It would be forty-eight hours before the police confirmed that the two bodies recovered from the San Francisco Bay were indeed those of Laci Peterson and her unborn son, Conner. But everyone had already assumed the obvious.
Shortly after I spoke to Scott, when I had told him about the second body, I tried to contact him again. I called the cabin in Lake Arrowhead, let the phone ring twice, then hung up and redialed. There was no answer.
I called Jackie. She sounded flat, not at all like herself, and she told me she had no idea where he was. She sounded evasive, too, almost cold, but I think she was simply in shock.
She said almost exactly what Scott had said—“It’s not them”—and told me not to worry.
Then I called my doctor, Dr. Toni Brayer of Cal Pacific Medical Center, and I told her that I needed to talk to someone before I went into shock myself. She called me back a few minutes later with the name of a therapist, who came highly recommended. I placed a call to Dr. Linda Tucker, and she called me back right away. I told her I was Scott Peterson’s sister and that I was falling apart, and she made room for me that very afternoon.
I liked her the minute I walked into her office. I sat down and gave her a very short version of my life story, with the emphasis on recent events. I spoke about my relationship with Scott, with Jackie, and with my own parents; I told her about Tim and about our crumbling marriage; and I told her about my two little boys and how badly I wanted to be the World’s Most Perfect Mother. I was trying to be as honest as possible, even if it made me look bad, because I knew too many people who lied to their therapists, and they never seemed to get better.
“I can see you have a lot on your plate,” Dr. Tucker said. “Let’s try to get you feeling a bit more stabilized, and we’ll tackle these problems together, one at a time.”
I went to see Dr. Tucker again the next day and the day after that.
“Everybody’s looking for Scott.” I said. “Everybody wants to know where he is. I can’t understand why he didn’t go directly to the police station to do what he could to identify his wife and child.”
Dr. Tucker didn’t say anything, but her gentle eyes said enough: When are you going to wake up, Anne?
“Do you think Scott is guilty?” I asked her.
“How could I know such a thing?” she replied. “I only know what it is that you’ve told me, and up until now you have not wanted to believe that he could have done such a thing.”
“Yes, but you see it on the news,” I said, pushing for an answer. “You must have an opinion as to his guilt or innocence.”
“Anne,” she said. “I’m not trying to evade your question. What really is most important is what you think, and I know how difficult an answer this might be for you.”
“I don’t know what I think anymore,” I said. “It’s just, you know—those don’t seem like the actions of someone who cares.”
I still couldn’t accept even the possibility that Scott was guilty. In the weeks to come, Dr. Tucker would help me through a great deal. But for the moment I remained shrouded in a fog of self-delusion.
Shortly after I got home, I remembered that my parents were leaving for London that afternoon, and I thought I might have missed them. I called the house and saw that it was after five. I realized they were already en route to the airport, so I hung up after two rings.
Then I had a strange thought, and I dialed the number again.
“Hello?”
It was him.
“Scott?”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t. I just guessed. What are you doing there?”
I’d given him a key to their house when we’d gone down to visit, but I couldn’t believe he was there—now, of all times. I didn’t say anything, but I felt as if he had violated my trust.
“I don’t know. I was just driving, and I found myself near San Diego, and I came here.”
“Why didn’t you go to Lake Arrowhead?”
“I started to, but the roads were slippery and the car spun out.”
He was lying. I could just tell. Plus, the numbers didn’t add up. I believe he was either around Berkeley or Modesto when I’d last talked to him—he’d said he was forty-five minutes from my place—so to reach San Diego so quickly he would have had to find the nearest freeway and bolted south. I remembered what Gordo had told me about that wad of Mexican pesos, and I immediately thought that he was headed for Mexico. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t going to Mexico. Or maybe he was and changed his mind because he figured they’d be watching the border.
I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t have the guts. “What are you going to do?” I asked instead.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to rest.”
That very evening, not an hour later, Natalie, a friend of my sister’s, arrived at the house where Scott had made himself at home. She was supposed to be taking care of the place while my parents were away, and she had stopped in to turn on a few lights. As soon as she walked through the door, she almost jumped out of her skin. Scott was parked in front of one of the computers, a bottle of wine at his side.
“Hey,” he said, turning to look at her. “Who are you?”
For a few moments, Natalie couldn’t say anything. She knew who he was. She knew about his connection to me and to my family, and only minutes earlier she had been watching the news on TV. There was little else on TV that day, at least up and down the coast of California. Two bodies had been recovered in the San Francisco Bay, and everyone was waiting for word from the police.
“I’m Natalie,” she said when she found her voice. “I’m taking care of the house while the Gradys are overseas.”
“Oh,” Scott said.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“My taxes. It’s April 14, right? Tomorrow is tax day.”
“You’re right,” she said.
He stood up and moved very close to her. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
He was practically in her face; she backed up, flustered, and tried to turn it into a little joke. “You’re one of those close talkers,” she said.
“So what are you supposed to do here?” Scott asked, ignoring the remark. “What’s there to take care of?”
“Not that much. Pick up the mail and stuff. I used to feed the cat, but the cat died.”
“Did you kill the cat?” he asked.
“No,” she said, and she decided it was time to leave. “Are you going to be staying here a while?”
“I don’t know,” Scott said. “Why?”
“Maybe you could bring in the mail.”
“Why don’t you give me your phone number, Natalie?”
“Excuse me?”
“That way I’ll call you and let you know when I’m leaving, so you can take care of the mail.”
Natalie gave Scott her number—the police found it in his pocket three days later, when they arrested him—and hurried off.
After Natalie called me to tell me about her bizarre encounter with Scott, I phoned Jackie. She was coming out of her slump—but her depression was giving way to anger. “Everyone is so wrong about him,” she said. “Scott is not an evil person. Only an evil person would do something like this. You know Scott, Anne. You know how sweet he is. You know he could never do something like this.”
“It’s terrible,” I said, looking for a noncommittal answer, and she launched right back into her litany of complaints: The Rochas were determined to frame her son, the police had never thoroughly investigated the most promising leads, and the media were just looking to boost their ratings.
When she was done, I tried to get back on track. “Jackie, I’m really worried. It’s a woman and a baby.” We were still waiting for the bodies to be positively identified.
“It’s not them,” she said.
“How can you say that?”
“Because it’s not! It’s not Laci and Conner. What we have to do is think about Scott. We have to protect Scott.”
I felt as if Jackie was being destroyed by anguish. My heart was breaking for her.
I remembered the day of Tommy’s christening and the way Lee had turned to the priest for advice. “What is someone to do in a situation like this?…How does one get through it?”
Now I understood what he had meant. He was talking about survival.
The next day, my brother Michael went over to our parents’ house to do his laundry. He walked into the kitchen and found Scott sitting there, watching himself on TV.
“Who are you?” Scott asked.
“I’m Anne’s brother Michael,” he said.
“Michael. Of course. I’ve heard a lot about you.” He stood up and shook Michael’s hand. “I’m Anne’s brother, too.”
They had met, briefly, at my wedding, but only in passing, and I’m not sure they were ever formally introduced.
“So you’re going to do your laundry?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “I’ll just put it in and leave.”
“Don’t hurry off on my account,” Scott said.
Michael called me from his cell as he was pulling out of the driveway. “What is going on? What is he doing there, in our parents’ house? Everyone’s looking for him. We need to tell the police.”
“The police aren’t looking for him,” I said. “Reporters are looking for him.”
“I don’t like this,” Michael said. “I don’t like this at all.”
On April 18, police announced that they had used DNA samples to positively identify the bodies of Laci and Conner.
When I heard the news, I remember I began to sob uncontrollably; when Ryan came home from day care I was still a complete wreck. I tried to hide it from him, but he knew something was terribly wrong. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what he said. “Is this about Laci?”
“Yes,” I said.
Somehow, his three-year-old mind was aware that she wasn’t coming back. He went into his room, grabbed the old crib mattress that we keep under his bed, and began pulling it toward the front door.
“What are you doing, honey?” I asked him.
“I’m taking this outside for when Laci falls down from the heavens.”
It was all I could do to not burst into tears all over again. Only a few days earlier, he had been asking me about death, which is not atypical for children at his age. He wanted to know what happened to people when they died, and I told him that they went up to the heavens.
“And then God fixes them, and they come back, right?” he had asked me.
“That’s right, Ryan,” I had said. “God fixes them.”
Later that very day, Scott was arrested in the parking lot of the Torrey Pines Municipal Golf Course, near San Diego. He was carrying fifteen thousand dollars in cash.
Among the items found in his car were several knives, including a double-edged dagger with a T-handle, a folding saw, duct tape, climbing equipment and rope, and a Mapquest map downloaded that day with directions to American Bodyworks, where Amber Frey was employed.
It was over. My brother had reached the end of the road.
Three days later, on April 23, Scott was brought into the Stanislaus County Superior Court and charged with two felony counts of murder. He pled not guilty.
For several days after Scott’s arrest, I couldn’t get over the fact that Laci’s body had been dumped in the San Francisco Bay, practically in my front yard. I had invited Scott into our home, given him safe haven, as it were. And the room I had given him overlooked Laci’s watery grave.
I don’t know how he slept at night.
Jackie called within hours of the arrest, and she was beside herself. She began talking about things I’d been catching snippets of on the news—the Mercedes-Benz he was driving, the large amount of cash—as if she were already plotting out his defense.
The Mercedes-Benz was hers, she told me. She had asked Scott to buy the car for her. And the fifteen thousand dollars in cash was to be used for his legal defense.
When I got off the phone, I called Dr. Tucker and told her I needed to talk to her. She made room for me that same afternoon, and in the months ahead I began seeing her two and three times a week.
The problem was really quite simple: I still refused to accept the possibility that Scott was guilty. Dr. Tucker’s job, as I saw it, was to help me remove my rose-colored glasses. Until I was finally able to separate fact from fiction, I wouldn’t find my way back. She was eager to help me find my way, but she never forced it: She wanted me to get there on my own.
“But why do you assume he’s guilty?” I asked her again.
“I don’t assume he’s guilty,” she replied. “How could I possibly know? All I know is what you tell me, and everything you’ve told me indicates that you don’t want to believe he did this. Now it looks like the doubts are taking hold, and I can see it frightens you.”
“It does,” I said. “I was very close to him. I was very close to Laci.”
“I know,” she said.
“I told my son all about his little cousin.”
“You know, Anne,” she said gently, “you have told me many things about Scott, including that you always seem to be making excuses for him. You have also told me many things that don’t seem to add up as you have explained them. I know how hard this is because you do love Scott, and because you want to help him in any way you can. But it’s not going to help you or anyone else if you refuse to see things for what they are.”
Later that day, I was in a neighborhood grocery store with both my kids when I noticed the two women in line behind me, poring over the National Enquirer. They were looking at an article about Scott.
“I can’t believe that monster killed his wife and baby,” one of them said. “He makes me sick.”
The second woman nodded in agreement. “He should be put straight to death,” she suggested. “They should just skip the trial.”
I was absolutely numb. It was all I could do to get my kids, and my groceries, back to the car.
Less than ten days after Scott’s arrest, I got a letter from him. It was written in pencil, from his cell at the Stanislaus County Jail, in Modesto, where he was taken right after his arrest. “I actually had a dream that I was waking up in your loft with a little breeze through the window,” he wrote. “It was better than really being there though because Laci and Conner were in my dream as well. We were all sharing the morning together. I was told that they were gone on the car ride back to Modesto by the detectives. I didn’t believe them, wouldn’t believe them…”
He also discussed his legal defense, noting that Jackie and Lee had talked to attorney Mark Geragos about taking his case. “I was going to go with the public defender because of cost,” he wrote. “Now Mom and my Dad have struck a deal with a prominent defender and I don’t know if I should accept it because they will sacrifice their financial future to get a job done that a public defender could probably do.”
On April 30, I wrote back.
Dear Scott,
I have been at a loss for words when it comes to your loss of Laci and Conner. I am just so sad and heartbroken and it must be so terrible for you.
Do you remember at Tommy’s christening, what the rector said? “They’re in God’s hands.” I am sure they are there, and know how much they mean to all of us. Especially to you.
I think about you all the time and wish that this pain and anguish would go away. I wish there were something more I could do to help. Please let me know if there is anything at all.
It is OK for you to break down and cry. I think it’s just expected. This is horrendous for you to deal with. We all love you so much and wish we could take the pain away.
God bless you, Laci and baby Conner.
We love you, Anne, Tim, Ryan and Tommy
He wrote back to thank me for my support and kind thoughts, and I replied immediately.
Dear Scott,
I just love your letters, they are so sweet and you have so much compassion and kindness. I don’t know how you do it.
Today I went to the mail and a letter I wrote to you came back. It said “no cards.”
I’ll switch to only stationery from now on…
Congratulations on Mark Geragos. I am so happy. I am sure he will do a great job.
I sent you Islands and Traveler magazine subscriptions so you can read up…
I love that you’re doing yoga. Good for you! Who sent you that book?
Yes, I am keeping up with Jessica Fletcher. I keep thinking about how you and Laci stayed there, were you both fans of the show?
I’m going to write more tomorrow—the kids aren’t quite in bed yet.
But I soon returned to finish the letter.
Scooby-Doo is entertaining the little guys for a few minutes. It’s been pouring rain for two days now so we’re stuck inside. It’s supposed to let up tomorrow.
We put down green Astroturf in the deck of ‘your room.’ Did I tell you already? I bought some children’s chairs, table, umbrella and a Buzz Lightyear swimming pool. Ryan loves it, and Tommy’s playpen is out there now. It’s nice to have a little outdoor area for them—although it is soaking wet up there now! It took me so long to blow up the pool. I’ll have to take a picture of it all so you can have a good laugh.
Keep sending your letters for me to forward. I’ll copy all—file in a binder and forward them on while you’re away at camp.
Love, Anne
I hadn’t been able to bring myself to write the word “jail,” so I used the word “camp” instead. I know it seems silly but that was how I felt.
That same week, the first week of May, Geragos announced publicly that he had been hired by Scott’s family and would be replacing the team of public defenders who had been assigned to him. “Scott looks forward to finding out who did this,” he said.
Also in May, the newspapers reported that Sharon Rocha and her family had gone into Scott and Laci’s house and taken a few things, including the baby’s crib. I thought maybe Sharon needed a little something to hold onto, and my heart went out to her. But the story didn’t end there. People were saying that Laci’s family had been forced to break in because the locks had been changed, and Jackie had refused to give them the key or the code to the alarm.
“That’s not true!” Jackie said. “I gave them the key and the code.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “It’s done.”
“But we paid for that crib! We paid for that crib!”
I didn’t see how that mattered. If Sharon Rocha took solace from having the crib near her, why couldn’t Jackie let it go? It dawned on me that the crib was the least of it. Jackie seemed to need something to get angry about. It must have kept her from going to a deeper, darker place.
Months later, when the Rochas went back for some more of Laci’s belongings, Jackie said she was worried because Scott had something in the house that “really mattered to him and that he would like them for when he is released.”
“What things?” I asked.
“His wine collection and his humidor,” she replied.
I didn’t understand how she could even be thinking about such things.
Ironically, the next time I spoke to Jackie it was my turn to talk about material goods. One of the local newspapers reported that Scott had given Amber some jewelry, and it made me think of the sapphire cocktail ring I’d wanted Jackie to sell for me, the one that turned up on Laci’s hand at her baby shower.
“That wasn’t your ring,” Jackie said.
“I’m pretty sure it was,” I said. It felt incredibly petty, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know.
“All those cocktail rings from the sixties look alike,” she said.
Then she thought about it for a moment and corrected herself. She suddenly remembered that she had bought the ring herself, to give to a friend as a gift. “Didn’t I send you a check?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I never got a check from you.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive.”
I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. Scott was in jail, and we were talking about a silly ring.
When we spoke the next day, the ring was still on her mind. “Scott told me that you gave that ring to Laci,” she said.
At that point I just dropped it. I didn’t care about the ring; I just wanted to make sure that Scott hadn’t given it to Amber. This business with the ring was getting as convoluted and confusing as the many conflicting stories about the fifteen thousand dollars the police found on Scott at the time of his arrest. Initially, Jackie had told me that the money was for his legal defense, but now she said that Scott had simply been in the process of transferring cash from one bank to another. By week’s end, I heard two more versions. The first was pretty halfhearted: “Scott always carries a lot of cash.” The second was kind of mystifying: “I sold my membership at the club in Solana Beach and for some reason they gave me cash instead of a check, and Scott was en route to the bank to deposit the money.” It was all getting too hard to follow or believe.
Scott continued to write from jail. The food was hideous. He was next to the drunk tank, and the noise was driving him crazy. It was hard for him to keep track of the days, he wrote. But he seemed to be taking solace in his memories: “The trip to San Diego with you was fun,” he wrote. “I’m lucky to have such a bighearted sister.”
Meanwhile, Jackie kept calling, sometimes two and three times a day. She always complained about the media, noting that their stories were invariably wrong. But I couldn’t help noticing that her stories were pretty contradictory, too.
I never asked Jackie any questions. She asked all the questions, and she gave the answers, too. Why did Scott have a water purifier in his car when he was arrested? Not because he was racing for the Mexican border, but because—“as you know, Anne”—he liked very clean water. Why was he carrying his brother John’s ID? Because the police had taken his ID. Why did he have so many clothes in his car? Because he didn’t have a home anymore.
It was almost as if she were trying to determine whether her reasons were viable, and she must have thought I would be a useful sounding board.
It broke my heart. She was my biological mother. We had found each other and grown close over the years. We had vacationed together, laughed together, and enriched each other’s lives in the truest sense of the word.
Now her son had been arrested for murder, and she was desperate. She would go to any lengths to save him, do anything for her little boy, fight to the death if she had to.
I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know where to begin. I was pretty traumatized myself. So I listened. And part of me continued to believe.
Tim was less understanding. Now that Scott was finally out of the house, Jackie was calling at all hours, and he was sick of it.
“What are you?” he asked. “Her therapist?”
“I’m her friend.”
“Why you? She’s got two other kids. She’s got a husband. He’s got kids of his own. Why doesn’t she call someone else for a change?”
“I guess it’s because we were close and because I felt so close to Scott.”
The calls continued, and Tim decided to do something about it. He sat down with a friend at work and told him all about “flirtini” night. The way Scott had shown up with that bottle of schnapps; the way he was practically drooling over Lorraine, our babysitter; and the fact that Lorraine became so uncomfortable with the attention that she left early.
The story appeared in the National Enquirer, as Tim knew it would. They got most of it right, which was good enough for Tim. The whole idea was to drive a wedge between Jackie and me. She would know the story had come from our house.
It almost worked.
“Was that Tim’s doing?” Jackie called to ask, furious. “Was it?!”
“Probably, Jackie. What can I say?”
“Where else would they get the story? Certainly not from Lorraine.”
“You’re right.”
“I want you to tell Tim that he’s a drunk, and that if they ever put him on the stand he would not make a very credible witness.”
That hurt. Tim was not a drunk. We had all been drinking a lot, yes, but that had been precipitated by Scott’s presence in our home. The leak to the Enquirer had been a bad idea, and maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly, but he was mad. He had been affected by the experience, too, and our marriage was suffering.
“I can’t believe he would do this to Scott,” Jackie went on. “We are terribly disappointed in him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Anne?”
“I’m here.”
“If anybody calls and asks you about Scott and the babysitter, deny it.”
“Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. But if I had, she was asking me to lie.
“If anybody asks you—anyone at all—deny it.”
Then I heard Lee’s voice in the background—I believe she was on her cell, in his car—and he was more circumspect: “Just say you don’t recall,” he said. He said it loudly, so that I’d hear.
I hung up. That was it: I was going to have to separate myself from Jackie. Blood is thicker than water, but there’s a limit.
Ironically, this wasn’t the end of the babysitter story. By this time, Lorraine had found full-time work at Tommy’s day care center, thanks in part to our recommendation. Shortly after the article appeared in the Enquirer, we were told that our son was no longer welcome.
I was very upset, but nowhere near as upset as Tim.
“Don’t you wish your family had never found you?” he asked.
I didn’t even know how to respond to that.
Not everyone on Jackie’s side of the family was behind Scott. Two of his young cousins were absolutely floored by the tragedy. They told me that many years earlier, when Scott was in college in Arizona, he’d gotten a girl pregnant. Somehow he persuaded the girl to get an abortion, and when it was all over Scott came home to Jackie and Lee. He never went back.
When I became a mother, I read a few parenting books so that I could work on becoming the best mother I could be. I remembered reading something about the importance of teaching children not to run away from problems, to take responsibility for themselves. Children whose parents constantly make excuses for their children’s bad behavior can grow up to be reckless, irresponsible adults.
I wondered if Scott was living proof of that theory.
The second thing the cousins told me about was far more disturbing than the first. They said that Scott had been investigated in connection with the disappearance of Kristin Smart, a nineteen-year-old student at California Polytechnic, in San Luis Obispo. She disappeared on May 25, 1996, a year before I reconnected with Jackie and Scott, and around the same time that Laci Rocha graduated from Cal Poly.
“Who told you this?” I asked.
“We heard the rumors.”
“Was he actually questioned?”
“Maybe not questioned, but someone said that he’d met her and that maybe they were even in a class together.”
I hoped this wasn’t true. If it was, and if Scott had actully been questioned, I’m sure the police had already made the connection, and they would probably be using it against him.
Now everywhere I looked I saw things that could be construed as evidence against Scott. When an article about the case appeared in People magazine, one of many, there was a photograph that showed Scott and Laci’s dining table, set for Christmas Eve dinner. The article suggested that Laci had set it herself, shortly before she disappeared, but when I took a closer look I didn’t think that was the case. Laci was a real stickler for detail, and she excelled at it. From what I could see, the table setting wasn’t up to her usual high standards. The linens, the place settings, the silverware, the glasses, the flowers—none of it looked quite right. I wondered if perhaps Scott had set the table after the fact.
Scott wasn’t setting any tables these days, but he kept writing me. He described the daily tedium, the bad food, his noisy fellow inmates, and a magazine called Fine Homebuilding that he seemed to find endlessly entertaining. He even wrote bad jokes: “Did you hear about the blonde who was bragging about having finished the jigsaw puzzle? The box said two to three years but it only took her one.”
I wrote back dutifully—mundane things about the kids, Ryan’s school, the weather, and the new neighbors—but he was always ahead of me.
“Sister Anne,” he began in one letter and then went on to note that the phrase had a “conventish ring” to it.
In another, he wrote that he was deeply influenced by my letters. At first I thought he meant he took comfort in them, but then I realized he was talking about the style of my handwriting, the shape of each letter, and the general presentation. He noted that the letters were a “positive force” in his life, and that he was working hard at emulating me.
I thought back to the day he returned from the P.O. box in Modesto with that stack of mail, including the death threat he was convinced was from the Rochas. I remembered how he had commented about the penmanship. “Look at this nice handwriting…. I wish I could write like that.”
What could all this mean? Scott was focusing on style, not substance. His life was being threatened—he saw the words right there in black and white. But he didn’t seem to hear them. His attention was elsewhere.
The next time Jackie called, she told me I should visit him. “There are only a few approved visitors on the list, and you’re one of them. He very much wants to see you.”
I went with Lee’s daughter, Susan, Scott’s half sister.
The Stanislaus County Jail is an old building, very dated. It’s falling apart, actually. The glass is chipped in many places. There are broken tiles everywhere. It even smells old.
I was so tense and uncomfortable that I let Susan lead the way, and I hardly remember how we got there. All I know is that we found ourselves standing in a murky, depressing waiting room, in front of one of the few cubicles that had a working telephone, and that I could feel my heart beating wildly in my chest.
I kept trying to calm myself down with silly thoughts. Why, this is just like in all those movies I’ve seen! I tried to recall some movies I’d seen that featured prison visiting rooms, but none came to mind.
Then a door opened—far, far away, it seemed, on the other side of the bulletproof glass—and Scott walked in, with a deputy close behind. He was wearing a reddish-orange jumpsuit, the kind I think they call a carrot suit, and his hands were cuffed and linked to the chain that circled his waist, like a belt. I thought the deputy was going to remove the cuffs, but he didn’t, and Scott walked over, trying to smile, and sat down. It was hard for him to reach the phone because the chains didn’t have much play. He had to bend forward to grab it, and he had to lift it off the receiver, as his chains rattled. When he sat down, he was forced to twist his entire body and cock his head at an odd angle to press it to his ear.
Susan talked to him first. I couldn’t hear his end of the conversation, so I just sat there trying not to look like I was going to scream. She talked about her kids, and about the family, and how everyone was thinking of him and asked whether he needed anything.
It was horrible to see him like that. I thought back to the last time I’d seen him, which was right after we returned from that trip to San Diego. He had changed and showered and left without telling me where he was going. I remembered thinking how wholesome he had looked. Now he didn’t look so wholesome.
When Susan handed me the phone, I didn’t know what to say. I looked at him through the grimy glass and hoped I was smiling.
“Hey, Sis.”
“Hey.”
“What have you been up to?” he asked.
“You’re missing some real good episodes of Murder, She Wrote.”
He cracked up. I mean, really cracked up. I guess it broke the tension. The rest of the conversation was about kids, the family, and everyone’s general health, and it ended with a promise to send him books and more magazines. Not a word about Laci and Conner. Not a word about life in prison. Not a word about guilt or innocence.
That’s all I remember from inside the prison. Outside was a different story, however. Susan and I had just left the building, and we were making our way across the parking lot, toward the car, when she snapped, “I can’t believe you said that!”
“What?”
“About Murder, She Wrote!”
“We used to watch that together.”
“I don’t care. He’s in prison. They think he’s a murderer. What were you thinking?”
I just let it drop. I knew what I was thinking. I was thinking it would be a good idea to keep it light. And that’s what I’d done. I wanted to see Scott smile, and I got more than I bargained for. He had laughed: a big, happy, laugh—a genuine moment of levity. I thought that was a good thing, no matter what Susan said.
Scott kept writing, and in early July he sent me birthday wishes. “You’re not one of those people who will celebrate her thirty-ninth birthday for seven years now, are you?” he asked. “You will just have to face the fact.”
I wrote back, and my letters were so mundane that I was ashamed of them. Did he really want to know that Ryan, at age three, was still in the throes of the Terrible Twos?
His next letter was actually forwarded to me by Jackie, but it was meant for all the people he loved. Jackie had typed his words into her computer, and e-mailed the letter to various members of the family, including me. Scott began by saying that he would spare us the details of his days behind bars, which were terribly monotonous, one running into the next, then added that he had to be cautious because “whatever I communicate is subject to the deceitful and misguided eyes of those who have put me here and caused my family so much pain….” He talked about some of the books he’d been reading and noted that they had a common theme: the outdoors, adventure. They included Alaska, Nothing Else Like It on Earth; Undaunted Courage; and—the one he was in the process of tackling—Travels with Charley. He complained about nightmares, although he didn’t go into detail, and said he’d been moved to a new, quieter cell, farther away from the drunk tank. He closed with, “The true lifeline is the telephone and your visits.”
For a long time, nothing happened. The media struggled to keep the story alive, but there was little to report. Scott was in prison. The lawyers were reviewing the material. The investigators were still putting together pieces of the puzzle.
I lived in fear that I would be called to testify, but I wasn’t.
On November 18, 2003, following an eleven-day preliminary hearing, Scott was ordered to stand trial for the murders of his wife and unborn child.
The Christmas that followed wasn’t exactly the best Christmas of our lives.
At the end of January 2004, I got a very bizarre letter from Scott. He had already spent nine months behind bars, and I wondered what it was doing to him. The letter was either a sign of his mental deterioration or a stab at serious writing. “The environment is sterile with a concrete floor, stainless steel fixtures and sliver of deeply tinted window which changes from black as pitch to battleship gray through the cycle of the sun,” he wrote. “An attempt to look through it yields only your reflection. I wonder if even its change of hue is due only to the changes of the interior lighting conditions….
“I will take this time to humanize this cell with my pictures of Laci and the rest of our family. A photograph from your wedding reception hangs above the scared [sic] desk.”
The following month, and again in March, I was subpoenaed and told I might be called upon to testify for the defense. I was horrified. I didn’t want to testify. I was so confused by this point that I began to wonder whether I might make a better witness for the prosecution. I wasn’t going to lie on the stand, even for my brother. I was almost certain I would fall apart under cross-examination. By some miracle, however, I was put off both times. It appeared that I would not be called.
After the danger passed, I went to visit Scott again. The trial had been moved to Redwood City, and he was now being held at the Maguire Correctional Facility. Jackie gave me some advice before I went. “You have to check in before visiting hours,” she said. “You’ll see people lining up. And listen, this is important: I want you to write Scott’s name down on a piece of paper, and when the deputy asks who you’re there to see, just give him the paper. You don’t want to say his name out loud.”
Before I went, I visited the jail’s website and read through the long list of rules and regulations. You weren’t permitted to take any personal items into the visiting room, not even your purse. You couldn’t bring gifts for the inmate, not even books or magazines. The visits were limited to two per week, forty-five minutes in length. If you showed any disrespect to the staff, you would be escorted out of the facility and future visits might be revoked. They also had rules regarding children, noting that at certain hours there were volunteers present to help out. I imagined a young mother visiting her husband, trying not to fall apart, while her children, oblivious, played in a room off the lobby under the supervision of a complete stranger.
I went on my own this time. When I pulled into the parking lot, on Bradford Street, I could already see people moving toward the entrance. I parked and cut the engine and wrote Scott’s name on a small piece of paper, just as Jackie had instructed me to do. I had a magazine with me, so I tucked the slip of paper between its pages. Then I got out of the car and approached the building. It had a white façade, with the words BRENDAN P. MAGUIRE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY etched into the stone in tall letters. The glass front doors were to the left, and I stepped through them and got in line.
I was pleased to see that this place was a huge improvement over the last one. It was a modern, clean building. There were three deputies behind bulletproof glass, tending to the visitors.
When it was my turn, I looked for the slip of paper and couldn’t find it. I felt like an idiot. It had probably fallen to the ground in the parking lot.
“Who are you here to see?” the deputy asked me.
I took a moment. “Scott Peterson,” I whispered.
“Who?” He couldn’t hear me through the glass.
“Scott Peterson,” I said, and this time everyone heard me. The entire room turned to stare at me.
“Are you on the list?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Driver’s license?”
I fished out my license and gave it to him, and he checked me against the list of approved visitors then waved me through. People were still staring at me, making me feel as if I’d done something wrong. I tried to ignore them as I made my way through the metal detectors.
When I emerged on the other side, I noticed that most of the visitors were being herded off toward the west side of the building, but an older women and I were sent in the opposite direction. She seemed to know what she was doing, so I followed her into the elevator and up to the third floor. We didn’t talk. I looked at the numbers as the elevator climbed.
When the doors opened, we stepped outside. There were several heavy wooden doors on the far side of the corridor, leading to the various visiting rooms, with little windows you could see through, into the room itself. They had names like “East Visit 1,” “East Visit 2,” and so forth. It was clean and private and it was very quiet, mostly because we were the only two people on the floor.
“You have to let them know you’re here,” the woman explained, indicating an intercom on the wall. She could see how confused I was, and she went over and pressed the button and announced her son’s name. Then she turned to me. “Who are you here to see, dear?”
“Scott Peterson,” I told her. I guess she’d missed it downstairs.
The name seemed to give her a little jolt. She turned her attention back to the intercom and repeated it. “And Scott Peterson.”
“Thank you,” I said.
For a few seconds, we were both silent. Then curiosity got the better of her. “The Scott Peterson?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just wait here, dear,” she said after a pause. “You can see the rooms if you stand here in the middle. When they bring him out, you just go on over.”
“Thank you.”
She made no further comment, and the silence bothered me. I wanted to make conversation, so I unthinkingly asked her what her son was in for. She said it was a home invasion. I didn’t get it, and she saw the confusion on my face.
“Murder,” she said.
That’s when it hit me: We were in the maximum-security wing of the prison. “Does your son know Scott?” I asked.
“He’s seen him,” she said. “But I don’t believe they’ve talked.”
A moment later, she saw her son being led into one of the visiting rooms, and she smiled at me and wished me well and went off to see him. A split second after that, I turned and saw Scott being ushered into one of the other rooms. I hurried over, trying hard to smile. And I think I was smiling a little. He was wearing a prison jumpsuit, but the chains and the shackles were gone, which in and of itself was a relief.
We sat down simultaneously and picked up our respective phones.
“Hey, Sis,” he said, and he had a big smile on his face.
“Hi,” I said.
“How’s it going?”
“Good. You?”
“Thanks for coming to see me.”
At that moment, I caught sight of my reflection in the glass, almost superimposed on his face. It was eerie. Our faces fit together almost too well, and I was disturbed by the similarities.
“I’m such a klutz,” he was saying. “I was hurrying up the stairs, and I tripped and lost my shoe. The guard had to wait for me. That’s why I’m a couple of minutes late.”
“Are you okay?”
He said he was fine. He had his own cell, and he was reading a lot, and nobody really bothered him much. There was something very flat about his delivery, an almost complete absence of inflection. He didn’t express any feeling, and he didn’t talk about his feelings, and because there was something almost subhuman about it I began to feel very uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to talk to him about or what to ask him. I didn’t want to say anything to upset him.
“I enjoy getting your letters,” I said.
“I enjoy getting yours.”
“Are you reading a lot?”
“Reading and sleeping. Plenty of time for both.”
It was excruciating. Finally, I couldn’t take anymore. “You must really miss Laci,” I said.
And he looked at me, paused for a moment, and said one word: “Yeah.”
That was it. Yeah. Completely devoid of emotion.
When I left, I was surprised at how casual and uneventful the visit had been. I don’t know what I had expected, but I felt almost disappointed—as if I’d just had a conversation with a stranger at a bus stop. What’s more, I felt useless. I realized I had done absolutely nothing for him. I imagined him going back to his cell, picking up a book, and falling asleep on his little mattress.
I visited him twice more. Jackie had gone to see him, which she was doing twice a week, and she told me that his spirits had been greatly buoyed by my visit. I had seen no evidence of that, but I wasn’t going to argue.
The second visit was more of the same—we talked briefly about Alaska, a book he found engrossing—but there were long patches where I had to struggle to fill the silence. I kept reminding myself that this was my little brother in there, and that the human contact—just seeing me there, through the glass, and hearing my voice—was probably good for him.
The third visit was as quiet as the others, and I found it excruciating. Much as I hate to admit it, I was waiting for the visit to end, waiting for that telltale flicker of the lights that warns you your time is up, that the guard is on his way.
When it came, we were facing each other through the glass, the phones in our hands. Scott looked away suddenly, not wanting to meet my eyes. He was looking down, and a little to the right.
“You know I didn’t kill my wife,” he said.
Then he looked back up at me, as if to gauge my reaction, and a moment later the door behind him opened and the guard came through. Scott stood and turned his back and walked away without another word. I watched him until he was out of sight, watched until he and the guard slipped outside and the door swung shut behind them.
It was the first time he had proclaimed his innocence.
And I really, truly wanted to believe him.