A Deadly Game

by Catherine Crier

  “It’s not going to get to trial because it’s not a case, but he said this is a capital case, and they can make anything enough to arrest you. You will not be allowed bail. You will be in jail for months until we can get you released.”

  The conversation ended with Amber threatening to go to police with the details of their sexual affair.

  “Well, yeah, if you think that’s the right thing to do, do it.” Scott told her.

  It was just before 4:00 P.M. when surveillance teams observed that Scott was heading toward police headquarters on Tenth Street. Using the tracking device on the Land Rover, the team trailed behind him as he slowly circled the building. It appeared that he might be looking for a parking space, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he drove toward the Investigative Services building that housed the Detective Division, a few blocks away. Cops followed behind him as he crept along F Street to Thirteenth Street, then turned south on E Street, lapping the department’s satellite office at a slow crawl.

  Using their cell phones, the surveillance officers alerted detectives inside the building. Rushing to the window. Detectives Buehler and Owen and Sergeant Alan Carter gazed out at the street in time to see the green Land Rover motoring eastbound on F Street.

  Scott never did park the Land Rover and go inside either police building that afternoon. Grogan later theorized that his suspect was doing some surveillance work of his own—checking to see if Amber Frey was making good on her threat. I wonder what Scott might have done if her car was in the parking lot. He was obviously suspicious about her police connections by this time, and further conversations should be reviewed with this in mind.

  Scott may have been concerned about Amber’s actions, but clearly that wasn’t the only thing on his mind. Later that day, he called the Dish Network to request that the Playboy Channel be added to his programming package.

  At 4:00 P.M., police watched from a distance as Scott pulled into the parking lot of the Enterprise car rental office on Seventh and G Streets. Noting that he was wearing the symbolic yellow and blue ribbon on his shirt, they watched as he loaded several items from Laci’s Land Rover into a white Chevy rental truck, left the parking lot, and returned home.

  That same day, police divers were examining the waters beneath the Berkeley Marina with a sonar device. Search teams focused on the waters off the Cesar Chavez Park, where earlier cadaver dogs had picked up a scent. Detectives had been advised that a blue tarp had been recovered from the bay earlier in the month, near the corner of the Cesar Chavez Park.

  Interestingly, an officer from a neighboring police department re-ported that she had seen a blue tarp on Brooks Island on December 28. That site was directly in line with the area in the park where the tarp was recovered, and where search teams were now poised to begin their sweep. Investigators wondered whether the tarp, which was similar in color to the one Scott had used to wrap his umbrellas, was linked to Laci’s disappearance. Authorities forwarded it to the Department of Justice’s crime lab, where an examination revealed the presence of cat and dog hairs. The hairs were submitted for comparison against those of Scott’s pets.

  When the searchers had no luck in the Cesar Chavez section, they shifted to the water near the Old Pier. There, one of the officers noted an object on the screen. It appeared to be the silhouette of a human body floating off the marina, about three miles from the shore.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JANUARY 9, 2003

  At sunrise on January 9, police dispatched divers to the Berkeley Marina to take a closer look at what they believed to be the silhouette of a human body.

  As Grogan waited for word from the dive teams, he was advised that Scott had taken the white Chevy rental truck and was on Highway 132 heading in the direction of the marina. Scott had loaded a black suitcase into the rental’s cab and a white one into the bed of the truck. By 10:30 A.M., he was pulling into the marina’s yacht club. “He drove to the end of the road, where the road circled around. Peterson slowly drove around the circle as he looked at the water,” the surveillance report read. “Once around the circle, Peterson turned into a parking lot [and] drove around the parking lot twice.”

  At 10:44, officers reported that Scott exited the marina and drove to the San Luis Reservoir, where he entered the parking lot for O’Neil Forebay. He circled the lot for several minutes, then left the parking area, traveling east on Interstate 580.

  “Peterson was utilizing counter surveillance driving when he left the San Luis Reservoir area,” the surveillance report stated. “Since Peterson’s vehicle was equipped with a tracking device, surveillance units backed way off, allowing Peterson to drive into parking lots, make U-turns for no reason, stop on the side of the road and eventu-ally end up at the Double Tree in Bakersfield. All of Peterson’s erratic driving was captured and stored in the tracking device.”

  The surveillance officer reported that he next trailed Peterson to the South Central Valley, near Fresno. The officer verified that Amber Frey was not at her massage therapy center nearby. Scott re-turned to Bakersfield, where he checked into a Double Tree Motel and stayed the night. “Cell records indicated he was at a motel,” profiler Sharon Hagan wrote in a Criminal Investigative Analysis. “He didn’t answer incoming calls and let them be transferred to his voice mail. This behavior was inconsistent with his habit of frequent cell phone use.”

  That evening, Grogan telephoned Sharon Rocha and Lee Peterson to advise them that search teams “had viewed an image that appeared consistent with a human body” in the San Francisco Bay. He told both sets of parents that a team of divers would conduct a search on Saturday, January 11. A dive team had attempted to view the object earlier that morning, but weather conditions had prohibited the underwater search, he said.

  Grogan also explained that if the object did turn out to be a body, it might not be Laci. He warned them against believing any news reports they heard, advising them to wait until police contacted them. The detective later reported that neither Lee nor Sharon believed the discovery was Laci.

  “Have you informed Scott?” Lee Peterson asked Grogan.

  The detective replied that he hadn’t, but said he would call Scott to let him know.

  According to friends and family, Scott had hoped that going out into the world and “doing something” would “make it easier” to deal with Laci’s disappearance.

  By the morning on January 10, TV trucks encircled the area of the bay where police teams were working. As officers worked an underwater grid with sonar devices, Scott was at the Enterprise rental office in Modesto exchanging the white truck he had been driving for a silver Saturn.

  Police weren’t prepared for this latest change; Scott’s new car had no tracking device.

  Scott was still driving the silver car when he left home on the morning of January 11. He checked the undercarriage of Laci’s Land Rover before leaxing his house, apparently looking for a tracking device. Police observed that Scott was carrying a duffel bag and had stopped at the bank, possibly withdrawing money. From there he drove to the Red Lion and remained there for about thirty minutes. Once he emerged, he began using counter surveillance tactics on members of the team.

  One of his maneuvers was to come to a sudden halt on the freeway, forcing officers in pursuit to pass him. At one point, after leaving the highway, he approached a member of the team who had turned off on a cul-de-sac in Modesto. When Scott got out of his car and began walking toward her, the officer reported, she quickly drove off.

  Based on Scott’s behavior, Grogan ordered the supervisor of the visual surveillance to cease the covert operation. From that point on, police kept tabs on him by monitoring the wiretap on both his cell phones.

  The police had since obtained a new warrant, expanding their wiretap beyond Amber’s calls to include sixty-five other individuals. Most were family and friends, but the list also included a number of high-profile members of the media, including Greta Van Susteren, Diane Sawyer, Matt Lauer, John Walsh, Gloria Gomez, Dan Abrams,
Larry King, and Rita Cosby. Had any of these figures known they were being recorded, of course, they would have been furious. I am surprised that not one of them raised any objections when they found out. I know for a fact that some of them tried to get copies of the transcripts of their calls, but they were never turned over by po-lice. Ultimately, however, the officers had the courts’ authority to do so, and the media was fair game.

  “Throughout the day, officers who were monitoring the wire on Scott’s cellular phone updated me,” Grogan wrote in his report. “Scott told his friends that he was in Bakersfield, to verify that he was not at or near Bakersfield at that time based on his cell site.”

  Even as he was stringing the cops along, Scott was apparently still up to his old manipulative tricks with his family and friends. “Scott acted as though he was crying in one telephone conversation and then in the next behaved completely normally when the telephone calls were separated only by a few moments,” the detective noted.

  “Later in the afternoon,” Grogan reported, “we were informed that the dive team in the San Francisco Bay had identified the object on the sonar and a dive team determined it was a boat anchor.” The news traveled fast: “Within a few moments, we were in-formed that Scott received a phone call from a cellular phone number associated with Laci’s mother, Sharon Rocha, where a fe-male voice informed Scott that officers in that area had found a boat anchor rather than a body.”

  “Hi Scott, this is Mom,” Sharon’s message began. “It’s about quarter to one, just wanted you to know, I just got a call from Ron Cloward, who is at the boat marina, and it was a boat anchor. Of course, we knew it wasn’t Laci. But I just wanted you to know.” Listening to the message, Scott broke in with a loud whistle. To the agent listening in, the whistle sounded like “a sigh of relief.”

  That afternoon Scott spoke to his father, telling him that he was in Bakersfield when in fact he was in Gilroy, some two hundred miles away. He also spoke with Guy Miligi, telling him that he’d gone back to work, believing that “going and doing something” would make it easier to cope.

  “God, yeah, I couldn’t imagine,” Miligi concurred.

  “And then, now all the suspicion, man, did you see all the people at the marina?” Scott asked.

  Miligi said he’d heard about the crowd. Scott said he’d received a call from the Modesto police chief informing him that the object in the bay turned out to be a boat anchor.

  Scott laughed. “They had eighty-eight people out there, you know, and they came up with an anchor. Maybe they will send the eighty-eight people somewhere else and start working, I don’t know.” Scott was campaigning among his friends, but to what effect.-’ Did he hope they would relay his reservations to law enforcement? If the community thought the cops were on the wrong track, would the po-lice really change their tactics? It was wishful thinking.

  Scott ended the conversation abruptly. “All right, man, I gotta go, or I’m going to have to pull over here,” he told Miligi, suggesting he might be about to cry.

  Scott’s display of emotion didn’t last long. Within four minutes he was back on the phone, leaving a message for his friend Mike. His tone was upbeat; the officers listening in detected no signs of sadness in his voice.

  Sunday was a quiet day for investigators but Monday, January 13, brought a twist in the case that forced investigators to become more circumspect in their dealings with Amber Frey.

  When Detective Buehler reported for duty on Monday, he learned that the tap on Scott’s cell phone revealed that he and Amber had had a thirty-minute phone conversation on Sunday evening. The records also indicated that Amber had received a two-minute call from Scott earlier that day. But Amber had not recorded these calls. For reasons police could only speculate on, Amber mentioned neither conversation when Buehler reached her that afternoon.

  Since she’d first called the police on December 30, Amber had been staying with Doug Sibley, her friend Shawn’s uncle. Now, she told Buehler, she wanted to move back to her own house in Madera.

  Buehler interpreted Amber’s request as an attempt to maintain her privacy, and to ensure that Doug would not overhear her phone conversations with Scott. Buehler noted that “it also matched up with her apparent lack of concern of a violent attack as she continued to stay at her residence through Tuesday night, 1/13.”

  “It appeared possible that Frey is attempting to maintain contact with Peterson in the event he is not involved in the disappearance of his wife,” Buehler wrote. “At this time, it is unknown if she is making more contact with Peterson or if she is not cooperating with this investigation and possibly giving him information.”

  That same day, Grogan was advised that the National Enquirer intended to run a story in the upcoming issue, scheduled to hit the newsstands on Thursday, January 16, that could blow Amber’s cover.

  The police didn’t know how much information the paper had. They knew that the article was likely to include “unspecified details about a girlfriend, quite possibly from the Fresno area, along with some restricted information about evidence that would appear in print.” The physical evidence “included but was not limited to con-crete anchors that were made and had been discovered during the investigation.”

  Detectives discussed the “positives and negatives” of releasing information about the affair “to the family of suspected murder victim Laci Peterson.”

  During the meeting, Grogan received a call from Scott’s lawyer. McAllister was angry that the detective had been speaking with his client knowing that Scott had secured counsel. Grogan informed McAllister that he was not in violation of any law. Scott was not in custody, nor had he filed any complaints.

  The lawyer said his concerns were ethical ones.

  Grogan said his concern was for Amber Frey’s safety, and he wanted Scott to know that police now knew about her.

  Still unaware of either her son-in-law’s relationship with Amber Frey or the impending Enquirer article, Sharon Rocha appeared on live television that evening, telling viewers that she stood firmly behind Scott. Sharon Rocha, Ron Grantski, Lee Peterson, Amy Rocha, and Modesto Police Chief Roy Wasden were all Larry King’s guests that night. Also appearing as a commentator was defense lawyer Mark Geragos, who was not yet representing Scott.

  When King asked how Scott was holding up, Lee said that his son was “devastated,” that he was “just terribly distraught. He’s lost a lot of weight. I’ve never seen him so sad. He’s just what you’d expect from someone who is missing their wife and baby.” He told the audience that “Scott and Laci were a wonderful couple, just very de-voted and did everything together. They had such a marvelous life. They had a home they bought two years ago, [that| they were re-modeling. And, well, the baby was coming, and they gardened. They just did everything together.”

  Laci’s mother seconded Lee’s portrait of Scott and Laci’s happy marriage. “They just are really truly in love with each other. They’re partners. They’re a team. They love each other. They planned together. They play together. They’re always smiling. They’re just a very happy, well-adjusted couple. Never been any indication, I never heard Laci say she was even angry with Scott for any reason at all.”

  “We have no question in our mind about Scott. He’s part of our family,” Amy Rocha added.

  “One of the things that does come up, Lee, [is] why Scott doesn’t appear for interviews,” King asked. “Do you know why?”

  “Yes,” Lee began. “Well, he’s very emotional. He would … he would break down. He wouldn’t be able to finish an interview. And he doesn’t want the media focus on him, he wants it on having Laci’s picture in front of the nation so that someone may report something and we can get her back in our family.”

  Then King asked Chief Wasden to comment on why Scott was still under suspicion “while the family on both sides stands by him.?”

  “We won’t speculate in public, and we won’t speculate in the media. We will follow through on that,” Wasden replied. “At this po
int in time, Scott has not been eliminated from the investigation.”

  When Detective Grogan reported for work on Wednesday, January 14, he was alerted to yet another unreported phone call between Scott and Amber that was picked up the night before.

  Unbeknownst to Amber, police were now tapping her phone as well as Scott’s.

  “It was apparent by listening to this recording of their conversation that Amber may not have told Scott Peterson she had made con-tact with detectives from the Modesto Police Department,” Grogan wrote in his report. “Amber and Scott had also communicated by telephone on Sunday, 1/12/2003, and due to technical problems with the wire, we were not aware of what was said.”

  Investigators met to continue the discussion about Amber, the wiretaps, as well as concerns about the upcoming article in the Enquirer.

  “Because … the information that was coming out in the National Enquirer quite possibly would include Amber Frey’s name, and possibly other details about her (that we could not possibly know at this time), it was believed necessary to inform the family of her identity,” Buehler wrote in his report. “There are computer generated reprints of one of the photographs of Amber and Scott together on 12/14/2002, during the evening of the formal gala they had attended, that we could not be certain were retrieved from family, friends, and clients of Amber Frey.”

  “For this reason, along with not wanting the family to be caught without this knowledge, it was agreed to inform them of this information,” Buehler noted.

  That afternoon, Grogan contacted Scott on the cell phone he used to talk with Amber Frey. Scott picked up right away.

  Grogan could hear voices in the background. “Are you by your-self?” he asked.

  “Yeah, what’s up?” Scott asked.

  “That photograph I showed you of the girl.”

  “Okay. Should we be having a discussion or is Kirk gonna call me up again and say that it’s inappropriate?”