Killer Dads (26 page)

He was a strikingly handsome salesman from Modesto with a wrestler's build and smoldering dark eyes, a pretty, loquacious wife, a swimming pool in a comfortable California neighborhood, and a baby boy on the way.
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But Scott Peterson, who was close to turning 30, wasn't happy. He was once a restaurateur in Southern California, glad-handing the customers and flirting with the women. The restaurant wasn't a roaring financial success, and his determined wife, Laci, wanted to be closer to her mom in her hometown of Modesto, especially once she planned to have a baby. So there was Scott: a charismatic head-turner with the women, but, essentially, now a pedestrian family man selling fertilizer, and not very effectively, in a dusty middle-class cow town in the landlocked Central Valley of California—“just a normal, every-day town, not anything unusual or different than any other city,” is how his mother-in-law would describe it later in court. That's the kind of mediocrity Scott was struggling with as he floated in his pool on a hot, dry summer afternoon in 2002, his heels cooling in the water that collected in the bottom of his air mattress. He was talking, quietly, to his brother-in-law, Brent Rocha, who had become good friends with Scott since he married Laci five years earlier. Laci, along with Brent's wife, Rose, and the Rochas' toddler son were in one section of the pool, and “me and Scott
were on the other end, and we were just kind of talking about life,” Brent would later testify in court. “We were just talking about, you know, not only about him being a parent, but in general how he wasn't doing good at his job, and kind of had a lot going on: He's turning 30, and he was going to be a father. He was down, kind of quiet. He was talking about how he was trying to interview new associates at his business, and hoping they would be better sales people than he would be.” Scott wasn't thrilled about having a baby, Brent's wife would later recall, pointing to a chat with Scott about starting a family. “We were talking about pregnancy or having a family, and I believe I said something to the effect of, to Scott, ‘Are you ready for this?' and he looked at me and said, ‘I was kind of hoping for infertility,'” she would testify. “He wasn't laughing, he wasn't smiling, so when I heard that I was kind of surprised, I was kind of shocked by what he said, and I didn't know how to read him.”

On Christmas Eve that year, Laci Peterson, eight months pregnant with the couple's first child, vanished. Later in spring, a couple walking their dog would find her fetus entangled in seaweed on the shore of San Francisco Bay. A day later, Laci's torso was found nearby.

Scott Peterson was the man who launched me on this book. I covered his 2004 trial for the capital crime murder of his wife and unborn son for the
New York Daily News
. When I walked into the courtroom, I was already suspicious he was guilty. For one thing, statistics were on my side. Any time a family member is missing or murdered, the most likely suspect is the spouse, or, in the case of a child, a parent, so Scott was doubly suspect. And Scott's early concern for his missing wife looked canned. He cried too easily, talked too articulately when TV cameras were on him, casually skipped at least one community vigil for Laci, and started to store furniture in the nursery he and Laci had prepared for the boy. He knew his baby wouldn't be returning to use it. In the cynicism of the newsrooms of places like the
New York Daily News
or
New York Post
, reporters and editors alike watching dads and moms like Scott cry so easily at pleas for lost children, quickly scoff “guilty” when they're clustered around TV monitors or looking up from their desks at televised press conferences, before turning back to news of the next dead body. The innocent who have lost loved ones are often
paralyzed by sorrow; they have a difficult time even communicating, so wracked by fear and worry are they. The anguish of Laci's mom, Sharon Rocha, was palpably painful to witness.

Figure 13.1. Laci flashes a smile and rests her hands on her pregnant belly. Though Laci grew increasingly uncomfortable as the months progressed, she was thrilled to be pregnant.
Presented in evidence at Scott Peterson's murder trial.

A relaxed Scott smiled lazily, and often, at the defense table in the Redwood City courtroom where he was tried, but I could see death row in the faces of the jury, and he'd have no glad-handing as a restaurateur, not even a life in Modesto, nor a baby boy on the way—a son he and Laci had already named Conner. The son-about-to-be had a nursery waiting for him in the couple's Covena Avenue home in Modesto, decorated in a nautical theme with a plaid life preserver over his crib that said “Welcome Aboard” when Laci's body was found.

I didn't get it. Every day, squeezing past knees to my courtroom seat, I wondered, again, what could drive a man to kill the only offspring he'd ever have? There'd be no chance for Scott to father a child in San Quentin. It seemed to be against every human instinct to kill a pregnant wife. Did Scott have some profound biological defect in his brain wiring that created a lethal personality? Was he turned into a killer by an abusive childhood? Or was something in him so twisted by social forces that it overrode a primeval human drive to procreate? Were we creating a culture that somehow helped unleash a twisted machismo that destroyed its own spawn? Mothers killing their children are as profoundly upsetting. But, as a woman, I could more easily understand many cases in which a mother was clearly mentally unstable (killing a child to exorcise “demons,” for example) or in the throes of a vicious postpartum depression. An apparently cold, calculated decision to eliminate a pregnant wife and son so close to birth, simply—as it appeared to be in Scott's case—to exchange one woman and one life for another without the bother of divorce court, the expense of alimony and child support, and the tarnish of a failed relationship, I found completely incomprehensible.

Absolutely nothing in Scott Peterson's background indicated he would become a killer of his wife and unborn son—he had no known history of violence, no arrest record. “Scott does not have the genetics of a cold-blooded, premeditated killer,” his attorney Mark Geragos told
People
magazine just as the trial was about to begin.
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Laci never complained of abuse; in fact, she seemed to have a near-perfect marriage. There wasn't a whisper of trouble to her friends, nor did she ever confide that anything was wrong to her mom, Sharon Rocha, who was described by Sharon's longtime companion as Laci's “best friend.”

Scott was the much-loved last child of Lee and Jackie Peterson, who merged their earlier families in a kind of Brady Bunch before Scott's birth. Jackie had given up two babies for adoption before she met Lee—and nearly a third one until her doctor talked her out of it—because she feared she couldn't adequately care for them as a single mom. It was clear at the trial from Jackie's fiercely defensive behavior with the press and Laci's family that she had desperately tried to make up with her son for the children she had left behind. When Jackie was asked on the witness stand if she was Scott's mother, she responded: “Proudly so, yes.” At the penalty phase of the trial, she pleaded with the jury “not to take my son away.” He's an “exceptional young man and he's my son,” she said. “I know he's not perfect. But he is genuinely a loving, caring, nurturing, kind, gentle person.”

Figure 13.2. Laci and Scott pose happily for a snapshot long before there was another woman in Scott's life.
Presented in evidence at Scott Peterson's murder trial.

Scott was a popular student, a sought-after date, a star golfer in high school. He met Laci while the two were students at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo. Laci majored in decorative horticulture, and Scott in agricultural business. As he attended school, he worked at a packaging company owned by his parents, who had given him an investment stake in it, but he later cashed it out to combine funds with money from Laci to launch a burger restaurant called The Shack. Laci gushed to her mom about Scott, who was tender and attentive, and wooed her with thoughtful, romantic flourishes. The first time Sharon Rocha traveled to San Luis Obispo to meet Scott at Laci's insistence in 1994, he had a special table waiting for them at a restaurant where he worked at the time. There were a dozen red roses on the table for Laci, and a dozen white roses for Sharon. Scott and Laci married three years later, shortly after Laci graduated. She found a job as a wine distributor in the Monterey area, so she lived in Prunedale while Scott finished up his degree the following year and continued working at The Shack. They bought their Modesto home with financial help from the Petersons. Laci eventually settled into regular work as a substitute teacher. Scott found a job selling fertilizer for agricultural supplier Tradecorp, and joined the nearby expensive Del Rio Country Club to pursue his passion for golf. He barbecued, the couple put in a swimming pool in the backyard, he called his mother-in-law “Mom.” “You thought the world of him” before the day Laci vanished, “is that a fair statement?” Scott's attorney Mark Geragos asked Sharon Rocha on the witness stand.

 

Rocha: Yes, it is.

Geragos: He called you Mom?

Rocha: Yes.

Geragos: He would talk to you, and you had no qualms about the way he treated your daughter whatsoever; isn't that correct?

Rocha: Yes.

Geragos: You never saw him ever get violent with her, did you?

Rocha: No.

Geragos: You never saw him even get angry in the sense where he would yell at her or raise his voice at her, did you?

Rocha: No, not that I ever recall.

 

There were even times, Geragos pressed Rocha, “when he probably should have been mad at Laci, and did not get mad at her, would just say, ‘Oh, honey, that's okay.' Is that an accurate characterization of the relationship?” To which Laci's mom conceded: “Possibly.”

Sharon Rocha's common-law husband, Ron Grantski, the man who helped raise Laci from the time she was two, sometimes found Scott unnaturally patient with the occasionally pushy Laci, whom Grantski had nicknamed “JJ” for “Jabberjaws.” Laci “got basically anything she wanted because Scott tried to give it to her, isn't that correct?” Geragos asked Grantski when he was on the witness stand, and Grantski agreed.

But despite every appearance, the relationship was crumbling, and Sharon and Laci didn't have a clue. Scott had an intense, secret life he kept well hidden from his friends, his wife, and his mother-in-law, which he launched just months before his son was about to be born. Scott was wooing another woman just as Laci was struggling with the increasing discomforts of her advancing pregnancy. “She was complaining about her feet swelling, having a hard time standing up for any length of time or walking, her back was aching and she seemed to be tired all the time,” her mom testified. Scott's brand-new secret mistress was everything Laci was not at that moment—petite, blonde, fragile, and painfully shy.

Scott had set up a blind dinner date with 27-year-old massage therapist and single mom Amber Frey just two months before Conner's due date. A flirtatious Scott had struck out first with Shawn Sibley, a brunette saleswoman whom he had met at a conference of the California Association of Pest Control Advisors six months earlier. Shawn told him she was already engaged to her “soul mate.” Scott “told me that that at one point in his life he had found a woman that he thought was his soul mate—but then he lost her,” Sibley would testify. “He asked me, did that mean that this was going to mean that he was going the to spend the rest of his life alone? I told him, I said, ‘No, I don't believe that. I believe there are a thousand people out there in this world who can be your soul mate, but because of circumstances, or whatever, you are not going to meet all thousand of those people.'” So Scott pressed Shawn to help him find one of the “other” thousand he was meant to be with, and to set him up with an appropriate single friend of hers. Sibley
thought of her pal Amber, but recalled telling Scott that “she's been through a lot of bad relationships, so if you're not serious about having a long-term, meaningful relationship, then I don't want to hook you up with her. But if you are, then I would be willing to introduce you. He was very interested in meeting her,” Sibley testified. “His first question was, ‘Is she intelligent?' And I said, ‘You know, there are different levels of intelligence. I think she is intelligent.'” He asked if she was pretty. “I said, ‘I think she's pretty. Some people think she is too thin.' He said, ‘I like thin women.'” Scott and Shawn e-mailed after the conference, and Scott continued to press for a meeting with Amber, signing his e-mails “HB” for “Horny Bastard.”