When Brocchini asked Greg Reed about a message Scott left on his answering machine. “Have you or Kristen seen or talked to Laci today or yesterday? I can’t find her,” was the exact message Scott left Greg that Christmas Eve. Scott must have been in the car when he phoned, Greg told Brocchini; he could hear road noises in the background. Scott never told Greg where he was, and Greg never asked.
“Are you certain that’s what he said?” Brocchini responded. It was the phrase “yesterday or today” that seemed strange to the detective. “Yesterday” would have been December 23, and Scott told police that his wife had disappeared on Christmas Eve. Greg had saved the message on his voice mail, and offered to let the detective listen to it.
Greg and his wife, Kristin, lived around the corner from Scott and Laci, and Greg’s mother was the couple’s next-door neighbor. He and Scott were good friends, and they spoke at least once or twice a week. Laci was in his wife’s Lamaze class, which Kristen conducted at their home on Edgebrook Drive.
Greg also told the detective that Scott had called him on the afternoon of December 24. The two discussed an upcoming New Year’s party. He and Scott often talked about hunting and fishing, so when he learned later that Scott had bought a boat he was surprised that he hadn’t mentioned it—or his fishing trip—on the call.
Nor had he mentioned his wife.
“What do you think about this case?” Brocchini asked Greg.
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” Greg told the detective. Several things bothered him. He couldn’t understand why Scott was refusing to speak to the press. Nor could he understand why Scott had asked about hearing from Laci “yesterday or today” in his mes-sage. For me, this remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the case. Was Scott worried about something Laci might have told the Reeds before she disappeared? Or was he revealing, inadvertently, that she hadn’t lived through the night?
Greg recalled something else unusual. He recounted a conversation he had with Scott the year before about a fence between Scott’s house and his mother’s place that needed to be replaced. At the time, Scott said he had no money for a new one. A month later, he in-stalled a swimming pool in his backyard. If Scott had been telling the truth about not having the money to replace a simple fence, Greg wondered, how did he find the money for an expensive pool a month later?
In the days ahead, Brocchini also interviewed an employee of Scott’s named Rob Weaver. Weaver told the investigator, he and Eric Olsen met with Scott at a restaurant in Fresno. Olsen, who was re-signing from Tradecorp, came to the meeting to return the company fax machine. With Olsen’s departure, Weaver was now Scott’s sole employee. Scott talked about Laci’s disappearance, telling them that he was a suspect in the case, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He also said that he’d had a private meeting with Geraldo Rivera, but never revealed what the two discussed.
Next, a former classmate from Cuesta Junior College, Richard Reynolds, spoke with the detective. Reynolds said he and Scott had played on the school’s golf team together. Like several of Scott’s other friends, Reynolds described his buddy as a “loner.” During college, he would date women just two or three times before moving on. Reynolds said that his wife, Lisa, had never cared for Scott, mainly because she didn’t like his sense of humor. Reynolds recalled that Scott had once sent him a suggestive photo of a woman standing next to a bed with a caption that read, “This is my wife.” From the photo, it was obvious that Scott wasn’t married to the fe-male posing in the photo. Reynolds’s wife thought the joke was in bad taste.
In early January, Lee Peterson called the Modesto Police Department tip line to alert officers that he’d heard of a Modesto satanic cult called the Order of the Silver Crescent that sacrificed babies. The group, he said, was headquartered at 701 I Street.
A detective assigned to check out the tip learned that 701 I Street was occupied by a commercial business, and neither the business owner nor the others he spoke to there had ever heard of the Order of the Silver Crescent. A check of police records showed that officers had been called to the address twice that year, once for a discarded license plate and once for an alarm going off. There was no indication of any criminal activity, and nothing to suggest that a satanic cult was operating from that address. Still, the detective decided to check further.
The previous year, there had been four calls to the police from that address—three for an alarm sounding and the fourth for a burglary. When the detective checked with the police department’s gang unit, he was told that none of its members had ever heard of a group called the Order of the Silver Crescent.
“I determined there was no validity to this tip,” the detective wrote in his report.
Later, once Scott hired Mark Geragos to lead his defense, stories about Satanic cults gained widespread attention. But these early tips suggest that more than a few people were ready to believe that such cults were operating in their midst.
A more realistic tip came from a woman named Kristen Dempe-wolf, who told the clerk that she’d seen a man she believed to be Scott Peterson on Christmas Eve morning in front of his house. He was in the driveway, and said “Good morning” to her as she walked by the house on her way home from the park. Dempewolf said the man was “putting things in the bed of his truck, small things, but I didn’t see any of the items. He was moving things around.”
Dempewolf, a petite brunette eight months pregnant, explained that at 8:45 that morning she was walking her chocolate Lab in East La Lorna Park. She had already called police on December 25 to alert them that she was in the park between 9:00 and 9:30 on Christmas Eve morning and hadn’t seen Laci there.
Dempewolf said she walked from East La Lorna Park up to the bridge at Kerwin and then left the park at the easement by the 1000 Oaks Lift Station. From there, she walked by the Petersons’ residence. Dempewolf told police that during the walk, she encountered a man and two women walking with a golden retriever that wasn’t on a leash. Between 9:20 and 9:40, while she was walking on Covena, she’d seen Scott Peterson standing in the bed of his pickup truck. She said she typically heard a dog barking when she passed that house, but that there was no barking on that day. She observed an “older white utility van parked across the street” from the house. Her tip was passed upstairs to Detective Brocchini.
At least five people, including Diane Jackson, Rudy Medina, and Kristen Dempewolf, reported seeing a strange van in the neighborhood around the time of Laci’s disappearance. Several of the sightings occurred on or near Covena Avenue at the very time Scott was loading his pickup in the driveway. Yet, I found it curious that Scott never mentioned seeing a van that morning.
Two explanations for this have been suggested to me. The first is that Scott did not act alone and the van was somehow linked to an accomplice.
The other is that Scott was too busy loading Laci’s body into the truck to notice.
As the investigation progressed, Scott remained under twenty-four-hour watch. On January 5, the surveillance team reported, Scott paid a visit to his attorney. Kirk McAllister. When Scott entered the Eleventh Street office, he was dressed in a red-checkered shirt and blue jeans, with a business-card-sized photo of Laci pinned to his lapel. When he emerged, the photo was no longer there.
At 10:20, the team followed Scott to the Enterprise Rent-a-Car office in Modesto, where he parked Laci’s Discovery in the lot and rented a 2002 Honda. He retrieved something from the back seat of the Land Rover and put it in the red Accord. Scott then unknowingly led officers on a ninety-minute ride to the Berkeley Marina. He parked for a total of ten minutes, and then “contacted an unidentified subject in the parking lot.” Sources close to the investigation beheve this man could have been an accomplice, and one source even told me that it’s possible money was exchanged that day. The police report revealed nothing further about this clandestine meeting; the officers reported only that they lost track of Scott as he left the parking lot.
Some pundits have argued that a single i
ndividual could not have committed this crime, and have pointed to this meeting as evidence of a conspiracy. It does seem clear that the officers should have noted the license plate of the man Scott met that day and followed up on the contact. They did not. Yet, I have never seen any evidence that would support a second participant in this crime, and to this day I find it highly doubtful that this loose end would have led to such a discovery.
After losing him at the marina, the police set up mobile units at Scott’s house, his business, and the Red Lion, hoping to resume their surveillance when he returned. Officials from Enterprise Rent-a-Car promised to alert the team as soon as Scott brought back the red Ac-cord or rented another vehicle.
That evening, Sharon Rocha appeared on the Fox News Channel’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. The distraught mother continued to support her son-in-law.
“If you knew Scott, you wouldn’t have any doubts,” Sharon Rocha assured viewers. “If you saw the way the two of them are together, and always have been together, I mean, I’ve never even known the two of them to have an argument or harsh words with each other. They’ve just always been a team.”
Oh, my God, I’m so glad that … to hear from you,” Amber told Scott when he phoned that evening.
“Why?” Scott asked.
“Oh well, something uh … strange happened today.”
“Amber?” Scott asked, as if he couldn’t hear her through the static on the line.
“I’m here,” Amber replied.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“I don’t know,” Amber stated. “Sauki called and left me a mes-sage and said she was worried about me. She was in between flights and she said she needed to talk to me when she got back into town, and I have no idea.”
Amber was referring to a message her friend Sauki had left on her answering machine earlier that day. She said that she was at the airport and had just read the latest edition of People magazine. “There’s something in it that just at this moment, it just shocks me and if I don’t talk to you before I get on the plane … I will call you as soon as I get in … I really hope you’re okay,” Sauki said in her recorded message.
“Huh? Weird,” Scott responded. “She left like a cryptic message?”
“I have no idea,” Amber said. “I’m scared, I have no idea what she’s talking about.” Amber—and the police—were hoping that Scott would pick up on the subtle cue and tell Amber about Laci. The latest issue of People did contain a story about the Laci Peterson case. Only later did Amber learn that Sauki herself had supplied the magazine with a photograph for the story in People. Amber suspected that her friend had phoned to alert her because she was feeling guilty for what she had done.
“Weird,’’ Scott repeated, but offered no explanation.
It was just after eleven on January 6 when Scott Peterson dialed Amber’s cell phone again. This time, unbeknownst to Scott, the young woman was sitting in an interview room at the Modesto Police Department’s Detective Division with criminal profiler Sharon Hagan and Detective Jon Buehler. Hagan and Buehler planned the phone call, even giving Amber specific questions to ask Scott. It was in this taped phone call that Scott confessed to lying to Amber about “everything.”
“I’m so sorry that this has happened,” Scott began. “And I’m so sorry that I’ve hurt you in this way. I don’t want to do this over the phone. I want to tell you this. I want to be there in person to tell you this. But I’m sure that’s why Sauki called you.”
“What.?” Amber asked.
“You haven’t been watching the news, obviously,” Scott stated. “No,” Amber replied.
Scott hesitated. “I have not been traveling during the last couple of weeks. I have, I’ve lied to you that I’ve been traveling.”
“Okay,” Amber replied.
“The girl I’m married to, her name is Laci. She disappeared just before C’hristmas… . For the past two weeks, Fxe been in Modesto with her family and mine searching for her. She just disappeared, and no one knows where she’s been,” Scott explained. “I can’t tell you more because I need you to be protected from the media and Ayiana.”
“Okay,” Amber said. “Scott, are you listening.?”
“Yeah, I am,” Scott replied.
“You came to me earlier in December and told me that you had lost your wife. What was that about.?”
“She … she’s alive,” Scott said.
“What?”
“She’s alive,” Scott repeated.
“Where? She’s alive? Where?”
“In Modesto. Now, I know, I this is the hardest, I wanted to tell you in person. I … you need to protect yourself from the media.”
“Okay,” Amber replied.
“If you even watch the news at all … well, you haven’t. Um, the media has been telling everyone that I had something to do with her disappearance. So, the past two weeks, I’ve been hunted by the media. And I just … I don’t want you to be involved and to protect yourself. I know that I am, I’m destroyed. And God, I hope … I hope so much that this doesn’t hurt you.”
It was amazing: only two weeks into this investigation, long be-fore the media coalesced around Scott as the suspect, Scott was telegraphing his fear of detection to Amber.
“How could it not affect me?” Amber asked, her voice rising.
“It does, and I just…” Scott started.
Amber sighed.
“But I … I … I … have just been torn up the last two weeks wanting to tell you, and I’m so weak that I haven’t. And I just, I just hope that, um, I had to call you and tell you that.”
“You never … you never answered my question, Scott.” Amber said.
“Sweetie, you don’t, I can’t, I can’t say anymore,” Scott told her.
“I think I deserve … ” Amber started.
“You deserve so much better,” Scott interrupted.
“Yeah, and I deserve an explanation of why you told me you lost your wife. And this was the first holidays you’d spend without her.” Amber asked. “That was December 9, you told me this, and now all of a sudden your wife’s missing. Are you kidding me? Did you hear me?”
Scott repeated that he could not give her any more information.
“Well, you know, you told me you lost your wife. You sat there in front of me and cried and broke down. I sat there and held your hand, Scott, and comforted you and you’ve lied to me.”
“Yeah,” Scott admitted.
“Lying to me about lying,” Amber continued.
“I lied to you about traveling,” Scott said.
“But didn’t you say. Amber, I will do anything for you to trust me?’ ’Baby, we have, I feel we have a future together.’ What was that about?” Amber demanded.
“I never said anything to you that I didn’t mean,” Scott replied.
“You never told me anything you didn’t mean?” Amber repeated in an angry tone.
“I lied to you about things, I did,” Scott insisted. “And you don’t deserve the things that I’ve done to you, but … there’s no but. Hey, I agree with that. I want to explain everything to you, but I can’t.”
Scott would repeat this damning phrase again and again in his conversations with Amber. I find this extraordinary. Even as he protested his innocence, Scott was insisting that he knew much more than he was telling. If he had nothing to do with Laci’s disappearance, why would he say such a thing?
“Why?” Amber asked.
“Primarily, well, I’ve got a lot of reasons. Primarily protection for everyone.”
“Protection of who?” Amber inquired.
“Everyone,” Scott restated.
“Who is everyone?”
“Everyone is … you, me, our families,” Scott explained.
“I asked if there was anybody else. ’Oh no, I’m monogamous as far as I’m concerned,’” Amber mocked.
“I never cheated on you,” Scott declared.
“Ha, ha.”
“I never did.”
> “You’re married,” Amber announced. “How do you figure you never cheated on me? Explain that one to me.”
“I want to explain to you Amber,” Scott stated.
“And you’re going to, right? Is that…”
“I will. No, no, I will,” Scott promised.
“When?” Amber asked.
“I hope … God, I hope the hell that you will listen to me and I can. I want to explain it to you so badly, but I can’t now. And I … I can never ask you to … to trust me or to even listen to me again.”
“You know what, that … that makes a lot more sense to me now, Scott,” Amber said.
“What’s that?” Scott asked, confused.
“Of course you couldn’t tell me the story about your wife, because it hadn’t happened yet,” Amber declared, “and you were hoping to resolve [it] in January, that it would be resolved, and you’d have a story to tell me.”
“Sweetie, you think I had something to do with her disappearance? Amber, do you believe that?” Notice how many times Scott answers a question or challenge with another question. He seems to believe he can deflect inquiry with this tactic—as, no doubt, he had done throughout his life.
“Well, let’s see, how can I believe that? How can I believe anything?”
“I am not evil like that,” Scott insisted.
“I would hope not,” Amber said. “You know you’ve lied to me now and, do you know how many people I’ve given your picture to, or of us in Christmas cards? So, you’re telling me that you want to keep me out of this, and Ayiana, and you want to protect me from that. I’m just at a loss.
“But isn’t it ironic how, Scott, when I first met you on our date, how you told me you were going to Maine with your family, and you were going to Paris and Europe and all these things,” Amber continued. “And then you came to me after Shawn found out that you were married and you came and told me this elaborate lie about her missing and this tragedy and that … this will be the first holidays without her.”
A Deadly Game Page 20
