother, Brent,

lived with their mother in Modesto but spent every other weekend

with their father on their grandparents’ dairy farm, located about

twenty-five minutes outside the city. Dennis subsequently remarried,

and six years after Laci was born had another daughter, Amy. When

Dennis’s second marriage broke up, Amy, too, spent weekends at the

Rocha family dairy. To the children it was a magical place with barns

and horses and a coyote pup named Princess as the family pet.

2 0 7

2 0 8

E R A S E D

‘‘It was a great place to grow up,’’ said Brent, who was four years

older than Laci. ‘‘We rode four-wheelers out there, went swimming

in my grandparents’ pool. There were tons of places to play. You kind

of create your own things to do when you’re out in the country.’’

At age nine, Brent went to live full-time with his dad, but he always

remained the protective older brother.

When the Rocha family came to believe that Scott had killed Laci

and publicly broke from him at a January 24, 2003, press conference,

it was heart wrenching to hear the sense of guilt and responsibility

Brent felt for not protecting his sister from a danger no one could

have perceived. It stood in stark contrast to the complete lack of

conscience and denial of responsibility Scott showed with regard to

his wife’s murder.

Laci was very close to her paternal grandparents, and Brent saw

his sister as a younger version of their grandmother: loving, centered,

thoughtful. Laci inherited her grandmother’s passion for cooking

and from both sides of her family an appreciation of the land and its

bounty. (Her maternal grandfather was a foreman on a fruit and nut

farm in the same small town of Escalon where the Rocha dairy was

located.)

Even as a child, Laci liked to work in the garden and dreamed

of one day owning her own flower and herb shop. One of Brent’s

fondest memories of his sister is as an earnest little girl trying to

help feed the cows while wearing her dad’s oversized rubber boots,

slipping and falling in the mud and manure. No one laughed harder

at moments like that than Laci herself.

‘‘She was always fun to be around,’’ said Amy. ‘‘I was the little

sister who wanted to tag along, and she let me.’’

Laci inherited her broad dimpled smile from her mother. Sharon

remembers Laci even as an infant smiling each morning when she

came to take her out of her crib. Once she learned to start talking, she

never stopped. One of her girlfriends nicknamed her Chatty Cathy.

Her stepfather called her J.J. for Jabber Jaws. Once on a car trip when

Laci was little, he made a bet with her to see if she could go thirty

seconds without saying anything. She agreed, then immediately asked

if the time was up yet. After she was killed, Ron was left with the pain

of wondering if his good-natured teasing had hurt Laci’s feelings.

Laci was good at just about anything she put her mind to. She was

popular enough to make the cheerleading squad, but was also a good

athlete and an excellent student. By the time she graduated in 1993

Too Good to Be True

2 0 9

from Modesto’s Downey High School, film director George Lucas’s

alma mater, Laci had developed the tight-knit circle of girlfriends

who would work so tirelessly to find her when she went missing. Just

as she and her siblings had done on the farm, Laci and her friends

created their own fun. They tee-peed each other’s houses, videotaped

themselves making mock commercials, and threw raucous slumber

parties in which the first person to fall asleep would have her bra

frozen. They shared everything together, even their first hangover.

When one of the girls sneaked a bottle of champagne into one of the

sleepovers, they all vowed to make it to school the next day, but Laci

was the only one who managed.

‘‘She would never let us forget that,’’ remembers René Tomlinson.

‘‘Laci was in all the smart classes, and she was so dedicated.’’ In Laci’s

mind it was simpler than that. They had made a pact. A deal was a

deal. When she set her mind to something, she was determined to

see it through. It was the same way she would one day embrace the

concept of marriage.

Q

Laci and Brent were the first in their family to graduate from

college. While Brent went off to law school, Laci chose California

Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, a state college

specializing in agricultural studies, where she majored in ornamental

horticultural. Laci’s passion and creativity stood out among her peers.

She won her department’s Outstanding Freshman award and was

one of just thirty students across the nation selected for an endowed

internship to train in the floral industry. She was elected president

of the horticulture honor society and hired to manage the campus

flower shop.

Laci had been involved in only one significant relationship

before meeting Scott Peterson. She was a fifteen-year-old high

school sophomore when she started dating William ‘‘Kent’’ Gain, a

seventeen-year-old senior who had recently moved to Modesto from

the Bay Area.

From the outside looking in, they made a picture-perfect couple:

he dark-featured and handsome as a soap star, Laci gorgeous and

magnetic. He moved to San Luis Obispo with her when she went

away to college, and they shared a cottage during her freshman year.

While Laci studied, he worked in a warehouse and surfed. They dated,

2 1 0