The exit sign said MERCY ROAD, but on this morning, both words were a lie. There was no road, and there would be no mercy.
Newlyweds Cynthia Knott and Bill Weick got off the freeway at the exit, pulled their Volkswagen Beetle up to the ROAD CLOSED sign, and stopped. They didn’t know what lay beyond it.
Beyond it, the off-ramp curved down onto old Highway 395, which the freeway had replaced. Now it was just an underused bike trail leading to a deserted highway overpass overlooking a steep canyon with a dry creek bed. The area was so desolate and forbidding that it was a go-to spot for the furtive: undocumented migrants sharing meals, hookers giving blow jobs, junkies getting off, and sometimes, police officers stealing a forbidden snooze or a smoke or a few minutes of solitude to write their reports. On this nearly moonless morning, the place was empty and dark and pillowed in fog.
Cynthia and Bill had been crisscrossing the freeway for any clue to the whereabouts of Cynthia’s twenty-year-old kid sister, Cara. This was their second stop at Mercy Road that night; the first time they had obeyed the sign. They were obedient by nature, but they were at the end of their rope. Should they go in?
Cara Knott had phoned her parents at 8:30, saying she was leaving her boyfriend’s house and driving to theirs, a forty-minute shot down Interstate 15 from Escondido to El Cajon. Nearly two hours later, with no Cara at home and no further word from her—she was always punctual and always kept her family alerted to delays—the large Knott family had mobilized a search party. Multiple cars began retracing Cara’s route, exploring off-ramps. Cara’s mother, Joyce Knott, and Cheryl, the third sister, stayed home, coordinating phone calls, trying hospitals and police stations, trying Cara’s friends. Trying anyone they could think of.
It had gone on for hours. The Knotts had traversed every inch of highway. The whole night had passed, and dawn was just breaking. And now, in desperation, Bill Weick eased his car around the sign. Alert for axle-breaking ruts, he drove almost a quarter of a mile past piles of trash into the eerie dark and silence, and then they saw it: Cara’s white Volkswagen Beetle, parked at an odd angle in a dead end, inexplicably far from the highway.
For a split second, elation. Then fear. Then hope—a sliver of it, anyway. After a night of nothing, here was something.
Cynthia ran to the car. The engine was off, the keys in the ignition. No Cara. (If she got out to walk, why would she leave her keys?) The driver’s side window was half open. (She would never crack the window in a place like this, not for anyone.) On the passenger seat, a receipt for gas from a station some ten miles away. (Did someone see her in the station and follow her?) In the back seat, Cara’s pocketbook, with money and credit cards. (Not good at all.) No Cara. Husband and wife bellowed her name into the fog. No Cara.
Cynthia and Bill got back in their car and pulled away to find a pay phone. Finally, at least, the police would have to listen.
WE ARRIVE AT CERTAIN assumptions about the things in life we need not fear and those that we must. It’s a necessary accommodation to negotiate this world without falling prisoner to all its attendant terrors. For Southern Californians, the events of that miserable night in 1986 and the discoveries that followed would rupture that fundamental compact about the people and institutions we can intuitively trust. And it would set an anguished father on a lifelong crusade on behalf of crime victims—designed perhaps as much to save his sanity as to right a wrong.
The father was Sam Knott, a tall, florid-faced, raspy-voiced man who counseled people on their investments. It was he who had taken the phone call from Cara at 8:30 that Saturday night as his family sat around the Christmas tree, did a jigsaw puzzle, and watched a VHS tape of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. (This family enjoyed cornball.) And it was Sam who sat bolt upright when Cara was more than an hour and a half late and announced that he knew something was wrong. Sam was intuitive. In court, he would describe that moment in mystical terms: “It was a call to my soul.”
At one point on the nightlong search, Sam Knott stopped two police officers to tell them of his missing daughter. The officers informed him that a person had to be missing twenty-four hours before an APB could be issued. It was an inviolable policy, they said. Later in the night, briefly back home and making phone calls, Sam was told much the same thing but in a more callous way. One dispatcher urged him not to worry because “girls will be girls.” A California Highway Patrol dispatcher told him she could retire if she had a dollar for every briefly missing young person who turns up fine—if it is a woman, presumably blushing and debauched. Then the dispatcher blandly suggested that Sam “check the jails.”
Sam did not check the jails. Cara, the youngest Knott daughter, was almost a caricature of a nice girl—congenial, sweet-natured, law-abiding almost to a fault. At the zoo, privately deputizing herself, she would stop strangers from feeding the animals. In no-smoking areas, she’d ask smokers to desist. If she saw a guy littering, she’d pick the trash up, hand it back to him, and politely point out the closest trash can. How many people have the personality to pull this off without being dismissed as a scold? Cara did.
A top student at San Diego State, she was an ardent environmentalist and an athlete who ran the high hurdles and won. She was also a chocolate-eyed beauty with blond Farrah Fawcett hair and an authentic full-face smile—a head-turner who seemed naively oblivious to her own allure. Once, on a trip to Europe, a man who found himself unexpectedly in her presence accidentally walked into a swimming pool. Cara had no idea what had just happened or why.
Cara Knott’s high school photo—the one that would be given out to the press by a grieving family on December 28, 1986—was so lovely and heartbreakingly wholesome that it would push her story onto front pages even in some newspapers outside of California.
Bill Weick and Cynthia Knott finally reached a pay phone, and the San Diego police finally had an inarguable reason to mobilize.
JIM SPEARS WAS THE FIRST patrol officer to drive to the scene, speeding down I-15 to Mercy Road. After being briefed by Cynthia and Bill, Spears approached Cara’s car. He put on gloves, reached inside, and half turned the key. The gas gauge crept all the way to full. It was an automatic transmission, in park. Still outside, Spears hit the ignition. The engine started up and idled just fine for a few seconds until he shut it off.
Spears did not tell the family why he’d done that, in case they hadn’t figured it out, because the results were not encouraging. Cara’s 1968 VW was old, but the engine and battery were evidently fine. It was not car trouble that brought her here. An unalarming explanation for her absence was getting more unlikely, but Spears felt it was still possible, right until the moment he looked down at the driver’s side door and saw a small drop of what appeared to be blood.
He didn’t tell the family about this, either. He just asked them to stay away from the car. Thirty years later, Spears would remember how the sight of blood put him into “instant crime-scene mode.” A second officer, Mary Cornicelli, had arrived, and right on her tail, Sam Knott. Sam just followed her squad car in, wanting to ask for help, never expecting to find Cynthia there or Cara’s VW.
Jim Spears radioed his acting sergeant, Bill Maheu. Spears knew he had to be careful in what he said, both because the family was within earshot and because local journalists monitored police radio transmissions and understood cop talk—the last thing Spears needed were reporters crawling around the scene. What he wanted to tell Maheu was that he had “possible 187,” which meant a homicide. But all he actually said was that he was requesting backup. Maheu took in the urgency of his patrolman’s voice and understood. He decided to drive to the scene himself.
After calling the police, Cynthia had gotten back on the pay phone, alerting the family. So by the time Maheu pulled into the Mercy Road exit, another car had arrived, and then a third. Cara’s sister Cheryl drove in from the south with her grandfather. Then, from the north, Cara’s boyfriend, Wayne Bautista. It had likely been years since that many people were together at one time, for one purpose, at Mercy Road.
Like all the cops in the area, Maheu knew the reputation of this phantom exit. He knew its remoteness led to the occasional transactional liaison, but he dismissed this idea almost immediately when he saw these people. His experience told him that when there is something sordid or irresponsible or mentally unstable in the background of a missing person, if this was a likely runaway, you can usually read it in the faces of friends and family. One or two of them would be less distraught than the others. They would know. But out on Mercy Road, Maheu was looking at a large, engaged, attractive family uniformly scared out of its wits.
The sergeant drove back to the station so he’d have a secure line to call for homicide detectives and a K-9 officer. Then he returned to the scene. This time he decided to approach it from the north. He got off at the next exit, Poway Road, parked, and walked back toward Mercy Road along the old highway bridge. That gave him a good view of the whole canyon. He glanced left and right, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and then looked down toward the creek bed, sixty-five feet below, which is when he drew a sharp breath.
Maheu was young for a sergeant—only twenty-seven—but he was long on experience, some of it harrowing. Thirty years later, he would remember finding Cara Knott’s body as one of just a handful of on-the-job memories that he could not erase. It’s not the violence that sticks with him, exactly—for police officers, violence can become both banal and routine. Maheu tends to remember moments that take him inside himself.
Just two years before, he had been at the scene of the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre, one of the worst mass killings in American history. A mentally ill man with assault weapons had opened fire in a crowded McDonald’s, methodically murdering twenty-one people as they cowered, aiming deliberately to pick off children as their mothers tried to shield them. One of the dead was eight months old. By the time Maheu arrived with a SWAT team, the killer had already been taken down. The evidence of James Huberty’s savagery was all over, but the thing that stays with Maheu most vividly was meeting the eyes of a survivor, a teenager in a McDonald’s uniform, as she was stumbling out of the restaurant. She was not physically injured, but her face told him that she would never be the same person she was when she arrived at work that day. What he remembers feeling was profound futility. There are things no cop can fix.
On Mercy Road, Maheu took Spears aside and quietly told him that he’d seen a woman’s body under the bridge. The two men headed down to the creek bed by foot, accompanied by a police dog and his handler, who had just arrived. As they walked, the men put on surgical gloves. They disappeared from the view of the Knotts.
Cara was on her back, wearing white half boots, purple sweat pants, and a white sweatshirt, lying in a bed of pebbles and scrub brush and trash. Her left arm was across her chest. She could have been asleep, except for the blood that dappled her shirt. Spears felt for her carotid artery, but he knew it was futile even before he found no pulse. Her neck was as cold as the chill in the air, and stiff with rigor mortis.
This was the indelible moment for Maheu. A graceful young woman with impeccably manicured nails, fully engaged in life, beloved by a big family that was about to have the worst day of their lives become immeasurably worse . . . dumped like a sack of garbage.
Had the two men inspected further, they would have seen the cause of death, but that wasn’t their job. At this point, Maheu and Spears had two responsibilities. The first was hard: They’d need to preserve a sprawling crime scene down here in the canyon and up on the bridge until the homicide detectives arrived. Their second job was harder.
“I’ll do it,” said Spears. He’d grown up in Brooklyn and feels it toughened him. He had a way of compartmentalizing things, of doing his job without feeling his job, and he thought he could handle this.
So it was Spears who walked ahead, alone, to Sam Knott. Before he could say anything, Sam met his eyes and said, “You found my daughter.” Sam was a shrewd and observant man, a good poker player. From the moment he’d seen Maheu and Spears slipping on gloves, Sam knew.
It turns out Spears wasn’t entirely right about compartmentalizing. He had trouble finding his voice, then trouble keeping it level and steady. His eyes welled. Finally: “Your daughter. She’s dead.”
The shock of such a disclosure often leaves family members uncomprehending, unwilling to accept it emotionally, and for some small time they’ll speak of the dead in the present tense. But Sam Knott had been given some minutes to prepare for this. He said to Spears: “If you had only known her. My daughter was an angel.”
Then he walked to his family and told them, and they sagged into one another’s embraces.
LATER IN THE DAY, the coroner would find broken bones and ruptured organs and conclude Cara Knott had been thrown from the highway bridge, a six-story fall that accounted for much of the blood and most of the injuries; one police officer told the Los Angeles Times “she was like a frozen Milky Way that’s been slammed against a table.” But it wasn’t the fall that had killed Cara. Over the orbit of her right eye she had a deep, shattering bruise. That also had not been fatal, but it had at least initially incapacitated her, which was what allowed her murderer to slip some sort of noose around her neck and strangle her to death. The ligature had necklaced her with welts and bruises, three separate strands of them, meaning at some point she’d likely writhed and struggled for her life. Or possibly the murderer had twice readjusted this grip, for better bite. In either event, the coroner concluded, death had come from asphyxiation.
IT’S ODD WHAT PROFESSIONALS take away from a scene of violent death. They tend to focus on small things. Homicide detective Bill Nulton, called to Mercy Road on his day off, had seen hundreds of bodies. The thing he remembers is that the fall had exposed Cara’s midriff, a little hint of belly, which made her seem even more violated and vulnerable. He had to keep the crime scene intact, so he couldn’t pull the shirt down. Nulton also saw that Cara wasn’t wearing a bra, and it troubled him that he was going to have to ask the family about that. If going braless had not been Cara’s custom, possibly there had been some sort of sex crime? And if so—where was the bra?
But the family confirmed she sometimes went without a bra, and the coroner determined she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, a fact that became part of the puzzle.
And it was a puzzle. For some reason, a good-natured, intelligent, demure, cautious young woman had threaded her car around a barrier and driven a quarter of a mile into a scary place, where she was bludgeoned, then strangled to death for no apparent reason. This wasn’t robbery. This wasn’t a carjacking. There was no rape. None of it made any sense.
If you have a suspicion about how Cara Knott came to arrive at that place and why she was murdered, it is likely because you are reading this in the twenty-first century, not in 1986. You are comparatively jaded. In 1986, certain things were unthinkable.
In the first couple of days after the murder, not a single investigator saw where this was heading. The cops had one working theory, which proved to be right: That Cara would have driven to that remote spot only with or at the direction of someone she thought she could trust. So the initial suspicion fell on Wayne Bautista, Cara’s boyfriend. But that proved to be wrong.
On the third day, there was a break in the case, and within a couple of weeks the identity of the prime suspect leaked out among members of the San Diego police. Bill Maheu remembers hearing about it from his fellow officer, Mary Cornicelli. And he remembers thinking: Of course.
WHEN POLICE FIND themselves with little to go on, they often seek help from the public, which means cooperating with the media, particularly TV stations. Put it all out there—maybe someone saw something. There may never have been a case in which this strategy worked better.
Police assisted the local ABC affiliate to put together a quick CrimeStoppers segment, using actors to show Cara stopping at a Chevron gas station off the interstate, near Bear Valley. The local NBC affiliate asked the California Highway Patrol to send an officer for a ride-around feature on vehicular safety—advising motorists on what to do, and what not to do, if they are alone at the wheel and encounter trouble. CHiPs offered up Craig Peyer, as they did so often for liaisons with the public. The patrolman presented well, if a bit unsmilingly. With his close-cropped hair and lugubrious manner, he bore a superficial resemblance to Sergeant Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am.
Peyer, thirty-six, was straitlaced, by the book, businesslike—the guy who wrote up the most summonses, who kept his cruiser spotless, his shirt crisp, his pants creased, his shoes gleaming. As he rode with young TV reporter Rory Devine on Monday night, he stayed on message, as he usually did, his solemn voice urging caution.
The video is still out there: Peyer, at the wheel at night, talks while keeping his eyes riveted on the road. He advises people who have car trouble to stay in their vehicles, even overnight if need be, even if a stranger stops and offers help. What he says next is so terse and blunt, it’s clearly intended to stay with you:
“Don’t get into anyone else’s car, because you’re at their mercy. Being a female you could get raped. Robbed, if you are a male. Um, all the way to where you could be killed.”
Thirty years later, Rory Devine, the TV reporter, would remember two unusual things about this otherwise routine assignment. She wanted to film some of the interview at Mercy Road, but Peyer nixed that. Never said why.
The second thing she remembers is Peyer stopping his car to help out a guy who ran out of gas. That put a question in her mind, one that hadn’t occurred to her before:
“I did say to him, ‘What if it’s a cop who stops you?’ and he said, ‘Well, that’s kind of a different story.’”
And . . .
“And I just let it go.”
ON DAY THREE, phone calls started coming in. Some callers had seen CrimeStoppers. Some had seen Rory Devine’s ride-along with Peyer. All had heard or read about Mercy Road as the scene of the crime. And a large number of the calls were from or on behalf of women—women who’d had strange, disturbing encounters with an officer Craig Peyer, on Mercy Road.
The women were all young with long hair and trim figures, and all had been alone at the wheel. Most were blondes. Several drove VW Beetles. They told roughly the identical story: Using his lights and blaring PA system, Peyer would pull them over on Interstate 15 for some trivial infraction that many cops might ignore—a busted taillight, misaligned headlights, failing to signal a lane change. (“Red Honda, please pull over on the right.”) The right was invariably Mercy Road. Then in many cases he’d direct them around the barrier, after which things would get . . . unnerving.
Sometimes he’d get in their cars or invite them into his. He’d engage them in small talk, sometimes for an excruciatingly long time. Sometimes it was about their driving or the daunting price of Southern California real estate. Sometimes he’d lecture them on how dangerous it is to be a woman traveling alone. Sometimes he’d compliment their appearance. (“You have beautiful eyes.”) Sometimes he’d inquire whether they had boyfriends. He creeped out a twenty-two-year-old department store security guard by asking if she’d ever watched females in the dressing rooms, changing clothes.
Altogether, about two dozen women had contacted the San Diego police to complain about a thoroughly skeevy encounter with patrolman Craig Peyer. Though none had been physically assaulted, and though they tended to agree the officer had been outwardly polite, many had been rattled by what they thought bordered on predatory behavior. He had to know he was making them uncomfortable. Several drove off with their hands trembling. Several said that he’d been so flirtatious they expected him to call them and ask them out.
It was during these first two weeks that word leaked out to the rank-and-file San Diego police that detectives were looking at a cop as the possible killer. Which is when acting sergeant Bill Maheu had his disturbing revelation.
It was someone Cara thought she could trust.
CRAIG PEYER WAS a thirteen-year CHiPs veteran with an unblemished record. Family man, nice suburban home, three kids in a blended marriage. Under questioning, he denied ever having stopped or seen Cara Knott that night. He produced his logbook, which showed that he’d given out a ticket at another part of the county at 9:20, roughly the time Cara was killed.
In the initial stages, police treated the investigation of Craig Peyer as a lead on which to show due diligence and then move on. Sure, this particular Sergeant Friday might turn out to be a creep who got his jollies by hitting on hot young blondes in situations with a power imbalance, but nothing about his past suggested criminality, certainly not a capacity for murder.
Still, they were obliged to check him out. What they found sickened them.
Late on the night of the murder, Peyer had walked into the stationhouse with bloody welts and abrasions on his face and right arm, and a story of how he had gotten them. He even filed a report: At the police station gas pumps, he said, he had stumbled on spilled gasoline and hit his head on a chain link fence. Investigators went to the gas pumps and took measurements. To have hit the chain link with his face, they concluded, he would have to have taken a running start and launched himself at it, like a high jumper.
Tire marks at the scene of the murder suggested the presence of a second vehicle, one that left in a hurry, burning rubber. It was a big, squat car: The distance between the tire tracks was fifty-three inches. Police cruisers are big, squat cars. The distance between Peyer’s tires was fifty-three inches.
Those things were suspicious but circumstantial, as were the blood tests. The droplet of blood Jim Spears had seen on Cara Knott’s car door was too small to yield any information, but investigators had found a larger drop on Cara Knott’s white boot. Cara’s blood was type O. The drop on the boot was type A, as was Peyer’s. This was before reliable DNA testing, but taken together with the few genetic markers found in the blood, experts determined the drop was rare enough that it could belong to only 1 in 161 people in the San Diego area. This abbreviated field included Craig Peyer, but also some 12,000 other people.
Detectives found no microscopic traces of Peyer in Cara’s car, or of Cara in Peyer’s car, or of blood inside either car. But they did learn that Peyer had meticulously cleaned out and hosed down his cruiser more than once in the days after the murder.
In Peyer’s trunk, detectives found a four-foot length of rope that was not standard-issue police equipment. It was narrow and braided, and its topology neatly matched the welts on Cara Knott’s neck. But a forensic search of the rope showed no microscopic shreds of skin or blood on it. Had he scrubbed it clean? Had the rope been longer before the murder, with the lethal part now discarded? Or was this all just a red herring?
Investigators went back to Peyer’s logbook to check out his principal alibi. He had written thirteen tickets that night, which was a ton for most patrolmen, but pretty standard for Peyer, known among his peers as a “hot pencil.” The logbook was meticulous, typical of Peyer. It was a three-ring binder into which he had entered the date and time of every traffic stop he’d made.
It showed that he gave a speeding ticket to a woman at 7:45 and another to a man shortly after eight P.M. Then there was an uncharacteristically long gap before the next ticket was issued. It was for a broken taillight. That’s the one that showed 9:20, around the time of the murder. But there was something odd about this entry. The time looked altered.
Detectives found the recipient, a high school student named Jean-Pierre Gulli. The teenager told them the stop had been at ten P.M. The officer, he said, seemed to be in a big hurry, and had initially put the time as 10:30 on his ticket. But then, Gulli said, the officer scratched that out and made it 9:20. Investigators found the ticket itself. It had been altered, too.
Finally came the most intriguing clue of all. It was the size of an eyelash.
On Cara Knott’s clothing, detectives had found a single tiny gold-colored fiber. It matched nothing Cara was wearing. It was so unusual looking—ostentatious gold, as though not from a garment but from some sort of ornamental display—that it stuck in the mind of the forensic fiber expert, John Simms. So when Simms was given the uniform that Peyer had worn on the night of the murder, he saw something he might have otherwise overlooked. The uniform was bland khaki, but it had a CHiPs insignia on a shoulder, and the insignia had gold braiding.
Simms extracted a fiber and put both samples under a polarized light microscope; they were at least highly similar. Both were pigmented rayon, and when the pigments were further studied under a spectrophotometer, they were chemically identical. It was a perfect match of what turned out to be a rare type of thread. Peyer kept his uniforms in spotless condition, so his lasted longer than most other officers’. Its patch was more than five years old. Almost all CHiPs patrolmen had newer uniforms, with patches that had been made using a different dyeing process, showing a different spectrophotometric profile.
This nailed it for them. Craig Peyer had betrayed his badge, and it then betrayed him.
On January 15, 1987, he was charged with first-degree murder.
NEWS OF THE KILLING had disturbed San Diego, but news of Peyer’s arrest traumatized it. That basic social contract—you obey police and in return they protect you—had been shredded. Ordinary highway stops became tense encounters. Young women began refusing to pull over in areas that were not brightly illuminated. At least one arrest was made for this disobedience, but a court overturned it. Quickly the state passed a law allowing motorists stopped by police to pull ahead as far as they wanted, into a place they felt safe. Law enforcement organizations were outraged; government seemed to be saying the public was justified in fearing police.
Bringing the case against Peyer was Joseph Van Orshoven, a well-regarded prosecutor with a well-known drinking problem. He was in his late fifties, craggy-faced, silver-haired, sober of mien. This 1987 trial, his last big one, was a disaster.
Juries like things neatly sealed. The absence of a smoking gun—say, an eyewitness to the crime or a fingerprint match—is always a challenge for a district attorney.
Although a parade of young blond female witnesses extravagantly established Peyer’s disturbing behavior, not one woman said he was impolite or touched her inappropriately. The blood and fiber evidence was highly suggestive, but not conclusive.
No one could clearly place Peyer at the scene of the crime at the time of the crime. The defense took advantage of some of Van Orshoven’s sloppiness to turn small discrepancies in evidence into what seemed like significant holes in the case. Some prosecution witnesses had not been properly prepared: Canny cross-examination of the coroner made it seem as though the time of death could not even be approximated, undercutting the significance of Peyer’s logbook adjustments. After seven days, the jury declared itself deadlocked, split seven to five for conviction. Craig Peyer went free, pending a new trial. It came the following year. This time things would be different.
A new prosecutor was chosen—Paul Pfingst, a recent arrival in San Diego. At thirty-five, he had been an assistant district attorney from New York, a hotshot who had already won more than twenty murder convictions. Pale, fair-haired, and sharp-featured, he looked like a cross between Art Garfunkel and William Hurt.
Pfingst was determined to learn from Van Orshoven’s mistakes, among them having marginalized the Knott family. No one was more emotionally involved in this case than the Knotts, particularly its patriarch, and Pfingst realized they could be a resource. In the days after the mistrial, Sam Knott, on his own, had assembled in his home seven of the jurors and debriefed them about what had gone wrong. Pfingst listened to Knott and learned. He also saw some things Van Orshoven had missed, particularly regarding Peyer’s movements on the night of the murder.
Just as Nazis’ meticulous record-keeping created evidentiary problems for them when they faced tribunals of justice, Peyer’s hot pencil had given prosecutors a gift. By stopping so many cars that night and recording where and when he had done so, Peyer had allowed Pfingst to create a convincing timeline of the patrol route he had taken. And because Cara had gotten gas not long before her murder and the receipt was time-stamped, Pfingst could match times and places and probable rates of speed to place the officer and the victim at roughly the identical place on Interstate 15 at roughly the identical moment. As Cara was getting back onto the highway, heading south after gassing up at Bear Valley, Peyer was following his circular route, making a U-turn on the interstate, getting back on, going south . . . at Bear Valley. Pfingst blew up the timeline into a huge, convincing exhibit.
According to testimony, just days before her murder Cara Knott had taken a course in self-defense. The instructor advised women not to be docile. If things become threatening, Cara had been told, “explode” toward the eyes and throat. Use your nails. Claw and gouge. Craig Peyer’s injuries, the prosecution contended, precisely reflected that lesson perhaps too well learned.
After giving his testimony, Bill Maheu remembers walking out of the courtroom, seeing a bench filled with attractive, long-haired blondes, and smiling to himself. The parade of lovelies was about to begin again. But among them he noticed one young man. The man also had long blond hair. He’d been stopped by Peyer at Mercy Road, too. And of all the blondes, only the man testified he had not been detained for a long time. When Peyer walked up to the window from behind, the man said, the patrolman looked at him and quickly sent him on his way.
And finally, there was a surprise witness. Not long before trial, Pfingst heard from a young woman named Traci Koenig who claimed she’d been on I-15 the night of the murder. She said she’d seen a white VW bug with a woman inside get pulled over by a highway patrolman at the Mercy Road exit, between eight and nine o’clock.
Pfingst was skeptical. Where was Traci Koenig for the first trial? Why was she showing up now? He figured she might be a publicity seeker or a nut, but both possibilities evaporated when he met her. She hadn’t been alone that night—she’d been with her fiancé, who confirmed the sighting. She had also told her parents about it both before and after news of the murder broke, and they confirmed it to Pfingst, too.
Why had she not come forward before? Because, Traci said, she had a secret she did not want to have to disclose in testimony—an arrest for retail theft—and because, based on news reports, prosecutors seemed to have had a good case without her. Now she felt guilty.
The defense went nuts at this eleventh-hour bombshell. But Traci and her boyfriend were allowed to testify. At last there was an eyewitness, if not to the crime itself then to its ominous beginnings. It was devastating to Peyer’s case.
It was not the trial’s most unforgettable moment, though. That came when Pfingst put Sam Knott on the stand, to testify about the morning of December 28, when Cara’s body was discovered. As Sam described his lone car ride home from Mercy Road at midday, when he was agonizing over just how to tell his wife, Joyce, that their youngest daughter was dead, he wept, which was to be expected. What was unexpected was the way this father’s sorrow drenched the courtroom and crept into nearly everyone’s heart.
Paul Pfingst, sixty-five, is now a partner in a San Diego law firm. “I have tried many murder cases and supervised hundreds more,” he says. “I have seen victims and victims’ families get up and testify, and I’ve seen people touched by them. But I never saw anything like this, before or since. Everyone in the courtroom was crying. Jurors were crying. The defense lawyers were crying. I have never been known for sentimentality—legions of people wonder if I have any sentiment at all—and I was crying. On the bench, the judge, Richard Huffman, tried to rotate his chair away from the jurors, so they couldn’t see. But he was crying.”
Through his attorneys, Craig Peyer maintained his innocence, though he never testified. On June 22, 1988, he was convicted of first-degree murder. He got twenty-five years to life.
THE CASE WAS over for everyone but a small cadre of appeals attorneys, and Sam Knott. For Sam Knott, things had barely begun.
Since the night of the murder, Sam had become intimately familiar with a law enforcement system he felt was fatally corrupted, not by intentional misconduct but by institutional indifference and disorganization. He was particularly galled to learn that before the murder, at least two women had complained to CHiPs superiors about Peyer’s behavior during traffic stops; not only were the complaints dismissed, but Peyer was complimented for being so friendly and thorough.
Sam Knott felt that his family had been betrayed by the system and that he was going to be the one to fix it. It would be a deeply personal crusade, and it would keep the memory of Cara alive. To those close to Sam, it sometimes seemed that in his mind, it kept Cara herself alive.
Sam understood he had the benefit of public sympathy, and he was determined not to squander it. In public appearances, he kept his rage in check, but his indignation was front and center always. His voice was measured, his comportment stoic. He never, ever uttered Peyer’s name, not to family and friends, not in interviews with the media, not in lobbying meetings, not in testimony. His daughter’s killer simply became “the monster.” This Manichaean view helped him frame the issue: There are monsters out there; all the rest of us must mobilize against them.
Sam Knott had developed a game plan. He typed it up as something of a manifesto, dozens of pages, single spaced, divided into chapters. Some still survive.
Here’s chapter 11, which is about making improvements in CHiPs. Chapter 11 has twenty-one subsections. Each item is both pragmatic and personal, with Sam’s outrage evident in every occasional stressed, capitalized, and boldfaced syllable.
Subsection 3: The recognition on the part of the CHP that it is an Intolerable Situation to Not Know the Location of All Officers in the Field by the field supervisory sergeant or duty watch commander.
Subsection 7: The development of an Educational Program for all dispatchers and CHP personnel . . . that specifically addresses Attitude Question or Mindset that a Call-in by a Citizen Is Somehow a Meaningless Call-in by a Traffic Violator or a Lawbreaker. This bureaucratic attitude on the part of the CHP was a fundamental element that contributed to Cara’s murder. The failure by the CHP supervisory staff to take seriously or hear the alarm calls from concerned citizens about a dangerous traffic stop made in a dark and desolate area.
Sam Knott’s first specific target was the Mercy Road exit itself. Within weeks he had hectored local authorities into sealing it off. Next he attacked the twenty-four-hour missing-persons rule—some local police jurisdictions even insisted on forty-eight hours—and won that at the statehouse in Sacramento. A new law, enacted in response to his testimony, elevated the status of missing-persons reports, meaning police agencies had to activate search protocols immediately if there were reasonable grounds to suspect foul play.
Outraged that police labs were not availing themselves of the most modern science, Knott pestered authorities until the federal government awarded the first national grant for research in DNA forensics to the sexual assault unit at a medical center in Seattle. It would be the start of a revolution in public funding for DNA testing.
On behalf of his family, Sam Knott also filed a $7.5 million wrongful death claim against the state and CHiPs. The family would eventually—many years later—settle for $2.7 million.
The Knotts became concerned by Sam’s obsession. His health was beginning to fail, and the stress of his crusade didn’t help. He was diverting more and more time to it, so the family’s finances were suffering. But Sam was unstoppable. He began to lobby for cameras and GPS devices on police cars—the technology for both was there, but largely unused in law enforcement—to keep tabs on where officers are and what they are doing. Public servants were beginning to cringe when Sam Knott showed up at their office doors; few welcomed his dreadnought approach, though most were in genuine awe of it.
After an eight-year crusade, by 1996, Sam had persuaded the state to help set up a memorial garden under the old highway bridge, near the spot where Cara’s body had thudded to the ground. It was dedicated to victims of violent crimes. The old bridge—formerly the Los Penasquitos Creek Bridge—was renamed the Cara Knott Memorial Bridge. The road leading down to the oak grove became Cara Way. The initial plantings were oak saplings Sam Knott had grown in his backyard, from acorns.
The San Diego Crime Victims Oak Garden is a serene place, with hiking paths, planned and impromptu artwork, and a big central gazebo. The preferred method of remembrance is an engraved garden stone. Cara’s is a simple white one that reads: Cara Knott, In Loving Memory 1966–1986.
Nearby is a stone for Charles “Chuck” Crow (Forever in our hearts), a young father shot to death in his Jeep in 2006 during an encounter with a rancher onto whose property he had driven. When the rancher was acquitted of manslaughter, Crow’s mother left the courtroom, begging sheriff’s deputies to shoot her, too. Exactly what had happened during the fatal confrontation is in dispute, but what is clear is that the shooter was more than ably represented in court. His lawyer was Paul Pfingst. The criminal justice system is not without bittersweet ironies.
And it still must deal with the incomprehensible: One stone is for Leah Tadeo, who was seventeen when she was shotgunned to death by a man who thought she had slighted him by crossing out his nickname, which had been soaped onto a mirror during a party. He’s in prison for life.
The grove bears testament to the timelessness of grief. Engraved on a stone for Nikki Benedict is a 1960s peace symbol and these words: Still skipping stones and feeling groovy. Nikki was killed in 1967, at age fourteen, stabbed in the heart while walking home from a friend’s house not far from Mercy Road. The killer has never been found.
As often as he could, Sam Knott would return to the memorial grove, which is where he was on the afternoon of November 30, 2000, tidying up Cara’s small ring of stones and clearing some brush. When he was done, he got in his car and drove back up toward the interstate.
What happened next is part surmise: It was dinnertime. To head home, Sam should have turned left when he reached I-15, but instead, inexplicably, he turned right. It may be that he felt the coronary coming. He drove a short distance, until he was just over Cara’s memorial, a hundred feet above it. Responsible as always, he pulled over to the side of the road and died. He was sixty-three.
“Half of him died there,” says Paul Pfingst. “The other half had died on December 28, 1986.”
Of the circumstances of Sam’s death, Pfingst says: “It was the wrong time, but the perfect place. I like to think it was divine intervention. When it was Sam’s time to go, I like to think he was directed to that spot to take his last breath.”
There’s now a stone for Sam Knott in the crime victims memorial. He was, after all, a crime victim, too.
CRAIG PEYER has never confessed. Though his guilt is obvious, some mystery remains. How did a harmlessly creepy police officer become a cold-blooded murderer? What, exactly, happened that night between the cop and his victim?
Paul Pfingst believes he knows. He spent weeks re-creating that traffic stop in his mind, cross-checking it against available evidence, testing it against what he knew of the personalities of the killer and victim, so he could lay it out to a jury in a persuasive narrative.
As Pfingst talks about it thirty years later, it is as though no time has passed. “It is an escalating pattern of misbehavior. The pattern involves stopping attractive women on the highway and exercising control over them. Their responses were to try to please him, to avoid getting a ticket. It made Peyer feel manly. It was a sick appetite, and it became an addiction.”
In the days before he killed Cara, Peyer was getting bolder and more outrageous, stopping more women, bringing them further into the desolation of the Mercy Road dead end, holding them longer, sometimes for more than an hour. It was a compulsion that was getting out of hand. On December 26, the day before Cara was killed, he pulled over three separate women at Mercy Road for lengthy, skin-crawling interrogations in a place so far off the highway that it was beyond the range of a scream. Then Cara.
Paul Pfingst:
We know Cara had an inoperative light over her license plate. That’s probably the pretext under which he stops her. He directs her into this unsafe place. She realizes there is something very wrong about this place, how isolated it is, and she is alarmed. Her car is facing back toward the highway. His car is facing her, and I think it is blocking her escape. When he approaches her, she gets out of her car. They are both out of their cars. She’s a track star; if she has to, she is thinking she can outrun him back up to the highway, where she will be comparatively safe. It all happens outside the cars, which is why there’s no evidence inside either one.
She is the kind of person who will speak up for herself, and she has her father’s strong sense of right and wrong. She is no doormat. She is the kind of person who will say, “I’m going to report this. I am going to tell my family, I’m going to tell my father.”
He doesn’t know what to do except what cops do, which is take control, issue directives. It doesn’t go well with her. When he attempts to reassure her, it has the opposite effect. When things go off script, he is not someone able to summon reassuring personal vibes. I think at this point there is physical touching. Maybe he pulls her arm. She becomes indignant. She says, “You can’t do this.” She struggles to pull away, and he restrains her with greater force. Now her self-defense training kicks in. She goes for his face. He reacts instinctively, reflexively. He is already holding his flashlight. He hits her over the head with it. She’s down.
Now he recognizes this is all falling apart. He had treated her not like a young woman but like some DUI guy who was violently resisting arrest. He realizes there is no way this can be explainable. Any investigation will certainly uncover his prior behavior, certainly result in termination of his career and maybe his marriage. His whole identity, his ego, is tied up in being a CHiPs officer. Now he’s got to kill her.
How do you kill a gal and leave as few traces as possible? He can pummel her and get blood all over himself—that doesn’t make any sense. He can’t shoot her because ballistics would get him. He can’t just throw her off the bridge. It’s a soft river bottom, with leaves and debris and muck. She might survive the fall. Remember this is all happening in real time; there is no time to reflect. He must act. He can strangle her, but if you do it with your bare hands, you might leave evidence, skin under the fingernails. Plus, it’s too personal. You have to push down, looking at her looking up at you doing it. He’s making this up as he’s going along. He’s full of adrenaline.
Then he remembers, and goes to his trunk. This is where a misunderstanding becomes first-degree murder. It is so cold and cruel and premeditated. Maybe she is coming to. He lays her prone, on her belly, wraps the rope around her neck and strangles her from the back. Maybe he’s got a knee between her shoulder blades. His hands are in close to the neck. It takes less time than you think. Less than four minutes. It’s done.
Now he has a big problem. Ideally, he brings the body to somewhere where it would deteriorate, where animals would get to it before people find it. But what do you do with her car? You can’t move it because you’d have to get in it. But as soon as her car is discovered, everything will unravel. You can’t transport her anywhere, because her blood will get in your car. You do the best you can.
You put her on the top of your car. You can hose that off, and you will. You drive a few hundred feet to the overpass and throw her over. But you do have to carry her to the roof of the car and then to the bridge. You try to be careful—try to avoid blood on her, but there are fibers that transfer, and one of them is gold. . . .
Then you burn rubber getting out of there. You have to get back on the road before it becomes more obvious you are missing. You’ve got to write tickets to cover your ass.
THE ONE PERSON who can confirm or correct that narrative, won’t. Craig Peyer’s consistent and continuing story is that he never met Cara Knott. It has been his story for thirty years.
And yet.
One fact neither jury ever heard was that in the days after the killing and before Peyer’s arrest, he volunteered to take a lie detector exam administered by the police. Independently reviewing the results, four separate polygraph operators concluded he was lying when he answered no to two relevant questions. They were: “Are you responsible for the death of Cara Knott?” and “Regarding the death of Cara Knott, did you strangle her and throw her body off that bridge?”
And then there is this:
Not long after winning the Peyer case, Paul Pfingst became San Diego’s district attorney, and he instituted a new policy, the first of its kind in the country: In cases where it might expose a miscarriage of justice, his office would use public funds to conduct DNA tests on old evidence in convictions obtained before 1993, before DNA testing was used. All he would require was a request from the convict. Pfingst’s office identified more than seven hundred such cases, one of which was Craig Peyer’s.
DNA testing has been a godsend for the unjustly convicted. Nationally, it has exonerated dozens of people and set them free, some from death row.
In 2003, Pfingst’s co-counsel in the Peyer trial, Joan Stein, contacted Peyer’s lawyers. If Peyer requests it, she said, the county will retest the blood in the case, including the spot of blood on Cara Knott’s boot, which had been central to his conviction. If under more rigorous testing it turned out not to be Peyer’s, he might get a new trial.
Days went by. Then the answer came: No, thanks.
A few months later, at his parole hearing, Peyer’s attorneys announced in advance that he would take no questions. Stein, however, was allowed to have one of hers entered into the record, and it was read aloud at the hearing. It was: “If you are innocent, as you maintain, why did you decline to have a DNA test that could prove it?”
Peyer remained silent, staring straight ahead.
No, he didn’t get parole. He didn’t in 2008, either. Or 2012. He’s up next in 2027.