A Deadly Game

by Catherine Crier

  Scott’s half-siblings, John and Susan, would later testify about those early years. They were both thrilled to have a little brother. He was carried around so much that family members joked about being afraid that “he might not learn how to walk.” Scott’s childhood nickname, Scooter, captured his upbeat charm perfectly. Always smiling, always quiet and well behaved, Scott apparently could do no wrong. John could think of only one incident where the boy displayed a temper. At age four, after a light spanking by his father, Scott left the room. A moment later he came back and punched his father in the stomach.

  That was the only memorable disturbance in Scott’s gentle demeanor until Christmas Eve 2002.

  When the fair-haired boy turned four, his family moved to Scripps Ranch, a neighborly middle-class suburb in northeast San Diego. Scott’s father began a shipping and packing business nearby, and his young son would often accompany him on deliveries. Witness after witness described their close father-son relationship. Together they enjoyed fishing and pheasant hunting on the weekends, and from the age of five Scott went along with his father to the local driving range to learn golf. He practiced with a special sawed-off driver his father made for him. Lee had saved the homemade club in the basement of the family’s home as a memento of those days. By age seven, Scott joined the Peterson clan on golf outings at a local country club. Yet he rarely made it to the eighteenth hole, opting in-stead to take his small fishing pole to a nearby river.

  Lee described Scott as a happy, “shiny” baby who rarely cried. His own childhood hadn’t been as bright as the one he gave his children. Lee’s grandmother had immigrated to the United States from Lithuania, settling in Minnesota, where the family lived without running water. Just as Scott accompanied his father on deliveries, Lee had followed his mother on her housekeeping jobs. As a young man, he joined his father on his rounds repairing typewriters. Lee eventu-ally joined the business.

  Lee wanted his family to enjoy a better lifestyle, and for years he had struggled financially to make it happen. The family finally turned the corner when they moved to Rancho Santa Fe. When Scott was ten, the family headed to Poway, an inland city of about 50,000, where he attended Painted Rock Middle School. He went on to the University of San Diego High School, a Catholic preparatory school set high above the city overlooking the Pacific Ocean. While there, Scott honed his passion for golf. When he got his driver’s license at sixteen, his parents rewarded him with a used Peugeot sedan.

  Police learned that Scott had at least two high school girlfriends. The first was Stephanie Smith, who began dating Scott when he was a senior and she was in the tenth grade. When the police interviewed Stephanie, she described how Scott had lavished her with gifts and flowers. He picked up the tab on all their dates, and even presented her with a special ring for Valentine’s Day.

  The two had been dating for nearly four months when Stephanie heard rumors about a classmate named Dawn Hood. Friends were saying that Dawn had been seen driving Scott’s new car and holding hands with the young man.

  When Stephanie confronted him about the rumors, however, she found his response hard to believe. Dawn and he had swapped cars, he said, so she could try out his new wheels. When pressed, Scott vehemently denied there was anything going on with Dawn. The two were just “friends.”

  Stephanie asked about the hand-holding.

  “I hold hands with lots of my friends,” he responded.

  “That was the last straw,” Stephanie told the police. She asked Scott to return the items she had given him, and immediately called it quits. Not long after, Scott began seeing Dawn Hood exclusively.

  The police also located Dawn, who confirmed that she and Scott had dated for about eight months, beginning in the spring of 1 990. They were “health freaks,” she said, and refrained from alcohol and drugs. She and Stephanie both described Scott as a gentleman.

  Dawn told investigators that she performed community service for one of her high school classes, and that Scott frequently accompanied her to a facility for children with disabilities. Scott also did volunteer work at a homeless shelter as part of a school course.

  Dawn and Scott broke up in the fall of 1990, when Scott moved to Arizona to attend college. Dawn remembered Scott as “a loner.” Her family was friendly with Scott while they were dating, and he sometimes stayed with her parents, even when Dawn wasn’t there. Dawn had never noticed any violent or strange behavior during the entire time she knew him, and she couldn’t imagine that Scott had anything to do with his wife’s disappearance.

  Scott spent one semester at Arizona State University, but he told police that he’d grown disillusioned with the school after deciding he didn’t like the golf coach. The facts are probably quite different. One of his teammates was the now-famous golfer Phil Mikelson. When reporters asked him about his relationship with Scott, he couldn’t re-ally remember him because they were never “in the same league.” Phil was a rising star; Scott was not. It is far more likely that Scott re-treated to Cuesta Junior College in San Luis Obispo when he realized that a PGA career wasn’t in his future.

  Perched above the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, San Luis Obispo welcomes thousands of tourists every year. Scenic Hearst Castle, the palace-like estate of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, is located nearby. Scott attended the junior college for about eighteen months, made the Dean’s List, and played on the school’s golf team. He paid for school by working. According to his mother, he never asked his parents for financial assistance. He surprised them both when he announced that he was moving out of their house to room with two golfing teammates. Lee Peterson told a local reporter that his son and his friends surfaced the flat roof of their new home with artificial grass. From there, they would hit golf balls into a neighboring cow pasture. According to friends, Scott dated while attending school there, but he was never seriously involved with anyone. They said he liked things his own way.

  In 1994 Scott transferred again, this time to California Polytechnic State University, a four-year-college in San Luis Obispo. There he earned a bachelor of science in agriculture. Scott’s friends described him as laid-back, focused, and someone who rarely dis-played emotion.

  While he was at Cal Poly, Scott cut back his studies, taking just two courses each quarter while working at a golf club and waiting tables downtown at the Pacific Cafe. There, he met a young waitress named Michelle. After they’d been dating for about eighteen months, Michelle told police, Scott started talking about getting married. When he became jealous and overbearing, she broke off the relationship—but only after a fight.

  “Scott did not want to take no for an answer,” Michelle recalled. “He would hold all his emotions in for a long time, and then have an emotional breakdown.” Scott cried on a number of occasions, begging her for another chance. Even after they split, Scott would come to Michelle’s house, eager to woo her back, trying to rekindle their sexual relationship.

  Still, it was only a few weeks after Scott and Michelle split up in 1995 that he began dating Laci Rocha.

  Laci was also attending Cal Poly. One of her friends was employed at the Pacific Cafe, and Laci would occasionally come in to visit. Scott, always charming and well mannered, caught her attention, and she asked her friend about him. Scott, in turn, had noticed the petite, curvy former cheerleader with the engaging smile.

  Laci asked her friend to give Scott her phone number. When handed the slip, Scott assumed his coworker was playing a trick and tossed the paper in the trash. When he realized it wasn’t a joke, he retrieved the number.

  From the moment she wrote the note, Laci was confident that Scott would call her. Indeed, she’d already told her mother she’d met the man she wanted to marry—that she’d fallen in love with Scott on sight. Sharon asked if she’d gone out with him yet. Laci said no, but predicted that they’d go out together soon. This was entirely in character for Laci. A confident young woman, she could also be headstrong and was used to getting h
er way. Both her mother and her sister, Amy, said the same thing: If Laci put her mind to something, look out.

  Before long, Scott did ask her out—on the deep-sea fishing trip he’d mentioned to the police. Laci became seasick, however, and the excursion ended sooner than planned. Still, the attraction between Scott and Laci was strong and the two continued dating. Laci told her mother that she’d found her lifelong partner.

  Several weeks later, Scott invited both women to the Pacific Cafe. He greeted them politely as they entered the trendy restaurant, and led them to their table, where he had specially arranged a dozen white roses at Sharon’s place setting and a dozen red ones for her daughter.

  Scott’s parents also met Laci soon after the two began dating. The Petersons liked the bubbly, dark-haired beauty from the start. But their other children found it surprising that Scott had picked a girl with a colorful sunflower tattooed on her left ankle. They thought it was “outrageous.”

  What Laci didn’t realize was that, while all this was going on, her new boyfriend was still pleading with his ex, Michelle, to take him back. Scott brought Laci into the Pacific Cafe during Michelle’s shift to try to make her jealous, and even introduced the two women. At some point, Laci apparently caught on and became upset, but in the end she prevailed. Michelle moved away from San Luis Obispo about two months after their breakup and never saw or spoke to Scott again.

  By Christmas 1995, Laci had moved into Scott’s apartment. Her holiday gift to him was the auburn-haired puppy they named McKenzie. Laci graduated from Cal Poly the following spring with a degree in ornamental horticulture. Scott had avoided alcohol in high school, while dating Dawn Hood, but with Laci, he developed a taste for good wine. Indeed, Scott’s parents told investigators that when they dined with Scott and Laci, they insisted that the younger couple pay for their own bottles because they had such ex-pensive taste.

  When I started reading about the couple’s early years together, Scott’s personality traits began making sense to me. A sociopath is quite capable of morphing into the very person his companion needs. It is this ability to manipulate, ultimately for selfish reasons, that is a hallmark of this behavior disorder.

  Just as he had with Stephanie the health nut, and then again with Janet Use the vegetarian, Scott seemed to get through life by mirroring the needs of his companions. He quickly became, at least on the surface, the person Laci wanted him to be: the rising young entrepreneur and suburban father, who spent time remodeling the home, working in the yard, and joining her to entertain friends and neighbors. Later, with Amber Frey, Scott would go from a man who never attended church, to one who professed in a letter from jail that he hoped to get out and “do the work of the Lord.”

  Shortly after Scott met Laci, he learned about his two siblings who had been given up for adoption before his birth. Don Chapman of Pennsylvania and Anne Bird of San Francisco were first reunited with each other and then with their biological mother, Jackie Peterson. As he seemingly did with every other aspect of his life, Scott took the news quite calmly and quickly developed a relationship with his additional siblings.

  In researching this book, I had the opportunity to sit down with Anne Bird, a bright, articulate, well-spoken woman with a highly de-fined sense of ethics and integrity. She seemed concerned that she might know something important to this case, and out of a need to “tell the truth,” as she put it, she spoke out in detail for the first time over dinner at a California restaurant.

  Anne came into the Peterson family in 1996 when her half brother, Don Chapman, contacted her to ask whether she wanted to meet her biological mother. After conducting a search on his own be-half, Don located Jackie Peterson and sent her a certified letter saying that he was her son. Jackie reportedly opened the letter in front of her family, and then “freaked out” because no one else, including Lee, had ever heard about Don and Anne.

  Anne was hesitant, but eventually green-lighted Jackie to contact her. She first met Scott when he rang the doorbell at Jackie’s home and she let him in. He could not stop staring at her all evening. She was thinner then, and the two looked very much alike, especially their eyes.

  Anne believes that Scott was immediately taken with her. She was worldly and well-traveled, having spent seven years in London, where she attended Oxford University. She’d also been to Brussels and other European cities, experiences Scott had only wished for. Her adoptive parents were wealthy and Anne had a lot of well-todo friends. At twenty-two, she had landed a great job at the Golden Door Fitness Resort and Spa in Escondido, and then later at a spa in Mexico. Scott was impressed with the life Anne had lived—so much so that his sister, Susan Caudillo, grew envious of their relationship. Later, when Scott became a suspect, she carefully monitored everything Anne would say, as though she was concerned that Anne might slip up and mention something that would help the police.

  Over time, Anne learned a great deal about Jackie and her back-ground, but the stories her biological mother told changed continually. She recalled several different versions of Jackie’s upbringing, including the one Jackie later recited at Scott’s trial. In that version, Scott’s mother told the court that her father had been killed on December 24—the same date Laci disappeared. He was struck in the head with a lead pipe for the $800 in his pocket. Jackie was just eight years old at the time. Apparently the murder took a toll on Jackie’s mother. Some of her children were sent to live with various relatives, and Jackie was placed in an orphanage.

  Jackie’s story did include some truths, but Anne learned from other family members that it also contained some fiction. For one thing, her father had been killed on December 23, not December 24, as Jackie testified in court. There were other embellishments, but like Scott, Jackie always stayed close to the truth.

  There were other things about Jackie that disturbed Anne. When they first met, Scott’s mother, who had lifelong lung problems and often relied on oxygen to help with her breathing, had spent some time talking to Anne about lung transplants and how hard it was to find a donor. Anne couldn’t help wondering whether she was being sized up as a potential organ donor.

  According to Anne, Jackie’s husband was introduced to her as “Pete.” Only later, after the case broke, did Anne learn that Lee Peterson had started going by “Pete” in the wake of some money troubles in the 1980s. At the time, Lee and Jackie were reportedly living high in Rancho Santa Fe. Jackie was driving a Rolls Royce, and Lee a Ferrari. They owned an expensive home that was mortgaged to the hilt. It seemed the couple had a penchant for expensive things “whatever the cost … even if they couldn’t pay for them.”

  Eventually, Anne was told, the Petersons moved to Morro Bay, where Lee began using the name Pete. While she was already in the picture at the time of Laci and Scott’s wedding, Anne reported, she wasn’t invited to attend. Laci didn’t want to be upstaged on “her day,” Anne felt, by a new member of the family everyone would want to meet.

  On August 9, 1997, Scott and Laci were married at the Sycamore Mineral Springs Resort in San Luis Obispo, where Laci later worked as a banquet coordinator. Nestled in the lush wooded hillsides of the Avila Valley, the luxurious resort was a popular spot for weddings, family reunions, conferences, and retreats. The grounds were densely planted with bougainvillea and other brilliant tropical flowers, lush sycamores, and oak trees.

  Laci’s parents, Sharon and Ron, gave the couple about $7,000 for their wedding; Scott’s parents, Jackie and Lee, contributed a similar amount, and Scott and Laci covered the rest of the expenses. The ceremony was private but well attended; it was a glorious, sunlit day, and Laci was resplendent in a sleeveless wedding gown with a square-cut neck. She wore her dark hair in a sweep adorned with an elaborate headpiece and flowing white veil. Their wedding day was a mix of the traditional and the personal: The three-tiered wed-ding cake was dotted with exquisite flowers, and the couple celebrated their nuptials with a champagne toast. Scott raised a glass to his new in-laws, Sharon and Ron, thanking them for their
“perfect daughter.”

  Yet beneath the surface, as investigators later learned, the wed-ding day was less than perfect. The resort’s general manager, Roger Wightman, told police that before the wedding he saw Scott sitting at the bar, drinking and “hitting on” the waitress. Wightman described Scott’s behavior as inappropriate. It also seemed strange that Scott asked a new acquaintance, Mike Richardson, to be his best man, despite his supposedly close relationship with his brothers.

  Scott wasn’t the only one behaving badly on the night of his wed-ding. According to the manager, Laci’s biological father, Dennis Rocha, arrived there late, and was so intoxicated that he needed help putting on his pants. Then he fell and ripped the seat of his pants. Wightman said he took the slacks, stapled them together, and helped him get dressed again.

  It isn’t uncommon for a daughter to marry a man like her father. Scott and Dennis both drank to excess that day, and as we’ll see, Scott continued to drink heavily throughout the marriage.

  Sharon and Dennis Rocha were married for only seven years. They had two children, Brent in 1971 and Laci four years later. Dennis left Sharon when Laci was only a year old, and Laci’s relationship with her natural father was reportedly somewhat “strained.” The two had little contact, mostly on holidays and family events.

  Dennis’s parents, Helen and Robert Rocha, owned a 325-acre ranch and dairy farm in Escalon, California, and as a girl Laci spent weekends living the country life. The ranch included four houses, a mobile home, four or five barns, and a working dairy. The couple also owned a smaller 40-acre ranch nearby. As a younger man, Dennis had worked diligently on the farm. But after years of irresponsible behavior from Dennis, the senior Rochas drew up a trust naming Laci’s brother, Brent, and Dennis’s sister, Robin, as executors of the estate. The ranch was sold in 1995, and the new owner leased a small parcel to Laci’s father, where he still lives.