Scott had been at our place in Berkeley two or three times, mostly passing through on business. On his last visit, however, he had been there to do a favor for Jackie and Lee. They had bought a small cabin in the Sierras—the doctors felt the mountain air might be good for Jackie’s lungs—and they needed to furnish it. Tim and I were replacing some of our old furniture, and they sent Scott to pick it up. The two men loaded it into the truck and Scott drove off into the foothills the following morning, eager to deliver it.
Now he was back, under very different circumstances, and he was a changed man—changed mostly by the horror of the preceding weeks. When he walked in I gave him a big hug and kiss, and Ryan hurried over to say hello to his Uncle Scott.
He looked exhausted, understandably, and he began by thanking me for putting him up. “You can’t believe what it’s like down there,” he said. “I’m basically a prisoner of my own face. Everywhere I go, people stare at me.” He shook his head. “I can’t go anywhere, I can’t do anything, and I’ve got nothing left. The police took everything. Even my computers.”
I took him upstairs and showed him the room where he’d be staying. It’s a loft, and it overlooks the San Francisco Bay, with the Bay Bridge visible in the distance. The loft is quite cozy. It has parchment-painted, angled ceilings, and there were floral Ralph Lauren sheets on the bed. A rolltop desk stood against one wall. Everything looked right. I found myself thinking that Laci would probably like the room. She would have found some way to improve it, no doubt, but she would have liked it.
I turned to look at Scott and noticed that he had the beginnings of a goatee. “So what’s this?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Just seeing how it looks.”
When we went back downstairs, I noticed his truck outside. I was confused because I’d heard that the police had taken his truck, so either they’d returned it, or he’d borrowed one from a friend. And I was doubly confused by what he said next: “The cops put a tracking device on that thing.”
“They did?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw it under the seat but couldn’t get it out. And those guys can find me anywhere. Every time I look in my rearview mirror, there they are.”
Scott fooled around with Ryan a bit, roughhousing on the couch, and then Tim came home and they greeted each other and I went into the kitchen to make dinner. Tim wasn’t being particularly friendly, but he wasn’t being hostile, either. I’d asked him if it was okay for Scott to stay with us, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled, but he wanted to do the right thing. After all, Scott was family.
After I got the boys to bed, we sat down and I broke out a couple of nice zinfandels. I wanted Scott to feel relaxed, to know that he was safe here, and we didn’t get into anything about Laci or the continuing investigation. We talked about wines, and the relative merits of one zinfandel over another, and we polished off two bottles among the three of us.
Scott didn’t look particularly tortured; in fact, as the evening went on he seemed to get a second wind. Suddenly he was chatting and smiling like a guy who didn’t have a care in the world. I thought it might be the wine, and I also thought he deserved a break, so I accepted it. Still, it had been several weeks now since Laci had disappeared, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what he must be going through. And even now, as I’m putting these words to paper, I realize just how right I was: I could not even begin to imagine the horrible images that would remain forever in his head.
That night, I got Scott situated in the loft and went off to prepare for bed. Tim was already under the covers, but he was wide awake. He looked at me.
“What?”
“Are you at all bothered by this?”
“By what?”
“By him. By having him here.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to be like everyone else. The whole world assumes he’s guilty.”
“That should tell you something.”
“It doesn’t tell me anything,” I said. “The whole world doesn’t know him like I know him.”
“What was it your brother Don said? ‘How well do you know Scott?’ Isn’t that what he said?”
“You know something, Tim? I’m not going to argue with you. In this country, people are innocent until proven guilty. I know Scott pretty well. I know that he is not capable of doing something so horrible, and I’m not even going to go there.”
I remembered some of those nightmarish images I’d struggled with that day after the news broke, and I did my best to put them out of my mind.
“I don’t know,” Tim said. “I sort of expected him to be more screwed up over this. He seemed fine at dinner. He seemed like a guy who didn’t have a care in the world.”
“He was making an effort to be sociable,” I said.
“It didn’t look like it took much effort.”
“It was the wine, then,” I snapped, unable to keep the anger from my voice. “Is that what you want to hear? It was the wine.”
And so it began: the big sister, making excuses for her little brother.
The next day, Scott went into town and picked up some new clothes at REI and The North Face. He told me the police had taken most of his clothes, and that he’d left in a hurry, so he didn’t even have time to pack the few things that they’d left. He sat on the couch with his purchases, removing the tags and watching himself on TV. There was a recent shot of him making his way down a Modesto street. I could tell it was recent because he had the new goatee.
“So what do you think, Sis?” he asked, rubbing his chin. “You think I should get rid of this thing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It looks okay to me.”
I wasn’t really thinking about the goatee, but I was wondering why he was thinking about it. Scott sat there watching himself on TV, listening to reporters talking about his missing wife, dissecting the case, scrambling for new developments…and he seemed more interested in his new facial hair than in the search for his wife. Then he turned his attention back to the TV and began to shake his head.
“They’re looking in the wrong places,” he said.
“Who?”
“The police. Everyone.”
A normal response would have been to ask him where they should be looking, but I didn’t ask him. I didn’t want to know why he knew that they were looking in the wrong places or where he might suggest they should be looking. But it gnawed at me. And it kept gnawing at me.
The next day our babysitter, whom I’ll call Lorraine, came to help me with the kids. She is very attractive, and when Scott saw her he did a double take. Suddenly he was smiling and flirting. He was now a very long way from the bereaved husband. He looked like a charming young man without a care in the world—a man on the make.
Our babysitter was a little uncomfortable, but I found myself wondering whether part of her liked the attention.
After she left, Scott couldn’t help himself. “That is one very pretty babysitter,” he declared.
“Yes,” I replied. “And she lives with her handsome young boyfriend.”
We went into town and picked up some groceries and a few bottles of wine. Jackie had called to ask me how Scott was doing and to tell me that he was broke and whether I would mind helping out a bit. I told her that he seemed to be happy at our place and that I’d make sure he got plenty to eat.
That night, we had dinner again—Tim, Scott, and I—and we washed it down with two bottles of wine. When we turned on the TV, the news was on, and, as always, it was about Laci. Reporters were going on about the various searches, and it was mostly stuff we’d already heard, but I was riveted. This wasn’t simply a news story. This was a news story that involved people I loved, and one of the principal players was sitting right here, in my living room. Scott wasn’t even looking at the TV, which I found a little irksome. If anything, he should be hungry for details. If it was me, I would be doing everything in my power to find my missing wife. I’d be obsessed to the point of madness.
I went and found an area map and spread it out on the table.
“What are you doing?” Scott asked.
“I’m just trying to get some ideas about where she might be,” I said.
Scott got a bored look on his face. I saw it, and Tim saw it, and Tim got up and found another bottle of wine and went to look for the opener. I ignored him and turned my attention back to the map. “Did they ever find out about that car with the Confederate flags?” I asked Scott. “Or the van?”
“I don’t know,” Scott said, and it seemed as if talking to me took incredible effort. “I think the van belonged to some landscape guy. The car I don’t know about.”
I heard the pop of the cork, followed by the gurgling of wine being poured. Tim was behind me, and I couldn’t see him, but from the sounds of it he was pouring himself a very generous glass. This was unusual for us. We like a little wine now and again, but we had been overdoing it since Laci’s disappearance, and Tim always seemed to be way ahead of me.
“Let me have a little of that,” Scott said.
Tim set the bottle on the table, where Scott could reach it, and Scott refilled his glass.
“Just look at the map, Scott,” I said. “Just take a guess. You knew Laci. Is there someplace here she liked? Someplace that jumps out at you? Someplace the police might have missed?”
Scott looked at me like he was on the verge of getting angry, and I got the feeling he was doing his best to contain himself. He raised his finger and very theatrically brought it down in an area near Modesto, right around Interstate 5. “Here,” he said. “Yes. Maybe here. I think that’s a place they haven’t looked.”
The way he said it was patronizing, bordering on nasty. It seemed as if he had picked the spot at random just to shut me up. I looked closer, where his finger had been. “Mape’s Ranch?” I asked. “What is that? Does that place mean anything to you and Laci?”
“We’ve been past it,” Scott said dismissively. He got up and moved to a more comfortable chair and stretched out his legs. I saw Tim looking at me. He was pissed. He brought his wine to his lips and drained the glass and went off to the bedroom. I looked over at Scott. He was studying the color of his wine, holding it up to the light. He seemed like a man without a care in the world.
But I was wrong. He had his cares. According to evidence introduced in court at his trial, on January 14 he was talking to his girlfriend, Amber Frey, about the things that really mattered to a man like him—the things he cared about. “I really care about you,” he had told her, “so communication is precious to me.”
The following day, January 15, the police went to see Laci’s parents. They told Sharon Rocha and Ron Grantski that Scott had been having an affair with a woman from Fresno, but they stopped short of identifying Amber Frey by name. They also told them that Scott had recently taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy on Laci.
Laci’s parents didn’t share this information with Jackie—maybe they had been asked to keep it to themselves—so the Peterson side of the family was left in the dark.
Scott came and went as he pleased, and I gave him a key to the house. This really upset Tim. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “He’s my brother.”
“I know he’s your brother,” he snapped. “You keep saying that.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
He was getting ready to go out—I think it was a Saturday—and I grabbed the kids and we all went out together. We ended up at an auction house in Oakland, a place Tim likes to go to. He collects clocks, and he’s always looking for new ones. We didn’t see any clocks that day, but I saw something that gave me a bit of a jolt. It was a pair of platinum earrings with screw-backs. They looked exactly like a pair I’d seen on Laci some months back. I was so shaken that I asked to talk to the person in charge of jewelry, and when she came out I identified myself as Laci’s sister-in-law. She was both taken aback and sympathetic, and when I explained about the earrings she rushed to her office to look at her records. A few minutes later, still looking flustered, she was back. “The people we got those earrings from are very reliable people,” she said. “We’ve been doing business with them for many years. Also, I should point out that those aren’t one-of-a-kind earrings. It’s possible that they just look like the ones your sister-in-law was wearing. If you could come back with a more exact description, however, I will do everything I can to help. And if anything matches up, we’ll involve the police.”
When we got home, I called Jackie and told her about the earrings. She asked me to call Sharon Rocha and tell her the story. I had never met Sharon Rocha, and I felt a little awkward about calling, but I took the number and called anyway. I left a message. I told her I was Scott’s sister, and I apologized for bothering her, but I thought this might be important. I described the earrings and told her what I’d discussed with the woman at the auction house, and I gave her my phone number.
I didn’t hear back from her, and I was disappointed. Laci had wanted me to meet her mother, and we had talked about it several times, but it never happened. That was probably my fault. I had never gone to Modesto to visit Laci.
When I called Jackie back to tell her I’d left a message, I ended up talking to Lee. He sounded very upset. “It sickens me,” he said. “It seems that every day Scott is becoming more and more of a suspect in people’s minds. I don’t know how they can suspect him. What has he done that makes them so suspicious?” Lee was a man of few words, but he was talking now. “What is he supposed to do? They hate him because he isn’t showing emotion. But if he was showing emotion, maybe they’d say he was overdoing it.”
“You’re right,” I said. “There’s just no rule book for this. Nobody knows how you’re supposed to behave in these types of situations.”
“How is he supposed to behave?” he replied. “Can anyone tell me that? How in God’s name is he supposed to behave?”
He sounded traumatized, and I was doing my best to help, but it didn’t seem as if I was getting through to him.
Jackie, meanwhile, was also struggling. But unlike Lee, who tended to internalize his feelings, she began lashing out at everyone in sight, especially the police. They were incompetent. They weren’t making an effort to find Laci. They were treating her son as if he was somehow involved in Laci’s disappearance.
I didn’t know how to help them, and it saddened me. I had only recently rediscovered my family, and they had become an integral part of my life, and suddenly we had been visited by horror and tragedy.
In late January, Tim and I took the kids to Mexico for a few days. We thought it would be good for them and good for us. The tragedy was beginning to drive a wedge between us, and it was compounded by Scott’s presence, by the way he was using our home as a hotel. I wanted to handle the problem before it was too late. I was also worried about Tim. It was impossible to miss his frustration and unhappiness, and I worried, with all of our sitting around drinking wine at night, that neither one of us was dealing with it at all.
On January 21, while we were in Mexico, a Modesto newspaper claimed that Scott had been having an affair. It also mentioned the $250,000 life insurance policy on Laci’s life. When Scott was questioned by a passing TV reporter about the report, he called the allegations “a bunch of lies.”
When I reached Jackie on the phone, she was livid. She hated that cow town, hated the reporters, and hated the police. “But I spoke to Diane Sawyer,” she added, as if that were a good thing. I didn’t think it was a good thing. I thought she and the family should keep as low a profile as possible. By this time, Laci’s disappearance had become a national story. The press saw that it had all the right elements: a handsome young businessman on the rise, his beautiful, smiling wife, and the baby they were expecting. This was a far cry from the usual sordid murder stories. The press seemed to be saying, These are nice people. These are people like us. Our kind of people. And audiences ate it up. As a result, there didn’t seem to be anyone who wasn’t aware of Laci. The story didn’t need any more publicity. I didn’t think a call from Diane Sawyer was anything to celebrate.
“She wants to talk to us and Scott,” Jackie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is that such a good idea?”
On Janaury 23, the Rochas gave a news conference at the Modesto Police Department. Amy Rocha, Laci’s younger half sister, was the first to speak. “The past few weeks have been the most painful I’ve ever experienced,” she said, but she couldn’t go on. Then Laci’s older brother, Brent, took the microphone. When he announced that the family had lost faith in Scott, I was completely floored. “I trusted him and stood by him in the initial phases of my sister’s disappearance,” he said. “However, Scott has not been forthcoming with information regarding my sister’s disappearance, and I’m only left to question what else he may be hiding.”
Finally, it was Sharon Rocha’s turn. It was odd seeing the family there in the Modesto police station: Sharon, Amy, Brent, and, in the background, Ron Grantski. These were people I’d often heard about from Laci, and in a strange way I almost felt as if they were my inlaws. “Since Christmas Eve, our one and only focus has been to find Laci and bring her home to us,” Sharon said. “I love my daughter so much. I miss her every minute of every day. I miss seeing her. I miss our talking together. I miss listening to the excitement in her voice when she talks to me about her baby. I miss not being able to share with her the anticipation of her approaching delivery date. I miss listening to her talk about her future with her husband and her baby. I miss sharing our thoughts and our lives together. I miss her smile and her laughter and her sense of humor. And I miss everything about her.
“Someone has taken all of this away from me and everyone else who loves her. There are no words that can possibly describe the ache in my heart or the emptiness in my life.”
I was crying long before she finished, and I was still crying long after she was done.
The next day, January 24, it was Amber Frey’s turn. I sat glued to the television, my mouth open.
“Okay, first of all, I met Scott Peterson on November 20 of 2002,” she said. “I was introduced to him. I was told he was unmarried. Scott told me he was not married. We did have a romantic relationship.”
The hits just kept on coming.
“When I discovered he was involved in the Laci Peterson disappearance case, I immediately contacted the Modesto Police Department,” she continued.
“Although I could have sold the photos of Scott and I to the tabloids, I knew this was not the right thing to do. For fear of jeopardizing the case or the investigation, I will not comment further.”
She seemed very shaken, and for a moment she looked completely lost. But then she pulled herself together and finished what she had to say: “I am very sorry for Laci’s family and the pain that this has caused them. And I pray for her safe return, as well.
“I would appreciate (if) my friends and acquaintances (would) refrain from talking about me to the media for profit or recognition. I am a single mother with a twenty-three-month-old child, and I ask [you] to respect my privacy. Thank you.”
Tim was watching this with me, and when Amber had finished I could feel his eyes on me. I was almost afraid to look at him.
“What do you think now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. He was having an affair. It doesn’t mean he hurt Laci.”
“Are you kidding me?!” He was furious. “Are you honestly going to tell me you believe he’s innocent?”
“Tim, I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“Well that Amber girl isn’t lying!” he shot back. “Why would she lie? You don’t go to the police and make up a story about having an affair with some guy who forgot to tell you he was married, and you especially don’t go to them if the guy’s wife is missing.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you better start doing some serious thinking about your little brother.”
“What do you want me to do, Tim?”
“I don’t want him in our house.”
“That’s not fair. He has nowhere else to go.”
“You’re not his only family, okay? He’s got other family. You wouldn’t even know about him if that Don guy hadn’t shown up with this ‘great news’ about your birth mother.”
That was low. He had me in tears now. Instead of apologizing, he went off to get a drink. When he came back, I told him I wasn’t going to abandon Scott. “After this, everyone’s going to turn on him. He needs us.”
“I don’t want him in my house. I don’t want him around my kids.”
“Why don’t we give him a chance to explain?”
“He’s a pathological liar. Maybe worse. What’s he going to tell you? ‘Hey Sis, I didn’t do it?’”
“So you’re just going to assume he’s guilty?”
“I don’t think it was the guy with the Confederate flags, okay? Or the burglars across the street.”
“Do you think Laci’s dead?”
“Of course I think Laci’s dead. Everyone thinks Laci’s dead. Everyone but you.”
He was right. I didn’t know what to do anymore. Even Laci’s family had turned on Scott. What had they seen that I wasn’t seeing? Or, more accurately, what was I refusing to see?
“Don’t you want to hear it from him?”
“No! I told you. I don’t want him in our house.”
“I’m not putting him out in the street, Tim. I can’t do that.”
My cell phone rang. We both looked at it. I went over and picked it up. It was Jackie. I hadn’t spoken to her in two days, since the day before Laci’s family held their news conference.
“Have you been watching the news?” she asked, beside herself.
“Yes.”
“That Sharon Rocha, there’s a word to describe that woman. She is evil. That’s what she is, evil. She and her friends and family are destroying my son. How dare they stand there and point the finger at Scott?! Who do they think they are? As for that Amber Frey, what’s the big deal? So Scott slept with a bimbo? So what?”
She was pretty worked up, and Lee took the phone from her. “Anne, don’t worry. Jackie’s very upset. But she’s right. Men stray sometimes. It doesn’t mean Scott hurt Laci. He wouldn’t have hurt Laci.”
When I got off the phone, Tim was staring at me.
“What?”
“What did she say?”
“She’s mad at Laci’s family. And Lee said not to jump to conclusions. Sometimes men just stray.”
“You know what? They do stray. But I don’t think very much of a man like that.”
I knew this was hard for Tim. Tim had liked Scott from the start, and Tim prides himself on being a good friend. He has solid values. He was also brought up to believe that a man doesn’t cheat on his wife. If a man has a problem, and the marriage isn’t working, and he doesn’t think it will ever work, he should get out. But to start up with another woman while you’re still married was plain wrong.
“Okay,” I said. “He cheated on her, and it’s wrong. But like Lee said, it doesn’t mean he hurt Laci.”
“He’s a coward. He’s a coward, and he’s a cheat. And brother or no brother, I think he’s much worse.”
“I just can’t believe that about Scott,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I can’t.”
“He cheated on Laci. He lied to all of us. Then he comes to our house and whines about the way he’s being treated by the press and by the police and by people on the streets, but when do you ever hear him talking about Laci? When has he said he misses Laci? When have you seen him break down?”
How could I argue with that? I couldn’t. And yet I tried.
I didn’t want to believe that Scott was capable of hurting Laci. He was my flesh and blood. It wasn’t in him. Was it?
The next time I saw Scott, I came right out and asked him. “I want to know about Amber,” I said.
“She’s nothing,” he said. “It was just a fling. Down and dirty. It meant nothing.”
“I don’t understand….”
“It happens, okay?” he said, cutting me off. “People cheat. Don’t act like people never cheat. I mean, I remember one time on this long flight—I took turns with two women in two separate bathrooms. And another time—there was this girl in San Luis Obispo. It was just sex. Nothing else.”
I didn’t know why he was telling me this. All I could think was that he was trying to trivialize that sordid business with Amber.
“Did Laci know?” I ventured to ask.
“Yes!” he said dismissively, turning away to avoid my eyes. “And she was extremely pissed off, okay?” He looked back at me now, as if he were trying to gauge my response—as if he wanted to see whether I believed him. “She’ll get through it,” he added. “She’s been through it before. It was no big deal.”
At this point I knew he was lying, so I didn’t pursue it.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said, disappearing in the direction of the loft. “It’s just as well people know. Now we can concentrate on what really matters.”
I went out to buy groceries, and when I came back he was gone. I remember that Scott had used our computer, and I wondered if there was anything on it. He had a Hotmail account and his password was “biscuit,” or “biscuitluv,” his nicknames for Laci, but I didn’t know how to access his account.
When I looked at the recent history on our computer, I saw that someone had been looking at porn. It upset me. I decided to stop digging.
Jackie was calling again, and soon her calls were coming nonstop. I was hearing from her two or three times a day, and it was always the same litany of complaints, only harsher and angrier.
“Those Rochas—what awful people!”
“No one is standing up for Scott. I thought this was America. Where’s the justice?”
“Why are they looking in the bay? Just because Scott went fishing there? What do they think they’re going to find in the bay?”
“My son has done nothing wrong!”
Sometimes, after I got off the phone with her, I would call my parents in San Diego. Just as Jackie turned to me for support, I would turn to them. My father was noncommittal. He would listen politely, saying little, but I could tell he was worried about me and about my involvement in the case. He never breathed a word about Scott’s guilt or innocence, however.
My mother was equally supportive and a very patient listener. I would find myself telling her stories about Laci, suddenly remembering little things I myself had forgotten. Most of them were inconsequential. I told her how Laci had wanted a new car, not for herself, but for the baby, and how she was on this mission to find the safest car in the world. I told her about that time in Disneyland when we’d laughed about my thirty-dollar plumping lipstick. And I remembered the way she’d rolled her eyes when we walked into Pierre Deux.
“Are you okay, honey?” my mother asked
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I miss Laci.”
“I know, honey.”
“I miss her a lot.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” I said. But I wasn’t okay. Laci was gone, Scott’s behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre, Jackie was falling apart, and my marriage to Tim was showing the strain. “I’m fine.”
It was right around then that Jackie and Lee approached Kirk McAllister about representing Scott. The next time Scott came by the house—unannounced, as always—I asked him about McAllister. “Do you like him?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “He seems like a nice guy.”
I didn’t think “nice” was the issue. I told Scott I had a friend who was married to a criminal lawyer and that I could probably arrange for them to meet. “It would be informal,” I said. “If you have some questions, he might be able to answer them. You never know. It could help.”
Scott wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the idea, but he didn’t seem to object to it, so I invited the lawyer over and left him alone with Scott and a couple of beers. They talked for about an hour, and when they were done I walked the lawyer out. I wanted to ask him what he thought of Scott, and he could see what was coming, and he was very professional about it. “It’s better if you don’t ask,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
I went back into the house, and Scott didn’t volunteer anything either. He was sitting there with a fresh beer, acting as if the last hour had never happened.
“How’d you like him?” I asked.
“Good guy,” he said. “Thanks for setting that up.”
That was all I got from him, so the next day I went to see my friend, the attorney’s wife, and I cornered her in her kitchen. “I’m dying to know what he told you,” I said.
She said she didn’t know anything and that she couldn’t tell me even if she did. It would have been a violation of Scott’s rights. But in my heart I knew; the look on the lawyer’s face was enough. He must have thought Scott had had something to do with it. If he thought otherwise, he wouldn’t have been so quick to run off; he would have stuck around for a second beer.
I know I looked tortured because my friend seemed very concerned and asked me if I was okay.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, what do you think, Anne? Do you think Scott had something to do with this?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated. But I realized I’d begun to waver. “I don’t even want to think about it. If I really believed he was capable of hurting Laci…” I trailed off then tried again. “If I really believed he was capable of hurting Laci, the world would seem like a much, much darker place.”
When I got home, Scott and Tim were sitting in front of the television, watching an old movie. They both looked up as I came through the door, their heads moving in slow motion. Scott half-waved. Tim didn’t even do that much.
I heard Scott climbing toward the loft later that evening. Tim never made it to the bedroom.
In the morning, surprisingly, Scott was gone. I had expected him to spend the day in bed, nursing a hangover. I saw him again that night, on television. He was talking about the case with Gloria Gomez, a local reporter. I had no idea when he had done the interview, nor whether what I was watching was a new piece or a repeat. But I do know it was very disturbing.
Scott began by talking about how he went through “a range of emotions, from anger to frustration to grief,” and how they came and went at different times of the day. I’d seen a little frustration, and I’d seen a little anger, but I hadn’t really seen much grief. The only time I had seen Scott cry was at Tommy’s christening, and there had been something off-putting about those tears.
Under continued questioning, he went on to explain why he went fishing on his own on the day that Laci disappeared, despite the fact that it was Christmas Eve and that there was so much to do. Everything was already taken care of, he said, and Laci was fine with his going. The two of them had “separate pursuits…. It’s the wayour relationship works.”
Ms. Gomez then asked him about Amber—thinking, perhaps, that she was one of Scott’s “pursuits”—and he told her he was relieved when Amber came forward. “I’m glad she did the press conference. I’m glad that’s out there. It had nothing to do with Laci’s disappearance.”
When I heard Scott tell Gomez that Laci had known about the affair, I practically fell out of my seat. He said Laci knew not because she found out, but because he, Scott, had volunteered the information. Asked why he had done so, Scott said, “Just because it was the right thing to do. As you know, when you’re not doing the right thing, it just, you know, eats you up…. You feel…sick to yourstomach, and you can’t function, and…you have a hard time, you know, looking at someone.”
That was a blatant lie. Laci couldn’t have known that Scott was having an affair. If she had, she wouldn’t have kept it to herself. She may have been concerned about image and about appearances but not to the point of madness. Laci would have shared her heartbreak with someone—if not me, then with the mother she loved, or with any number of the close friends she often talked about.
The next thing I knew, Scott was showing the reporter his hands. “You can see cuts here on my knuckles, numerous scars,” he said. “I work on farms. I work with machinery. I know I cut my knuckle on that day…on Christmas Eve…reaching in the toolbox in my truck and then into the pocket on the door. I cut open my knuckle and there was a bloodstain on the door.”
This was getting altogether too bizarre; now we were in O. J. Simpson territory. The reporter was asking the same questions that were on everyone’s mind: Why had he gone fishing on his own? What about that life insurance policy? Was there anything to the rumors about blood evidence? She also wanted him to explain something I was hearing about for the first time: What had happened to the fifty pounds of cement mix that Scott had purchased at Home Depot around the time of Laci’s disappearance? Scott almost lost his temper: “I’m not going to waste what little time we have…by defending myself against irrelevant things.”
But I didn’t think they were irrelevant. I wanted Scott to explain all of these things, especially that business with the cement, and I wanted desperately for him to be convincing. He was my little brother, after all. I didn’t want him to be guilty.
On January 28, Scott appeared on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer. Jackie had told me that Sawyer had been in touch, but she hadn’t bothered to tell me that they had met and that she had interviewed Scott. I guess our family ties went only so far. However, to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the Petersons were asked to keep it quiet.
I watched that interview from start to finish, glued to the TV like millions of other people. Scott talked about his “glorious” marriage and about his “amazing” wife, and he said again that he and Laci had been dealing with his infidelity, which he had told her about and with which she was coming to terms.
“Do you really expect people to believe that an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant woman learns her husband has had an affair and is saintly and casual about it, accommodating, makes a peace with it?” Sawyer asked.
“No one knows our relationship but us,” Scott said.
When Sawyer had had enough, she asked him point blank: “I think everybody at home wants the answer to the same question: ‘Did you murder your wife?’”
“No,” Scott replied. “No. I did not. And I had absolutely nothing to do with her disappearance. And you use the word murder, and right now everyone is looking for a body. And that is the hardest thing because that is not a possible resolution for us. To use the word murder and—yes, and that is a possibility. It’s not one we’re ready to accept, and it creeps in my mind late at night and early in the morning and during the day all we can think about is the right resolution to find her.”
I called my mother after the interview, knowing that she’d also watched it, but there really wasn’t much to say. It didn’t look good. Then again, I wasn’t calling to analyze his performance. I was calling to see if I could give Scott a key to my parents’ cabin in Lake Arrowhead. I was hoping Scott would stop crashing at our home, but—as I had told Tim—I didn’t have the heart to leave him in the street.
“That’s fine,” my mother said, but she wasn’t exactly brimming over with enthusiasm. “Whatever you need, honey.”
That’s family for you. A parent will do anything for her child. And some parents will do too much.
The next time I saw Scott, I didn’t even mention the interviews, and The next time I saw Scott, I didn’t even mention the interviews, and he didn’t bring them up.
“I spoke to my parents,” I said. “They have a little cabin in Lake Arrowhead. I thought you might like to stay there from time to time.”
“Why?” he asked. “Don’t you want me here?”
“Of course I want you here. You’re always welcome here. But it’s a nice place, secluded, tucked in the woods, and I thought you might enjoy being on your own from time to time. If nothing else, it’ll get you away from the media.”
He looked at me like he didn’t believe me. He knew exactly what I was saying, and I think he felt betrayed.
“Okay,” he said. “Where is it exactly?”
“I’ll draw you a map,” I said.
My hands were shaking. The Petersons had come into my life in 1997, only five years earlier, and I had been cautious about forging my relationships with them. My brother Don, however, had plunged right in, embracing them from the very start. I’d like to think my circumspect approach was the wiser of the two, but it didn’t seem to matter. At the end of the day, the family was falling apart.
“In case your cell doesn’t work up there,” I said, “I’ll call the cabin. I’ll let it ring twice then I’ll hang up and call back. Okay?”
“Yeah,” he said.“Fine.”
“Drive carefully.”
Scott waved and took off. He was more removed than usual. He knew he was on the verge of losing another ally.
I went into the kitchen, took the empty bottles outside, and dumped them into the recycling bill. It was already full to overflowing. We were consuming way too much alcohol in this house.
“You still think he’s innocent?” Tim asked me later that night. We were in bed. I could tell he was mad.
“I’m not sure anymore.”
“Well, thank God!” he said sarcastically. “At least we’re making progress.”
“That was unnecessary.”
“What more do you need, Anne? He sits there, watching himself on TV, and he shows no feeling whatsoever. You can’t read the guy. Doesn’t that spook you?”
“Maybe he’s traumatized or in shock or something.”
“Jesus. When are you going to stop making excuses for him?”
Scott was back a few nights later, and we were watching the news again, and I was studying him out of the corner of my eye, trying to read him. Suddenly he laughed. I looked over at him. He was grinning a lopsided grin. “This is ridiculous,” he said, still grinning.
“What?”
“Every night, it’s the same thing. Scott Peterson, Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein, Scott Peterson. The two most hated men in the world.”
Jackie kept calling. “Scott is not an evil person,” she said. She kept repeating it over and over again, as if it were her mantra. Scott is not an evil person.
Now she was mad at Scott’s bosses at Tradecorp. They hadn’t exactly fired Scott, but they had asked him to take a little time off, at least until this whole thing blew over. “Scott was very upset,” Jackie told me. “He was on his cell phone, screaming at someone from work. I don’t know who, but I know I’ve never seen him so angry in my life.”
She told me to hold a minute because another call was coming in and she thought it might be him. When she came back on the line she told me that it was Scott and that he was up in the cabin, at Lake Arrowhead, freezing to death. He had a sleeping bag on the floor in front of the fireplace, and he’d gone out into the bitter cold to gather wood, but he couldn’t find much more than a few twigs.
“I’ll call him,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
I reached him. I let the phone ring twice then called again.
“Scott?”
“Yeah.”
“I hear you’re freezing?”
“I am.”
“Go downstairs. There’s a panel on the wall that’s hard to see. Slide it back. You’ll find an entire cord of wood in there.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“Call me if you need anything else.”
“Okay,” he said.
He was still removed, still distant. I guess he was mad at me. If he hadn’t been, he would have called me directly. Instead he had used Jackie to enlist my help. Maybe he was trying to tell me that he didn’t need me. It was payback time.
But the next afternoon he called me directly. “It’s really nice up here,” he said.
“I know.”
“And it’s so peaceful. You were right. I don’t have to worry about the press or anyone. From now on, whenever I refer to this place, I’ll call it ‘Uncle Jim’s cabin.’”
“Who’s Uncle Jim?” I asked.
“We don’t have an Uncle Jim,” he said. “That’s the point.”
I laughed.
“I met one of the neighbors today,” Scott said.
“Who?” I was worried he might be recognized.
“It was some little old lady. She was coming home with her groceries, and she was slipping and sliding on the ice, and I went over and helped her.”
“Did she say anything?”
He put on an old lady voice: “You’re such a nice young man!”
“That’s great!”
“I could live up here,” he said. “I could be a regular Boy Scout.”
Jackie called the next day, while I was out doing errands, and the babysitter answered.
“Oh, Lorraine,” Jackie said, all sweetness. “This is Scott’s mom.”
“Oh. Hi.”
“I wish Scott could meet someone like you.”
Lorraine freaked out. She was speechless. When I got home, she repeated the conversation, and I couldn’t believe it either. “Are you sure that’s what she said?”
“I’m positive. I can’t believe she said that to me.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I just couldn’t believe it.
I now found myself making excuses for Jackie, just as I’d done for Scott. “This has all been very hard on her. I mean—you know—it’s total hell, what she’s going through. She’s probably a little confused.”
Then I wondered what Scott had told his mother about Lorraine. “Mom, you wouldn’t believe Anne’s sitter! She’s a major babe.”
The whole thing was insane.
On February 8, a Saturday, 350 people turned out to search for Laci. The search had been organized by Sharon and Ron and their side of the family. I’d never been told about it, of course, since I belonged to the enemy camp. They spent the day walking through pastures and wetlands, in and around Modesto, and to points north, although people were beginning to say that Scott had probably dropped Laci in the San Francisco Bay.
There were two more searches, on two successive Saturdays, but each time there were fewer and fewer people, and when I read the accounts in the local paper I was reduced to tears. People were losing interest, or they were giving up hope.
When I told Scott that the police had again been searching the bay, he sounded petulant. “Why are they wasting their time?” he snapped, his voice getting loud and croaky. “They’re such idiots. They’re looking in the wrong place.”
“Where should they be looking?” I asked.
He immediately changed the subject: “How’s my buddy Tim?” he asked with a nasty edge.
That was so unlike him. That was not the Scott I knew. The Scott I knew didn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body.
On February 18, the police went back to Scott’s house with another warrant. According to reporters, they spent ten hours looking around. They took his new truck but returned it a few hours later. There were also reports that Laci’s sister, Amy, had been escorted into the house by police and that she had remained inside with them for more than an hour.
Scott showed up later that day, which was Ryan’s third birthday. I can’t remember whether he was driving his truck or a rented car, but I remember exactly what he said as he came through the door. “I was just in Lake Arrowhead. I have a shovel I borrowed that I need to return.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“What shovel?”
“Nothing. A shovel I borrowed.”
That was certainly odd. Why was he telling me about a shovel? And what had he been doing with it?
He dropped onto the couch with a stack of mail.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“I just came back from my P.O. box. Is it Ryan’s birthday or something?”
I went over to see what he had in his hand. It was a card with a drawing of a birthday cake on the front. There were three little candles in the cake. Scott opened the card. It said, Happy Birthday Ryan. There was no name or return address, and I was suddenly very freaked out. Obviously someone knew that Scott was staying with us, and this was his or her way of letting us know.
“Who would send something like that?” I asked. “It’s really creepy.”
“So it’s his birthday today?”
“Yes.”
“Who would know it’s his birthday?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
Another card had a picture of a praying mantis across the front, which had been cut out of a magazine, but no note. “What an idiot,” Scott said. “Everyone knows that mantises eat their lovers, but this moron got it backward. It’s the girl that eats the guy.”
Then there was a letter in some kind of plastic sheath. There was a childlike, almost cartoon-ish, drawing of Laci, in tears. Beyond it, there was a drawing of Scott and Amber in his truck, with one of those bubble captions over Scott’s head: “Come on, baby!”
“The hate mail just keeps on coming,” Scott said. He seemed almost amused.
The last envelope contained an actual letter, in an envelope with no return address. Only Scott’s name was on it. The letter was written in a clean, feminine hand, in cursive, and I can’t remember the exact words, but the message was clear and unmistakable: “We know what you did. You will never be safe. One of us will always be following you. Turn around, we’ll be there.”
“You should give that to the police,” I said.
“Why bother? It’s from the Rochas.”
“That’s ridiculous! How can you say that?”
But I couldn’t waste much time worrying about Scott’s theories. I was still troubled by the fact that someone knew it was Ryan’s third birthday, and that he or she knew that Scott had been staying at our Berkeley home.
Scott spent the night again, in the loft, overlooking the bay.
In the morning, I woke up feeling jittery. Whenever a car came down the street, I’d tense up. When the phone rang, I jumped.
“What’s wrong with you?” Tim asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well.”
I felt awful. I wondered if I should have said anything about those cards and letters, but we had enough to deal with already.
Scott came down from the loft at around eight o’clock that morning. He looked unusually glum. At the time, I didn’t realize that he’d been on the phone with Amber Frey that morning and that Amber had suggested they stop talking until the case was resolved. I put that together only months later, when I heard those tapes during the trial.
After Tim left for work, Scott parked himself in front of the television and watched police officers moving in and out of his house, hauling off bags and bags of evidence. You could see other officers wandering up and down the driveway with measuring tapes. Scott lost interest. He killed the picture.
“Put it back on,” I said. “I think it’s almost time for Murder, She Wrote. ”Back then the USA network was running reruns of the show every morning, and they had become a regular part of my morning. I’d get the kids dressed, feed them, then put Tommy into the stroller and walk Ryan to his playschool. When I got back, I would do laundry and try to catch part of the show. It started at ten and again at eleven.
Scott found all this very amusing. He referred to it as my “little routine,” and when he was around he became part of it. We’d walk Ryan to school, return home, and watch TV. Sometimes he helped me fold laundry. Other times he played with Tommy.
“So this is your life, eh, Sis?” he asked, laughing. “You take the kids to school. You do laundry. You watch Murder, She Wrote.”
It was my life. I had a three-year-old and a baby and a husband who wasn’t all that happy with me at the moment.
The next day Scott disappeared, and I didn’t hear back from him for a couple of days. When he called it was early, and I was watching Murder, She Wrote. He said he was almost at my house, and wanted to know if he was missing anything good. I told him it was a great episode, so he should hurry, and asked him if he wanted a BLT sandwich, since I was about to make one for myself.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I won’t be long.”
I found out later that the police were wiretapping the calls, and that was one of the ones they intercepted. I have since wondered what they made of it.
Scott arrived, and we ate our sandwiches in front of the TV. When the show was over, he told me that he and Laci had often spent the night at a bed-and-breakfast in Mendocino that looked a lot like the main house in Murder, She Wrote. “One day Laci and I went for a walk, and we ended up in a part of town we’d never seen before. We came across a small cemetery, with an even smaller cemetery just beyond it. The small cemetery was all overgrown with weeds, and the headstones were really small, so we assumed it was a pet cemetery.
“Laci and I climbed over the little broken fence and started to read the headstones. They were really old, and really overgrown, and it was hard to read them. But then we read one and realized that this wasn’t a pet cemetery at all. It was a children’s cemetery. It was full of little children.”
I was holding my breath. The way Scott was telling the story, it seemed almost as if he were in a trance. His voice was flat, hypnotic.
“Laci started crying,” he said, continuing in the same, uninflected tone. “She was very upset. She wanted to fix up the place. She wanted to clear out the brush and plant beautiful flowers and make it nice for the children. It was just, you know, it was just really sad.”
Scott was staring at me now, and I thought he might be about to cry. I also thought he was trying to tell me something. I had a feeling that the story wasn’t true, and that he’d made it up so he could find some way to tell me the truth about everything else.
I could hardly breathe. “What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Scott said, and he seemed to snap out of his trance. The spell was broken. “We left the cemetery and went back to town.”
He got up and went off to do something on the computer, and I sat there feeling winded and increasingly upset. Maybe Scott hadn’t been trying to tell me anything at all; maybe it was my imagination. But that was the moment I knew that Laci and Conner were never coming back.