Killer Dads (29 page)

Peterson's ultimate nemesis would be short, black-haired Allen Brocchini, a persistent, no-nonsense Modesto detective with a body like a truck and face like a pugilist. He was called into the case almost immediately because it was quickly determined to be a “suspicious missing person” situation. He finished his Christmas Eve dinner with his family and headed over to Covena Avenue, and walked through the Peterson house one more time with Scott. Like Spurlock, he spotted the dirty rags on top of the washing machine, and inside, a pair of blue jeans, a blue t-shirt, and a green pullover, already washed but still wet. Scott explained that he had taken out the dirty rags that the cleaning woman had placed in the machine, and instead washed his clothes because they were wet from fishing.

Brocchini then walked with Scott to the driveway, where Laci's Land Rover and Scott's pickup were parked. Brocchini noticed a cell phone plugged into a dashboard charger of Laci's car, and spotted a toolbox, two large tarps, and a number of large patio umbrellas in the bed of the pickup, along with up to 100 feet of orange nylon rope. When police returned the day after Christmas with a search warrant, the rope had vanished, and the blue tarp was discovered in a tool shed on the property, under a lawn mower leaking gas. There was also a gun in the glove compartment of Scott's truck. He told the detective he had two guns, but that one had been stolen. There was a Big 5 Sporting Goods bag inside the truck with two new fishing lures still in their packaging and a fishing pole with a receipt dated four days before Laci disappeared—and in the back seat, a dry camouflage jacket that Scott said he had worn in the boat, Brocchini testified. A pair of pliers with a strand of black hair would later be found on Scott's boat.

Close to midnight, Brocchini accompanied Scott to the police department for an interview to, he explained, “go over what we had been talking about.” Scott was “calm, cool, relaxed,” the detective testified. Brocchini said he was already “suspicious of a lot of things,” but that he tried to keep their interaction “friendly.” Brocchini videotaped Peterson as he answered basic questions about his whereabouts that day.

Figure 13.8. This police evidence photo shows needle-nosed pliers holding two black hairs that were found in Scott's boat, which police believe Peterson used to transport Laci's body to the bay.
Presented in evidence at Scott Peterson's murder trial.

The case looked far worse for Scott when Amber, who learned of the news reports about Laci and Scott, called the Modesto police tip line to tell detectives about their affair. Police began recording Scott's conversations with her. In one of the conversations, he tells her that his wife is missing, and warns her to “protect” herself from “the media.” Frey, who knew what had happened by that point, acts stunned to hear the news about Laci from Scott, and accuses him of “lying about lying,” and demands an explanation, which he says he can't give yet. “You deserve so much better,” says Scott. “There's no question you deserve so much better.” Frey responds: “Yeah and I deserve to understand an explanation of why you told me you lost your wife and this was the first holidays you'd spend without her. That was December 9 you told me this, and now all of sudden your wife's missing? Are
you kidding me?” She says in another conversation: “Isn't is so ironic that she goes missing before the first holidays? Are you following me, Scott?” He admits, “That sounds pretty sinister.” She also confronts him about referring to her daughter, Ayiana, as the “only child” in his life. “But you had a child on the way that whole time in that conversation,” she adds. Scott responds, “I understand your confusion, definitely.”

When Brocchini later parked near a vigil for Laci, Scott walked over to his car to thank him for discussing the case on
America's Most Wanted
and for answering the tip line. “You got some explaining to do,” Brocchini responded. Scott told him: “You don't know. I just stop on the side of the road and break down for no apparent reason.” Brocchini said he wasn't acting like “somebody that missed is his pregnant wife.” When Brocchini was asked in court what Scott's demeanor was at that point, the detective answered: “Emotionless, matter of fact. Calm.”

Months later, in mid-April, a couple walking their dog discovered the body of a late-term male fetus among a wash of seaweed and garbage on the shore of San Francisco Bay at a Richmond Point park north of Berkeley. A day later, the torso of a recently pregnant woman washed ashore a mile away from where the baby's body was found. The body was missing the head, the forearms, the right foot and lower left leg. Two cracked ribs apparently occurred at the time of death. The bodies were identified as Conner and Laci. Because of the state of Laci's body it was impossible to determine cause of death.

Five days after the first body was found, Scott Peterson was arrested in La Jolla near the Mexican border. He was carrying his mother's driver's license, $15,000 in cash, camping equipment, four cell phones, a gun, and a map to Amber Frey's home. He was sporting a new goatee, and his hair and beard were suddenly blond, though he insisted the color change was caused by swimming in a chlorinated pool.

The jury convicted Peterson after two days of deliberation and sentenced him to death in the penalty phase of the trial. The prosecution made a case that Peterson had likely smothered or strangled Laci the morning she disappeared or the night before, and he transported her body to San Francisco Bay wrapped in a tarp, and tossed her overboard, weighted down
with missing cement anchors of the five that investigators believe he made at his shop. After months, rope used to lash her to an anchor likely ate through her neck and limbs, finally allowing her torso to float free.

Figure 13.9. This is how Scott appeared when he was picked up by police near the Mexican border with camping supplies, $15,000 in cash, and blond hair. He insisted his hair changed color because he had been in a chlorinated pool.
Presented in evidence at Scott Peterson's murder trial.

During the victim impact statement of the penalty phase of the trial, Laci's mom described long days lying in bed, so depressed by the murder of her daughter that she couldn't face the day. “I miss her. I wanted to know my grandson. I wanted Laci to be a mother. I wanted to hear her called ‘Mom,'” said Rocha. She said she still sometimes reached for the phone, thinking it was her daughter. “There's been several times, but I remember the first time it happened I was on my way outside. I already locked the door. I heard the phone ring and then I unlocked the door and went back in. I, I
was thinking it was Laci. I hadn't heard from her in a long time,” said Rocha. “And then I realized it wasn't. It will never be her. I remember another time walking into the house. I opened the door and walked into the entryway and I had to stop, and she turned around and said, ‘Hi, Mom.' It was as though she was right there. I saw her. A lot of times I think when I have a question about something that's been going on, I'll just ask her and she'll tell me. But I can't. Laci didn't deserve to die.”

———

Scott Peterson's murder of his pregnant wife was exceptionally coldhearted. In my search for “types” of killer dads (or, in Scott's case, killer dads-to-be)—from murderous stepfathers to family annihilators driven either by rage or a twisted devotion to their loved ones to furious fathers who kill their children to punish wives who have left them—Peterson's crime stood alone as chillingly emotionless. He showed no signs of anger with Laci that anyone could see; in fact, he seemed at times too-perfectly patient or tolerant in his relationship, beyond the norm of engaging in even minor conflicts or arguments married couples typically experience. And he wasn't suddenly, unexpectedly swept off his feet by a lover so captivating that he had to possess after getting his wife out of the picture. He didn't spot Amber Frey across a crowded room and become smitten. He discovered her as part of a determined hunt for “another soul mate” just months before his wife was due to give birth to his son. His prime motivation seemed to be that he had grown bored with his life and was in the mood for a change. He wanted his wife “lost,” and he set out to make it a reality. “Divorce is always an option,” Laci's heartsick mom said in her victim impact statement. He dodged divorce court, alimony, and child support—and at the same time won “poor Scott” sympathy for his tragic “loss.” When Amber heard from her friend Shawn that Scott might, in fact, be a married man, he broke down in tears to confess that he had lost his wife, eliciting tenderhearted sympathy from Amber and turning Laci's disappearance into a kind of macabre pick-up line to solidify his relationship with his lover.

Even for a murderer (and far more so for an innocent man), Scott's
repeated lengthy, fawning, jocular phone conversations with Amber Frey while cadaver dogs were searching for his wife's body and police cars were parked outside his door are stupefying. He called Amber nearly 200 times after Laci vanished, and most of the conversations were recorded because Amber was secretly cooperating with police. He appeared to be an attentive, thoughtful, empathetic lover—with Amber just as he had been in wooing Laci years earlier. Scott said the right things, made all the right sounds, had all the moves, but apparently had no real heart. Even after Amber tells him she knows that police are searching for Laci, he begs her to let him come to her home—or to a house on California's Lake Arrowhead—to see her. “I just never felt such a strong desire as I do,” he says, sniffling. “I think it would be good for us.” Frey defers, telling him at one point that she feels like a magnet “to wolves in sheep's clothing.” He promises to “explain everything” at some point in the future.

With a man like Scott Peterson, the “observer is confronted with a convincing mask of sanity” . . . complete with “verbal and facial expressions, tones of voice, and all the other signs we have come to regard as implying conviction and emotion and the normal experiencing of life as we know it ourselves and as we assume it to be in others,” wrote Hervey Cleckley in his 1941 book
The Mask of Sanity
, which is still today a kind of bible on psychopathic or sociopathic personalities.
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“Only very slowly and by a complex estimation or judgment based on multitudinous small impressions does the conviction come upon us that . . . we are dealing not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. We know that reality, in the sense of a full, healthy experiencing of life, is not there.”

Peterson's crime is similar to only a handful of other killer-father cases, most notably the crimes of Jeffrey MacDonald and Neil Entwistle. All three insist they're innocent.

MacDonald claimed a murderous band of Charles Mason–like hippies stormed his North Carolina home in Fort Bragg in 1970 and brutally bludgeoned and stabbed his pregnant wife, Collette, and two young daughters to death. Collette and the younger daughter, two-year-old Kristen, were stabbed with a knife and an ice pick more than 37 times. MacDonald suffered
relatively minor injuries while “fighting for his life,” he testified in court. The handsome, athletic Green Beret surgeon was sentenced to life in prison. The gripping case of the man-with-everything turned murderer is detailed in author Joe McGinness's book
Fatal Vision
. But the killer's cause was recently taken up by Errol Morris, whose book
A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey Macdonald
, argues that he's innocent, attacks the case against him, and points to Helena Stoeckley, a troubled drug user who at various times confessed to the crime, then claimed to have no memory of it (and no evidence was found to charge her). McGinness has convincingly refuted each point in Morris's book, and has noted that falling into MacDonald's sway is part of the power of the charismatic psychopath that MacDonald is. The killer dad's latest appeal was shot down, and McGinness has published a short new digital book,
Final Vision
, updating the case 42 years after the murders.
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