A Deadly Game

by Catherine Crier

  In mid-February, police received a strange tip from an American Airlines employee claiming that Laci Peterson had called the reservation line almost two months earlier, on December 22 or 23, to book tickets to San Diego for Christmas Day. The agent, who wanted to remain anonymous, told police that Scott could be heard yelling in the background. Apparently, he wanted to use frequent flyer miles rather than pay for the $98 round trip tickets.

  It’s unclear what finally prompted the ticket agent to call in February after being silent for so long. However, one thing is certain—the agent provided plenty of detail. “Susan said I could use her miles,” Scott reportedly shouted when Laci tried to explain to him that it would be better to save the free miles for a more expensive ticket.

  Laci had booked two seats for a flight from San Francisco to Orange County, returning the following day. The reservation was such that she and Scott could pay at the counter on the day of departure. The agent remembered that Scott wanted to fly to San Diego, but settled on Orange County because the fare was lower. The agent couldn’t understand why Scott would want his pregnant wife to ride in a car for three hours after a one-hour flight, just to save a few dol-lars. Laci also asked about flights to Mexico in early February, but the agent advised that she would need her doctor’s permission to fly that late in her pregnancy. Scott sounded relieved when it became ap-parent that Laci wouldn’t be able to accompany him, indicating that it would save him money, the agent recalled. Laci explained that Scott’s company was paying for his ticket.

  Police subsequently subpoenaed the American Airlines accounts for Scott, LCI, and Scott’s sister, Susan Caudillo. What those subpoenas produced, if anything, is not known. The conversation would have been inadmissible in court in any event because there was no real proof that the caller was actually LCI or that it was in-deed Scott yelling in the background. Even if this was established, the exchange only demonstrates that Scott could lose his temper. Nothing about the call incriminated him in the murder of his family, but it certainly suggested that there may have been much more going on in those closing hours before Christmas Eve than has yet been established.

  A number of these intriguing ancillary stories developed as February drew to a close. Several checks addressed to LCI and Scott Peterson were discovered in the possession of a convicted forger named Sarah Taberna. The checks were cash advance drafts from a credit card company. When first questioned, Scott explained that he hadn’t been regularly checking the mail delivered to his warehouse, and perhaps the material was stolen from there. Then Scott said that he often took his mail home, and thought that the checks could have been stolen from there. He suggested that whoever had taken the checks could be linked to Laci’s disappearance, and that the person might have stolen the checks during her abduction. Grogan noted Scott’s concerns, and promised to follow up. Scott insisted that he wanted the thief prosecuted. Taberna, who had brought the checks to the police in the first place and admitted that she’d stolen them, was cleared of any connection with Laci’s murder.

  Another story involving a check arose from a search of Scott’s truck. Police found a draft for $450 made out to a Gainesville, Florida, psychic named Noreen Renier and signed by Jackie Peterson. There was a note attached, requesting that Scott mail it to Renier. Apparently Scott stuck it in the glove compartment and forgot about it.

  In a phone conversation with Renier, Grogan learned that Jackie had hired the psychic to assist in the search for LCI. Jackie sent her one of Laci’s T-shirts, but Renier claimed that the garment was of no value to her, and asked for something more personal, such as a tooth-brush, hairbrush, or a shoe, to complete a psychic connection. When Craig Grogan contacted her, Renier asked him to mail her a shoe or something else she could use in trying to help find LCI. Grogan said he would consider her request and call her back.

  In early March, the detective received a second call from Renier. She had performed her first session, she reported, and determined that LCI was the victim of an assault and was most likely deceased. Renier said she had not yet established Laci’s whereabouts and could not point to an exact location where a search should be conducted.

  Grogan later received a report on Renier’s psychic session in which she claimed to be speaking to LCI. She claimed that LCI had been struck in the head with a baseball bat or some similar object as she was walking through a doorway. Renier reported experiencing the trip to the San Francisco Bay, and described the scenery and railroad tracks she passed before ending at a large body of water. Renier also talked about cement weights being tied around the body. Police read the re-port, but determined that it contained no new information.

  Police also recovered from Scott’s Dodge truck a bag full of LCI Peterson missing person posters with the original reward of $25,000, rather than the half million dollars now offered, along with a second sack of LCI Peterson buttons. Volunteers had run short of these materials. Now they would learn why.

  Another interesting storyline revolved around a man from a small town in Missouri. In mid-February, the man left four messages on Sharon Rocha’s answering machine. “Just give me the word, and I’ll take care of Scott,” the messages said. The caller left a return phone number.

  Believing that the caller might be a hit man, Sharon notified Detective Grogan. He learned that the man lived at home with his mother, and had a criminal record for theft by use of a computer. During their conversation, the man told Grogan he had been following the LCI Peterson case. When Amber emerged, he became convinced that Scott was involved in Laci’s disappearance. In an at-tempt to assist police, the caller had located Scott’s phone number and in late January left him a message, saying, “I’m your girlfriend’s psychiatrist, she told me everything. I’m going to turn you in.”

  The man from Missouri believed the message would “put pressure” on Scott and “force” him to confess. He told Grogan the key to the case was in the child’s nursery. He suggested police locate a teddy bear in the room and check it for dust. If it were dusty, it would mean that Scott did kill LCI. Any person who is actually-grieving for the loss of their wife and unborn child would go into the nursery and hold the child’s toys, he said.

  When asked about the messages he left for Laci’s mother, the man said he was simply trying to offer his assistance in the investigation. After a subsequent background check on the man, police decided he was harmless.

  By early March, forensic testing produced some meaningful new information. The single hair recovered from a pair of pliers found in Scott’s boat at the warehouse was consistent with a hair from Laci’s hairbrush. Because there was no root affixed to the recovered piece, only mitochondrial comparisons could be made. Statistically, the hair might belong to roughly one in six hundred women in the Modesto area.

  Unwittingly, the officer who retrieved the hair, Dodge Hendee, became the center of a major controversy that played out over several days during Scott’s preliminary hearing. When the evidence envelope was opened for testing, the single hair had become two. Mark Geragos insinuated that the hairs might have been planted, recalling allegations about O. J. Simpson’s glove. But the judge refused to suppress the evidence, finding it more likely that the hair found clamped between the serrated pliers was broken and simply came apart in the bag. Ultimately, the report concluded that “the ends of those hairs looked like they had been mashed and torn between two hard objects, not inconsistent with needle nose pliers.” Some plant material, fibers, and a substance with adhesive qualities had adhered to one of the hairs, but an attempt to match the adhesive to Scott’s duct tape was unsuccessful. When compared with Laci’s known hair, however, the evidence “appeared to be in the same range of variation.”

  In March, the police publicly reclassified the LCI Peterson case as a homicide.

  “As the investigation has progressed, we have increasingly come to believe that LCI Peterson is the victim of a violent crime,” detectives announced at a press conference. “This investigation began as a missing pers
ons case, and we all were hopeful that LCI would return safely. However, we have come to consider this a homicide case.”

  Police also announced a change in the criteria for the $500,000 reward being offered for information leading to Laci’s safe return. “Based on this belief, an additional reward is now being offered for in-formation that leads to her location and recovery,” investigators said.

  Police also delivered two binders with information related to the investigation to the Stanislaus district attorney’s office, officially involving them in the case for the first time.

  At headquarters, Grogan continued to work the evidence. In early March, he reviewed a report from John Yarborough of the Institute of Analytical Interview in Parker, Arizona. Police had mailed Yarborough several videotaped interviews of Scott Peterson for micro-expression analysis. A micro-expression is a very short facial expression of an intense, concealed emotion. Yarborough and his colleagues at the Institute were trained to read and interpret those in-voluntary messages for emotion.

  Yarborough pointed to two occasions where he saw “significant micro expressions.” The first was when Scott was asked about blood in the truck during an interview with KTBU Channel 2. He said Scott “micro-expressed” fear when asked a follow-up question if Laci’s blood was in the truck. The second “micro-expression,” this one of anger, came when Scott was questioned about the shades being closed at his home on December 24, during a time when LCI would normally have opened them.

  Yarborough indicated these two occasions were “hot spots,” though he did concede that he didn’t know exactly what Scott had been thinking at the time he made those expressions. However, he did note that Scott referred to LCI in the past tense on more than one occasion.

  Grogan also reviewed a Voice Stress Analysis that had been commissioned by a local television station. Expert Al Starewich had per-formed the test, using videotape interviews of Scott Peterson with members of the media.

  Starewich found that Scott was lying when he said he had nothing to do with Laci’s disappearance. He was telling the truth about some other matters—injuring his knuckle, for example—but he was nervous another blood stain was found in his truck. He showed abnormal stress when speaking about saltwater on his clothing, Starewich added, and he lied about telling LCI about Amber. The report concluded that, “Scott knows that LCI is never coming home.” None of this information would ever be made public, but it may have helped officers tailor their future interactions with Scott.

  At headquarters, police took a closer look at the phone book found on Scott’s kitchen counter on Christmas Eve. It had been open to an advertisement for a criminal defense attorney when police entered the kitchen. While examining the directory, detectives noticed that the page with the attorney’s ad was thicker than others in the book, and that the book naturally opened to that ad. The discovery left police uncertain whether Scott opened the book to that page on purpose or the already open book flipped to the advertisement on its own. Police later learned that the attorney, Richmond Herman, paid extra for the special feature.

  Police also spoke with the criminologist who examined the needle-nosed pliers and a pair of wire cutters that had been found in Scott’s warehouse to determine if either had been used to cut chicken wire found in the back of Scott’s truck. Dean De Young of the California Department of Justice determined that neither pair had been used to cut the wire. He saw that the needle nosed pliers were rusted, and asked police if they had been in contact with water or salt water. Police confirmed that they had been in salt water when found in the bottom of Scott’s boat.

  Grogan continued his search for Laci’s gold-and-diamond Croton watch. He learned that on December 31, 2002, a woman named Deanna Marie Renfro had pawned a gold Croton watch for twenty dollars. The name Renfro was familiar to police. In late December, police had interviewed Marie and Donnie Renfro about a woman who claimed to be the victim of a rape followed by a satanic ritual perpetrated by several people traveling in a brown van. The victim claimed that after the assault she heard the group discuss a Christmas Day death, which they promised she would read about in the newspapers. The police were interested in the Renfros because they had been traveling in a brown Chevrolet van and were camping in the park. Yet detectives ultimately decided the cases were not linked. Al-though Mark Geragos would introduce the pawn slip at trial, implying that it was evidence that someone had robbed LCI for the watch, the description of the pawned item didn’t reference the diamond bezel on Laci’s watch, and it seemed unlikely that they were one and the same pieces. The police and jury never bought the argument by defense counsel, and Laci’s Croton watch was never recovered.

  Most of the other information police gathered through the eight thousand tips that were received led nowhere. The recovery of Elizabeth Smart in mid-March prompted a number of calls about whether the course of the investigation would change. Several tipsters claimed that LCI was having an affair with a trainer at her gym, but they could find no proof of such a relationship.

  Other tips were a bit far-fetched. A woman named Penny Gagnon called to report that she’d been propositioned by Scott Peterson in a California bar in October 2002. Gagnon claimed she had been fighting with her husband of three years and had gone to a bar one afternoon to cool off. During her alleged encounter with Scott, Gagnon claimed that he spoke of killing his wife and disposing of her body by weighting it down and sinking it in a body of water.

  “He came straight out and said, ’You wanna have an affair?’ And I said, ’You’re a very good looking guy, but I’m married,’” Gagnon told Detective Brocchini during a phone interview. “He said, ’Well, so am I.’ I said ’Well, I’m a Christian, that’s not my thing.’ He said, ’Well, my wife’s pregnant and I wanna kill her.’ And … and it’s like so, so off the wall that it didn’t even sink in what he was saying. I didn’t even question it really. Well, I did question him, I said, ’Why do you wanna kill her?’ But not thinking he was serious, I guess is what I’m trying to say.”

  “He tell ya how far along she was?” Brocchini asked.

  “He said about six months, and I said ’You don’t wanna kill her, you guys have a new life ahead of you.”

  “So then what?”

  “Then I remember him saying, ’If you were to kill somebody, and didn’t wanna get caught, how would you do it?’ If I had thought he was serious, there’s no way I woulda given him any ideas, but I just said I would kill ’em and tie a weight around their ankles and throw ’em in the ocean.”

  Brocchini subsequently interviewed Gagnon’s husband, who said his wife had no reason to lie. He supported her story, saying that she’d told him the same story right after seeing Scott on the news when LCI went missing. Of course, she waited months to come for-ward to the police. Yet when she was asked where the encounter had taken place, and whether she could provide any proof that she’d actually been there at the time—such as a credit card receipt—Gagnon was unable to comply. Investigators remained skeptical, and never followed up on her story. That is hardly unusual. Reports of this nature always emerge during high-profile cases. Important leads can fall by the wayside as the police try to perform triage on the constant flow of information, but most investigators work diligently to sepa-rate the serious from the merely sensational.

  Even family members offered leads that were dead ends. Lee Peterson dredged up other cases that bore no resemblance to Laci’s dis-appearance, sending the police copies of articles he felt might lead them in new directions—and, no doubt, away from Scott.

  Despite Scott’s continuing pleas of innocence, his life was being severely affected. He told Heather and Mike Richardson that 60 to 70 percent of his clients at Tradecorp refused to see him. His employer had agreed to keep him on, but he had given Scott thirty days to hire someone as a figurehead so he could continue working be-hind the scenes.

  When police interviewed Mike Richardson, he said it seemed odd that Scott had chosen him to be best man at his wedding. The men
had only been friends a short time, and Scott had several brothers— none of whom were in the wedding party. Scott’s friend Aaron Fritz was a groomsman, along with another friend named Eric. Mike could not recall Eric’s last name.

  Another friend, Brian Argain, told police that he was no longer comfortable associating with Scott. Scott had left him several mes-sages asking him to get together for a round of golf, but he repeatedly declined. Argain also noted that while Scott was usually direct with him, he no longer looked him in the eye when talking about his wife’s disappearance. He said many of Scott’s friends felt the same way, claiming that they’d become suspicious of him in recent weeks. As the receipt found in his belongings confirmed, things were so tense for Scott that the country club was refunding his $23,000 membership fee.

  He was still a free man, but his world was rapidly shrinking.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  APRIL 2003

  On April 13, around 4:15 P.M., Cerrito residents Michael Looby and Nicole Belanger were walking their dog beneath a cloudy, threatening sky. They had strolled about a quarter mile off a popular bike path near the Richmond Inner Harbor on the northern shore of San Francisco Bay. It was low tide, and their dog stopped in a grassy area amidst the marshland and began sniffing something furiously. When Looby walked over to investigate, he discovered what looked like the decomposed body of a baby.

  Looby and Belanger hurried to a nearby housing development, where they asked a resident, Keith Woodall, to call the police. The Richmond fire and police departments wasted no time responding. Lying among the leaves and other debris, near a rocky area called “the breakers,” they found the fetus. It was lying on its back with its head tilted upward. Although all four limbs were attached, the right arm was almost severed. At 4:53, the town’s fire captain, Erik Newman, officially recorded that the infant was dead.