Harker and Amunds tried to unscramble all this confusion of dates and movements, but didn’t make much headway. Laren didn’t seem to know herself. They moved on to the morning of September 12.

“Six A.M.,” said Harker, “he’s dead. Okay. So what do you do with him at that point?”

“We say, ‘What are we going to do with him?’ and I say, ‘I don’t know.’ And she says, ‘Well, take the sheet that he’s lying on,’ and we wrapped it around him. And we took duct tape and wrapped it around him, and he was, like, in a crouch position … in my garage we had this one refrigerator.” She and Sarah dragged the body down to the refrigerator in the garage, took out the shelves, and stuffed Larry’s body, still wrapped in the sheet and duct tape, inside. Then they closed the door.

Laren said she then drove back to Los Angeles. Sarah was supposed to return to the horse show the next day.

“I called her,” Laren said, “and said, ‘Can you go by the house?’ And she told me [later] that she went by the house and that the refrigerator had come open, so she had to [put] him back in there, and [close it] with duct tape all the way around.”

“Because it was a tight fit?”

“Yeah. And so she was driving down, she got into a car accident … the next day she flew down to L.A. and then we just told everyone that he went back to the cult.” They sold the truck, Laren said.

“Were you gonna bury him in the back yard, or—?”

“No … we talked about burying him in the back yard, we talked about burying him over at the trainer’s, we talked about taking him to the desert and burying him. We didn’t know what to do, and then time starts going by, a month, a couple of months, and then, this girl we hired, it’s my understanding, called the police and said she thought that Larry was abusing me, because she knows that …”

This was a reference to Ginger Miller, and how Laren would know about Ginger’s November 30 tip to the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department that Larry was missing is curious. It’s possible that Larry’s lawyer Georgeann McKee may have told Laren about Ginger when she first called in December to tell Laren to have Larry call the police. But for Laren to explain why Ginger would have called meant going into why Ginger was mad, which would have opened all the fraud problems, undercutting Laren’s attempt to establish the battered-spouse defense that she’d already clearly embarked upon. It was better to tell Harker and Amunds that Ginger had “known” that Larry was abusing Laren (even though Ginger had never met him) and let it go at that.

Harker and Amunds nevertheless zeroed in on the operation of the law office, and soon Laren admitted that money was moved out of the client trust account into the general account, and then out the door to pay for things. She indicated that Larry was in on this. Harker asked how much money had been moved around this way, and Laren said it was about half a million dollars over the previous two years. Laren said probably $350,000 had been replaced in the client trust account over the two-year period, leaving it about $150,000 short. That was the same amount that had been ripped off from the Carters, of course.

By December, Laren continued, when the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department started asking about Larry, she and Sarah had realized they needed to do something about the body in the refrigerator. The day after Georgeann McKee called and told Laren that the police thought Larry was dead—that was December 12—she and Sarah decided to take the body to Las Vegas and leave it there.

“The next day we were supposed to be going to Las Vegas, so we put him in the trunk of the car.”

“Which car was that?”

“The Jaguar.”

Harker and Amunds wanted to know how they’d managed to get the body into the trunk.

“We took a trailer tire,” Laren said. “A tire for the horse trailer. We played the tire down in front of the refrigerator, opened the refrigerator door, slid him out, put him on the trailer tire … back up the Jag … and pushed him off the tire into the trunk. And he was shaped like this, you know [folded from the refrigerator], and we closed the trunk and went off to Las Vegas.”

When they got to Las Vegas, Laren said, they drove into the parking structure of the Bellagio hotel.

“We pulled up to the parking garage and there was a security guard there, and they said, ‘Can you pop the trunk?’ Sarah was driving, and I said, ‘What did she say?’ ‘Pop the trunk.’ [Sarah pushed the button to open the trunk.] Well I jumped out of the car at this point … and I said, ‘We’re looking for the Mirage,’ and I just pushed the trunk closed.”

“What was Sarah thinking?”

“She was just freaked out, she didn’t know, we were, like, living for every day after that happened.”

Laren said her plan was to bury Larry somewhere near Las Vegas. She said they had a shovel with them in the Jag.

The first night in Las Vegas, Sarah stayed in the hotel with Ralphie and Morgan, while Laren went out looking for a suitable spot to bury Larry. She couldn’t find anyplace, so she went out again the following night.

“I thought, Okay, I can do this, and I started digging,” Laren said, but she couldn’t do it. “So I went back to the hotel and I told her, ‘I can’t do it,’ and the whole time he’s still in the trunk and the valets are parking us, and it’s not good …”

Laren said the ground was too hard.

“So we came home that night, Sunday, and Sarah says, ‘You have to bury him today.’” Haylei wasn’t around, Laren said. “So I told her [Sarah], ‘I will take care of him’… so I got up at four in the morning, and it was raining and … I dug a hole.”

“How big of a hole did you dig?”

“Not big enough, obviously.”

She’d dug the hole in the rain and mud, but quit before long, Laren said. Laren indicated that Sarah was with her.

“Sarah said, ‘Make sure you take all his clothes off and then take off all the clothes that you’re wearing and get rid of them,” Laren said.

“Why did she say that?”

“For DNA and so on.”

“Did she say DNA?”

“Yeah, because she didn’t want her hair on him and she has a lot of hair.”

“So you took all his clothes off?”

“Well, I couldn’t because of the sheets and the duct tape … I couldn’t.”

Laren mumbled something inaudible. It appears that she indicated that Sarah cut off the sheet and the duct tape with the red scissors that had been found at the scene.

She’d pried the body out of the trunk with two pieces of plastic, then down onto a blanket, Laren said. “I rolled him onto the blanket and I dragged the blanket down to the hole … I had to pull and push and turn and pull the blanket the whole way down there and it was deep in mud the whole time.”

“So you’re getting stuck as you’re going?”

“Yeah, we … and then, Sarah said, ‘Pull.’ So I cut the stuff off him and then I rolled him into the hole, but not [deep enough].” There was no light to see by, she said. “I just couldn’t chance it. I couldn’t see anything, and so there was a lot of water and then we covered him up the best I could and I took, like, this grass … and I couldn’t find the scissors.”

Laren said they looked for the scissors for about an hour, fruitlessly.

After disposing of Larry’s body in the vineyard, Laren drove all over the area, even going far east of Sacramento, dumping clothes and shoes in Dumpsters to get rid of the evidence.

She got back to the Woodbridge house about 8 in the morning, Laren said. She and Sarah cleaned the Jaguar bumper to bumper. Then they started on the refrigerator.