During Scott Peterson’s notorious five-month trial 21 years ago, he never took the witness stand to defend himself against charges he murdered his pregnant wife, Laci, and threw her body in the San Francisco Bay so he could be free to carry on with his massage-therapist mistress from Fresno.
Back in 2004, he left it to high-profile lawyer Mark Geragos to tell the jury why he was “stone cold innocent.” Except for a prison interview last year for a Peacock docuseries that provided few revelations, statements two decades earlier while Laci was still missing, and a disastrous interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer in which he claimed his affair was known to his wife and had little affect on their “glorious” marriage, Peterson has said little publicly about his case.
But in an extraordinary and detailed 126-page, first-person declaration tucked into his latest appeal for a new trial, Peterson attempted to explain, point by point, the circumstantial case against him that convinced a jury he was guilty.
“I have lived with the pain of my poor judgment for 23 years, and I will continue to live with that shame for the rest of my life,” Peterson wrote of his affair with Amber Frey, but “I was in no way responsible for Laci’s disappearance or her death or that of our son, Conner.”
At times self-reflective and at times defiant, Peterson’s declaration after two decades in prison — most of those on Death Row — offers his most detailed version of a story that continues to capture international attention. The 52-year-old who grew up in privilege in San Diego, played high school golf with Phil Mickelson and graduated from Cal Poly before moving to Modesto to sell fertilizer for a living, addresses a character trait the media often seized upon and jurors found off-putting: aloofness.
“I was frantic and grieving,” Peterson wrote about the aftermath of Laci’s Christmas Eve disappearance in 2002. “In public, I tried to put on a brave face and that was apparently inconsistent with what a grieving husband ‘should’ have been showing. My public demeanor was put on national display and characterized as evidence of guilt.”
Peterson’s declaration is Exhibit 19 of a petition by the Los Angeles Innocence Project, which took on Peterson’s appeal more than a year ago. The 854-page petition is so large — at 176,186 words it’s seven times the size limit accepted by the court — that his defense lawyers will seek a waiver Friday.
“There is a lot to say here,” John Sonego, board chair of the LA Innocence Project said in an interview this week. “I do believe the writ as submitted clearly demonstrates sufficient proof that he was innocent.”
The Stanislaus County District Attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case, is waiting for the petition to be formally filed before responding, said Chief Deputy District Attorney Wendell Emerson. He declined to comment on its substance.
The petition attempts to make the larger case that Modesto Police disregarded the real murderers, likely men who robbed the house across the street from the Peterson’s Modesto home, who they allege kidnapped Laci after Peterson went fishing on Christmas Day. It contends they held Laci for days, then tossed her body in the bay to frame Peterson whose alibi was by then well known.
The body of Laci and her unborn son washed up separately along the Richmond shoreline four months later after a storm churned up the bay. The Innocence Project says it has new experts and new science that confirm the same claim offered during the original trial, that baby Conner’s size when found proved Laci lived for days after Christmas, which, if true, could exonerate Peterson.
Last year, a San Mateo County judge ruled against many of those arguments.
But Peterson’s declaration itself, in which he includes photos taken in Carmel a week before the tragedy, focuses on refuting a host of smaller details that Stanislaus County prosecutors said added up to murder.
That account, however, could open him up for the first time to cross examination on the witness stand. Former prosecutor Michael Cardoza, who conducted a practice cross examination of Peterson at the request of his defense lawyers during his 2004 trial, said it’s a risk the Innocence Project appears willing to take.
“You may not do well on the stand,” Cardoza said, “but damn, you’re getting up there because that’s our last hope.”
In Peterson’s declaration, he addresses a number of circumstances that police found suspicious, including:
He threw his clothes immediately into the washing machine when he came home from the marina because when he and Laci owned a burger restaurant in San Luis Obispo, where they met in college, “it became a habit of mine to put my work clothes straight into the washer … The prosecution nevertheless told the jury in closing arguments at trial that the fact that I washed my clothes was evidence of my guilt.” When police asked what he had been fishing for and he could only say “a prehistoric looking fish,” he said that “I could not immediately find the word ‘sturgeon’ in my head … With everything going on the day that Laci turned up missing … I felt a little overwhelmed.” Although at least one neighbor told police that Peterson said he had golfed on the day Laci disappeared, Peterson attributed that to “some confusion caused by a few people who believed or assumed I had played golf that day.” However, he said, at least eight people testified that he told them he had gone fishing. “I never hid the fact that I went to the marina that day.” Although prosecutors told jurors he had made five cement anchors at his office warehouse to drag Laci’s body to the bottom of the bay, and photos of messy cement and dusty rings there proved it, Peterson said that was left over from a previous project. He chose the bay for the inaugural launch of his new boat an hour-and-a-half from his home instead of a nearby lake on Christmas Eve morning, he said, because he wanted to go “full throttle” and didn’t want to disturb anyone fishing on a local lake. Besides, he said, he knew the way to the Berkeley Marina because he and Laci “both loved to go to Chez Panisse, and would walk along the perimeter of the marina afterward.” He left his new fishing lures on the seat of his truck not because he was preoccupied with disposing of his wife’s body, but because he was more excited about trying out his new boat.Peterson left numerous pieces of evidence unexplained, including why he never mentioned his new boat purchase to his father-in-law, who was an avid fisherman, or why when he called his mother-in-law looking for Laci, he told her she was “missing” or why, during a secretly wire-tapped phone call when his mother encouraged him to fly to Washington to follow a tip that Laci was spotted there, he could be heard laughing when he hung up.
Nonetheless, he wrote, “I did not deny the police access to anything they wanted to search because I had nothing to do with Laci’s disappearance.”
“The worry over Laci and Connor and what they may be enduring left me unable to sleep at night and often for days at a time,” he wrote. “In retrospect, I wonder at and am embarrassed by many decisions I made at that time.”
He also didn’t go into detail about his affair with Amber Frey and why he told her he had “lost” his wife and would be spending his first Christmas without her before Laci had even disappeared, or why during a recorded phone call with her from Laci’s public vigil, he said he was in Paris partying at the Eiffel Tower.
“I do not have an acceptable explanation for my infidelity or the lies I told Amber Frey,” he wrote. “Despite the disgraceful and immature behavior I exhibited when I was unfaithful to my wife and despite the poor judgement I exercised when I compounded the error by not being forthcoming with police about it, I loved my wife very much.”
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