Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (39 page)

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two surviving children nearly make the Olympic team. The only

comfort they draw from Kristin’s short life is that she packed a lot of

adventure into that time. One thing she never got to do, which she

dreamed of doing, was go to Australia and Fiji. Her brother, Matt, a

pharmacy rep, visited those places in her honor.

‘‘You’re always in conflict: do I help my living children or do

something for Kristin?’’ says Denise. They vow that they will never

stop looking for Kristin, never stop trying to bring to justice the man

who they believe took her life.

‘‘People ask, ‘How do you ‘‘do life’’ and still do this?’ ’’ Denise says

of their efforts on Kristin’s behalf. ‘‘It’s not easy. It’s a pain that never

dissipates. Sometimes you have to pretend like it didn’t happen.’’

C H A P T E R

T W E L V E

A Collision Course

Q AfterScottgraduatedfromCalPolyinJune1998,

his parents moved back to San Diego. Lee sold his half of Central Coast

Crating to Scott for just $3,500, the price of his initial investment.

But Scott had no real interest in the shipping business and quickly

sold off the company. Instead, he and Laci decided to start their own

business, opening a restaurant in an abandoned bakery a few blocks

from campus.

According to the Petersons, The Shack was based on a business

model Scott devised for a class project. As business plans go, it

was a pretty simple one and seemed like a can’t-lose proposition: a

sports bar with cheap grub and brew and different games playing on

the various televisions scattered throughout the room. They ran the

restaurant for two years, and as far as they ever told anyone, it was

a success. But a lien for unpaid taxes was not satisfied until almost a

year and a half after they sold the restaurant.

Whether or not the business was in financial trouble, the day-to-day drudgery of running a restaurant had grown old for Scott. Brent

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Rocha remembers his brother-in-law telling him, ‘‘I don’t want to

spend my life flipping burgers.’’

Laci had her own reasons for wanting to sell the restaurant. The

death of her beloved paternal grandmother to lung cancer in 1999

made her realize how much she missed her family and friends in

Modesto. Her grandfather was suffering from dementia and would,

within a few years, need full-time convalescent care. Laci wanted to

be closer to those she loved. She was ready to start her own family,

and wanted her children to grow up in the kind of community and

around the people she so treasured.

One can’t help but wonder if Laci also may have been reacting

to lingering fears about Scott’s infidelity. Perhaps she hoped that

moving away from the site of his past indiscretions would remove

Scott from temptation and cement his commitment to her.

She made a deal with her husband. If he agreed to move to her

hometown, she promised that she would return the favor in the future,

should he ever want to live closer to his family. His family maintains

that relocating to the Central Valley was no real sacrifice for Scott.

‘‘Because his major was in agriculture, it was an ideal place for

that,’’ his sister, Susan, said. ‘‘And Scott came from a big family so

it was nice to have Laci’s family around.’’ Yet for someone weaned

on country clubs and ocean-view estates, the move to landlocked,

working-class Modesto must have been a shock to his system.

In May 2000 Scott and Laci sold The Shack. With no jobs or home

to live in—truly, this time—they moved in temporarily with Sharon

and Ron. They soon found work: Laci as a wine salesperson and

later as a substitute teacher, and Scott with Tradecorp, a position he

obtained with the assistance of one of his Cal Poly professors.

A Spain-based exporter of agricultural chemicals, Tradecorp was

attempting to break into the American market. Scott was named

manager of U.S. operations, a big title in an unglamorous field.

He would at times try to make it sound even bigger, telling some

people that he was the owner of Tradecorp, that he had ‘‘come out

of retirement’’ to launch the start-up after making a killing selling a

previous European venture. In reality he was a salesman, a company

of one, driving around the Southwest peddling manure—albeit

high-priced, new age–formulated synthetic manure with bionutrients

and amino acids.

Unlike his sure-thing sports bar, this was risky business. Farmers

are traditionalists, constitutionally averse to change. It would take

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someone with indefatigable drive and superb salesmanship skills to

convince the average grower to take a new and more expensive

approach than their fathers and grandfathers had before them and to

believe that feeding their crops a diet of zinc and iron and calcium

would ultimately produce bigger yields and more profits.

Under Scott Peterson’s leadership, the company did not even make

a dent in the market. In 2002, total sales for Tradecorp USA were a

meager $124,000, and company accountants had to intervene to get

Scott to pay delinquent taxes. A month before Laci disappeared, the

executive director of Tradecorp told Scott that he needed to increase

sales tenfold in order to reach the company’s goal of breaking even

in 2003.

Just as he had entered into marriage (and would later into

prospective fatherhood) without the requisite acceptance of the

responsibilities involved, Scott was not self-reflective enough to

recognize that the job with Tradecorp was a bad fit. He was neither

consumed by passion for the field nor disciplined enough to succeed

at such a self-directed position. The title appealed to his ego, as did

the freedom the job provided— freedom both from the oversight of

his bosses, far away in Europe, and from his wife. He spent many

nights away from home on sales calls, and traveled to Mexico, Egypt,

and Europe for business meetings and conventions. As police would

discover after Laci went missing, not all Scott’s overnight excursions

were work related. His job provided good cover for his secret life. He

could see other women, and his wife was none the wiser.

At least one member of the Peterson family was not particularly

happy about Scott and Laci’s new life. Jackie Peterson privately

referred to Modesto as ‘‘a little nothing town’’ and ‘‘the wrong

side of the tracks.’’ She would contend that Scott and Laci never

intended to settle there permanently, that they were simply operating

on a ‘‘five-year plan.’’ She also seemed somewhat ashamed of Scott’s

chosen profession. After her son became a household name, she

berated reporters for calling him a fertilizer salesman.

‘‘He’s the West Coast representative of an agricultural supply

company,’’ she corrected them. Nevertheless, she and Lee gave the

couple $30,000 to purchase a $177,000 home less than a mile away

from Laci’s mother’s house, a three-bedroom, two-bath fixer-upper

on a leafy street that dead-ends on a large, rambling park.

The fifteen-hundred-square-foot clapboard and brick home, built

in 1949, was exceedingly humble by California real estate standards.

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But Laci saw its potential. With her decorating skills and Scott’s

handiness with tools, they quickly turned their home into a showplace

for entertaining friends and family. They remodeled the kitchen into

a chef’s paradise. They had a hot tub and a kidney-shaped swimming

pool installed in the backyard, and Scott built an outdoor barbecue

and tiled wet bar for summer pool parties.

Several whimsical touches were pure Laci. She draped a canopy

of mosquito netting over the bed she shared with Scott, creating a

romantic harem-style effect. And she hung a large framed chalkboard

on the wall near the dining room on which she would write descrip-tions of the elaborate dishes she served her guests, like the specials

board in a fancy restaurant.

‘‘She said they wanted their house to be the place where everybody

hangs out, the place everyone would consider home,’’ said René

Tomlinson. ‘‘And it was home to a lot of us.’’

One of Laci’s primary goals on returning to Modesto was to bring

her old circle of girlfriends back together. They were all adults now,

of course, with careers and mortgages, and several had children of

their own. Yet Laci was determined to recapture the closeness they

shared as kids. She reinstituted the tradition of slumber parties,

hosting grown-up sleepovers when Scott was out of town. Laci was

more worldly than most of her friends, many of whom had never

left Modesto. But rather than holding herself above the group, says

Tomlinson, ‘‘she brought the world to us.’’

She had taken cooking lessons in Tuscany after she and Scott

were married, and she delighted and amazed her friends with her

gourmet concoctions. She threw parties for nearly every occasion:

Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July, an annual Cinco de Mayo

party with margaritas and Mexican food for her May 4 birthday. She

was generous to a fault, her gifts personalized and thoughtful. She

baked eye-popping cakes for all her friends’ birthdays, each more

spectacularly decorated than the last. Even after she became pregnant,

she volunteered to do all the cooking for a friend’s wedding.

Laci was the life of every party, the center of every gathering. After

she went missing, her friends could not remember ever seeing her in

a bad mood. They could find no photograph in which she was not

smiling.

‘‘She was just this amazing force,’’ says Garza.

Laci’s girlfriends were as taken with Scott as her family had

been. When Scott and Laci entertained, he was the perfect host,

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bartender, and grill-master, catering to everyone’s needs and oozing

self-confidence. They marveled at the adoring, attentive way he

looked at his wife, how he completed without complaint the running

‘‘honey-do’’ list of errands and projects she kept on the refrigerator

door. Even at the slumber parties when the girls inevitably got around

to complaining about their husbands or boyfriends, Laci never once

had a negative thing to say about Scott.

‘‘They really seemed to have the perfect marriage in every sense of

the word,’’ said friend Kim McNeely six weeks after Laci disappeared.

‘‘He doted on her. And she always referred to him as ‘My Husband,’

even to us, showing her pride in him, that he was her husband. She

loved him and he loved her, so it appeared. They had a wonderful

home; they were expecting this baby. It was everything we all wanted.’’

Scott was so good at focusing attention on others, at making

whomever he was speaking to or waiting on feel like the center of

the universe, that only in retrospect did Laci’s friends realize they

knew very little about him beyond his obvious passions for things

like golf. Until confronted with incontrovertible proof in the form

of his ongoing affair with Amber Frey that he was not the grieving

husband he pretended to be, none of Laci’s friends could imagine

that he was capable of harming his wife in any way.

Laci’s family defended Scott just as vociferously in the early

weeks of the investigation. Only Dennis Rocha saw his son-in-law

as something other than a perfect gentleman, devoted husband,

and excited father-to-be. Dennis believed that, like Jackie, Scott

looked down on humble Modesto, that he viewed the Rochas as

unsophisticated farm people.

Q

It is a well-known fact that opposites attract. We are often drawn,

subconsciously, to the qualities in others that we lack in ourselves. On

some level, we hope our partner will complete us, that through some

kind of mystical alchemy two ‘‘halves’’ will make a perfect whole.

Scott used just such language in one of the four carefully orchestrated

interviews he granted in the days after Amber Frey was unveiled at a

police press conference.

‘‘You always look for someone who completes you, you know,

that harmony,’’ he told KTVU reporter Ted Rowlands, describing

what attracted him to Laci.

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Considering what it took to kill and then dispose of his wife in

the fashion he had, could Scott ever have truly felt that way about

Laci?

Two months before his wife disappeared, Scott told Shawn Sibley,

the woman who would introduce him to Amber, that he had once

found his ‘‘soul mate,’’ but lost her. Was he talking about Laci,

presaging her death just as he would when he ‘‘confessed’’ to Amber

that he had ‘‘lost’’ a wife who was not yet dead? Might he have been

referring to Janet Ilse, the woman he talked about moving in with

while his wife was living out of town? Could it have been Lauren

Putnat, the last woman he was seeing before Laci, whom he had

asked to marry him and tearfully begged to take him back after she

ended their relationship? Or was this proclamation just another lie,

an artifact of his imagination?

If he was referring to Laci as his lost soul mate, she was already

dead in his mind, a distant memory. Scott seemed to crave the great

love his parents shared, but he was unable to sustain it. Relationships

were only skin deep for Scott because he was only skin deep. Inside

he was a mystery even to himself.

One of the things that first struck me as odd about Scott when I

began reporting on Laci’s disappearance was that he seemed to have

few real friends of his own. Almost all the people in their circle were

primarily Laci’s friends. She collected friends like a magnet, but he

had few enduring relationships—odd for someone who had been

voted ‘‘friendliest’’ in his junior high school class. Not once during

the entire trial did anyone other than immediate family members or

infatuated strangers ever speak up in the press on behalf of Scott or

sit in court to show his or her support. A few friends did ask for his

life to be spared in the penalty phase. But just three were people with

whom he had a significant ongoing relationship at the time of the

crime.

In many ways, Scott had chosen to marry a woman very much like

his mother. People who know Jackie Peterson describe her in terms

nearly identical to those used to describe Laci.

‘‘She laughs a lot, she’s always looking on the bright side,’’ Joanne

Farmer, a friend of Jackie’s for nearly forty years, said at the trial. ‘‘I

don’t think I have ever seen Jackie really, really down.’’

Laci and Jackie were each the center of their respective worlds.

Jackie’s brothers John and Robert describe their sister as the ‘‘heart-beat’’ of their family, bringing the Latham siblings back together

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after tragedy separated them as children and the responsibilities of

adulthood scattered them around the globe.

Just as people saw Scott and Laci as a perfect couple that never

argued, the same is said of Lee and Jackie. Laci and Jackie also shared

a similar power dynamic within their respective relationships, at least

on the surface. Jackie is the dominant figure in her marriage, with Lee

the laconic cowboy, seemingly happy to take a backseat to his more

assertive wife. This dynamic remained in place even after their son

was accused of murder, with Jackie very much the driving force in

her son’s defense, both in public and behind the scenes. Laci ‘‘wore

the pants’’ in her marriage as well.

In his daily life with Laci, Scott was passive almost in the extreme.

He appeared content to bask in his wife’s glow. Yet he must have

resented the subordinate role he played so expertly. Murdering her,

then hiding her body and pretending it never happened, is the

ultimate passive-aggressive act.

After Scott was arrested, the Peterson family painted an idyllic

portrait of Scott and Laci’s marriage for
People
magazine, accompa-nied by smiling photos the Petersons provided of the two. Curiously,

Jackie also provided
People
with a warm note Laci had once writ-ten to her for Mother’s Day, which the magazine photographically

reproduced in its five-page cover story. ‘‘You are a wonderful and

caring person, friend, and mother,’’ reads the note, which ends with

Laci’s signature and a smiley face. ‘‘I am fortunate to be gaining a

mother-in-law like yourself. Thank you for treating me like your own

daughter. I love you.’’

Yet, according to Anne Bird, Jackie was actually quite critical of

her daughter-in-law. She complained to Bird about the ‘‘silly’’ way

Laci dressed, about her perfectionist tendencies, even about things as

particular as how Laci wrote thank-you notes. (It’s hard to find fault

with the example Jackie herself provided to
People
.)

At a Latham family reunion a year after Scott and Laci got married,

Jackie made fun of the romantic trail of roses Laci had laid up to

the door of the cottage she and Scott were sharing. Only Laci would

do something like that, Jackie scoffed. Anne wondered what Jackie

could find wrong with such a loving gesture. Didn’t Jackie want Scott

to have a wife who adored him?

The first time Anne met Laci, shortly after she and Scott got

married, Anne commented to her mother about how pleased she

must be with her new daughter-in-law. Jackie complained about

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