Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (33 page)

E R A S E D

according to Gain’s exacting computation, for ‘‘3 years, 4 months,

and 7 days.’’ He says he asked her to marry him, but Laci told him

the time wasn’t right.

Inside, the relationship was anything but perfect. Kent had a

temper, and Laci confided to friends that Gain yelled at her, demeaned

her, and angrily pushed her once during an argument. At the end

of her freshman year, they broke up, and he moved out. When Laci

disappeared, Brent Rocha was concerned enough about Gain that he

suggested police check him out as a suspect.

What the police discovered about Gain shocked everyone. Kent

and Laci’s relationship had been more violent than she had ever let

on. But he could not have been involved in her disappearance because

he had an airtight alibi: he was in prison in Washington State serving

a fifteen-year term for shooting a subsequent girlfriend in the back.

On January 17, 1999, five years after Kent and Laci broke up,

Gain shot his twenty-four-year-old live-in girlfriend, Grace Ho,

with a .44-caliber pistol. Gain admits he was arguing with Ho at

the time, but insists the shooting was a drunken accident, that he

simply dropped the gun and it went off. However, shortly before

the shooting, Gain had called another girlfriend and told her he was

going to hurt Ho. That girlfriend was on the phone to 911 at the exact

moment Ho was shot. (Gain was also on the phone with another

friend venting about how mad he was at Ho when the friend heard

the gun go off.)

Nevertheless, a jury rejected the charge of attempted murder and

convicted him of first-degree assault. His lawyer had argued that

Ho suffered no permanent, life-threatening injury, although that was

due to sheer luck. The defense also claimed that Gain was too drunk

that night to consent to a search of his apartment or waive his rights

against self-incrimination.

Gain eerily posted several impassioned messages to the Web site

set up by Laci’s family and friends after she went missing. He has the

words ‘‘In Memory of Laci Denise Rocha’’ tattooed
Memento
-style

across his chest and calls the tattoo his ‘‘shield.’’ He claims he still

loves Laci and has pictures of her in his cell, as does Scott, but he

insists he is nothing like her husband. ‘‘He never deserved to be with

Laci,’’ Gain says.

To try to prevent future eraser killings, and domestic homicides in

general, it is important to look at these cases from the victim’s point

of view, to see if there were warning signs of impending danger, if

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there was anything the victim could and should have done to protect

herself. That both of Laci’s long-term relationships involved men

capable of such extreme violence is one of the most unsettling facts

in the Peterson case, but it probably says more about the shocking

prevalence of intimate partner homicide than it does about Laci

repeating any kind of dysfunctional pattern.

We do now know that Laci kept some aspects of her relationships

secret and was willing to tolerate, at least for a while, abusive behavior

from Kent. She also knew about at least one of Scott’s affairs and

remained married to him—although there is no evidence that she

knew of, or tolerated, ongoing cheating.

This leaves open the possibility that there could have been some

prior acts of violence in the Peterson marriage that Laci kept hidden.

But neither the police nor anyone else has uncovered any evidence of

that, and the fact that Laci did break off an unhealthy relationship with

Kent Gain, that she refused to marry him, more likely indicates that

she recognized the danger in a more typically abusive man like Gain.

Scott Peterson seemed to be as different from Gain as one could

possibly be: successful, ambitious, kind, considerate, solicitous in the

extreme. The only person around Laci who had any reservations

about Scott prior to Laci’s disappearance is Dennis Rocha, who says

he found his son-in-law cocky and patronizing. But even Dennis

sensed nothing disturbing in Kent Gain, who had visited the farm

often with Laci and appeared to him to be a nice young man.

Q

Laci was nineteen when she met Scott in the summer of 1994 at

the Pacific Café, shortly after breaking up with Gain. She had been

into the restaurant several times with a friend, whose boyfriend also

worked there. Never shy when it came to getting what she wanted,

Laci made the first move. One day, she wrote down her phone

number and asked her friend’s boyfriend to give it to Scott. Believing

his coworker was playing a joke on him, Scott threw Laci’s number in

the trash. But after being convinced otherwise, he retrieved the piece

of paper and called her.

On their first date, Scott took Laci deep-sea fishing on a catamaran.

Laci got horribly seasick and refused ever to go fishing with him again.

That fact ate away at Sharon Rocha as police searched the bay for her

daughter’s body.

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E R A S E D

‘‘Laci always got motion sick . . . and you knew that and . . . you

put her in the bay,’’ Sharon railed at Scott during her victim-impact

testimony at sentencing. ‘‘You knew she’d be sick for all eternity.’’

Despite an unpleasant and embarrassing first date, Laci was awed

by Scott, who seemed like a combination of Jay Gatsby and Ernest

Hemingway. He wasn’t even twenty-two yet, but he owned his own

business, drove a Porsche, and oozed self-confidence. He was dashing

and daring and exceedingly romantic. He looked like he was going

places. He looked like he had his life together.

Scott was drawn to Laci’s fun-loving, outgoing personality. It

complemented, and camouflaged, his more reserved, guarded nature.

According to his sister Susan, he was also impressed by Laci’s

adventurousness, ‘‘that she was willing to try almost anything, that

she wasn’t high-maintenance.’’

Scott would claim in his ‘‘damage-control’’ interview with Diane

Sawyer that he fell in love with Laci on one of their very first dates. He

said he realized he was in love as they were driving down the highway

one day, and he couldn’t stop smiling ‘‘because she was there.’’

In truth, Scott was begging another girlfriend, an eighteen-year-old

waitress he worked with at the Pacific Café, to come back to him for

a couple months after he started seeing Laci.

Lauren Putnat had dated Scott for about a year and a half, but

broke up with him after he started talking marriage. Lauren was one

of the few women who recognized that Scott was too good to be true,

who saw his romantic excesses as too studied, as an imitation of love.

Scott could turn as cold as ice when he was through with a

woman, but as the rejected one, he showed extreme emotion, crying

and pleading with Lauren for a second chance, and attempting to

make her jealous by inviting Laci to the restaurant while she was

working. The more she denied him, the more jealous and persistent

he became, until she moved away and ceased all contact with him.

Scott didn’t tell Laci anything about Lauren Putnat. But he did tell

her that he had lived with a woman while he was at Arizona State, a

woman he said was several years older than him.

Laci decided right away that Scott was ‘‘the one’’ for her. After they

had dated only a few times, she called her mother and told Sharon

that she had met the man she was going to marry. About a month

later, Sharon came down to Morro Bay to meet Scott at the Pacific

Café. Scott staged a breathtaking tableau.

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‘‘He greeted us at the door with this huge grin, looked at Laci and

said, ‘I have a special table for you,’ ’’ Sharon recalled. On the table

were a dozen red roses for Laci and a dozen white roses for me. I was

very impressed.’’

Neither Laci nor Sharon knew that Scott’s grand romantic gesture

was a stock one, practiced and honed to perfection. Equally as

constant in Scott’s dating history, all the way back to high school,

were cheating and lying. And Scott didn’t just lie when he was caught.

He lied gratuitously. He lied outlandishly. He lied even when faced

with absolute proof to the contrary.

When Scott was a senior at Uni High, he wooed sophomore

Stephanie Smith with flowers and expensive gifts, including a ring

for Valentine’s Day—when all the while he was cheating on her with

another classmate. When friends told her that they saw Scott holding

hands with the other girl and had seen her driving his car, Scott came

up with the most preposterous explanations.

‘‘I hold hands with lots of my friends,’’ he said. And he had simply

traded cars with the girl for a day so she could try his out— a very

similar explanation to the one Lee Peterson gave under oath for why

he had Scott’s truck, with GPS locator attached, and Scott was driving

Lee’s, in the days leading up to his arrest.

‘‘That’s something we did all our lives,’’ Lee testified. ‘‘We like

cars and we like, you know, to drive different cars.’’

Even after Scott had wooed and won Laci, he continued to break

out the roses to pursue other women. He showed up with twelve

bouquets of a dozen roses each for his first date with Janet Ilse, a

Cal Poly sophomore, who had no idea Scott was married until she

walked into his house one day and found him in bed with Laci.

Katy Hansen found out Scott was married when Laci came up and

gave him a big kiss as she and Scott sat together at their Cal Poly

graduation ceremony. A week after being outed at the ceremony,

apparently hoping to rekindle the relationship, Scott sent Katy a

dozen pink roses with the cryptic note ‘‘No job, no home.’’ Was he

pretending that Laci had thrown him out and he was now free to be

with Katy?

Scott’s lies to his last extramarital girlfriend, Amber Frey, would

become legendary, as would the cheesy
9 1
/
2 Weeks
–style rosebud

seduction he used to distract Amber from his admission that he had

been married but had ‘‘lost’’ his wife.

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E R A S E D

What Scott didn’t say was even more telling. He would talk about

his passion for golf, his inflated ambitions—he told Katy Hansen he

planned to run for mayor of Fillmore, California, a city in Ventura

County where his friends Mike and Heather Richardson live but

where Scott never has. But he rarely revealed anything personal or

honest about himself.

Whereas his parents and siblings relished talking about Scott

and his accomplishments, however minor, he hardly ever talked to

anyone about his family. He spoke so little of them that Katy Hansen

assumed he was an only child. He told Laci that his family was

‘‘dysfunctional.’’ Anne Bird was disturbed by how, in all the time

he stayed with her after Laci’s disappearance and when she visited

him in jail, Scott never once talked about his wife or child with any

emotional resonance.

‘‘Everything was on an historical level, like he was repeating

something from a history book,’’ she said. ‘‘He would talk about

things that happened— like how he hiked up a hill in Mexico to get

some fresh fruit for Laci, or recipes, or things that were going on in

jail—but nothing about feelings, or being sad that Laci was missing.

Nothing on an emotional level.’’

Q

Laci and Scott moved in together a few months after they started

dating. At one point they shared a house with another couple. For a

few years, they rented a tiny bunkhouse on a ranch near a fish-stocked

pond, around which Laci would walk McKenzie, the golden retriever

puppy she gave Scott as a Christmas gift.

After drifting in and out of school for several years, Scott eventually

enrolled at Cal Poly, where he majored in agricultural business—a

curious choice for someone without any apparent affinity for rural

life. He did well in his classes, graduating with a B+ average and

making the dean’s list three times, without ever applying himself

too strenuously. He started work on his senior thesis— choosing

the rather self-evident topic ‘‘Attributes That Consumers Desire in

Fresh-Cut Salad’’—just two days before it was due, and aced it.

Scott began schooling Laci in the finer things in life. When Brent

went to San Luis Obispo to check out the guy Laci was so smitten

with, he found a ‘‘good guy, a good-natured person’’ who really

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seemed to care about his sister. He was struck by the changes in Laci,

how worldly she was becoming.

‘‘She wasn’t the typical college student going to keggers,’’ he

recalled. ‘‘Going to dinner was an event for her, where they’d pair the

wines up with the meal—a little more cultured atmosphere than we

are used to in the Valley. She loved to cook exotic meals. She grew so

much and she taught me so many things.’’

Amy Rocha first met her future brother-in-law when Laci brought

him to one of her middle school cheerleading practices. (Laci had

volunteered to teach her sister’s squad some cheers.) Amy became so

fond of Scott that she considered him both like a brother and as the

type of man she hoped to find one day for herself, words that would

later sicken her. Ron Grantski was impressed as well. ‘‘He was the

kind of guy you wanted your daughter to marry,’’ Ron believed at

the time. ‘‘He seemed like a perfect son.’’

There was at least one sign that something was amiss, however.

The industrious young man, lauded by his parents for holding down

up to three jobs at a time, was fired from the Morro Bay golf course

for stealing. He told Laci that it was all a misunderstanding and that

he had straightened everything out— the same thing Mark Hacking

told his wife about the medical school to which he had never even

applied. If it was a mistake, if everything had been ‘‘straightened out,’’

why didn’t Scott get his job back? Laci believed him. She seemed

outraged that he had been accused of something he hadn’t done, just

as his family (and hers, too, initially) would be when he was accused

of her murder.

In late 1996, about two and a half years into their relationship,

Scott and Laci got engaged. In engagement photos taken on the

beach, they dressed identically in white shirts and jeans, Scott already

seeming to merge his identity into Laci’s—just as he had once styled

himself as a miniature version of his father.

Without being asked, Scott would transform himself, chameleon-like, into whatever he thought people wanted him to be. He gave up

meat while dating vegetarian Janet Ilse. For Amber he started reading

the Bible and analyzing parables—this from a man who told Amber

when they started dating that he wasn’t religious at all.

Q

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