Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (35 page)

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reductionism—as if the case against his son were no more than a state

conspiracy built on penis envy. In fact, it was Scott who seemed to

be sexually obsessed with the detectives, making derisive comments

about their size and potency.

Laci must have at least suspected something was going on between

Scott and Katy Hansen, but she probably had no idea until graduation

day. During the ceremony she told her friend Heather Richardson

that Scott was ‘‘acting single.’’ She didn’t elaborate, but later that

night, after a celebratory dinner, Heather overheard Laci yelling at

Scott in the bathroom. She heard no response from Scott.

Katy told police that her relationship with Scott had not yet

become sexual. Perhaps Scott convinced Laci it was just a friendship.

Maybe Laci blamed herself for their physical separation or attributed

his behavior to a period of adjustment. Or maybe, as the child of

divorce, Laci was determined to make her marriage work at all costs.

Other than her brief comment to Heather, she never told anyone

about this episode. Although the plan had been for Scott to join her

after graduation, she instead quit her job and moved back to San Luis

Obispo. Little did she know that Scott tried to win Katy back with

flowers and a note hinting that his wife was no longer in the picture.

Nor did she know that Scott had told Janet Ilse that he never wanted

to have kids because they would get in the way of his lifestyle.

C H A P T E R

E L E V E N

Seeds of a Plan

Q Theleastfortunateofallerasedpersonsfallintoa

black hole in the criminal justice system, a bizarre netherworld in

which they are considered neither alive nor dead. The investigation

into their disappearance is never officially closed, but as months and

then years go by, it remains neither active nor productive.

Contrary to the impression created by the popular TV drama

Without a Trace
, crack FBI agents are not sitting around waiting

to leap into action when someone files a vexing missing persons

report. In general, police departments are reluctant to jump into an

investigation, sometimes reluctant even to take a report, because of

the roughly eight hundred thousand Americans reported missing in

any given year, the vast majority turn up on their own within a few

days or weeks.

Over the last two decades, major reforms and safeguards have

been instituted nationwide regarding police handling of reports of

children abducted by strangers, a tiny subset within the much larger

number of children taken by one parent or the other in the midst of a

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custody dispute. There is now widespread recognition that children

abducted by strangers are in mortal danger, often murdered within

hours by their kidnappers, so time is of the essence.

The system often breaks down, however, with older teens or young

adults, whom police are more likely to treat as runaways or as people

who have simply dropped out of sight temporarily—say, to ditch

an exam they have not prepared for or to take a road trip without

informing mom and dad. It is a sad and little known fact that Ted

Bundy was able to kidnap and kill dozens of young college students

in several states before he was caught, in part because many of his

victims were initially deemed to be runaways.

While Scott Peterson was living and working and going to school

in San Luis Obispo, his normally sleepy little college town was hit by

an inexplicable crime wave. In a span of less than three years, three

young women, all college students, seemingly vanished into thin air.

It was perhaps the most baffling cluster of mysterious disappearances

anywhere in the country, considering the area’s otherwise exceedingly

low crime rate and the fact that none of the women was in any

high-risk category for criminal victimization.

The town was gripped by fear. For years you couldn’t go anywhere

in San Luis Obispo without seeing a young woman’s face on a missing

persons poster, couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV news

without hearing one of the girls’ names. Speculation and rumor ran

rampant. Many wondered if a serial killer was operating in their midst,

someone like Ted Bundy with a penchant for pretty coeds. Because

of San Luis Obispo’s proximity to the Pacific Ocean on one side and

the sprawling and sparsely populated coastal foothills on the other,

it was easy to imagine how bodies might go undiscovered forever.

Like everyone living in San Luis Obispo at that time, Scott Peterson

became well versed on the subject of vanished women and the inner

workings of a missing persons investigation. At a formative stage in

his life, as he was grappling uneasily with the strictures of marriage

and adult responsibility, he saw how easy it was to make a woman

disappear and for a suspect far less savvy than himself to avoid

being charged with murder. He learned how poor police work in

the early stages of an investigation could prevent a suspect from

being arrested, much less convicted, even when authorities were

absolutely convinced he was guilty. He heard investigators disparage

circumstantial evidence and proclaim that unless their suspect chose

to confess there was nothing they could do to him.

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Before he had any desire or notion to erase someone from his

own life, he came to believe that murder cannot be proved without a

corpse.

Whereas the lack of empathy and conscience that leads someone

to feel entitled to take a life are believed to be the result of both nature

and nurture, the idea that one can carry out a ‘‘perfect murder’’ is

learned. In the abstract, the story Peterson would later spin to cover

his own wife’s murder, that a grown woman was snatched off the

streets just blocks from her home, seems ludicrous. In light of what

he learned in college, it makes perfect sense.

Q

The first disappearance to strike San Luis Obispo took place right

on the grounds of his campus. Kristin Smart, a nineteen-year-old Cal

Poly freshman, was last seen just a few hundred feet from her dorm as

she walked home from a fraternity party in the early morning hours

of May 25, 1996.

Rachel Newhouse, a twenty-year-old Cal Poly junior, disappeared

on November 12, 1998, while walking home from a party at a popular

downtown bar. Her blood was found the following morning on a

pedestrian bridge over a set of railroad tracks, the route she would

have needed to take to get home.

Just four months later, Aundria Crawford, a twenty-year-old

student at Cuesta College, the community college Scott Peterson also

attended before he transferred to Cal Poly, was kidnapped from her

apartment. A screen had been removed from a bathroom window,

and traces of Aundria’s blood were found inside the duplex.

Although thousands of dangerous men are incarcerated just a few

miles from campus at a state prison and a maximum-security hospital

that treats the criminally insane and sexually violent predators,

murder is almost unheard of in San Luis Obispo. During the last

decade, only three to seven murders a year have been committed in

the entire county, in most years none within this city of forty-four

thousand. Those that do occur generally fall into the typical range of

disputes over drugs or money or the escalating violence of domestic

abuse. Three young college students vanishing in the night was

something very different and extraordinarily alarming. Young women

began packing Mace, flocked to counseling sessions offered by the

colleges, and signed up for self-defense classes.

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‘‘Norman Rockwell doesn’t live here anymore,’’ a grim-faced

police sergeant told hundreds of anxious students who took time out

during finals week to attend a safety seminar at Cuesta College after

the third young woman disappeared.

Seeking to quell a growing sense of panic, police announced that

they did not believe there was any connection between the cases. Yet

they continually linked the first two victims by the fact that they had

been drinking on the night they vanished, as if they were somehow

complicit in their own disappearances. At a press conference three

days after Crawford vanished, Captain Bart Topham of the San Luis

Obispo police differentiated Aundria from Kristin and Rachel by

saying, ‘‘She doesn’t drink, she’s not a partyer.’’

In fact, it was the second and third cases that turned out to be

related. Rachel Newhouse, characterized by the police as a ‘‘partyer,’’

was in fact a straight-A student and student body officer in high

school who came to Cal Poly to study nutrition. Aundria Crawford

had to give up her first love, ballet, due to constant pain, switching her

passion to horseback riding and barrel racing. She was working hard

to qualify for transfer from Cuesta College to Cal Poly, where she

wanted to study interior design, and hoped to own a ranch one day.

All the hopes and dreams of Rachel Newhouse and Aundria

Crawford were extinguished when they had the misfortune to catch

the attention of Rex Allan Krebs, a sex offender paroled to the area in

1997.

Krebs, who was eventually abandoned by an alcoholic mother

after years of violent abuse from her husband, admitted to police

and a psychiatrist who examined him that he hated women and felt

the need to completely dominate them. He fits the classic profile

of the sexual sadist, taking a step up from rape to sexual homicide.

Although his victims were not his intimate partners by choice, he

used the same kind of thoroughness and cleverness in erasing their

bodies and covering up his connection to their disappearances.

Rex Krebs was leaving a bar just after midnight on Friday the

13th of November 1998, when he noticed a pretty young woman

walking toward the Jennifer Street Bridge, which was the only way to

cross the railroad tracks in that part of San Luis Obispo. A winding,

mazelike staircase leads up to the enclosed pedestrian bridge, which

is essentially a steel cage suspended three stories above the street.

In the eyes of a predator like Rex Krebs, it was a perfect place to

trap his unsuspecting prey. By the time Rachel saw the man lying in

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wait for her, a terrifying Halloween skull mask obscuring his face,

there was no way to escape his clutches. He knocked her unconscious,

dragged her down to his pickup, and drove her to an abandoned cabin

near the home he was renting in a remote canyon just a few miles

from the beautiful resort where Scott and Laci were married. There

he raped and killed her—although he would insist she accidentally

strangled herself while struggling against her bindings.

A few months later, when Krebs caught sight of Aundria Crawford

entering her apartment as he drove by on the way home from one

of his other favorite watering holes, he knew he’d found his next

victim. He cased her duplex on four different occasions, peering in

the windows and watching her undress, before he worked up the

nerve to break in.

On March 11, 1999, he decided to take her. He had a hard time

squeezing through an unlocked bathroom window, injuring his ribs

in the process. Aundria heard a commotion and went to investigate.

But he quickly overpowered her, beating her, as he had with Rachel,

until she lost consciousness. Then he transported her to his house,

where he raped her and then strangled her to death.

Krebs might very well have gotten away with his crimes. Much

of California’s central coastline is undeveloped. A few miles away

from the picturesque coastal highway and its resortlike towns, the

pavement turns to dirt and gravel and the terrain to steep canyons

and inhospitable brush. Krebs took advantage of his isolated sur-roundings, burying both girls near where he was living, in an area

so remote that neighbors often went months without seeing each

other, and accessible only by a treacherous unpaved road. In one of

the graves, which was farther out into the woods, he took the extra

precaution of placing wire mesh over the body to prevent it from

being dug up and exposed by wild animals.

He burned his victims’ clothes and threw away the shoes and

clothing he had been wearing when he kidnapped them. He washed

their blood out of his truck and carefully cut out carpeting and a

seatbelt he couldn’t wash clean. There were no eyewitnesses to the

abductions. He left behind no fingerprints or other forensic evidence

linking him to the crime scenes. They were close to being perfect

murders.

He was caught, however, thanks in large part to an astute parole

officer who followed his intuition—just as Modesto Police Detective

Al Brocchini would follow his gut instinct when he was assigned to a

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