A Deadly Game

by Catherine Crier

  None of the investigators at the scene was able to determine the fetus’s gender or race. Its genitals were not intact, and its intestines were exposed. A piece of nylon twine was entangled in the remains and appeared to be looped and tied or tangled around the neck. Coroner’s Investigator Chris Martinez, a deputy with the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office, took several photographs of the scene and of the fetus, then gently wrapped it in a towel and placed it in doubled plastic bags for transport to the Contra Costa Coroner’s Office.

  The police ruled it an unexplained death. A preliminary police report stated that the infant, which weighed three and a half pounds, was full-term and appeared to be only a few days old. It was ashen gray and appeared to be essentially disemboweled. There was no obvious cause of death, as the external trauma had most likely occurred post-mortem.

  In the wake of the discovery, a missing persons teletype was sent out to agencies across California. At eight o’clock the following morning, a clerk with the Modesto Police Department notified Detective Grogan about the gruesome discovery. The Richmond Police Department was investigating.

  Although he was due in court to testify in a kidnapping case, Grogan immediately called Contra Costa County Detective David Villalobos, leaving him a voice mail before he turned off his cell phone and entered the courtroom.

  During the lunch recess, Grogan received a call about another body.

  This time it was an adult female, just found off Point Isabel in Richmond. Contacting Lieutenant Pete Small with the East Bay Regional Park Police, Grogan learned that park visitors had reported finding the remains shortly before noon. The responding officers had located the body of a woman washed ashore directly east of Brooks Island—the very spot where Scott said he was fishing on Christmas Eve.

  Lying prone on the rocks, the body was clad in a bra and what appeared to be remnants of pants. The park police had not located a skull, and both legs were missing below the knee. Smalley knew about the fetus that had been recovered from the same general vicinity; the recent stormy weather must have moved the bodies onto shore, he thought.

  Small suggested that the Modesto police hasten to the scene. The press was already arriving, and, more important, it was still low tide. Soon the body would have to be moved, and any evidence might be washed away. Grogan instructed Small to photograph, videotape, and recover the body as soon as possible, whether Modesto police had arrived or not. He also requested that no details about the clothing or condition of the body be released.

  Sergeant Carter and Detectives Hendee and Owen helicoptered to Point Isabel Park. As they landed, the officers could see reporters already camped out in the parking lot just east of the shoreline. From that vantage point, it wasn’t possible to see the body, which was concealed beneath a yellow tarp, but two news helicopters had already taken footage, and one of the choppers was still circling.

  Sergeant Dave Dubowy of the Park Police greeted the Modesto investigators and led them down to the cordoned site. This area of the beach was frequented by joggers and dog-walkers, he told them, given the traffic, he didn’t believe the body had been there long.

  The badly decomposed body had no head, hands, or feet. There was nothing below the right knee and only the tibia and fibula bones remained beneath the left. A good portion of the woman’s buttocks, hips, and lower abdomen were intact, but they had undergone extensive decomposition. The rib cage and part of the spine were exposed, and the stomach and most internal organs appeared to be missing.

  While the officers would have to wait for DNA testing before a positive ID could be made, there was some very telling evidence still clinging to the body. The bra that was fastened around the woman’s chest was virtually intact, and bore a Bali label. Her pants were so decomposed that most of the fabric was mere fuzz, but the waist-band revealed a Motherhood maternity label, and the color of the trousers, off-white or cream, could still be determined. The last article was a pair of Jockey brand underwear, also severely degraded.

  One other item that was carefully retrieved was a strip of gray duct tape, about twelve to fourteen inches long, that had been affixed vertically down the front of the woman’s pants.

  Police on the scene interviewed A. Gonzalez, the woman who had reported finding the body. “Around 11:45 A.M., I was walking down the shoreline and just kept looking over the rocks, watching some dogs. And I was curious what they were looking at and I looked . . . and it was a body, face-down, and I saw the body and went and called authorities.” When asked how she knew it was a body, she admitted that the decomposition had made it difficult. What she saw “had the shape of a body, but it looked like someone had wrapped it like a mummy.” Gonzalez, who had a bachelor’s degree in gerontology, was studying to be a physical therapist. Having taken a number of anatomy and physiology courses, she said, she had worked with a lot of cadavers.

  Gonzalez also said that the body had been “pretty tangled in the rocks,” and that she hadn’t seen a head. The body was half in the water and half out, and from the lower thighs down, she couldn’t see the legs. Gonzalez reported that there were a few additional people walking around, including one other woman who had spotted the body, but had already left the scene.

  The interviewing officer asked if there was anything else they should know. Gonzalez said, “After the body gets investigated, they have to know there were dogs eating it.”

  The officer repeated, “There were some dogs eating it?”

  Yes, she confirmed. “So all the markings aren’t going to be true to the crime scene.”

  “Okay, could you say how many dogs there were?”

  Gonzalez said there was definitely “one big black dog” that they’d spotted near the body. “It left a while ago. I think the owner was concerned about it getting sick.”

  Dodge Hendee reboarded the helicopter and took digital video-tape and photographs of the recovery sites for both bodies. He also recorded their relationship to Brooks Island and the Berkeley Marina.

  Officers from the Contra Costa Coroner’s Office rolled the female body into a sheet and placed it inside a body bag. Police then ordered that cadaver dogs be brought to the scene to search for additional body parts.

  Brian Peterson of the Contra Costa Coroner’s Facility (no relation to Scott) performed the autopsy on the fetus, now referred to as “Baby Doe.” He determined that it was a full-term male infant in an advanced stage of decomposition. The skin was discolored but well-preserved. He estimated the gestational age of the fetus at between thirty-three and thirty-eight weeks.

  Dr. Peterson was unable to determine whether the umbilical cord, only half a centimeter long and ragged at one end, had been tied or if it had simply detached in the water. The decomposition also prevented him from concluding whether the fetus had actually gone through the birthing process. He did, however, find evidence of meconium in the body, indicating that the baby had most likely not been born alive.

  Meconium is a substance that accumulates in a fetus’s lower intestine in utero. In 95 percent of live births, a baby expels the meconium within twenty-four hours after he or she is born. The fact that meconium was protruding from Baby Doe’s anus indicated that if he was born alive, he probably did not survive for more than twenty-four hours. Dr. Peterson found no deformities or abnormalities that could have prevented the baby from surviving outside the womb if properly cared for.

  The lungs were found to be small and wet, and Dr. Peterson could not say whether the baby had ever taken a breath. The stomach was empty, and there was no animal or fish activity. This was quite unusual given the advanced state of decomposition and suggested that the baby had been in utero until very recently. The body’s condition also made it impossible to use its weight to reach an accu-rate estimate about age. Yet the height indicated that the child was close to full term. An estimated gestational age of nine months was based on its crown-heel length, although it could have been a large seven-and-a-half-month-old infant, since such measurement standards are merely average
s.

  Whether Conner was born alive became a critical issue at trial. Defense counsel Mark Geragos would tell the jury in his opening statement that Conner was carried almost to full term and was born alive. Since his client had been under police scrutiny from the moment LCI was reported missing, there was no way Scott could have removed and later disposed of Conner’s body. Someone else must be responsible. The debate over Conner’s life would become critical in the battle for Scott’s as well.

  None of the coroner’s observations eliminated the possibility that this was Scott and LCI Peterson’s child.

  The coroner noted that a piece of fiberglass-type tape was loosely wrapped around the fetus’s neck and left shoulder when the body was recovered. The tape appeared to be knotted at the point of the shoulder. Speculation would abound as to whether the loop and knot were man-made or simply the result of churning waters entangling the body in floating debris. There was only a two-centimeter gap between the material and the neck, which meant that the circumference of the loop was smaller than the baby’s head. This could support the notion that the noose was affixed by someone after the baby was born, but the prosecution experts had other theories. The baby’s brain had liquefied, allowing for the possibility that the loop could have slipped over the collapsed head. Furthermore, if the tape had been tied around the neck, the state would argue that there should have been a residual mark on the skin at the throat. There was none.

  The coroner ruled that the autopsy could not reveal a cause of death.

  Detective Grogan was left with the grim task of informing Laci’s family of the discoveries. On the afternoon of Monday, April 14, Grogan left messages for Sharon Rocha, Ron Grantski, and Brent Rocha, requesting that they contact him.

  About four o’clock he spoke to Sharon Rocha, informing her that the bodies of an adult female and an infant had been recovered from the San Francisco Bay. They had not yet been identified, but he promised to keep her updated. A little later, he relayed the same mes-sage to Laci’s brother.

  Around ten o’clock that evening, Grogan contacted the family again to prepare them for breaking news reports that the female’s body had no head, hands, or legs. Both Sharon and Brent asked Grogan where Scott was. He did not know. Sharon told Grogan that she’d left a message for Scott the previous day, but her call went un-returned.

  She then checked with Jackie Peterson, who had been trying to reach him since the previous evening and was beginning to worry. Sharon told Jackie that she thought Scott might want to be with family because of the news about the bodies. The press reports alone, however, weren’t enough to convince Jackie that these were the bodies of LCI and Conner. She told Sharon about another female body, similarly mutilated, that had washed up in January.

  That same evening, an autopsy was performed on the Jane Doe. It was in an advanced state of decomposition, missing not only its head, and portions of the lower legs, but all internal organs from the abdominal cavity except the uterus. Since no evidence of tool marks was found at the bone joints of the missing appendages, the medical examiner performing the autopsy concluded that either someone with great surgical skill had removed them, or the victim had been weighted in those areas, and then the water’s currents and decomposition had caused the limbs to pull apart at the joints. The bones bore no sign of injuries that occurred before death, such as resorption lines, callous formation, or rounding of fracture margins. However, Dr. Peterson found that the woman’s fifth, sixth, and ninth ribs were broken; the fracturing appeared to have occurred shortly before her death.

  Jane Doe’s missing limbs suggested that the body had been in the water a long time. The corpse also showed signs of extensive fish activity. In foraging on human remains, fish start by eating exposed areas of soft tissue that are unprotected by clothing. Once the exterior flesh has been eaten away they will swim up sleeves or through other gaps in clothing, and often find their way into the chest cavity and consume the internal organs.

  In a subsequent review of the autopsy at my request, San Antonio’s chief coroner, Dr. Vincent DiMaio, confirmed the Contra Costa coroner’s findings, and theorized that the fractures were most likely sustained around the time the woman died. It appeared they were the result of one violent blow, such as a kick, to the left side of the rib cage. The injuries could have been the result of similar violence to the body shortly after death, but simply dropping the body in transit would not likely result in such breaks.

  While the body could have been identified as LCI Peterson by the tattoo on her left ankle, a missing ovary removed when she was a child, or the abdominal scar from the surgery, the state of decomposition eliminated these possibilities. Dental records were useless be-cause the head was absent. The body did have an enlarged uterus, which signaled her pregnancy, but there was no physical evidence of a vaginal delivery. The fact that the woman had been wearing under-pants supported this theory, he noted. The cervix and area below the belly button were intact, and there was no sign of a man-made incision to remove the baby. Yet a tear in the body’s abdominal wall was large enough to permit the fetus to exit the womb through it, as interior pressure from bacteria and gases built up inside the mother—a sad phenomenon known as a “coffin birth.”

  In his confidential report, Dr. Peterson noted that the condition of the female’s body was consistent with an exposure of three to six months in “a marine environment.” There were barnacles adhering to the exposed skeleton. Some of the deep muscle tissue was still red, indicating that decomposition had not progressed completely through the remains. The cold temperature of the San Francisco Bay had slowed the decomposition process.

  A toxicology examination of the woman’s tissue revealed no illicit drugs or poison, only elevated levels of caffeine and PEA (a product of decomposition). As with Baby Doe, the autopsy alone could not determine the cause of death.

  A large plastic bag bearing the logo of a company called Target Products, Ltd. also washed up in the area where the two bodies came ashore. It had a piece of silver duct tape wrapped around it. The police recovered the bag and used the Internet to identify Target Products as a Canadian company. The owner said that the bag sounded like what they used to cover pallets of their product, concrete grout used in bridge construction. They were currently shipping material to the San Francisco Bay area for projects, including the Richmond Bridge.

  After the bodies were found, the detectives also began recovering fliers that had been posted by Scott Peterson. They wanted to know if he had used duct tape to affix them, if the brand matched the strip on the woman’s body, and if the adhesive on the tape could be linked to a substance on the hairs found in Scott’s boat.

  At 5:50 that evening, police received a call from a woman reporting a suspicious incident. While she and her husband were dining at a restaurant called Skates over the weekend, the couple noticed something unusual in the bay through the restaurant’s window. It looked like dark brown or black hair bobbing up and down with the waves about 150 feet from the water’s edge. She said “the hair” did not appear to be attached to a person, which was the reason she didn’t report it. It wasn’t until hearing the news that po-lice had recovered a headless body at Point Isabel, about three miles north of the restaurant, that she realized the incident might be significant.

  Kristine Crawford and her certified cadaver dog, Dakota, arrived at the scene at 6:30 in the evening. Dakota, a six-year-old pit bull terrier, was a seasoned investigator who had taken part in sixty searches since being certified. A second dog, Merlin, and her handler, Eloise Anderson, were also called in to search the southern portion of the beach. When Dakota and Kristine Crawford started traveling north along the shoreline, Dakota hit on a piece of fabric tightly wedged between two boulders. In almost the same area, she showed interest in the breeze, which was blowing onto the shore in an easterly direction. Dakota walked into the water, but was forced to stop when it reached her shoulders. Investigators flagged the spot for future reference.

  As they we
re wrapping up the search, an unidentified woman told the officers that she had spotted a tarp in another area of the beach. However, follow-up using the cadaver dog indicated no ties to the body.

  The police also found pieces of duct tape stuck to some of the rocks in the area, and one officer located a dense metal rod that was wrapped in duct tape. Although the rod broke into pieces when he attempted to dislodge it from the rocks, he kept it as evidence.

  As Grogan was overseeing police activity on the shoreline, Detective Brocchini was searching for Scott. It was likely he had quit driving his white 2002 Dodge Dakota truck, with its GPS tracking system because he suspected that he was being followed. Scott had apparently traded vehicles with his brother, John. Agents were watching his parents’ house, his father’s business, and an address in San Diego where the Dodge truck was parked. At one point in the evening, Lee and Jackie Peterson left their residence in Jackie’s 1998 Jaguar. Scott was not with them.

  On Wednesday, April 16, around 9:00 A.M., Brocchini finally located Scott through wiretaps on his cell phone. Peterson was checking his voice mail from 3949 Le Cresta Avenue in San Diego.

  Surveillance units were immediately dispatched to the location, which was a house belonging to his sister Anne Bird’s adoptive parents. Scott was staying there with Anne’s permission, and using their Lexus instead of his Mercedes-Benz. Forty-five minutes later, Brocchini got word that Scott was walking around the neighborhood. An agent reported that his appearance had changed considerably since she’d last seen him in February 2003. He had grown a thick goatee and bleached his hair, eyebrows, and beard blond, with an orange tint. The female agent noted that “he appeared to be walking in the surrounding areas through alleys with no apparent place to go.”