Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (36 page)

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report of a missing pregnant woman on Christmas Eve 2002, pressing

the ‘‘grieving’’ Scott Peterson for a detailed statement, searching his

home and warehouse, and preserving crucial evidence that might

no longer have existed two days later when police returned with a

warrant and Scott had hired an attorney.

David Zaragoza graduated from Cal Poly with the same major as

Scott Peterson. But finding little opportunity in the agricultural field,

he made a career in law enforcement. When he read in the newspaper

about the disappearance of Aundria Crawford, one of the more than

one hundred parolees he was assigned to supervise sprang to mind.

Breaking into his victims’ homes as part of a sex crime was the modus

operandi of someone whose rap sheet he knew well: Rex Krebs.

It was something of a stretch to suspect Krebs in the case of a

missing woman, however, as he had only ever been arrested for rape

and burglary, not kidnapping or murder. Zaragoza took the initiative

anyway to visit Krebs at his isolated residence. He found his parolee

wincing in pain, a weightlifter’s belt wrapped around his injured

ribs.

Good investigators are quick to notice something unusual or

out of place, and Zaragoza pressed the ex-con about his injury.

Krebs claimed that he had tripped and fallen onto his woodpile. But

Zaragoza’s instincts were now more aroused, as he was aware that

Crawford’s kidnapper had crawled in through a window barely big

enough for a grown man to pass through. He passed on his suspicions

to the San Luis Obispo police, who in turn passed the information

to the Department of Justice, the agency in charge of culling through

lower-priority tips.

The investigation of Rex Krebs as a potential suspect could easily

have ended here, as more than five hundred tips had already been

received on the Crawford case, and more were coming in every

day. Fortunately, the DOJ did follow up. During a search of Krebs’s

property, agents found BB pellets and got Krebs to admit to owning

a BB gun that simulated a more dangerous weapon. That constituted

a parole violation and meant that they could take Krebs into custody

and begin trying to break him down.

Larry Hobson, an investigator with the district attorney’s office,

played a key role in this stage of the case. He worked to develop a

relationship with Krebs, first asking for his expertise as a sex offender

generically to help police solve the cases of the missing young

women, then asking him to help himself by giving them information

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needed to clear him. As more evidence came in—including wiretaps

of conversations between Krebs and his girlfriend, in which he

admitted no guilt but failed to deny any involvement and continually

probed her for information about the status of the investigation—the

investigator went back at Krebs again and again.

For two months Krebs could not be broken. Then a second, more

thorough search of his property cracked the case. Minute traces of

blood belonging to Rachel were detected on the jump seat from

Krebs’s pickup truck, which he had removed from the vehicle for

cleaning but had not sanitized thoroughly enough. And a small 8-ball

key chain known to have belonged to Rachel was also found tucked

away in his house, which he kept because he had a fondness for the

number eight and considered it to have special significance. Now they

had evidence that tied Krebs not only to Crawford but to Newhouse as

well. When confronted with the forensic findings, he gave a detailed

confession and led investigators to the women’s bodies.

Krebs was subsequently diagnosed as an antisocial personality

and as a sexual sadist aroused by women’s suffering. Yet he seemed

to have an insight about himself that Scott Peterson lacked. When

Rex’s girlfriend became pregnant two months after he killed Rachel

Newhouse, he told her he didn’t want the child.

‘‘I don’t have a conscience,’’ he explained, simply and honestly. In

a jailhouse interview the day after Rachel and Aundria’s bodies were

exhumed, Krebs told a reporter, ‘‘If I’m not a monster then what am

I?’’ and said he deserved the death penalty.

In 2001 he was sentenced to death. He resides today on San

Quentin’s Death Row with Scott Peterson and about six hundred

other condemned men.

Q

Kristin Smart remains missing, but the circumstances of her

disappearance are no longer a mystery to authorities. They are

certain that she is dead. They believe they know when she died

and where she died. For ten years they have had one and only one

real suspect: Paul Flores, a fellow college student who promised to

escort her home from a party. They have named him publicly. They

have amassed considerable circumstantial evidence against him. But

they have never arrested him, never charged him with anything

because by the time they got around to taking Kristin’s disappearance

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seriously, vital evidence was long gone and the investigation seriously

hampered.

Unlike Rex Krebs, a seasoned criminal who would have gotten

away with murder if not for good police work, the person police

believe to be responsible for the disappearance of Kristin Smart is

about as unsophisticated an offender as a detective would ever con-front. Yet the Smart case is a textbook example of what happens

when police botch a missing persons investigation, when inexperi-enced cops fail to recognize the likelihood that a crime has occurred,

fail to preserve critical evidence, fail to bring pressure on a suspect

within the narrow window of opportunity when he is most vulnerable

to confessing or incriminating himself.

The catastrophic result of such failure is that Kristin’s parents are

no closer to finding their daughter today than when she disappeared

more than a decade ago. Like Laci’s parents, they have suffered an

indescribable loss, but they don’t even have the cold consolation of

being able to visit their daughter’s grave, much less any sense of

justice having been served.

Q

Watching the drama of the Kristin Smart case unfold was like

a graduate-level course in criminology for Scott Peterson. He saw

how critical timing is to police response, which could explain why he

chose a holiday to disappear his own wife. He heard or read over and

over again how mistakes police made in the first month after Kristin

disappeared doomed their ability to bring charges.

Perhaps that knowledge, filed away in the recesses of Scott’s mind,

had something to do with why he promised Amber Frey that he

would be able to spend more time with her at the end of January

2003—a month after his wife disappeared. He may have believed that

if he could get through those first thirty days, he would be in the clear.

The Kristin Smart case gave Scott Peterson a blueprint for how to

get away with murder. The plan he would later conceive to explain

his wife’s disappearance was not far-fetched after all. Women vanish.

He had seen it over and over again in his safe little college town, the

smiling faces of Kristin and Rachel and Aundria frozen in time on

billboards and on countless fliers under the haunting words, ‘‘Where

are they?’’ Some women are, in fact, kidnapped and killed by parolees

and sex offenders. Some are never found, and no one is ever charged.

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Scott didn’t expect the police in Modesto to be any smarter or

better trained than those who looked for Kristin. Yes, Rex Krebs

was nabbed for the other two disappearances, but he made stupid

mistakes—like saving that dime-store key chain and bloodstained

car seat. And he confessed. He
led
investigators to those girls’ bodies.

Otherwise they never would have been found in so remote an area.

Actually, Krebs probably factored directly into Peterson’s cover

story. It was Scott who fed Det. Brocchini the theory that Laci might

have been kidnapped by vagrants who hang out in the park near his

home, some of whom have criminal records.

Just as one cannot fully understand the mind-set of Scott Peterson

without looking at what he may have ‘‘learned’’ while he was in

college, one cannot judge how the police handled the investigation

into the disappearance of Laci Peterson without first looking at how

authorities mishandled the Kristin Smart investigation. The con-tention that Modesto police ‘‘rushed to judgment’’ against Peterson

must be considered in the context of what happens when investigators

do not act quickly and aggressively in a missing persons case.

Because Laci Peterson was seven and a half months pregnant,

happily anticipating the birth of her child, closely bonded to her family

and friends, Modesto police correctly concluded that she would not

have walked away from her life. They immediately suspected foul

play and focused in on the last person to see her, someone whose

behavior and affect was, from that very first night, suspicious. They

moved heaven and earth to find her and, in the words of Al Brocchini,

‘‘to get whoever got Laci.’’

The system failed Kristin Smart. Cops more adept at writing

parking tickets than investigating a potential homicide treated her

like a lost bicycle—telling her friends and family to check back in a

few days to see if she turned up. They did not follow up promptly on

clues and contradictions that should have set off alarms. As precious

time slipped away and evidence was lost forever, they viewed her

behavior and character as more suspicious than that of the man who

would become the prime suspect in her disappearance.

Q

On the Friday evening leading into Memorial Day weekend, 1996,

Kristin went to a party at a home leased by fraternity members just a

block from campus. She had been out with a group of friends earlier

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in the evening, but none of them wanted to go to the party, so they

dropped her off, and she went in alone.

Tim Davis, one of the students at the party, noticed Kristin talking

several times that night with a nineteen-year-old freshman food

science major named Paul Flores. At one point there was a loud

noise. When he looked to see what happened, he saw that the two had

somehow fallen to the floor in the hallway, Paul on top of Kristin.

He told police he didn’t know whether Flores knocked her down

intentionally or if they simply fell together, but when they got up,

they separated.

At 2:30 that morning Davis was outside arranging rides home for

some his friends when he saw Kristin lying on the lawn next door.

Davis assumed that Kristin had passed out, but when he app-roached her she was conscious and told him she was cold. (A person

who is drunk usually feels warm, not cold.) He helped her up and

arranged for a female student who lived in a neighboring dorm,

Cheryl Anderson, to walk Kristin home. Just as they were about to

leave, Paul Flores reappeared, saying he also lived in the dorms and

would accompany the two girls home.

As they walked the quarter-mile route to the residence halls

clustered on the eastern edge of campus, an unsteady Kristin leaning

against Paul for support, the two stopped to rest.

‘‘Just keep going, I’ll get her home,’’ Paul told Cheryl. But she did

not feel comfortable leaving Kristin alone with Paul, so she waited,

and they continued walking together. When they came to the turnoff

Cheryl needed to take to go to her building, Paul asked Cheryl for a

kiss. She refused. Paul then asked her if he could ‘‘at least get a hug.’’

Cheryl again said no.

She left them about three hundred feet from Kristin’s dormitory,

Muir Hall. Paul’s dorm, Santa Lucia Hall, was kitty-corner to Kristin’s.

All the residence halls in that area are identical three-story red brick

buildings. In the state Kristin was in, she could easily have been

steered into the wrong building thinking she was being led to her

own room.

Q

Kristin had left a telephone message for her parents earlier in the

week to report good news. A biology professor the previous term had

misplaced her final exam and didn’t believe she had actually taken

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the test. He had given her an incomplete in the class, and she fretted

about the situation all term. Now the professor had located the test,

and she had been vindicated.

‘‘I’ll give you the details later,’’ Kristin said, promising to call on

Sunday, as she did every week. When her parents did not hear from

her on Sunday, however, they were not alarmed, as it was a holiday

weekend.

The following Tuesday, everything changed. Kristin’s roommate,

Crystal Calvin, called Kristin’s mother, Denise Smart, in tears. Crystal

had gone away for the weekend after Kristin left for the party. When

she returned, she could tell that Kristin had never been back to their

room. Her backpack was just as she had left it, atop her bed, her

makeup partially spilling out. The roommates were not close, so for

Crystal Calvin to be that emotional, Mrs. Smart knew something was

terribly wrong. She began shaking uncontrollably. But her nightmare

was only beginning.

Some of Kristin’s friends had reported her missing to the dorm’s

resident adviser over the weekend. The RA contacted the campus

police on Monday, but they refused to take a report, telling her to

wait and see if Kristin showed up for classes on Tuesday. In their

view, it wasn’t unusual for a college student to leave campus without

telling anyone, especially on a holiday weekend. Now it was Tuesday

and Kristin was nowhere to be found, yet Denise Smart still could

not get the university police to take a missing persons report on her

daughter.

Kristin’s father, Stan, left immediately for San Luis Obispo, where

he would spend the next three months personally searching every

culvert, tunnel, and creek bed in San Luis Obispo County—anywhere

he thought he might find his daughter, dead or alive.

He told Denise to stay home in case Kristin called or showed up

there. Mrs. Smart didn’t leave her house for five weeks. She began

working the phone, calling the FBI, having no idea who or what to

ask for. She got passed to a sympathetic agent on the sexual assault

task force who called Cal Poly and got the campus police to finally

take a report.

There was little reason to believe that Kristin had taken off of her

own accord. Her wallet, ID, and all her personal effects were still in

her room. The only thing missing was her room key and the clothing

she had on the night of the party: a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes.

She had no money with her, no checkbook, no ATM card, no credit

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