July 15, 2024 • 62 mins
The thoroughness of a prosecutor can make or break how a case unfolds in court. And it can take a prosecutor to explain why a case led to a conviction or failed to do so. Enter "The Prosecutors" podcast. Alice and Brett pool their experiences as prosecutors to dive into some of the country's most followed cases.
In this episode, Alice and Brett compiles the evidence, presenting the case for why Scott Peterson is guilty of murdering his wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn son, Conner.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Highly educated prosecutors to the most famous cold case mysteries
of all time. Murder, mayhem, disappearances, you name it. If
it's true crime, they're on it. In today's episode, Alice
and Brett condense a six episode series into one concise
hour of all the evidence they believe points to why
(00:24):
Scott Peterson is guilty in the murder of wife Lacy
and unborn son Connor. The Prosecutors.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I'm Brett and I'm Alice.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
And we are the Prosecutors today on The Prosecutors, Scott
Peterson is guilty. Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode
(01:36):
of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always
by my efficient co host Alice.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Hi Brett. Okay, guys, we're letting you in on a secret.
Brett thinks we can somehow get through today's episode in
one episode. I don't know if we can. I'm not
gonna lie because we are not going to do it.
We have not been known not to be long winded.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
The whole point of this is to do this in
one of them.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Okay, find no, Okay, you know what you're right. Let's
be efficient. We can do this. Challenge accepted challenge accepted.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Okay, So what we're doing today, As you guys know,
typically we go into cases we try to keep an
open mind. We have done Scott Peterson. We did I
think six episodes on Scott Peterson, maybe seven, who knows.
It was a ton and a lot of you guys
have been very complimentary about those episodes. But Scott Peterson's
been in the news lately. In December, we're going to
(02:31):
find out whether he gets a new trial. People always
ask us why we think he's guilty to sum up
sort of the entirety of what we did before. So
what we have decided to do is to cut out
all the fluff and reduce this down to just the
evidence that Scott Peterson is guilty. If you want to
hear the full thing, go listen to all six episodes,
(02:53):
where we will include the defense's arguments and various other things.
This is why Scott Peterson is guilty, and we have
tried really hard to cut this down to the point
where we can do it in one episode. There's a
lot here, so we're going to see, but we're going
to give it our best shot.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
And guys, note what we just said, we kept an
open mind in all our previous episodes of Scott Peterson.
What we're attempting to do here is like how we
would write a brief where you have an advocacy point
that you're taking, and our advocacy point here is that
he's guilty. So those of you listening for the first
time don't say they're so biased. We've already done the
(03:33):
whole considering all sides of the issue. This is written
like a law brief where you are an advocate for
your side.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah, So if anybody ever tells you there's no evidence
that Scott Peterson's guilty, you can just direct them to
this episode because frankly, not even all the evidence is
in here. We cut judiciously to try and do this
in one episode. So I think that's enough introduction. I
think everybody gets what we're trying to do now. So
we're going to do this God's feed out. I was
(04:00):
seeing if we can do.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I don't know which of us is going to be
more inefficient.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Well, we're gonna We're gonna do our best. Okay, let's
start with the timeline. November twentieth, two thousand to Modesto,
California on November twentieth, Peterson and Amber Fry meet at
a bar in Fresno. They begin a whirlwind romance. On
December second, while they are decorating the Christmas tree, Amber
(04:29):
asked Peterson if he has ever been married or ever
been close to being married. Peterson says no. Amber also
asks Scott if he has children or if he's ever
been close to having children. Again, Peterson said no. For context,
at this point, Lacy Peterson, who is his wife, is
(04:51):
approaching eight months pregnant with their first child, a son
named Connor. December sixth two thousand and two, a friend
of A Sean Sibley, who's actually the person who introduced them,
confronts Scott. Scott is sobbing, and he leaves a message
on Sibley's voicemail that says, I'm sorry I lied to
(05:12):
you earlier. I have been married. It's just too painful
for me to talk about. Call me back. They eventually
speak later that day. Peterson was sobbing hysterically. The next day,
December seventh, Peterson begins looking for a boat.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
On December eighth, two thousand and two, an Internet search
was made on the home laptop with the terms boat
plus Ramp plus Pacific and also Boat plus Ramps plus,
Watsonville Plus Pacific and San Francisco Bay plus Boat plus Ramp.
Websites were accessed related to the Berkeley Marina, Central San
(05:52):
Francisco Bay, and Suson Bay and related to nautical charts
and this is on the Peterson computer. On the night
of December eighth, someone used the home laptop at the
Peterson home to access websites for the San Francisco Port,
the United States Geological Surveys, velocity maps for currents in
(06:13):
central San Francisco Bay, and other sites with navigation and
nautical charts. A couple of image files were also viewed,
which were linked to web pages on bay currents. The
image files showed an enhanced map view of the tip
of Brooks Island and surrounding area in the Berkeley Marina.
(06:36):
For context, why this matters, Lacy Peterson and her unborn son, Connor's,
bodies were found in this very area on December ninth,
two thousand and two. Peterson told Frey he lied about
being married, and that it was less painful for him
to let people think that he was never married rather
than to tell them the truth. And the truth he
(06:58):
said was that he had quote lost his wife. Peterson
explained that the upcoming holidays would be the first without
his wife. Fray thanked Peterson for sharing the information with
her and asked him if he was sure he was
ready for a relationship with her. Peterson replied, quote absolutely.
(07:22):
That same day, Peterson paid fourteen hundred dollars cash for
a boat.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
December fifteenth, two thousand and two, Peterson tells Amber he
is going on an extended trip. He spoke to her
on the nineteenth, the twenty second, and the twenty third.
On the twenty fourth, Amber did not hear from him.
That is the day that Lacey will disappear. She does
hear from him on the next day, the twenty fifth,
which is Christmas. Peterson talks to Amber and claims to
(07:51):
be in Maine with his family. He will talk to
her on the twenty seventh as well. Going back, that
was the fifteenth when he said he was going on
an extended trip. On December twentieth, Scott purchases a two
day fishing license good for two days and two days
only December twenty third and December twenty fourth. December twenty third,
(08:11):
two thousand and two from five forty five to eight
point thirty, Lacey goes to Salon Salon, where her sister
Amy Roca works, and Amy gives Scott a haircut. Amy
says that Scott mentions plans to play golf in the
morning and offers to pick up a gift basket for
their father at a store called Vella Farms. Amy tells
(08:35):
police that Lacey was wearing tan pants and a black
blouse with small flowers.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
The next day is Christmas Eve. At eight forty am,
someone logs onto the Peterson computer in the spare bedroom.
The MSN homepage, a weather site from Yahoo, and two
Yahoo shopping sites are accessed. One shopping site was for
a a red gap scarf and the other at Sunflower
(09:04):
umbrella stand. The searches for the umbrellas and scarf were
made at eight forty two a m. At eight forty five,
Scott wrote an email. When police arrived at the house,
they found that the curling iron was plugged in and
a bench that Lacey sat on was pulled out. The
(09:25):
housekeeper said that the day before they were not like
that because the housekeeper had cleaned and recognized that the
curling iron and bench were new and that they were
pulled out. The searches in This detail, along with a
few others, have led some to say that Lacy was
clearly alive, as Scott would have needed to be a
criminal genius to fake them. However, if Scott killed Lacey,
(09:49):
he had been planning it for days, if not longer,
and his plan was always to fake a kidnapping attack
when he left for his warehouse, as evidenced by his
dog wandering the neighborhood with its leash attached to his collar,
it would not be surprising at all if Scott took
additional quote proof of life steps he could later point
(10:11):
to when he told his detailed story to the police
about that morning, a story where Lacey was alive and well.
When he left, Scott loaded three patio umbrellas from the
backyard into the bed of his truck. He was going
to store them at his warehouse. However, Scott arrives at
the warehouse but does not drop the umbrellas off. Instead,
(10:35):
he drove to the warehouse with the umbrellas in the
back of his truck, drove with them to the marina,
and drove with the umbrellas back to his house. He
told the police he forgot to take them out, though
in order to attach his boat at the warehouse, which
he did to drive to the marina, he would have
(10:55):
had to see the umbrellas. Scott checks his voicemail on
his side cell phone at ten oh eight am. According
to the prosecution, the call pinged the same tower that
is calls from home always pinged, indicating that Scott was
still at home or near it when this ping happened. However,
(11:16):
by the end of the call, the call had changed
to the tower near his warehouse, which was only minutes
from his house.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
So Scott leaves ten oh eight at the latest. At
ten eighteen some estimates's latest ten thirty, a neighbor finds
the family dog, McKenzie, walking around with his lee Shawn.
She puts the dog in the backyard. The dog will
be found there when Scott returns home with its leash
still attached. At ten thirty five. The Medinas, who live
(11:47):
in the house across from the Petersons that will be
burglarized at some point leave their home for Los Angeles.
So they are leaving their home after the dog has
already been found with its leash. A witness these people
outside the Medina home just before noon. The burglars who
robbed the Medina home will be arrested and say they
robbed the place at four am on the twenty sixth.
(12:11):
They said they saw some TV trucks on the street,
so they went in a different entrance. All things considered,
they probably robbed the house on the twenty third and
lied about it to avoid association with a Peterson murder,
though once again significantly, whenever they robbed the house, it
would have been after Mackenzie the dog was found wandering
the neighborhood with its leash still attached.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Scott leaves the warehouse about eleven eighteen am to drive
to the Berkeley Marina. This is about an hour and
thirty six minute drive. Scott said he felt it was
too cold to golf, so he decided to head to
the Berkeley Marina to go fishing instead. Of course, this
makes it awfully convenient that on the twentieth Scott bought
(12:56):
a fishing license for just two days, and this was
one of the two days that the license was good for.
Scott purchased a boat launch ticket at twelve fifty four
PM when he arrived at the Berkeley Marina. From the
time he bought that ticket, until the time he left
was approximately seventy eight minutes or eighteen minutes less than
(13:20):
the time it took him to drive there, so a
relatively short amount of time. During that time, Scott motored
north for probably two miles. He was near a little
island that had a bunch of trash on it. He
saw a big sign that said no landing and there
were some broken piers fitting Scott's description. The island described
(13:45):
turned out to be Brooks Island. Evidence photos show the trash,
the peers, and the no landing sign as described by Scott.
When the state called an expert to the stand at trial,
he stated that based on the current, the bodies would
have started their trek to where they were found between
Berkeley Marina and Brooks Island. In fact, if the bodies
(14:09):
had been dumped in deeper areas of the bay, they
would have washed out to sea rather than end up
where they were ultimately found.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
And if Scott did dump the bodies, this was just
unlucky for him. He basically dumped the bodies in the
one area of this marina where they would end up
Washington Shore instead of washing out to see at two twelve,
Scott says he leaves the marina. He eventually calls Lacey
at home on her cell phone. He leaves the message, Hey, beautiful,
(14:40):
I just left you a message at home. It's two fifteen.
I'm leaving Berkeley. I won't be able to get to
Vella Farms to get the basket for Papa. I was
hoping you would get this message and go on out there.
I'll see you in a bit, sweetie, Love you bye.
This message is unusual, given that, according to Scott, Lacy
had no idea he was in Berkeley in the first place.
It is, how however, consistent was Scott's plan to make
(15:01):
it look like Lacey had been alive when he left
for the warehouse that day. On January third, two thousand
and three, the burglars are arrested. The police find no
evidence of Lacy Peterson. And if you believe that the
burglars kidnapped Lacey and Connor and kept Lacey somewhere and
then Connor was born later, it would have been very
(15:23):
difficult for them, given that January third is only nine
ten days after the kidnapping would supposedly have happened. But
at no point that very early period of time, do
any of the burglars flip on anyone else, say where
Lacey's being kept, or really reveal any evidence related to
her disappearance. On February tenth, two thousand and three, Connor's
(15:46):
due date comes and goes. On April twelve, two thousand
and three, there is a heavy storm in San Francisco
Bay around the marina, causing higher than normal wave of
action in the area. The next day, April thirteen, people
walking near the San Francisco Bay find the body of
Connor Peterson. One day later, they will find Lacey. The
(16:07):
bodies are in the exact area where Scott was fishing.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Now, turning to Scott's demeanor, Scott's awfully relaxed during the
first interview with the police. For instance, when he's being interviewed,
he's drinking coffee from a coffee cup and his hands
aren't shaking, which you can see because he's holding that
coffee cup. He doesn't have trouble getting it from the
table to his mouth, no issues at all. Moreover, he
(16:34):
shows no emotion during the press conferences. He never breaks down,
He never seems as though he really cares. Now he
also doesn't grill the police about what they're doing and
whether they have any updates for him about his missing
pregnant wife. His non blood relatives are honestly more emotional
today than he was at the time of Lacy's disappearance.
(16:58):
The night during the search, when Lacey's mother, Sharon approached
Scott to give him a hug and comfort him, Scott
maneuvered away from her. It seemed to Sharon that he
was also avoiding eye contact with her. Likewise, Brent, Lacy's brother,
noticed that Scott was off by himself and was reluctant
(17:18):
to make eye contact. In fact, Peterson and Brent never
spoke that night, even though they had a quote great relationship.
Sharon's cousin Gwendolen Kempele, also took note that Scott would
not look at her, despite the fact that they had
seen each other numerous times at family functions. Lacey's stepfather,
(17:41):
Ron Grantski, asked Scott if he had gone golfing that day,
as Scott had planned. Now. Peterson paused and then replied
that he decided to go fishing instead. After Peterson told
grant Sky what time he left to go fishing, Grantsky
asked Peterson what he would be fishing for at that
(18:02):
time of day. Peterson walked away without responding. Although Peterson
told Gransky and the police that he went fishing, Peterson
told Charon's cousin Harvey Kemple, that he went golfing that day.
Peterson also told neighbors Amy Krigbaum and Tara Vettable that
he was golfing that day. Sandy Rickard was standing outside
(18:26):
the Covena residence when Peterson approached her. He put up
his hands and volunteered, quote, I wouldn't be surprised if
they find blood on my truck because I cut my
hands all the time. Peterson explained that it was because
he was an outdoorsman, or something to that effect, as
Rickard recalled, and Rickard found this interaction incredibly perplexing. So
(18:51):
in summary, in that one day, Scott tells some people
he went fishing, some people he went golfing, and offers
this strange comment about finding blood in his truck. Now,
let's talk about the boat that he took out that day.
The boat was a fourteen foot aluminum fishing boat. That's
a Class eight boat, one of the smallest boats you
(19:11):
can buy, although it's not impossible to take this kind
of boat out into the San Francisco Bay. It would
be really dangerous for someone who was not an expert
at boating.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
So let's talk about Scott as a fisherman. Conventional wisdom
will tell you that Scott was a terrible fisherman. But
he had been fishing before, he had owned a fishing
boat before, and he should have known what he was doing.
And yet on the day that he supposedly went fishing,
everything seemed to go wrong. Scott said that he was
taking the boat out to do some sturgeon fishing. The
(19:43):
prosecution called an expert fisherman to testify about that. He
stated that Scott's rod was not rigged for sturgeon fishing.
He was rigged for fresh water pass the line and
wait was wrong. The rod was wrong. One of Scott's
rodds didn't even have a handle on it and thus
wasn't functional. Another rod had no line on it. When
the expert reviewed Scott's tackle box, it was filled with
(20:05):
equipment to fish for freshwater bass. And remember this is
a saltwater marina. Moreover, the anchor would not work in
the bay. It was an anchor that Scott had made
for himself, but it was too small, and it wouldn't
dig into the ground and hold the boat, and there
is no long rope in the boat for an anchor. Finally,
(20:26):
there's the question of why Scott would go all the
way out to San Francisco Bay, more than an hour
and a half away. The prosecution put on evidence of
at least a dozen places much close to the home
in Modesto, where he could have fished, much more suitable
for his boat and his tackle than the San Francisco Bay.
The bay, however, was the closest saltwater fishery to Scott,
(20:49):
though Scott preferred saltwater fishing. One wonders why he had
so much fresh water tackle. Alice mentioned Scott's behavior before.
We put that in there, because some if you find
it very important and some of you don't. But nevertheless,
it's not the only strange thing that Scott did. On
January eighth, fourteen days after his wife has gone missing
(21:13):
and four months before she'll be found, Scott adds the
Playboy channel on the family's cable package. Five days later,
he decides that isn't doing it for him, drops Playboy
and adds the ten ecstasy package instead.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Now let's talk about whether Scott was considering running or
was it Lacy. The closet in the spare bedroom of
the Peterson home was open, and duffel bags appear to
have been pulled off the shelf, and one was lying
upside down on the floor. During an interview with the police,
(21:48):
Scott says that he abandoned his initial plans for the day,
which was to play golf because it was too cold. Instead,
he decided to go fishing. Now, it's strange that it
would be too cold to go golf but not too
cold to fish. One of the employees at the harbor
testified that hardly anyone came down to the marina because
of how cold it was that day. Scott was one
(22:12):
of three people there all day, and the employee called
it a gray, drizzly, nasty day. And it is interesting
that Scott just so happened to have a fishing license
for this spontaneous decision, one that he'd bought on December twentieth,
that was only good for December twenty third and twenty fourth.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Let's talk about Amber Fry some more so. After Amber
realizes who Scott is, she calls the police. Amber agrees
to cooperate and to record Scott's calls. Scott tells her
that he is in Paris. He has an elaborate lie
about being in Europe. He talks about fireworks at the
Eiffel Tower. In fact, he is at a candlelight vigil
(22:53):
for his missing wife while he is talking to Amber.
They talked dozens and dozens of times, twenty nine recorded
hours of calls. Scott now claims he only talked with
Amber to keep her from going public lest it interfere
with the investigation in finding Lacey. Scott will eventually it
meant to Amber that his wife had disappeared. So one
(23:16):
piece of evidence that the police found interesting was a
mop that was out. Scott told the police that the
reason the mop was out was because Lacey was going
to mop the floor that morning. But the maid had
been there the day before and she had mopped the
entire house, and this led the police to wonder if
(23:38):
Scott had something he needed to clean up. Then there's
Scott's behavior during the search. One witness testified that he
actually followed Scott from the volunteer center during the search.
Scott was supposedly going out to search for Lacey. Instead,
he went to a mall parking lot and sat for
forty five minutes in his vehicle rather than taking part
(24:01):
in the search. Multiple witnesses would testify that Scott did
not actively participate in the search. Moreover, Scott referred to
Lacey in the past tense and television interviews, which some
people think is significant. Also, Scott during the search is
playing golf all the time, including on the days after
(24:21):
his unborn child and wife are found murdered and dumped
in the bay. Scott was actually arrested in Tory Pines
at the golf course. Police stated that Scott had almost
no reaction when told the DNA results came back confirming
the entire family had been murdered, and apparently, despite his
sudden interest in fishing, it was golfing that he was
(24:44):
doing during that time.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Now, let's talk about Scott's trips to the marina. Police
put a GPS tracker on Scott's car to see where
he went, and on at least three occasions before Lacey
was found, police tracked Scott to to the Berkeley Marina.
While there he would just park and stare out over
the water. This is significant to some people because some
(25:09):
people will say it's strange that he continually visited a
place where Lacey and Connor's bodies were ultimately found. And
let's talk about the nursery at the Peterson home. When
the police returned to their home in February, Scott had
essentially turned the nursery into a storage room, piling a mattress,
(25:29):
office chairs, clothing, and other items into it, and some
of the items had actually come from his warehouse. And
note that February is actually the month of Connor's due date. Now,
prosecutors also entered two hairs that they found in a
pair of pliers, believed to be Lacey's. It looks and
seems identical and was from someone related to Lacey's mom,
(25:53):
which is pretty close to definitive. It's not much, but
given that Lacey was never in the boat and Scott
claimed to have only been in the boat once, it
is interesting that they found two hairs that belonged to Lacey.
And the police also utilized a cadaver dog, and this
(26:13):
police dog actually hit on Lacey's scent at the Berkeley
Marina on December twenty eighth, just four days after she disappeared.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
So let's talk about the anchors. Scott bought his boat
without an anchor. He told the police he made one
out of concrete in his warehouse. A concrete anchor was
found in his boat, though there was no line long
enough to use it. Concrete residue was found inside of
some buckets in his warehouse. There's also an area where
(26:43):
it's obvious the anchors were made. According to the prosecution,
there are multiple quote unquote voids or areas of less
powder on the surface, indicating that multiple buckets were sitting
there making multiple anchors. The prosecution speculated that these anchors
were used to weigh down Lacey's body when it was
put into the water. The defense attempted to make a
(27:05):
big deal of Scott using excess concrete to fill a
hole near his drive rather than making multiple anchors, though
even if he did that, it's unclear how that's inconsistent
with him making multiple anchors, since we don't know exactly
how much concrete there was in the beginning. Moreover, the
prosecution was ready for this and had an expert in
(27:25):
concrete who testified that the concrete near the driveway was
not consistent with the concrete used to make the anchor. Rather,
it was similar to cement used by Scott to put
in a fence post near where the concrete was found,
indicating that if Scott used additional concrete on the driveway,
it was from the fence post concrete, not the anchor concrete.
(27:49):
When Scott was eventually arrested, the police found four cell phones,
his brother's ID, camping gear, and fifteen thousand dollars cash
in his car. Scott had dyed his hair blonde and
grown beard which he also died blonde, and he was
hanging out in San Diego, which in fairness was his
home but also was close to the border. Let's talk
(28:09):
about Lacey's clothes. Scott told police that Lacey was wearing
a white blouse and black pants on the day that
she disappeared, December twenty fourth, but when Lacey's body was found,
she was wearing tan pants, which is what she had
been wearing on the twenty third, as well as a
(28:30):
maternity bra. The prosecution and defense disputed whether these were
these same tan pants that she'd been wearing, and it
has often stated that Amy Rocca, Lacey's sister, positively identified
pants at the house as the ones Lacey was wearing, however,
on the stand, despite many attempts by Mark Garrigos, who
was Scott Peterson's lawyer, to get Amy to confirm this,
(28:52):
she refused to do so. And although the top Lacey
was wearing on the twenty third was found at the house,
she had a number of different pairs of tan pants,
and it is certainly possible that the tan pants she
was found in were the tan pants she was wearing
on the twenty third. But what's very important here is
whatever happened to the tan pants. The pants Lacey was
(29:17):
wearing weren't black, and this becomes very important. Let's talk
about people who claim to have seen Lacey. A number
of people claim to have seen Lacey walking her dog.
For instance, Vivian and Bill Mitchell said that they saw
a woman matching Lacey's description walking the dog that morning.
(29:38):
Homer and Sue Maldonado said that around ten am they
went out driving to deliver Christmas presents and saw a
very pregnant lady struggling with a dog. Tawny Fridas says
he also saw a pregnant woman walking a dog that morning.
Frank Aguilar and his wife also saw a pregnant woman
with her dog. Diane Campos was having a cigarette behind
(29:59):
the local Hot Spittle. She looked across a creek into
a park and saw a pregnant woman walking a dog.
She saw two men following this woman. The dog was barking,
and the two men said, shut that effing dog up.
Then there's Tom Harshman, who said he saw a woman
in a red shirt and black pants, fitting Lacy's description,
being forced into a van sometime in the afternoon, a
(30:22):
couple miles away from the home. He said that she
had been squatting and urinating on the side of the road.
By the end of this around eleven people say they
saw a woman who might be Lacey walking the dog.
Nearly all of them described the person they saw as
wearing a white blouse and black pants, just as Scott
(30:43):
had said, and just as the missing person's posters described.
That was all well and good until six months later,
when Lacey's body was found and she wasn't wearing black pants.
She was wearing tan pants. Moreover, even though there was
testimony that Lacy enjoyed getting out and being active, the
(31:06):
prosecution put on a number of witnesses that testified that
Lacey was having extreme difficulty even walking by the end
of her pregnancy, and the doctor had told her to
take it easy after she complained of dizziness and exhaustion.
They also testified, given this, it is simply not believable
that she would have taken the dog on some sort
of long, strenuous walk through the park, and that's not
(31:30):
just anecdotal. In fact, at the end of October, two
months before Lacey disappeared, Lacey had walked to the park
and gotten very sick, to the point that she was
vomiting and almost passed out. Her mother testified that she
was extremely embarrassed because some maintenance men saw her and
(31:51):
had to help her and had to end up cleaning
up her vomit. After her Lacey talked to her doctor
about this event, and the doctor told her that she
should either stop walking altogether or do it much later
in the day after she'd had an opportunity to get hydrated.
In another instance, Lacey's prenatal yoga instructor testified that on
(32:15):
December twentieth, Lacey was in so much pain that she
could barely walk and that she needed help to get
to her car. Furthermore, the shoes Lacey typically used to
go on walks were found in the house. Finally, the
police did not ignore these sightings. They searched the park,
(32:35):
including with canine teams, and found no trace of Lacey.
They also interviewed folks in a homeless camp near the park.
None of them had seen Lacey.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
And the defense didn't call any of the witnesses you
always hear about. The defense never called a witness who
supposedly saw into Scott's boat and said it was empty.
The defense also never called witnesses who claimed to have
seen Lacey that day, either walking the dog or being
forced into the van. Moreover, there was another witness who
(33:09):
saw a pregnant woman walking a dog that day, called
it into the police, and then, when he was shown
a picture of Lacey, said that he was certain the
person he saw was not Lacey. Christopher Van Sant testified
that he saw pregnant woman walking her dog near the
footbridge at Dry Creek Regional Park, near the scene at hospital.
(33:31):
This sighting is consistent with many of the other sightings
offered by those who believe Scott is innocent, but Sant
testified that he is quote one hundred percent positive that
the woman was not Lacy Peterson. Following this testimony, the
prosecution called four different people, the husband of a pregnant
(33:52):
woman and three pregnant women, who testified that they had
walked the neighborhood either on that day or around it.
One walked a chocolate lab, one a lab mix, one
an Australian shepherd, and another one didn't even have a dog.
In other words, a lot of pregnant women were walking
(34:12):
dogs in the days surrounding Lacey's disappearance in the area.
To continue to hammer pome that point, the prosecution called
a parade of people who were walking in the park
that day, who were walking any number of Golden Retrievers
that day, or who were just in the neighborhood that day,
none of whom saw anything unusual, and any of whom
(34:34):
might have been mistaken by someone for Lacey.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
So when the bodies were found, Lacey's body was in
pretty bad shape, with barnacles growing on her bones. The
forensic anthropologist Alison Galloway testified that her level of decomposition
was consistent with being in the San Francisco Bay for
three to six months. Connor was less decomposed. The difference
(34:58):
in decomposition has led but some to speculate that Connor
was born somewhere else and then the bodies were dumped separately.
This of course would have meant that Scott is innocent,
but the autopsy does not support that argument. There was
no vaginal birth. The autopsy confirmed that Lacy's birth canal
remained closed. In fact, there also wasn't something called coffin
(35:20):
birth in this case, which is what happens when a
baby is expelled from a decomposing body. Moreover, there was
no evidence of a sea section. Although Lacey's entire body
was not recovered, the trunk of her body was, and
had there been a sea section, there would have been
evidence of it. What actually happened is that at some
(35:41):
point during decomposition, the body was expelled from the top
of the uterus and out of the body. Some have
suggested that if Connor remained inside Lacey's body for some
time after death, it should show tailtale signs of degeneration,
often seen in babies that are miscarried, and in fact,
Connor's body did show those signs. The process is called maceration.
(36:07):
The pathologists testified. We'll even use the term maceration in
a hospital pathology where we're looking at the still birth
in a baby that's died in the uterus and then
perhaps is delivered a day or two or three or
more later, will undergo the same type of changes, not
to the degree that we see in Connor, but maceration
(36:28):
type changes anyway, in a fresh or stilborn those will
often involve skin changes overriding the school plates and to
a certain degree, lucuefication of the organs. So we'll see
that in a hospital setting two, and that's where the
term maceration would be used. Although Connor suffered from this
kind of effect, and did so far worse than your
(36:50):
average still birth, he was still protected from the worst
of the elements in the bay, including predators. Thus, because
it took a while for the baby to be expelled,
Connor's body was protected from degradation to an extent greater
than Lacy. In fact, doctor Galley would testify that Connor's
body had been exposed in the bay for no more
(37:11):
than one to two days at the most. A quarter
inch of Connor's umbilical cord was still attached, and it
was torn, not cut. There's no evidence that the umbellical
cord was knotted or clamped, which, if Connor had been
born alive, would lead to the baby bleeding to death.
(37:31):
Some people pointed to some trash or twine that was
wrapped around his throat as a possible means of killing him,
but there was no damage from the twine, and it
had about an inch of slack. It wasn't tight around
his neck. Moreover, leaving the twine would be a pretty
stupid thing to do if that's how you killed Connor.
But you're going to dump him in the bay to
(37:53):
try and frame Scott Peterson.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
And let's tell we've talked a lot about Connor, but
let's talk about the age of the baby. Now. Lacey
was due on February tenth, two thousand three. She disappeared
and likely died on December twenty third, about seven weeks
from the due date. So one would expect then that
the baby was probably between thirty one and thirty five
(38:16):
weeks gestational age when he died, given that due dates
are not an exact science. According to the pathologists, the
gestational age of Connor was between thirty three and thirty
eight weeks. On cross examination, the defense attempted to push
this number higher to thirty five weeks, to further the
(38:37):
defense's theory that Lacey was kidnapped and held somewhere for
some period of time alive, and therefore Connor was alive
as well. The pathologists did not bend on this, repeatedly
explaining to the defense attorney that given the science and
the varying development of unborn children, thirty three to thirty
eight was the best range. Another petthidlogist, doctor DeVore, determined
(39:02):
that Connor died between the twenty first and the twenty
fourth of December, which is a much more precise date.
The defense called an expert who testified that the earliest
Connor could have died was December twenty ninth. Just on
the face of things, this testimony seems far fetched that
(39:22):
the doctor could say with certainty that a body in
the water for four months died without question no earlier
than December twenty ninth does not seem medically feasible. Cross
examination bore out this point. The prosecution was able to
unnerve the doctor, who admitted that his entire calculation was
(39:43):
based on the assumption that Lacy found out she was
pregnant on June ninth and immediately told her friends, a
fact that was actually disputed by those who knew her.
If she found out before June ninth and only told
her friends, then his whole theory fell a part. Given
that we are talking a matter of days here, the
(40:04):
notion that the doctor who was not a forensic pathologist
could determine with such certainty that Connor could not have
died a mere five days before his earliest estimate just
falls flat. And let's talk about where the bodies were found.
As the prosecution repeatedly stated, the bodies of Connor and
(40:24):
Lacy were found exactly where Scott was supposedly fishing. As
a matter of fact, the prosecution put on evidence that,
given where the bodies ended up and the currents in
the area, the probable dumping spot for the bodies was
just off Brooks Island.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So there's a lot of evidence there about what happened.
And as we've said before, this is a circumstantial case.
There's not going to be an eyewitness, there's not going
to be a slam dung. Once you have are a
bunch of different bricks that you are building a case with.
But the most significant point is the one that Alice
just made where the bodies were found. The bodies were
(41:04):
found in the place that Scott Peterson had gone fishing
that day. Now, people who don't think it was Scott
suggests that someone else kidnapped Lacey. Maybe it was the burglars,
Maybe it was a satanic cult of pregnant women snatchers,
Maybe it was someone looking to harvest organs. The theory
(41:26):
goes that Lacey was kidnapped, kept somewhere until Connor was born,
then both were murdered. At this point, the police had
announced that they were looking in Berkeley Marina because that
was the place Scott had been. Knowing that the police
were looking there, the kidnappers hatch a daring plot to
dump the bodies in exactly the same place Scott had
(41:48):
been fishing the day of the disappearance. And this is
a point that people grasp onto because you have to
this isn't a coincidence. It's not a coincidence that the
bodies were found an hour and a half away. One
of two things is true. Either Scott dumped them there,
or someone looking to frame Scott dump them there. And
(42:10):
oftentimes people will just say, well, the police said it
was Berkeley Marinas, a somebody probably just dumped them there,
and people just go with that, and they don't stop
to examine what would have to be true for that
to be true. And here's the thing that didn't happen.
No one kept Lacy alive for four months and then
(42:33):
dumped her body in the bay. First, there's no evidence
for it whatsoever. There are no credible sidings of Lacey
on December twenty fourth. None of the sidings of a
pregnant woman that day matched Lacy, nor are they consistent
with the physical limitations Lacey was having. Eyewitness accounts are
notoriously unreliable, and they are the first thing that innocence
(42:56):
advocates attack when attempting to overturn a conviction that is
actually faulty. To rely on them here, given all we know,
is questionable at best. But there's more. As to the burglars,
they could not have shown up until after the dog
was found wandering with her leash, meaning that the theory
(43:17):
that Lacey confronted them after her walk with the dog
is impossible. Moreover, there is no evidence Lacey was kidnapped.
There are no signs of struggle. No one saw Lacey
being kidnapped. One of The chief arguments against Scott being
responsible for Lacey's murder is that he would have had
to have gotten her body into his truck with no
(43:38):
one noticing. But what's more likely that Scott could kill
Lacey in the privacy of his home and maneuver her
into the truck, which he also happens to be loading
with large umbrellas that would conceal her. Or that a
gang of organ harvesters, burglars or Satanists snatched Lacey in
broad daylight while she was walking her dog doesn't end there.
(44:01):
You'd have to believe that no one has ever come
forward stating that they saw a captive, pregnant lady in
the months she would have been held. No one has
ever flipped on the kidnappers. There is not a hint
of anything like this happening, and its smacks of conspiracy.
And still that's not the end of the problems with
(44:23):
this theory. The theory that someone would frame Scott by
dumping the bodies falls apart upon even the barest scrutiny.
It is one thing to dump a body on a cold,
rainy Christmas Eve when no one is out. It is
another thing altogether to dump a body in a bay
that is being constantly searched by police and is the
(44:43):
center of media and public attention, and even Scott Peterson
is there watching the bay at various times. Moreover, for
this planned work, the kidnappers would need to dump the
bodies in such a way that they would decompose sufficiently
to not give the game away. If the bodies were
found too soon, then it would be evident that they
(45:04):
had been killed. Much later, the means of death would
be easily determinable, and they would need to do so
by dumping the bodies in the one area that would
be consistent with Scott's guilt. Dump them in an area
that was too deep and the bodies would be swept away.
Dump them in an area that's too shallow, and they
might be found by the constant searches by the police,
(45:24):
leaving you open to forensic evidence that would convict you.
Dump them in an area other than Brooks Island, and
the tides would have taken them somewhere else, somewhere that
an expert could trace back to a place that Scott
could argue he'd never been during his very short trip out.
The kidnappers would be taking enormous risks, all in the
(45:44):
hopes that enough time would pass before the bodies washed up,
if they ever washed up at all, to convince the
police that Lacy and Connor had been killed months before,
just around the time that Scott was at the marina.
And yet with all the focus and attention on Scott
and none on them, much simpler to bury the bodies
in the desert and never worry about it again. But somehow,
(46:07):
according to this theory, the kidnappers pulled all this off
without anyone seeing them or suspecting any different, fooling the
state's forensic pathologist, and having gotten away with this plot
to this day with a single person involved ever saying
a word. That is what you must believe in order
to believe Scott is innocent. Put aside the sidings of Lacy,
(46:30):
the condition of her body, whatever else it is. It
makes you think Scott is innocent. Unless you can show
that a gang of criminals managed to pull all that
we described off, Scott is guilty. That is the conspiracy
that has to be true for someone else to be involved.
Or maybe instead a man who routinely cheated on his
(46:53):
wife was finally facing up to the enormity of having
a child and being forced to be forever tied down,
and he decided the easiest thing was just to take
care of both problems once and for all.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
And that, folks, is how you do a closing argument.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
Boom.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
I can't believe we got through that. It was so hard.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
That was dedication.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
It was really hard not to talk about our feelings.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
I know, and put myself in other people's shoes. Do
you do all the things that irritate people?
Speaker 2 (47:27):
But you know, look, okay, so there you go. Guys.
You have all the evidence right there if you want
to hear the reasoning behind all that and listen to
the multi part episodes that we have. But we've tried
to compile all the evidence here for you.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
Yeah, I mean, I just want people to be armed,
because look, there's a fifty to fifty chance Scott's going
to get a new trial. We're going to cover that
on legal briefs. I don't want to do that tonight,
but we'll cover everything that's going on with jury, ms
conduct or whatnot. If it gets a new trial, we're
gonna have to go through this circus all again. Let's
hope that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
For the sake of Lacy and her family. I hope
that is not the case, because we've said this time
and again, this is circumstantial. That does not affect the
weight of the evidence. Circumstantial evidence is just as weighty
as direct evidence. We do not have anyone who saw
him dump Lacy overboard that we know to be true,
(48:20):
and most cases like this you don't have that because
if you did, there probably wouldn't be a trial and
they wouldn't have taken long to figure out who it was.
But this is circumstantial, and that is fine with respect
to the weight of the evidence. And there is so
much circumstantial evidence in this case. Take away the word
circumstantial if that SIT's funny with you, because you've been
(48:41):
told before that circumstantial evidence is not as good it is.
It is just as good. There is so much evidence
in this case. We spoke at lightning speed, taking out
all our opinions and all explanation to fit it into
one hour, which is so much evidence. And that's why
the tri I'll spend for so long. And that's why
(49:02):
our previous episodes explaining this case was also a multi part.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
And I just want to say now that we've finished,
and we've got time and we can like extemporize. You know,
I understand the desire not to look at Scott's behavior
because it's almost like you don't want to prejudice yourself.
I understand that we have rules in the law about evidence,
about what you can admit to keep people from being prejudiced,
(49:26):
to keep people focused on the actual evidence. So I
totally get that. But the simple fact of the matter,
if you look at most family annihilators, a lot of
them are having affairs, a lot of them are in
very similar places to Scott. I mean, if you look
at Chris Wats, Chris Watts and Scott Peterson are almost
the same person. Chris Wats did almost the exact same thing.
(49:49):
He strangles his wife, probably he loads their body into
the back of his truck. It's just instead of it
being two thousand and two, was much later, and his
next door neighbor had a ring camera, and so you
may basically caught him doing this on camera. And if
you've seen the documentary, you see you see the way
Chris Watts is reacting. And the thing is with Chris Watts,
nobody says, well, how he's acting is completely relevant no,
(50:12):
you do the much more human thing if you watch
him and you're like, that is not how somebody acts
when their love of their life is missing. He clearly
is guilty, and sure enough he was Scott Peterson. People
want to hand wave it away. They want to say, oh,
you know, it doesn't matter he was having an affair,
and it doesn't matter that he was a terrible person.
It doesn't matter how he acted after she went missing.
It doesn't matter that he got all the porn channels.
(50:33):
But it does. That speaks to the circumstances surrounding the case. Now,
is it the strongest evidence against him. No, the strongest
evidence against him is that his wife's body showed up
an hour and a half away from her house where
he just so happened to have been fishing on the
day she went missing. Come on, people like, it doesn't
take a rocket sigence on the day he.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Went fishing, when he had the night before said he
was going to go golfing and this was supposed to
be a sponge taneous trip to fishing, when he had
bought the license for that specific day many days previously,
and then later that day at a vigil, told some
people he went fishing, told some people he went golfing,
and know.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
By the way, before he even bought those licenses, he
was looking at the currents at that very place that
he ended up on the day she disappeared. And I'm sorry,
and I just go back to what we said earlier.
The problem for Scott Peterson defenders in this case, I
don't want to hear about who saw her walking the dog. Okay,
(51:35):
we've explained why that's not relevant.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
Well, let's just summarize it for maybe people who didn't
quite see all the different parts. Basically, there is absolutely
no evidence that anyone saw Lacey walking a dog. There's
evidence that people saw someone who looked pregnant walking a dog,
but that person or those people were not wearing what
(51:57):
Lacy was wearing when she was found.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
And that's huge, It's absolutely huge. And most of these
people didn't know her. You know, some people believe, well,
there was one person who did well, they went to
the same doctor. That's how they knew her. That they
weren't like best friends. Also, once again, you can point
to this stuff all day long, but what you have
to do you have to show that someone dumped those
(52:21):
bodies in that marina to frame Scott, and that is
just absurd. It is absurd to believe that Lacy was
kept alive. She obviously wasn't. I mean, there are barnacles
on her bones, for goodness sake. She had been in
that marina for a very long time, and Connor had
been inside of her most of the time. And we
know that because of what they the condition of his body,
(52:45):
and people say, well, but he was so well protected. No, no, look,
he was more protected than Lacey, whose body was in
terrible shape, who had been ravaged by the elements and
animals and everything else. The pathologist even testified that really,
one more day in Connor's body probably would have been
never found. The predators would have taken care of it.
(53:05):
He was in the water for a couple of days
at most. His body was not in good shape. It
was in really bad shape. It's one of the reasons
that figuring out exactly how old he was is hard
because one of the things you do as you look
at bones and a lot of his body he had
kind of liquefied by this point. It was just really hard.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
And by the way, you know, we've talked about how
this is a circumstantial case. What Brett just said there
is so important. A day longer and Connor may never
have been found, and Lacy maybe would have been found
much much later, even more decomposed, and we would not
have been able to know as much as we already
do about the gestational age about lack of a coffin
birth or c section. So the fact that this is
(53:43):
a circumstantial case is actually it's more than a circumstantial case.
The fact that Connor and Lacey were found in conditions
that could even be examined by a pathologist strengthens this
case so immensely. It was terrible luck for Scott Peterson
that Connor's body was found, because we know so much
more about the time frame and also when gestationally he
(54:07):
was when he passed away, because his mother passed away.
And so just know that the facts in this case
really are so incredibly strong. This case could have been
tried without their bodies. It absolutely could have the fact
that their bodies were found and they were able to
try the case with the pathology information from their bodies,
it's overwhelming how strong this case is.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
And that's why Scott's out there staring out over the
bay because he knows his entire future depends on those
bodies not being found. You know, he'd weigh them down.
He hoped they would never be found. But you had
that storm the day before they were found, and that
that's when it happened. That's when the body separated from
(54:51):
the weights. It's when the body of Connor was expelled
from his mother. And then the bodies turned up two
days later, and once again Scott Peterson most unlucky man
in the world. Basically, if he had put the bodies
anywhere else in the bay, the tidal action would have
carried them out to sea. But because he put them
(55:13):
where he did, in a shallower area, that's why the
bodies watched up where they did.
Speaker 2 (55:19):
And by the way, he may have done that because
he had remember kind of a terrible boat. He had
a Class A boat. This was not a good boat
to have in a very windy, very tumultuous bay. The
San Francisco Bay is not easy sailing at all. So
he had a small boat. He couldn't actually venture much
further out. And you know why he had a smaller
boat that he just bought, because he really only had
(55:41):
one purpose for this boat. This was not so that
he could regularly go out into the San Francisco Bay
and fish with his by the way ill equipped anchor
and fishing gear. So the reason this is a bad
boat is that he only needed a good enough boat
to accomplish this task, not to fuel him his hobby
in the San Francisco Bay.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Well, we could ran about this for another five episodes,
as we've done in the past.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
We won't. We'll stop here. We won't.
Speaker 3 (56:08):
We'll stop here. And look, if you think Scott Peterson's innocent,
I would love to hear it. I would love to
hear your argument for how he's innocent. I would love
to hear argument for the whole how the whole conspiracy
to dump the body thing went down and nobody noticed,
how the inept burglars who got arrested ten days after
the burglary, nevertheless somehow managed to keep Lacey's body for
(56:30):
another three months until they dumped the body somewhere. I mean,
I would just I would love to hear it. And
maybe that's what you think happened. And I'll just say
true crime. The great thing about true crime is, at
the end of the day, it really just comes down
to evidence. In facts. It doesn't matter what you think
of us. It doesn't matter what you think of Scott Peterson.
Either either the fact show he did it or they don't.
(56:52):
And when you look at the facts here, I just I,
like I said, when we did the first six episodes,
I didn't know going in whether he was guilty or not.
I just knew that everybody said he was guilty. We
have really just skimmed the surface. Read the transcripts. We
will put links up where you can read the transcripts
of these testimonies. Read the transcripts of the pathologists. Their
(57:15):
testimony is absolutely damning to any theory that those bodies
weren't in that bay for multiple months, Absolutely damning. Read
the whole thing. We quoted some of it. Read the
whole thing, and I just don't think you can read
the testimony and not see the truth here. And the
problem with this case is because it is circumstantial, and
(57:40):
you every little brick being built into every little brick.
Unless you really dig down into it and really look
at the evidence, it can be easy to be misled
into believing there's no evidence. It's one reason we wanted
to do this today, kind of do the reading for you.
But nevertheless, if you got time and you're really curious,
we're gonna put the links on the website. Check it out,
but I want to hear what you think. Shoot us
(58:00):
an email Prosecutorspod at gmail dot com, at Prosecutor's Pod
on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Hello to you guys watching this
on YouTube, and hello to awesome people on the Patreon
you were listening early and add free and join us
on the gallery, which is on the facebooks where we
hang out a lot. I'm sure people will be talking
(58:21):
about this case on there. Like I said, this case
will continue to develop. There will be follow ups on
this as the judge decides whether or not to give
him a new trial. Obviously, if a new trial is granted,
that will be appealed, and if it's not granted, it
will be appealed. So this won't end in December, but
it'll be the first step into figuring out whether or
(58:42):
not its Scott Peterson is actually going to get a
new trial or not. But I will say the same
thing I said at the end of our last six episodes.
If he's tried again, he will be convicted again because
the evidence against him is overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Indeed, thank you guys for joining us. We'll see how
people like this and if we need to do this
for some of our lower series.
Speaker 3 (59:01):
Yeah, and we promise not to recycle everything. We're not
going to just do that to you. But hey, you know,
we are very long winded. So if there are cases
you'd like us to do I follow up on, we're
really kind of drill down. We can do that. Well, guys,
we will be back next week with a case that
has been one of the most recommended cases, one of
(59:24):
the most requested cases that we have, and I'm really
excited to dig into that. It's a case that needs
all the attention you can get. But until then, I'm
Brett and I'm Alice, and we are the prosecutors. So
(01:00:03):
we want to do this all in one episode. Okay, Okay,
I have tried to limit it as much as possible,
but it's still eleven page.
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Peterson is guilt and we're not gonna get through this
in one episode.
Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
So that's the whole point is to do it in
one episode. Okay, We've already six episodes on it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
Okay, so no extrip, We're just going straight with the script.
I got it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Basically, that's what we got.
Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
To do it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:24):
We got it.
Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
I love going straight with the script. I'm all because
you know what I'm gonna do after we're finished, I'm
gonna go wash me a Hallmark Christmas.
Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
And it's time to see where they or out. We
can pull this off.
Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
I don't think we can, but let's do it.
Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
Okay, Okay, are you ready?
Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
I'm so ready. I've been ready for her. I've been
podcasting for forty five minutes ago, and
Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
They have a less basting, less
Highly educated prosecutors to the most famous cold case mysteries
of all time. Murder, mayhem, disappearances, you name it. If
it's true crime, they're on it. In today's episode, Alice
and Brett condense a six episode series into one concise
hour of all the evidence they believe points to why
(00:24):
Scott Peterson is guilty in the murder of wife Lacy
and unborn son Connor. The Prosecutors.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I'm Brett and I'm Alice.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
And we are the Prosecutors today on The Prosecutors, Scott
Peterson is guilty. Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode
(01:36):
of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always
by my efficient co host Alice.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Hi Brett. Okay, guys, we're letting you in on a secret.
Brett thinks we can somehow get through today's episode in
one episode. I don't know if we can. I'm not
gonna lie because we are not going to do it.
We have not been known not to be long winded.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
The whole point of this is to do this in
one of them.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Okay, find no, Okay, you know what you're right. Let's
be efficient. We can do this. Challenge accepted challenge accepted.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Okay, So what we're doing today, As you guys know,
typically we go into cases we try to keep an
open mind. We have done Scott Peterson. We did I
think six episodes on Scott Peterson, maybe seven, who knows.
It was a ton and a lot of you guys
have been very complimentary about those episodes. But Scott Peterson's
been in the news lately. In December, we're going to
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find out whether he gets a new trial. People always
ask us why we think he's guilty to sum up
sort of the entirety of what we did before. So
what we have decided to do is to cut out
all the fluff and reduce this down to just the
evidence that Scott Peterson is guilty. If you want to
hear the full thing, go listen to all six episodes,
(02:53):
where we will include the defense's arguments and various other things.
This is why Scott Peterson is guilty, and we have
tried really hard to cut this down to the point
where we can do it in one episode. There's a
lot here, so we're going to see, but we're going
to give it our best shot.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
And guys, note what we just said, we kept an
open mind in all our previous episodes of Scott Peterson.
What we're attempting to do here is like how we
would write a brief where you have an advocacy point
that you're taking, and our advocacy point here is that
he's guilty. So those of you listening for the first
time don't say they're so biased. We've already done the
(03:33):
whole considering all sides of the issue. This is written
like a law brief where you are an advocate for
your side.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah, So if anybody ever tells you there's no evidence
that Scott Peterson's guilty, you can just direct them to
this episode because frankly, not even all the evidence is
in here. We cut judiciously to try and do this
in one episode. So I think that's enough introduction. I
think everybody gets what we're trying to do now. So
we're going to do this God's feed out. I was
(04:00):
seeing if we can do.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I don't know which of us is going to be
more inefficient.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Well, we're gonna We're gonna do our best. Okay, let's
start with the timeline. November twentieth, two thousand to Modesto,
California on November twentieth, Peterson and Amber Fry meet at
a bar in Fresno. They begin a whirlwind romance. On
December second, while they are decorating the Christmas tree, Amber
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asked Peterson if he has ever been married or ever
been close to being married. Peterson says no. Amber also
asks Scott if he has children or if he's ever
been close to having children. Again, Peterson said no. For context,
at this point, Lacy Peterson, who is his wife, is
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approaching eight months pregnant with their first child, a son
named Connor. December sixth two thousand and two, a friend
of A Sean Sibley, who's actually the person who introduced them,
confronts Scott. Scott is sobbing, and he leaves a message
on Sibley's voicemail that says, I'm sorry I lied to
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you earlier. I have been married. It's just too painful
for me to talk about. Call me back. They eventually
speak later that day. Peterson was sobbing hysterically. The next day,
December seventh, Peterson begins looking for a boat.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
On December eighth, two thousand and two, an Internet search
was made on the home laptop with the terms boat
plus Ramp plus Pacific and also Boat plus Ramps plus,
Watsonville Plus Pacific and San Francisco Bay plus Boat plus Ramp.
Websites were accessed related to the Berkeley Marina, Central San
(05:52):
Francisco Bay, and Suson Bay and related to nautical charts
and this is on the Peterson computer. On the night
of December eighth, someone used the home laptop at the
Peterson home to access websites for the San Francisco Port,
the United States Geological Surveys, velocity maps for currents in
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central San Francisco Bay, and other sites with navigation and
nautical charts. A couple of image files were also viewed,
which were linked to web pages on bay currents. The
image files showed an enhanced map view of the tip
of Brooks Island and surrounding area in the Berkeley Marina.
(06:36):
For context, why this matters, Lacy Peterson and her unborn son, Connor's,
bodies were found in this very area on December ninth,
two thousand and two. Peterson told Frey he lied about
being married, and that it was less painful for him
to let people think that he was never married rather
than to tell them the truth. And the truth he
(06:58):
said was that he had quote lost his wife. Peterson
explained that the upcoming holidays would be the first without
his wife. Fray thanked Peterson for sharing the information with
her and asked him if he was sure he was
ready for a relationship with her. Peterson replied, quote absolutely.
(07:22):
That same day, Peterson paid fourteen hundred dollars cash for
a boat.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
December fifteenth, two thousand and two, Peterson tells Amber he
is going on an extended trip. He spoke to her
on the nineteenth, the twenty second, and the twenty third.
On the twenty fourth, Amber did not hear from him.
That is the day that Lacey will disappear. She does
hear from him on the next day, the twenty fifth,
which is Christmas. Peterson talks to Amber and claims to
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be in Maine with his family. He will talk to
her on the twenty seventh as well. Going back, that
was the fifteenth when he said he was going on
an extended trip. On December twentieth, Scott purchases a two
day fishing license good for two days and two days
only December twenty third and December twenty fourth. December twenty third,
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two thousand and two from five forty five to eight
point thirty, Lacey goes to Salon Salon, where her sister
Amy Roca works, and Amy gives Scott a haircut. Amy
says that Scott mentions plans to play golf in the
morning and offers to pick up a gift basket for
their father at a store called Vella Farms. Amy tells
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police that Lacey was wearing tan pants and a black
blouse with small flowers.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
The next day is Christmas Eve. At eight forty am,
someone logs onto the Peterson computer in the spare bedroom.
The MSN homepage, a weather site from Yahoo, and two
Yahoo shopping sites are accessed. One shopping site was for
a a red gap scarf and the other at Sunflower
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umbrella stand. The searches for the umbrellas and scarf were
made at eight forty two a m. At eight forty five,
Scott wrote an email. When police arrived at the house,
they found that the curling iron was plugged in and
a bench that Lacey sat on was pulled out. The
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housekeeper said that the day before they were not like
that because the housekeeper had cleaned and recognized that the
curling iron and bench were new and that they were
pulled out. The searches in This detail, along with a
few others, have led some to say that Lacy was
clearly alive, as Scott would have needed to be a
criminal genius to fake them. However, if Scott killed Lacey,
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he had been planning it for days, if not longer,
and his plan was always to fake a kidnapping attack
when he left for his warehouse, as evidenced by his
dog wandering the neighborhood with its leash attached to his collar,
it would not be surprising at all if Scott took
additional quote proof of life steps he could later point
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to when he told his detailed story to the police
about that morning, a story where Lacey was alive and well.
When he left, Scott loaded three patio umbrellas from the
backyard into the bed of his truck. He was going
to store them at his warehouse. However, Scott arrives at
the warehouse but does not drop the umbrellas off. Instead,
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he drove to the warehouse with the umbrellas in the
back of his truck, drove with them to the marina,
and drove with the umbrellas back to his house. He
told the police he forgot to take them out, though
in order to attach his boat at the warehouse, which
he did to drive to the marina, he would have
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had to see the umbrellas. Scott checks his voicemail on
his side cell phone at ten oh eight am. According
to the prosecution, the call pinged the same tower that
is calls from home always pinged, indicating that Scott was
still at home or near it when this ping happened. However,
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by the end of the call, the call had changed
to the tower near his warehouse, which was only minutes
from his house.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
So Scott leaves ten oh eight at the latest. At
ten eighteen some estimates's latest ten thirty, a neighbor finds
the family dog, McKenzie, walking around with his lee Shawn.
She puts the dog in the backyard. The dog will
be found there when Scott returns home with its leash
still attached. At ten thirty five. The Medinas, who live
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in the house across from the Petersons that will be
burglarized at some point leave their home for Los Angeles.
So they are leaving their home after the dog has
already been found with its leash. A witness these people
outside the Medina home just before noon. The burglars who
robbed the Medina home will be arrested and say they
robbed the place at four am on the twenty sixth.
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They said they saw some TV trucks on the street,
so they went in a different entrance. All things considered,
they probably robbed the house on the twenty third and
lied about it to avoid association with a Peterson murder,
though once again significantly, whenever they robbed the house, it
would have been after Mackenzie the dog was found wandering
the neighborhood with its leash still attached.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Scott leaves the warehouse about eleven eighteen am to drive
to the Berkeley Marina. This is about an hour and
thirty six minute drive. Scott said he felt it was
too cold to golf, so he decided to head to
the Berkeley Marina to go fishing instead. Of course, this
makes it awfully convenient that on the twentieth Scott bought
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a fishing license for just two days, and this was
one of the two days that the license was good for.
Scott purchased a boat launch ticket at twelve fifty four
PM when he arrived at the Berkeley Marina. From the
time he bought that ticket, until the time he left
was approximately seventy eight minutes or eighteen minutes less than
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the time it took him to drive there, so a
relatively short amount of time. During that time, Scott motored
north for probably two miles. He was near a little
island that had a bunch of trash on it. He
saw a big sign that said no landing and there
were some broken piers fitting Scott's description. The island described
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turned out to be Brooks Island. Evidence photos show the trash,
the peers, and the no landing sign as described by Scott.
When the state called an expert to the stand at trial,
he stated that based on the current, the bodies would
have started their trek to where they were found between
Berkeley Marina and Brooks Island. In fact, if the bodies
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had been dumped in deeper areas of the bay, they
would have washed out to sea rather than end up
where they were ultimately found.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
And if Scott did dump the bodies, this was just
unlucky for him. He basically dumped the bodies in the
one area of this marina where they would end up
Washington Shore instead of washing out to see at two twelve,
Scott says he leaves the marina. He eventually calls Lacey
at home on her cell phone. He leaves the message, Hey, beautiful,
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I just left you a message at home. It's two fifteen.
I'm leaving Berkeley. I won't be able to get to
Vella Farms to get the basket for Papa. I was
hoping you would get this message and go on out there.
I'll see you in a bit, sweetie, Love you bye.
This message is unusual, given that, according to Scott, Lacy
had no idea he was in Berkeley in the first place.
It is, how however, consistent was Scott's plan to make
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it look like Lacey had been alive when he left
for the warehouse that day. On January third, two thousand
and three, the burglars are arrested. The police find no
evidence of Lacy Peterson. And if you believe that the
burglars kidnapped Lacey and Connor and kept Lacey somewhere and
then Connor was born later, it would have been very
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difficult for them, given that January third is only nine
ten days after the kidnapping would supposedly have happened. But
at no point that very early period of time, do
any of the burglars flip on anyone else, say where
Lacey's being kept, or really reveal any evidence related to
her disappearance. On February tenth, two thousand and three, Connor's
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due date comes and goes. On April twelve, two thousand
and three, there is a heavy storm in San Francisco
Bay around the marina, causing higher than normal wave of
action in the area. The next day, April thirteen, people
walking near the San Francisco Bay find the body of
Connor Peterson. One day later, they will find Lacey. The
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bodies are in the exact area where Scott was fishing.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Now, turning to Scott's demeanor, Scott's awfully relaxed during the
first interview with the police. For instance, when he's being interviewed,
he's drinking coffee from a coffee cup and his hands
aren't shaking, which you can see because he's holding that
coffee cup. He doesn't have trouble getting it from the
table to his mouth, no issues at all. Moreover, he
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shows no emotion during the press conferences. He never breaks down,
He never seems as though he really cares. Now he
also doesn't grill the police about what they're doing and
whether they have any updates for him about his missing
pregnant wife. His non blood relatives are honestly more emotional
today than he was at the time of Lacy's disappearance.
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The night during the search, when Lacey's mother, Sharon approached
Scott to give him a hug and comfort him, Scott
maneuvered away from her. It seemed to Sharon that he
was also avoiding eye contact with her. Likewise, Brent, Lacy's brother,
noticed that Scott was off by himself and was reluctant
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to make eye contact. In fact, Peterson and Brent never
spoke that night, even though they had a quote great relationship.
Sharon's cousin Gwendolen Kempele, also took note that Scott would
not look at her, despite the fact that they had
seen each other numerous times at family functions. Lacey's stepfather,
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Ron Grantski, asked Scott if he had gone golfing that day,
as Scott had planned. Now. Peterson paused and then replied
that he decided to go fishing instead. After Peterson told
grant Sky what time he left to go fishing, Grantsky
asked Peterson what he would be fishing for at that
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time of day. Peterson walked away without responding. Although Peterson
told Gransky and the police that he went fishing, Peterson
told Charon's cousin Harvey Kemple, that he went golfing that day.
Peterson also told neighbors Amy Krigbaum and Tara Vettable that
he was golfing that day. Sandy Rickard was standing outside
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the Covena residence when Peterson approached her. He put up
his hands and volunteered, quote, I wouldn't be surprised if
they find blood on my truck because I cut my
hands all the time. Peterson explained that it was because
he was an outdoorsman, or something to that effect, as
Rickard recalled, and Rickard found this interaction incredibly perplexing. So
(18:51):
in summary, in that one day, Scott tells some people
he went fishing, some people he went golfing, and offers
this strange comment about finding blood in his truck. Now,
let's talk about the boat that he took out that day.
The boat was a fourteen foot aluminum fishing boat. That's
a Class eight boat, one of the smallest boats you
(19:11):
can buy, although it's not impossible to take this kind
of boat out into the San Francisco Bay. It would
be really dangerous for someone who was not an expert
at boating.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
So let's talk about Scott as a fisherman. Conventional wisdom
will tell you that Scott was a terrible fisherman. But
he had been fishing before, he had owned a fishing
boat before, and he should have known what he was doing.
And yet on the day that he supposedly went fishing,
everything seemed to go wrong. Scott said that he was
taking the boat out to do some sturgeon fishing. The
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prosecution called an expert fisherman to testify about that. He
stated that Scott's rod was not rigged for sturgeon fishing.
He was rigged for fresh water pass the line and
wait was wrong. The rod was wrong. One of Scott's
rodds didn't even have a handle on it and thus
wasn't functional. Another rod had no line on it. When
the expert reviewed Scott's tackle box, it was filled with
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equipment to fish for freshwater bass. And remember this is
a saltwater marina. Moreover, the anchor would not work in
the bay. It was an anchor that Scott had made
for himself, but it was too small, and it wouldn't
dig into the ground and hold the boat, and there
is no long rope in the boat for an anchor. Finally,
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there's the question of why Scott would go all the
way out to San Francisco Bay, more than an hour
and a half away. The prosecution put on evidence of
at least a dozen places much close to the home
in Modesto, where he could have fished, much more suitable
for his boat and his tackle than the San Francisco Bay.
The bay, however, was the closest saltwater fishery to Scott,
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though Scott preferred saltwater fishing. One wonders why he had
so much fresh water tackle. Alice mentioned Scott's behavior before.
We put that in there, because some if you find
it very important and some of you don't. But nevertheless,
it's not the only strange thing that Scott did. On
January eighth, fourteen days after his wife has gone missing
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and four months before she'll be found, Scott adds the
Playboy channel on the family's cable package. Five days later,
he decides that isn't doing it for him, drops Playboy
and adds the ten ecstasy package instead.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Now let's talk about whether Scott was considering running or
was it Lacy. The closet in the spare bedroom of
the Peterson home was open, and duffel bags appear to
have been pulled off the shelf, and one was lying
upside down on the floor. During an interview with the police,
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Scott says that he abandoned his initial plans for the day,
which was to play golf because it was too cold. Instead,
he decided to go fishing. Now, it's strange that it
would be too cold to go golf but not too
cold to fish. One of the employees at the harbor
testified that hardly anyone came down to the marina because
of how cold it was that day. Scott was one
(22:12):
of three people there all day, and the employee called
it a gray, drizzly, nasty day. And it is interesting
that Scott just so happened to have a fishing license
for this spontaneous decision, one that he'd bought on December twentieth,
that was only good for December twenty third and twenty fourth.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Let's talk about Amber Fry some more so. After Amber
realizes who Scott is, she calls the police. Amber agrees
to cooperate and to record Scott's calls. Scott tells her
that he is in Paris. He has an elaborate lie
about being in Europe. He talks about fireworks at the
Eiffel Tower. In fact, he is at a candlelight vigil
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for his missing wife while he is talking to Amber.
They talked dozens and dozens of times, twenty nine recorded
hours of calls. Scott now claims he only talked with
Amber to keep her from going public lest it interfere
with the investigation in finding Lacey. Scott will eventually it
meant to Amber that his wife had disappeared. So one
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piece of evidence that the police found interesting was a
mop that was out. Scott told the police that the
reason the mop was out was because Lacey was going
to mop the floor that morning. But the maid had
been there the day before and she had mopped the
entire house, and this led the police to wonder if
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Scott had something he needed to clean up. Then there's
Scott's behavior during the search. One witness testified that he
actually followed Scott from the volunteer center during the search.
Scott was supposedly going out to search for Lacey. Instead,
he went to a mall parking lot and sat for
forty five minutes in his vehicle rather than taking part
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in the search. Multiple witnesses would testify that Scott did
not actively participate in the search. Moreover, Scott referred to
Lacey in the past tense and television interviews, which some
people think is significant. Also, Scott during the search is
playing golf all the time, including on the days after
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his unborn child and wife are found murdered and dumped
in the bay. Scott was actually arrested in Tory Pines
at the golf course. Police stated that Scott had almost
no reaction when told the DNA results came back confirming
the entire family had been murdered, and apparently, despite his
sudden interest in fishing, it was golfing that he was
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doing during that time.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Now, let's talk about Scott's trips to the marina. Police
put a GPS tracker on Scott's car to see where
he went, and on at least three occasions before Lacey
was found, police tracked Scott to to the Berkeley Marina.
While there he would just park and stare out over
the water. This is significant to some people because some
(25:09):
people will say it's strange that he continually visited a
place where Lacey and Connor's bodies were ultimately found. And
let's talk about the nursery at the Peterson home. When
the police returned to their home in February, Scott had
essentially turned the nursery into a storage room, piling a mattress,
(25:29):
office chairs, clothing, and other items into it, and some
of the items had actually come from his warehouse. And
note that February is actually the month of Connor's due date. Now,
prosecutors also entered two hairs that they found in a
pair of pliers, believed to be Lacey's. It looks and
seems identical and was from someone related to Lacey's mom,
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which is pretty close to definitive. It's not much, but
given that Lacey was never in the boat and Scott
claimed to have only been in the boat once, it
is interesting that they found two hairs that belonged to Lacey.
And the police also utilized a cadaver dog, and this
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police dog actually hit on Lacey's scent at the Berkeley
Marina on December twenty eighth, just four days after she disappeared.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
So let's talk about the anchors. Scott bought his boat
without an anchor. He told the police he made one
out of concrete in his warehouse. A concrete anchor was
found in his boat, though there was no line long
enough to use it. Concrete residue was found inside of
some buckets in his warehouse. There's also an area where
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it's obvious the anchors were made. According to the prosecution,
there are multiple quote unquote voids or areas of less
powder on the surface, indicating that multiple buckets were sitting
there making multiple anchors. The prosecution speculated that these anchors
were used to weigh down Lacey's body when it was
put into the water. The defense attempted to make a
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big deal of Scott using excess concrete to fill a
hole near his drive rather than making multiple anchors, though
even if he did that, it's unclear how that's inconsistent
with him making multiple anchors, since we don't know exactly
how much concrete there was in the beginning. Moreover, the
prosecution was ready for this and had an expert in
(27:25):
concrete who testified that the concrete near the driveway was
not consistent with the concrete used to make the anchor. Rather,
it was similar to cement used by Scott to put
in a fence post near where the concrete was found,
indicating that if Scott used additional concrete on the driveway,
it was from the fence post concrete, not the anchor concrete.
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When Scott was eventually arrested, the police found four cell phones,
his brother's ID, camping gear, and fifteen thousand dollars cash
in his car. Scott had dyed his hair blonde and
grown beard which he also died blonde, and he was
hanging out in San Diego, which in fairness was his
home but also was close to the border. Let's talk
(28:09):
about Lacey's clothes. Scott told police that Lacey was wearing
a white blouse and black pants on the day that
she disappeared, December twenty fourth, but when Lacey's body was found,
she was wearing tan pants, which is what she had
been wearing on the twenty third, as well as a
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maternity bra. The prosecution and defense disputed whether these were
these same tan pants that she'd been wearing, and it
has often stated that Amy Rocca, Lacey's sister, positively identified
pants at the house as the ones Lacey was wearing, however,
on the stand, despite many attempts by Mark Garrigos, who
was Scott Peterson's lawyer, to get Amy to confirm this,
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she refused to do so. And although the top Lacey
was wearing on the twenty third was found at the house,
she had a number of different pairs of tan pants,
and it is certainly possible that the tan pants she
was found in were the tan pants she was wearing
on the twenty third. But what's very important here is
whatever happened to the tan pants. The pants Lacey was
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wearing weren't black, and this becomes very important. Let's talk
about people who claim to have seen Lacey. A number
of people claim to have seen Lacey walking her dog.
For instance, Vivian and Bill Mitchell said that they saw
a woman matching Lacey's description walking the dog that morning.
(29:38):
Homer and Sue Maldonado said that around ten am they
went out driving to deliver Christmas presents and saw a
very pregnant lady struggling with a dog. Tawny Fridas says
he also saw a pregnant woman walking a dog that morning.
Frank Aguilar and his wife also saw a pregnant woman
with her dog. Diane Campos was having a cigarette behind
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the local Hot Spittle. She looked across a creek into
a park and saw a pregnant woman walking a dog.
She saw two men following this woman. The dog was barking,
and the two men said, shut that effing dog up.
Then there's Tom Harshman, who said he saw a woman
in a red shirt and black pants, fitting Lacy's description,
being forced into a van sometime in the afternoon, a
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couple miles away from the home. He said that she
had been squatting and urinating on the side of the road.
By the end of this around eleven people say they
saw a woman who might be Lacey walking the dog.
Nearly all of them described the person they saw as
wearing a white blouse and black pants, just as Scott
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had said, and just as the missing person's posters described.
That was all well and good until six months later,
when Lacey's body was found and she wasn't wearing black pants.
She was wearing tan pants. Moreover, even though there was
testimony that Lacy enjoyed getting out and being active, the
(31:06):
prosecution put on a number of witnesses that testified that
Lacey was having extreme difficulty even walking by the end
of her pregnancy, and the doctor had told her to
take it easy after she complained of dizziness and exhaustion.
They also testified, given this, it is simply not believable
that she would have taken the dog on some sort
of long, strenuous walk through the park, and that's not
(31:30):
just anecdotal. In fact, at the end of October, two
months before Lacey disappeared, Lacey had walked to the park
and gotten very sick, to the point that she was
vomiting and almost passed out. Her mother testified that she
was extremely embarrassed because some maintenance men saw her and
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had to help her and had to end up cleaning
up her vomit. After her Lacey talked to her doctor
about this event, and the doctor told her that she
should either stop walking altogether or do it much later
in the day after she'd had an opportunity to get hydrated.
In another instance, Lacey's prenatal yoga instructor testified that on
(32:15):
December twentieth, Lacey was in so much pain that she
could barely walk and that she needed help to get
to her car. Furthermore, the shoes Lacey typically used to
go on walks were found in the house. Finally, the
police did not ignore these sightings. They searched the park,
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including with canine teams, and found no trace of Lacey.
They also interviewed folks in a homeless camp near the park.
None of them had seen Lacey.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
And the defense didn't call any of the witnesses you
always hear about. The defense never called a witness who
supposedly saw into Scott's boat and said it was empty.
The defense also never called witnesses who claimed to have
seen Lacey that day, either walking the dog or being
forced into the van. Moreover, there was another witness who
(33:09):
saw a pregnant woman walking a dog that day, called
it into the police, and then, when he was shown
a picture of Lacey, said that he was certain the
person he saw was not Lacey. Christopher Van Sant testified
that he saw pregnant woman walking her dog near the
footbridge at Dry Creek Regional Park, near the scene at hospital.
(33:31):
This sighting is consistent with many of the other sightings
offered by those who believe Scott is innocent, but Sant
testified that he is quote one hundred percent positive that
the woman was not Lacy Peterson. Following this testimony, the
prosecution called four different people, the husband of a pregnant
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woman and three pregnant women, who testified that they had
walked the neighborhood either on that day or around it.
One walked a chocolate lab, one a lab mix, one
an Australian shepherd, and another one didn't even have a dog.
In other words, a lot of pregnant women were walking
(34:12):
dogs in the days surrounding Lacey's disappearance in the area.
To continue to hammer pome that point, the prosecution called
a parade of people who were walking in the park
that day, who were walking any number of Golden Retrievers
that day, or who were just in the neighborhood that day,
none of whom saw anything unusual, and any of whom
(34:34):
might have been mistaken by someone for Lacey.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
So when the bodies were found, Lacey's body was in
pretty bad shape, with barnacles growing on her bones. The
forensic anthropologist Alison Galloway testified that her level of decomposition
was consistent with being in the San Francisco Bay for
three to six months. Connor was less decomposed. The difference
(34:58):
in decomposition has led but some to speculate that Connor
was born somewhere else and then the bodies were dumped separately.
This of course would have meant that Scott is innocent,
but the autopsy does not support that argument. There was
no vaginal birth. The autopsy confirmed that Lacy's birth canal
remained closed. In fact, there also wasn't something called coffin
(35:20):
birth in this case, which is what happens when a
baby is expelled from a decomposing body. Moreover, there was
no evidence of a sea section. Although Lacey's entire body
was not recovered, the trunk of her body was, and
had there been a sea section, there would have been
evidence of it. What actually happened is that at some
(35:41):
point during decomposition, the body was expelled from the top
of the uterus and out of the body. Some have
suggested that if Connor remained inside Lacey's body for some
time after death, it should show tailtale signs of degeneration,
often seen in babies that are miscarried, and in fact,
Connor's body did show those signs. The process is called maceration.
(36:07):
The pathologists testified. We'll even use the term maceration in
a hospital pathology where we're looking at the still birth
in a baby that's died in the uterus and then
perhaps is delivered a day or two or three or
more later, will undergo the same type of changes, not
to the degree that we see in Connor, but maceration
(36:28):
type changes anyway, in a fresh or stilborn those will
often involve skin changes overriding the school plates and to
a certain degree, lucuefication of the organs. So we'll see
that in a hospital setting two, and that's where the
term maceration would be used. Although Connor suffered from this
kind of effect, and did so far worse than your
(36:50):
average still birth, he was still protected from the worst
of the elements in the bay, including predators. Thus, because
it took a while for the baby to be expelled,
Connor's body was protected from degradation to an extent greater
than Lacy. In fact, doctor Galley would testify that Connor's
body had been exposed in the bay for no more
(37:11):
than one to two days at the most. A quarter
inch of Connor's umbilical cord was still attached, and it
was torn, not cut. There's no evidence that the umbellical
cord was knotted or clamped, which, if Connor had been
born alive, would lead to the baby bleeding to death.
(37:31):
Some people pointed to some trash or twine that was
wrapped around his throat as a possible means of killing him,
but there was no damage from the twine, and it
had about an inch of slack. It wasn't tight around
his neck. Moreover, leaving the twine would be a pretty
stupid thing to do if that's how you killed Connor.
But you're going to dump him in the bay to
(37:53):
try and frame Scott Peterson.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
And let's tell we've talked a lot about Connor, but
let's talk about the age of the baby. Now. Lacey
was due on February tenth, two thousand three. She disappeared
and likely died on December twenty third, about seven weeks
from the due date. So one would expect then that
the baby was probably between thirty one and thirty five
(38:16):
weeks gestational age when he died, given that due dates
are not an exact science. According to the pathologists, the
gestational age of Connor was between thirty three and thirty
eight weeks. On cross examination, the defense attempted to push
this number higher to thirty five weeks, to further the
(38:37):
defense's theory that Lacey was kidnapped and held somewhere for
some period of time alive, and therefore Connor was alive
as well. The pathologists did not bend on this, repeatedly
explaining to the defense attorney that given the science and
the varying development of unborn children, thirty three to thirty
eight was the best range. Another petthidlogist, doctor DeVore, determined
(39:02):
that Connor died between the twenty first and the twenty
fourth of December, which is a much more precise date.
The defense called an expert who testified that the earliest
Connor could have died was December twenty ninth. Just on
the face of things, this testimony seems far fetched that
(39:22):
the doctor could say with certainty that a body in
the water for four months died without question no earlier
than December twenty ninth does not seem medically feasible. Cross
examination bore out this point. The prosecution was able to
unnerve the doctor, who admitted that his entire calculation was
(39:43):
based on the assumption that Lacy found out she was
pregnant on June ninth and immediately told her friends, a
fact that was actually disputed by those who knew her.
If she found out before June ninth and only told
her friends, then his whole theory fell a part. Given
that we are talking a matter of days here, the
(40:04):
notion that the doctor who was not a forensic pathologist
could determine with such certainty that Connor could not have
died a mere five days before his earliest estimate just
falls flat. And let's talk about where the bodies were found.
As the prosecution repeatedly stated, the bodies of Connor and
(40:24):
Lacy were found exactly where Scott was supposedly fishing. As
a matter of fact, the prosecution put on evidence that,
given where the bodies ended up and the currents in
the area, the probable dumping spot for the bodies was
just off Brooks Island.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So there's a lot of evidence there about what happened.
And as we've said before, this is a circumstantial case.
There's not going to be an eyewitness, there's not going
to be a slam dung. Once you have are a
bunch of different bricks that you are building a case with.
But the most significant point is the one that Alice
just made where the bodies were found. The bodies were
(41:04):
found in the place that Scott Peterson had gone fishing
that day. Now, people who don't think it was Scott
suggests that someone else kidnapped Lacey. Maybe it was the burglars,
Maybe it was a satanic cult of pregnant women snatchers,
Maybe it was someone looking to harvest organs. The theory
(41:26):
goes that Lacey was kidnapped, kept somewhere until Connor was born,
then both were murdered. At this point, the police had
announced that they were looking in Berkeley Marina because that
was the place Scott had been. Knowing that the police
were looking there, the kidnappers hatch a daring plot to
dump the bodies in exactly the same place Scott had
(41:48):
been fishing the day of the disappearance. And this is
a point that people grasp onto because you have to
this isn't a coincidence. It's not a coincidence that the
bodies were found an hour and a half away. One
of two things is true. Either Scott dumped them there,
or someone looking to frame Scott dump them there. And
(42:10):
oftentimes people will just say, well, the police said it
was Berkeley Marinas, a somebody probably just dumped them there,
and people just go with that, and they don't stop
to examine what would have to be true for that
to be true. And here's the thing that didn't happen.
No one kept Lacy alive for four months and then
(42:33):
dumped her body in the bay. First, there's no evidence
for it whatsoever. There are no credible sidings of Lacey
on December twenty fourth. None of the sidings of a
pregnant woman that day matched Lacy, nor are they consistent
with the physical limitations Lacey was having. Eyewitness accounts are
notoriously unreliable, and they are the first thing that innocence
(42:56):
advocates attack when attempting to overturn a conviction that is
actually faulty. To rely on them here, given all we know,
is questionable at best. But there's more. As to the burglars,
they could not have shown up until after the dog
was found wandering with her leash, meaning that the theory
(43:17):
that Lacey confronted them after her walk with the dog
is impossible. Moreover, there is no evidence Lacey was kidnapped.
There are no signs of struggle. No one saw Lacey
being kidnapped. One of The chief arguments against Scott being
responsible for Lacey's murder is that he would have had
to have gotten her body into his truck with no
(43:38):
one noticing. But what's more likely that Scott could kill
Lacey in the privacy of his home and maneuver her
into the truck, which he also happens to be loading
with large umbrellas that would conceal her. Or that a
gang of organ harvesters, burglars or Satanists snatched Lacey in
broad daylight while she was walking her dog doesn't end there.
(44:01):
You'd have to believe that no one has ever come
forward stating that they saw a captive, pregnant lady in
the months she would have been held. No one has
ever flipped on the kidnappers. There is not a hint
of anything like this happening, and its smacks of conspiracy.
And still that's not the end of the problems with
(44:23):
this theory. The theory that someone would frame Scott by
dumping the bodies falls apart upon even the barest scrutiny.
It is one thing to dump a body on a cold,
rainy Christmas Eve when no one is out. It is
another thing altogether to dump a body in a bay
that is being constantly searched by police and is the
(44:43):
center of media and public attention, and even Scott Peterson
is there watching the bay at various times. Moreover, for
this planned work, the kidnappers would need to dump the
bodies in such a way that they would decompose sufficiently
to not give the game away. If the bodies were
found too soon, then it would be evident that they
(45:04):
had been killed. Much later, the means of death would
be easily determinable, and they would need to do so
by dumping the bodies in the one area that would
be consistent with Scott's guilt. Dump them in an area
that was too deep and the bodies would be swept away.
Dump them in an area that's too shallow, and they
might be found by the constant searches by the police,
(45:24):
leaving you open to forensic evidence that would convict you.
Dump them in an area other than Brooks Island, and
the tides would have taken them somewhere else, somewhere that
an expert could trace back to a place that Scott
could argue he'd never been during his very short trip out.
The kidnappers would be taking enormous risks, all in the
(45:44):
hopes that enough time would pass before the bodies washed up,
if they ever washed up at all, to convince the
police that Lacy and Connor had been killed months before,
just around the time that Scott was at the marina.
And yet with all the focus and attention on Scott
and none on them, much simpler to bury the bodies
in the desert and never worry about it again. But somehow,
(46:07):
according to this theory, the kidnappers pulled all this off
without anyone seeing them or suspecting any different, fooling the
state's forensic pathologist, and having gotten away with this plot
to this day with a single person involved ever saying
a word. That is what you must believe in order
to believe Scott is innocent. Put aside the sidings of Lacy,
(46:30):
the condition of her body, whatever else it is. It
makes you think Scott is innocent. Unless you can show
that a gang of criminals managed to pull all that
we described off, Scott is guilty. That is the conspiracy
that has to be true for someone else to be involved.
Or maybe instead a man who routinely cheated on his
(46:53):
wife was finally facing up to the enormity of having
a child and being forced to be forever tied down,
and he decided the easiest thing was just to take
care of both problems once and for all.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
And that, folks, is how you do a closing argument.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
Boom.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
I can't believe we got through that. It was so hard.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
That was dedication.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
It was really hard not to talk about our feelings.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
I know, and put myself in other people's shoes. Do
you do all the things that irritate people?
Speaker 2 (47:27):
But you know, look, okay, so there you go. Guys.
You have all the evidence right there if you want
to hear the reasoning behind all that and listen to
the multi part episodes that we have. But we've tried
to compile all the evidence here for you.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
Yeah, I mean, I just want people to be armed,
because look, there's a fifty to fifty chance Scott's going
to get a new trial. We're going to cover that
on legal briefs. I don't want to do that tonight,
but we'll cover everything that's going on with jury, ms
conduct or whatnot. If it gets a new trial, we're
gonna have to go through this circus all again. Let's
hope that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
For the sake of Lacy and her family. I hope
that is not the case, because we've said this time
and again, this is circumstantial. That does not affect the
weight of the evidence. Circumstantial evidence is just as weighty
as direct evidence. We do not have anyone who saw
him dump Lacy overboard that we know to be true,
(48:20):
and most cases like this you don't have that because
if you did, there probably wouldn't be a trial and
they wouldn't have taken long to figure out who it was.
But this is circumstantial, and that is fine with respect
to the weight of the evidence. And there is so
much circumstantial evidence in this case. Take away the word
circumstantial if that SIT's funny with you, because you've been
(48:41):
told before that circumstantial evidence is not as good it is.
It is just as good. There is so much evidence
in this case. We spoke at lightning speed, taking out
all our opinions and all explanation to fit it into
one hour, which is so much evidence. And that's why
the tri I'll spend for so long. And that's why
(49:02):
our previous episodes explaining this case was also a multi part.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
And I just want to say now that we've finished,
and we've got time and we can like extemporize. You know,
I understand the desire not to look at Scott's behavior
because it's almost like you don't want to prejudice yourself.
I understand that we have rules in the law about evidence,
about what you can admit to keep people from being prejudiced,
(49:26):
to keep people focused on the actual evidence. So I
totally get that. But the simple fact of the matter,
if you look at most family annihilators, a lot of
them are having affairs, a lot of them are in
very similar places to Scott. I mean, if you look
at Chris Wats, Chris Watts and Scott Peterson are almost
the same person. Chris Wats did almost the exact same thing.
(49:49):
He strangles his wife, probably he loads their body into
the back of his truck. It's just instead of it
being two thousand and two, was much later, and his
next door neighbor had a ring camera, and so you
may basically caught him doing this on camera. And if
you've seen the documentary, you see you see the way
Chris Watts is reacting. And the thing is with Chris Watts,
nobody says, well, how he's acting is completely relevant no,
(50:12):
you do the much more human thing if you watch
him and you're like, that is not how somebody acts
when their love of their life is missing. He clearly
is guilty, and sure enough he was Scott Peterson. People
want to hand wave it away. They want to say, oh,
you know, it doesn't matter he was having an affair,
and it doesn't matter that he was a terrible person.
It doesn't matter how he acted after she went missing.
It doesn't matter that he got all the porn channels.
(50:33):
But it does. That speaks to the circumstances surrounding the case. Now,
is it the strongest evidence against him. No, the strongest
evidence against him is that his wife's body showed up
an hour and a half away from her house where
he just so happened to have been fishing on the
day she went missing. Come on, people like, it doesn't
take a rocket sigence on the day he.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Went fishing, when he had the night before said he
was going to go golfing and this was supposed to
be a sponge taneous trip to fishing, when he had
bought the license for that specific day many days previously,
and then later that day at a vigil, told some
people he went fishing, told some people he went golfing,
and know.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
By the way, before he even bought those licenses, he
was looking at the currents at that very place that
he ended up on the day she disappeared. And I'm sorry,
and I just go back to what we said earlier.
The problem for Scott Peterson defenders in this case, I
don't want to hear about who saw her walking the dog. Okay,
(51:35):
we've explained why that's not relevant.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
Well, let's just summarize it for maybe people who didn't
quite see all the different parts. Basically, there is absolutely
no evidence that anyone saw Lacey walking a dog. There's
evidence that people saw someone who looked pregnant walking a dog,
but that person or those people were not wearing what
(51:57):
Lacy was wearing when she was found.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
And that's huge, It's absolutely huge. And most of these
people didn't know her. You know, some people believe, well,
there was one person who did well, they went to
the same doctor. That's how they knew her. That they
weren't like best friends. Also, once again, you can point
to this stuff all day long, but what you have
to do you have to show that someone dumped those
(52:21):
bodies in that marina to frame Scott, and that is
just absurd. It is absurd to believe that Lacy was
kept alive. She obviously wasn't. I mean, there are barnacles
on her bones, for goodness sake. She had been in
that marina for a very long time, and Connor had
been inside of her most of the time. And we
know that because of what they the condition of his body,
(52:45):
and people say, well, but he was so well protected. No, no, look,
he was more protected than Lacey, whose body was in
terrible shape, who had been ravaged by the elements and
animals and everything else. The pathologist even testified that really,
one more day in Connor's body probably would have been
never found. The predators would have taken care of it.
(53:05):
He was in the water for a couple of days
at most. His body was not in good shape. It
was in really bad shape. It's one of the reasons
that figuring out exactly how old he was is hard
because one of the things you do as you look
at bones and a lot of his body he had
kind of liquefied by this point. It was just really hard.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
And by the way, you know, we've talked about how
this is a circumstantial case. What Brett just said there
is so important. A day longer and Connor may never
have been found, and Lacy maybe would have been found
much much later, even more decomposed, and we would not
have been able to know as much as we already
do about the gestational age about lack of a coffin
birth or c section. So the fact that this is
(53:43):
a circumstantial case is actually it's more than a circumstantial case.
The fact that Connor and Lacey were found in conditions
that could even be examined by a pathologist strengthens this
case so immensely. It was terrible luck for Scott Peterson
that Connor's body was found, because we know so much
more about the time frame and also when gestationally he
(54:07):
was when he passed away, because his mother passed away.
And so just know that the facts in this case
really are so incredibly strong. This case could have been
tried without their bodies. It absolutely could have the fact
that their bodies were found and they were able to
try the case with the pathology information from their bodies,
it's overwhelming how strong this case is.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
And that's why Scott's out there staring out over the
bay because he knows his entire future depends on those
bodies not being found. You know, he'd weigh them down.
He hoped they would never be found. But you had
that storm the day before they were found, and that
that's when it happened. That's when the body separated from
(54:51):
the weights. It's when the body of Connor was expelled
from his mother. And then the bodies turned up two
days later, and once again Scott Peterson most unlucky man
in the world. Basically, if he had put the bodies
anywhere else in the bay, the tidal action would have
carried them out to sea. But because he put them
(55:13):
where he did, in a shallower area, that's why the
bodies watched up where they did.
Speaker 2 (55:19):
And by the way, he may have done that because
he had remember kind of a terrible boat. He had
a Class A boat. This was not a good boat
to have in a very windy, very tumultuous bay. The
San Francisco Bay is not easy sailing at all. So
he had a small boat. He couldn't actually venture much
further out. And you know why he had a smaller
boat that he just bought, because he really only had
(55:41):
one purpose for this boat. This was not so that
he could regularly go out into the San Francisco Bay
and fish with his by the way ill equipped anchor
and fishing gear. So the reason this is a bad
boat is that he only needed a good enough boat
to accomplish this task, not to fuel him his hobby
in the San Francisco Bay.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Well, we could ran about this for another five episodes,
as we've done in the past.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
We won't. We'll stop here. We won't.
Speaker 3 (56:08):
We'll stop here. And look, if you think Scott Peterson's innocent,
I would love to hear it. I would love to
hear your argument for how he's innocent. I would love
to hear argument for the whole how the whole conspiracy
to dump the body thing went down and nobody noticed,
how the inept burglars who got arrested ten days after
the burglary, nevertheless somehow managed to keep Lacey's body for
(56:30):
another three months until they dumped the body somewhere. I mean,
I would just I would love to hear it. And
maybe that's what you think happened. And I'll just say
true crime. The great thing about true crime is, at
the end of the day, it really just comes down
to evidence. In facts. It doesn't matter what you think
of us. It doesn't matter what you think of Scott Peterson.
Either either the fact show he did it or they don't.
(56:52):
And when you look at the facts here, I just I,
like I said, when we did the first six episodes,
I didn't know going in whether he was guilty or not.
I just knew that everybody said he was guilty. We
have really just skimmed the surface. Read the transcripts. We
will put links up where you can read the transcripts
of these testimonies. Read the transcripts of the pathologists. Their
(57:15):
testimony is absolutely damning to any theory that those bodies
weren't in that bay for multiple months, Absolutely damning. Read
the whole thing. We quoted some of it. Read the
whole thing, and I just don't think you can read
the testimony and not see the truth here. And the
problem with this case is because it is circumstantial, and
(57:40):
you every little brick being built into every little brick.
Unless you really dig down into it and really look
at the evidence, it can be easy to be misled
into believing there's no evidence. It's one reason we wanted
to do this today, kind of do the reading for you.
But nevertheless, if you got time and you're really curious,
we're gonna put the links on the website. Check it out,
but I want to hear what you think. Shoot us
(58:00):
an email Prosecutorspod at gmail dot com, at Prosecutor's Pod
on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Hello to you guys watching this
on YouTube, and hello to awesome people on the Patreon
you were listening early and add free and join us
on the gallery, which is on the facebooks where we
hang out a lot. I'm sure people will be talking
(58:21):
about this case on there. Like I said, this case
will continue to develop. There will be follow ups on
this as the judge decides whether or not to give
him a new trial. Obviously, if a new trial is granted,
that will be appealed, and if it's not granted, it
will be appealed. So this won't end in December, but
it'll be the first step into figuring out whether or
(58:42):
not its Scott Peterson is actually going to get a
new trial or not. But I will say the same
thing I said at the end of our last six episodes.
If he's tried again, he will be convicted again because
the evidence against him is overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Indeed, thank you guys for joining us. We'll see how
people like this and if we need to do this
for some of our lower series.
Speaker 3 (59:01):
Yeah, and we promise not to recycle everything. We're not
going to just do that to you. But hey, you know,
we are very long winded. So if there are cases
you'd like us to do I follow up on, we're
really kind of drill down. We can do that. Well, guys,
we will be back next week with a case that
has been one of the most recommended cases, one of
(59:24):
the most requested cases that we have, and I'm really
excited to dig into that. It's a case that needs
all the attention you can get. But until then, I'm
Brett and I'm Alice, and we are the prosecutors. So
(01:00:03):
we want to do this all in one episode. Okay, Okay,
I have tried to limit it as much as possible,
but it's still eleven page.
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Peterson is guilt and we're not gonna get through this
in one episode.
Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
So that's the whole point is to do it in
one episode. Okay, We've already six episodes on it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
Okay, so no extrip, We're just going straight with the script.
I got it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Basically, that's what we got.
Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
To do it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:24):
We got it.
Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
I love going straight with the script. I'm all because
you know what I'm gonna do after we're finished, I'm
gonna go wash me a Hallmark Christmas.
Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
And it's time to see where they or out. We
can pull this off.
Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
I don't think we can, but let's do it.
Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
Okay, Okay, are you ready?
Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
I'm so ready. I've been ready for her. I've been
podcasting for forty five minutes ago, and
Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
They have a less basting, less
Host
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