The Megyn Kelly Show - Scott Peterson： A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special

00:00:00.400 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.980 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and our true crime Christmas week here on the program.

00:00:18.420 My guest today is John Buehler, a retired detective for the Modesto, California Police Department.

00:00:24.660 Almost 20 years ago on Christmas Day, he got a call to help on the case of a mother-to-be who went missing on Christmas Eve 2002.

00:00:34.920 Her name was Lacey Peterson.

00:00:37.080 John worked with others in the Modesto PD to find Lacey and the person responsible, her husband, Scott Peterson.

00:00:44.360 John, so great to have you here. Thanks for coming on.

00:00:47.420 Yeah, thanks for the invite. I appreciate it.

00:00:49.120 Okay, so let's just start for our listeners who aren't familiar with the case.

00:00:54.200 With the story of Scott and Lacey Peterson.

00:00:57.440 They were living in Modesto, California.

00:00:59.780 How long had they been married at the time she disappeared?

00:01:04.360 Well, right about five years.

00:01:05.760 We've been married about that long and they'd come up from down in Southern California and moved up to Modesto to be closer to Lacey's mother and her sister and brother.

00:01:14.420 Okay. And were there any reports of marital problems or bad behavior by Scott or any of the stuff you look for once somebody's been convicted of double murder?

00:01:26.840 You say like, oh, he tortured the neighbor's cat.

00:01:28.980 He did, you know, when he was growing up, things like that.

00:01:30.820 Anything like that with him?

00:01:32.680 Gosh, Megan, nothing at all.

00:01:34.020 I mean, this guy was, he was the guy you want to marry your sister or your daughter.

00:01:38.960 I mean, there was, he just couldn't find any flaws in this guy at all from outward appearances.

00:01:43.540 You know, immediately when we met him, you know, it took a while before things started to fall into place.

00:01:48.080 And we saw that there was another side to him.

00:01:50.480 But from all appearances, you know, he didn't have a criminal record.

00:01:54.060 He, I mean, everybody liked him.

00:01:55.540 You know, you'd have a barbecue.

00:01:56.660 You want to make sure you invite Scott there because he's going to be part of the fun.

00:02:00.040 So he wasn't that guy who people are like, there's something creepy about him.

00:02:03.780 No. And, you know, that's kind of the thing that's a little bit unusual about that is nobody really could come up with that.

00:02:08.000 Although a lot of Lacey's friends then once Amber came forward and, you know, you want to cover that.

00:02:14.280 But once she came forward, then people, when they went away from talking to him as much as they were earlier,

00:02:20.820 they started bringing up facts that were a little bit inconsistent with the all-American boy, but nothing really alarming.

00:02:26.620 It's nothing that you would think of on an individual basis.

00:02:29.520 They're all anecdotal.

00:02:30.800 But when you tallied them up, then they showed a little bit different side to him, a side of a guy who really didn't want to be a dad.

00:02:38.220 And you, I mean, how long have you been a detective for?

00:02:40.780 How long were you doing that?

00:02:41.820 Um, well, I did it for 17 years and I was probably 12th year at that time, probably my 12th year.

00:02:50.200 And so I assume you've seen your fair share of homicide cases.

00:02:54.280 Yeah. When I left, I, I, I'd been involved in about 140 of them, 26 of which were mine.

00:03:00.100 So, you know, you have those, you have missing people, you have suicides, you know, you deal with family members that are under stress,

00:03:07.500 that are dealing with the death or the loss of a loved one. And so you kind of get used to what to expect from people within a certain range of emotion and reactions.

00:03:18.380 Right. Right. And you, I mean, I assume in that time you met or dealt with some defendants who you thought this is a sociopath right here.

00:03:26.640 Like this guy has no emotion, no feeling or empathy for others. Was there ever a defendant like that?

00:03:34.300 Yeah, I can remember a couple of them. One in particular, he did, he did, uh, actually the worst crime scene I ever went into was done with a knife and a claw hand.

00:03:41.500 There were no guns involved or anything like that. And the guy who did that murder, he truly was TV quality evil.

00:03:47.140 He was the guy that, you know, a script writer would, you know, detail out. And even when you looked in his eyes, they were cold. Like, it was like, there was nothing behind them.

00:03:55.400 And, you know, Scott doesn't have that look, but obviously with this situation, our belief is, and the jury's belief was that he had that capability.

00:04:02.560 Yeah. I was talking to Mark Garagos on the program not long ago. And, you know, he said this about virtually everybody. We talked about who he had represented.

00:04:10.660 You know, he's like, I, I knew him and I can, I get a sense for whether somebody is capable of this. And I just don't think he was, he wasn't that guy.

00:04:17.120 Now he also said the same thing about Jussie Smollett, which I don't believe either one, you know, it's sometimes we see what we want to see, but, um,

00:04:25.600 it sounds like you're not disputing that if you just met Scott Peterson on the street, you wouldn't have a creepy vibe. You wouldn't think, Oh, something wrong with him.

00:04:34.120 Well, no, I don't think he would. And that's the reason that, you know, he would be successful when it comes to, you know, committing a crime like this, because his suspicion level really wouldn't be there.

00:04:43.380 It's, it's a situation where you don't, he just doesn't look like a killer, which is a thing that made him in this case so dangerous because Lacey had no idea that this was coming, but he, over the years, you know,

00:04:55.060 you meet a lot of these guys and there was, I gotta tell you, Megan, there were a lot of guys I met that committed murder and murder aside, I kind of liked them.

00:05:02.460 And it's really the same thing with Scott. He, he was difficult not to like, cause he's so charming. He's so engaging. He's so polite.

00:05:09.340 And I don't know what he was saying behind our back all the time. I know some of it wasn't too polite, but to our face, he was always easy to deal with.

00:05:15.980 But at the same time, that was a picture for us that painted something different than maybe he expected.

00:05:22.620 When we deal with people that are accused of this, or we're focusing on them, usually we'll see a little bit of frustration on their part as things go by.

00:05:29.900 He didn't have that in the entire time we dealt with him and he was always cooperative to a point.

00:05:34.980 And then of course he would always draw the line in his cooperation because he'd only go so far.

00:05:39.120 He'd pull out that attorney card and he'd say, well, I'm going to talk to my attorney about that.

00:05:42.900 And so we dealt with that quite a bit.

00:05:43.960 We saw that in some of his public interviews, uh, he gave one to a local reporter and whenever she got him on something where he tripped up a bit, you know, like, what do you mean?

00:05:53.320 You told Lacey that you were cheating on her and then you continued the affair.

00:05:58.200 Why would you do that?

00:05:59.280 And he'd be like, well, the lawyers don't, you know, this is the point at which I can't get into anything that was tough.

00:06:04.640 He was like, oh, I'm not allowed to get into that, you know, and, and, and was really like, let's keep the focus on Lacey.

00:06:10.720 Um, but to me, watching that interview with the local reporter, watching the interview with Diane Sawyer, uh, you walk away thinking he never comes close to losing his composure.

00:06:19.960 This is a man who's used to wearing this mask.

00:06:23.460 Yeah, I think so.

00:06:24.440 And again, when dealing with him, he had an enormous amount of emotional control and that kind of fit in with our departmental psychologist, Phil Trumpeter.

00:06:33.260 He told us that, you know, this is the fit of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder.

00:06:39.160 He wouldn't go so far as to call him a sociopath or a psychopath.

00:06:42.340 I mean, you could give it any label you want on anybody, but in this case, he just, he was just a little bit different than us.

00:06:48.260 But if he, I don't know if you remember, there was one segment in one of the local reporters from Sacramento where she was asking him questions and his phone was ringing in the background.

00:06:57.820 It was back in the kitchen.

00:06:58.720 And the thing that really strikes a lot of people that, you know, we hadn't found Lacey at that time and he tried to continue with the interview and then he goes, Hey, you want me to turn that off?

00:07:08.240 And he goes back, he finds a phone, he turns it off.

00:07:10.100 Well, that could have been Brokini or me or Brogan calling him and saying, Hey, we got Lacey down here in Bakersfield, but you know, nothing like that.

00:07:16.020 He didn't want to take the call.

00:07:16.920 He just wanted to continue with the interview.

00:07:18.880 So, you know, where's the concern?

00:07:20.380 Where's the urgency on his part?

00:07:21.660 It just was absent, at least at that moment.

00:07:23.320 Yeah, and we'll get to what his half-sister said about him because she spent a fair amount of time with him, I guess, during those weeks that we were looking for Lacey.

00:07:32.340 And she did not walk away with a favorable view of her half-brother who she wrote a whole book about.

00:07:38.160 Okay, so there they are.

00:07:39.220 They're living sort of, they call them an all-American couple.

00:07:41.800 You know, she's got the thousand-watt smile.

00:07:43.860 He's obviously a very good-looking guy.

00:07:45.620 They get pregnant with their first baby after five years of marriage.

00:07:49.240 They've got the golden retriever, Mackenzie.

00:07:52.740 She's nearby her mom, who's adoring.

00:07:55.860 And everything's, you know, coming up roses, or so it would seem.

00:07:59.360 And then December 24th, we think, well, at least December 24th is when she was called in as missing.

00:08:07.300 He says he went to fish in the local marina with a 14-foot fishing boat.

00:08:15.160 He only recently bought that Lacey had never stepped foot in because that's just what he does for entertainment.

00:08:20.640 He says some guys would go golfing.

00:08:21.920 I like to fish, so I went fishing.

00:08:24.160 And Lacey was going to get together a couple of, you know, food items to share with her family later.

00:08:30.000 He says he left the house at 9.30 that morning for his fishing trip.

00:08:35.200 And what time does he say he returned home to find no Lacey?

00:08:39.740 Yeah, it was late afternoon.

00:08:42.520 I'm trying to remember exactly like 3.30 or 4.00, something like that.

00:08:46.020 But if you recall, his original claim that he had told everybody is that he was going to be golfing that day.

00:08:52.380 And he told us, of course, that he changed.

00:08:54.560 Yeah, he changed his plan to go golfing because it was too cold to golf.

00:08:58.860 But it wasn't too cold to go out in San Francisco Bay, which is certainly not the tropics, I can tell you that.

00:09:03.700 So, you know, a lot of little things, and this is the point for us is, you know, a premeditated murder is not going to have a witness and it's not going to have a videotape.

00:09:14.540 You know, the luxuries, the things that we all want.

00:09:16.400 And, of course, with Scott, you're never going to get a confession.

00:09:18.600 So you have to build that case by eliminating suspects from suspicion, by proving out their alibi and showing that they had no reason to do the killing.

00:09:27.560 But in Scott's case, although everybody else we dealt with in this case was pretty easy to clear, we couldn't clear him.

00:09:33.940 We would always be conditional about that.

00:09:35.860 So when he decides he's going to change his plans at the last minute and go fishing instead of golfing because it's too cold to golf, that's a red flag for us.

00:09:43.860 You know, maybe not right then, but it's certainly a red flag.

00:09:46.320 And then he couldn't remember what kind of bait he used.

00:09:49.420 That's weird.

00:09:51.360 Yeah, there was, I think he was more of a freshwater fisherman than a saltwater fisherman.

00:09:55.420 And so he wasn't sure what lures he had.

00:09:58.380 And I think Al Brocchini mentioned that the tackle that he did have in this boat was all freshwater tackle that you would use up in one of the lakes in the Sierras or the foothills, not something that you would use in San Francisco Bay if you were going for like sturgeon or striper or something like that.

00:10:13.280 So, you know, the fishing trip really wasn't much of a fishing trip.

00:10:16.980 It was more of a trip so that, yeah, you mentioned earlier that Lacey had never set foot in that boat.

00:10:22.340 Well, she had never set foot in that boat alive.

00:10:24.280 She certainly was in the boat after getting killed.

00:10:27.280 Right.

00:10:28.360 So he, on the way home from the marina, leaves what you guys, you and your partner, believe.

00:10:35.100 Because you and the, I'm sorry, I forget the man you just mentioned was your partner.

00:10:39.100 You were the main two detectives on the case.

00:10:40.740 Well, actually, there were three of us.

00:10:43.220 There were Craig Grogan and then Al Brocchini and I.

00:10:45.400 Now, Al started the case on Christmas Eve when he was notified about the missing.

00:10:50.040 And he knew that I always liked overtime, but he also knew I had my kids with me on Christmas Eve.

00:10:55.200 So he called me on Christmas Day as I was taking them over to their mom's house.

00:10:58.640 And of course, I was all too happy to jump on some Christmas Day overtime because I didn't have

00:11:04.400 everything going that day anyway.

00:11:06.040 But yeah, Al Brocchini, when he first started talking to him, he started gathering a lot

00:11:11.460 of evidence from the beginning.

00:11:12.420 And there goes, you know, your next three years completely devoted to this case.

00:11:17.100 So when Scott Peterson was on the way home from the marina, he left what appears to be to, you

00:11:23.100 know, I've said to my audience, I believe Scott did this.

00:11:25.600 So I am on your side, though, open minded and like, bring it on.

00:11:28.880 If you've got evidence to prove that he didn't do it, let's see it.

00:11:32.820 What appears to be sort of a cover your rear end voicemail to his wife, Lacey.

00:11:39.300 And here is how that sounded.

00:11:41.280 This is Soundbite One.

00:11:42.420 Not unusual for a killer to do something like that.

00:11:58.180 Yeah, it's, you know, I mean, for me, that was one of the first things that Brocchini

00:12:01.800 did when I met with him on Christmas Day is I met him at the office and he played that

00:12:06.280 tape for me.

00:12:06.900 And of course, the first thing I said, how long have these guys been married?

00:12:09.660 And he said, five years.

00:12:10.740 And I thought, I don't know, that seems kind of flowery for, you know, somebody married

00:12:14.040 for five years.

00:12:15.000 It just, yeah, it just seems sort of, you know, I mean, just like you said, you know, to me,

00:12:18.380 it was a staged call to take the focus off of him.

00:12:20.980 And it didn't mean he did it.

00:12:22.140 But I mean, you know, this stuff and your viewers know this stuff.

00:12:25.240 How do we start a murder investigation?

00:12:26.840 We start at the victim and we work outward.

00:12:29.100 And who's the first one you check when you've got a, you know, deceased girl?

00:12:32.780 Well, you're going to look at her boyfriend or her husband.

00:12:34.640 And especially when you've got a pregnant girl that goes dead or goes missing.

00:12:39.480 And I think they had that 2001 study where murder was the vast majority by an overwhelming

00:12:45.200 margin of the cause of death for pregnant girls.

00:12:48.820 And so, oh yeah, it's just, I thought you saw that.

00:12:52.440 You probably did.

00:12:53.000 You said, you got too much going around in your head.

00:12:54.540 So I forgot about it.

00:12:55.580 Or I chose to ignore it because it's disturbing.

00:12:58.560 It was very disturbing.

00:12:59.640 And so, you know, but like, again, you go back to Scott and it's easier to work a case

00:13:06.160 when you don't despise the guy that you think did.

00:13:08.580 You know, when he's polite to you and he's not saying anything bad about your mother or

00:13:12.260 anything like that.

00:13:13.040 And so you just kind of follow the evidence and like, this is another strike and strike

00:13:16.640 against him.

00:13:17.660 So when Al played that tape for me, I just thought, oh, this just doesn't sound quite right.

00:13:23.040 But I've had other guys like this before that I've dealt with where it didn't seem

00:13:27.500 right.

00:13:27.800 I remember one in particular, he had no reaction whatsoever to his wife and daughter being

00:13:33.120 missing.

00:13:33.760 And I thought, gosh, this is kind of freaky.

00:13:36.000 And but we were able to clear him right away, not only through a polygraph, but we also verified

00:13:40.200 his alibi.

00:13:40.900 And he was just a cold fish guy.

00:13:42.640 He just didn't have any emotion.

00:13:45.300 That's something that we should keep in mind as we go through this case over the next two

00:13:48.600 hours is, could he just be that person, you know, that sort of oddball whose affect is

00:13:54.620 different from what we're used to?

00:13:56.680 And maybe he's not a cold blooded killer.

00:13:58.960 Maybe he's just got a weird affect.

00:14:01.760 So I have space in my head for that possibility.

00:14:04.940 But there's a lot of evidence against Scott Peterson beyond his affect.

00:14:10.920 Can I ask you this?

00:14:11.680 One of the things that seems so weird about the case was who kills their wife on Christmas

00:14:15.920 Eve?

00:14:16.600 You know, it's like if you want to.

00:14:18.600 Kill your wife, your pregnant wife.

00:14:20.640 Like, wouldn't you choose a quieter date?

00:14:24.060 Like how cruel, how sadistic, like extra sadistic beyond killing a pregnant mother of your child?

00:14:33.100 Well, you know, that's kind of an interesting, you know, question to ask.

00:14:37.660 But the thing is, is whether you're killing your wife on the Fourth of July or you're killing

00:14:41.820 her on Christmas Eve, I mean, it's still pretty, pretty nasty stuff, you know, to do that.

00:14:46.360 So I think in a situation like this, you can't really apply the common sense things that we

00:14:52.900 operate on our day-to-day basis and try to put those on somebody who does something like

00:14:57.900 this because you're going to be disappointed every time because we don't do those things.

00:15:01.860 And so to try and make sense of things that don't make sense, gosh, it's just, you know,

00:15:06.480 you're going to be battling frustration the whole time you're batting that around in your head.

00:15:12.700 So you guys get involved in the case.

00:15:13.900 And one of the first things you ask Scott Peterson is, would you take a polygraph for us?

00:15:19.660 Right.

00:15:20.200 Is that standard procedure?

00:15:21.420 And do you usually receive a yes in response to that?

00:15:24.600 Well, yeah, the polygraph, I love the polygraph because it does a variety of different things.

00:15:31.120 Okay.

00:15:31.300 Now, of course, it's not admissible in court.

00:15:33.540 Well, I don't care about that because I'm not using it to go into court with it.

00:15:36.820 But the first thing you do is what's the person's cooperation level when you say the word polygraph?

00:15:42.780 You know, do they run like a scalded cat away from you?

00:15:44.940 Or do they say, oh, absolutely, I'll take it.

00:15:46.880 You know, and somebody who wants the focus to be on Lacey and wants us to be trying to turn over every rock and log and look under every car and blanket that might be in a park or something like that to try and find her, take the poly, take the focus off of you and let us move on.

00:16:02.500 So we're not spending time trying to clear yet.

00:16:04.640 But when he originally, he said yes to the poly on Christmas Eve when Brock asked him.

00:16:09.060 And then on Christmas Day when we were getting ready to do it, because when Al called me, Al Brocchini called me, and we went down there and we started to the office and started talking.

00:16:19.600 And then we went over to Scott's house, and that's when I first met him.

00:16:22.660 Pleasant, nonchalant, you know, he greeted us, you know, and it's like he just didn't have any concern.

00:16:29.360 I mean, he walked away, he had something else that he had to attend to.

00:16:32.600 And I just kind of thought, well, gosh, how come you're not asking me 90 questions?

00:16:36.520 Why aren't you, you know, asking me, what are we going to do next?

00:16:39.080 Are you going to get helicopters up?

00:16:40.460 You know, are you going to get a boat patrol?

00:16:41.600 I mean, whatever he wants to come up with.

00:16:43.220 He didn't have anywhere near the same emotional urgency that Sharon had or any of Lacey's friends or family.

00:16:50.780 And so when we got done meeting with him and chatting with him then, the first thing that I did after that is my neighbor, two doors over,

00:16:57.940 was the senior polygraph examiner for California Department of Justice, Doug Mansfield.

00:17:04.220 And so I called him, and he usually gets calls from me because I like doing the polygraph.

00:17:09.100 It was a pretty good tool.

00:17:10.780 And I, you know, of course, I hate to call him on Christmas Day, but he's always good for things like this.

00:17:15.020 And so he said, yeah, I'll come down.

00:17:16.100 So he came down and with the intention of, you know, putting Scott on the box.

00:17:20.480 And then between the time that Al had asked him the night before if he'd take the polygraph,

00:17:25.400 and then that afternoon when Doug came down to get him booked up, he apparently had talked to his father,

00:17:30.740 and Lee had told him, no, don't take it.

00:17:32.580 Now, I'm not sure what Lee's reasons for that is, but, you know, Lee's a successful businessman from San Diego.

00:17:38.100 Great.

00:17:38.380 But, you know, that's maybe not the best advice to give your son, not to take the poly when the detectives are trying to clear him

00:17:44.260 so we can start going towards, you know, better suspects than your son.

00:17:47.840 But it is what it is.

00:17:49.020 He did what he did, and I get it.

00:17:51.580 I get it, too.

00:17:52.940 What this is December at this point, 25th, 2002.

00:17:58.120 It was too cold for him to golf.

00:18:00.540 So he went out on the cold water.

00:18:02.600 Was the swimming pool at the at the Peterson house still open?

00:18:06.560 Yeah.

00:18:08.380 Oh, gosh, no.

00:18:09.560 You wouldn't be swimming this time of year.

00:18:11.420 So do you remember was it closed up?

00:18:14.220 Well, I mean, there was water in the pool, but, you know, it's way too cold in Northern California to go swim at that time of year.

00:18:20.880 So, yeah, he wouldn't have been swimming in there.

00:18:23.200 And obviously we checked the pool, no Lacey in there.

00:18:26.000 You know, we checked all over the house.

00:18:27.860 Well, the reason I ask is because his half-sister, I guess he had a half-sister who was given up for adoption,

00:18:32.820 and then she came back to the family.

00:18:34.360 And she got to know Scott and their mother, Jackie, well, and another sibling, I think.

00:18:39.560 And she would write in the book that she would ultimately publish something like 33 Reasons Why He's Guilty.

00:18:44.720 So her conclusion is right there.

00:18:46.680 She had a feeling that he was obsessed with his swimming pool at his house and that the way he would go back and take care of it and clean it and so on,

00:18:57.400 her own theory was he drowned her in that swimming pool.

00:19:00.820 Gosh, I'd never heard that.

00:19:03.600 I didn't read her book.

00:19:04.740 It's an interesting take.

00:19:05.920 I kind of don't agree with that because he would have had the – I mean, they both would have been soaking wet,

00:19:11.140 and it would have been a – gosh, that would have been a violent fight to try and, you know, drown her in the pool.

00:19:17.480 There would have been splashing and noise.

00:19:18.880 And the houses were close together there.

00:19:20.420 The house to the south where his neighbor Karen lived, I mean, that's right there.

00:19:24.680 And I think that would have potentially attracted too much attention, much easier to carry out suffocation or strangulation inside the residence itself,

00:19:34.180 underneath a pillow or a blanket or whatever you would choose to use.

00:19:38.320 And hopefully that, along with the walls of the house, would blank out the noise if there was any.

00:19:43.740 Well, what about – Mark Guerra goes this, and I said, what – you know, why couldn't –

00:19:48.620 because he's like, there were no forensics at all tying him to the murder, which I think is pretty true.

00:19:52.540 And I said, well, why couldn't he have just suffocated her or strangled her?

00:19:57.080 And he said there would have been secretions, which would have provided, you know, some evidence that a murder had taken place there

00:20:04.380 or something bad had happened to Lacey wherever he did that.

00:20:08.680 Well, I don't totally agree with that.

00:20:10.300 I mean, Mark's got his take, and I know, you know, what side he's on.

00:20:13.560 And I respect him.

00:20:14.520 He's, you know, he's walked the courtroom many, many times.

00:20:17.580 So I get that.

00:20:18.620 But I see it a little bit differently.

00:20:19.960 There was a whole ton of evidence there.

00:20:21.680 Now, if you take a look at this case and you think in terms of what if Scott didn't know Lacey

00:20:26.380 and we went and processed the house as a crime scene,

00:20:29.560 we would have found a multitude of evidence that would have linked him to the victim.

00:20:34.120 We would have found hair.

00:20:35.220 We would have found fibers from clothes.

00:20:37.340 We would have found maybe lipstick on a glass, all sorts of things, fingerprints all over the house.

00:20:42.960 And one of the things that we did, just so that everybody wouldn't think that we were one-sided on this,

00:20:48.460 is when we did process the house for evidence of a stranger in abduction or intrusion,

00:20:54.280 and there was no forced entry, of course.

00:20:55.880 We had the FBI come down from Sacramento with their evidence responsible.

00:20:59.460 We had them, independent of the medicinal PD, they processed the house.

00:21:02.800 And when they did that, of course, you know, I think there was a saying that you attorneys use,

00:21:06.800 evidence of absence is absence of evidence.

00:21:10.180 And there was no evidence that anybody else had come in that house.

00:21:13.600 So when you look at this situation, well, of course there's evidence there,

00:21:18.020 but it's not the type of evidence that you would think of on a, you know, movie or something like that,

00:21:23.500 because they lived together.

00:21:24.900 They were married.

00:21:25.900 So, of course, you're going to have her stuff there.

00:21:27.460 There was one spot of blood that was on the comforter that probably wouldn't have been there if Lacey was alive,

00:21:33.700 because Lacey was known as a fastidious housekeeper.

00:21:36.940 That blood spot was linked to Scott, of course.

00:21:40.460 Scott had a cut on his finger.

00:21:42.560 I don't remember which one it was, but one of them,

00:21:44.960 which could be consistent with her scratching him or something like that

00:21:48.420 as he's trying to suffocate her or strangle her in bed.

00:21:51.320 Now, whether or not she would defecate, whether or not she would urinate, I mean, I don't know.

00:21:55.180 It just said it all depends on the – I don't think he could rule that out.

00:21:58.280 I don't think he could rule it in.

00:21:59.340 And I certainly wouldn't say that the absence of those two things would suggest that he couldn't have done it in there.

00:22:05.500 Do you remember, John, whether the bed, for example, had, you know, fresh linens on it?

00:22:12.020 You know, did it look like he had cleaned up at all?

00:22:15.480 Well, the only thing I remember from the bed is there was an indentation on the comforter at the foot of the bed

00:22:20.040 that would be consistent with a human body, lacy size, being on the foot of the bed and then moved from there.

00:22:28.300 And, you know, I mean, it could have been a variety of different things.

00:22:31.180 Maybe Scott sat there or laid back or something like that.

00:22:33.700 I mean, it doesn't mean that she was there, but it is consistent.

00:22:36.600 And once again, you know, Megan, these cases are built on, you know, circumstantial evidence.

00:22:41.600 And you find a couple of things and, well, that's kind of interesting.

00:22:44.940 And then it kind of becomes suspicious when you find a few more.

00:22:48.520 And then when you've got, you know, two dozen, now it's kind of compelling.

00:22:51.420 And that's really how we work these cases.

00:22:53.700 You just follow what you have, you document it, and you look at it, you know, with an eye of experience.

00:23:00.500 And you say, gosh, this is not looking too good for this guy.

00:23:03.800 Well, I get that.

00:23:04.520 And there's plenty of stuff that pointed the finger at him.

00:23:06.800 But I'm just I'm kind of stuck in the forensics, like as a as an amateur, have you ever show

00:23:12.260 have you ever been to a scene where somebody was was strangled or suffocated?

00:23:16.780 And would there necessarily be, you know, urination or something by the person being killed?

00:23:22.640 Like, do you have any idea whether that's true?

00:23:25.600 Not at all.

00:23:26.180 You can't say that there's an absolute on it, that there would be anything like that.

00:23:30.660 And that's the thing with this case.

00:23:31.820 It's not all the murders that happen to be able to say that everybody who was strangled,

00:23:37.740 everybody who was smothered is going to either defecate or urinate or something like that.

00:23:41.940 It doesn't really mean it.

00:23:43.520 If you all of course, you'll remember that there was some laundry that was done by Scott

00:23:47.840 after he got back from his fishing trip.

00:23:50.880 And yeah, and anything that he discovered that might have been there, or maybe if she

00:23:55.940 had left anything on a blanket or a towel, there's no reason he couldn't have taken that with

00:24:00.520 him and disposed of that with her body up there in San Francisco Bay.

00:24:05.380 So, you know, there's a lot of things.

00:24:08.060 I remember that he had been mopping.

00:24:11.240 Somebody said he'd been mopping the floor area.

00:24:14.060 And he had said something earlier that Lacey was mopping when he left.

00:24:17.260 Well, the cleaning lady had mopped the house the day before.

00:24:20.460 She had noticed that Lacey was very tired at the time.

00:24:23.100 So she even doubted that Lacey went for a walk.

00:24:25.460 But for Scott to be doing any mopping or cleaning up seemed kind of suspicious.

00:24:29.020 And even one of Lacey's friends, Stacey Boyer, the next night, I think it was the 26th, she

00:24:36.440 had said something about Scott was doing some vacuuming around the house to take his mind

00:24:41.100 off of what was going on.

00:24:42.600 I mean, if I'm stressing about something, the first thing I'm not going to grab is my

00:24:46.740 Hoover.

00:24:47.280 You know, I'm going to do something else.

00:24:48.840 But, you know, that seems kind of funky.

00:24:50.500 And then you probably also remember there was a bunched up rug and a straight path from the

00:24:54.880 bedroom to the side door that goes out to the carport where his truck was backed in.

00:24:59.640 Unusual.

00:25:00.180 Neighbors had never seen him back the truck in before.

00:25:02.980 Bunched up rug.

00:25:03.960 Scott gave the explanation the dog did it or something like that.

00:25:06.760 OK, maybe the dog did do it.

00:25:08.360 But also maybe he did it when he was dragging Lacey from the bedroom out to the carport to

00:25:13.240 put her in the truck and then put the patio umbrellas on top of her that were in a blue

00:25:17.800 tarp so nobody would see her underneath there.

00:25:19.880 And people saw him drag out the patio umbrellas.

00:25:22.080 Yeah, and even one of the neighbors, she was walking up, I think it was a chocolate lab

00:25:27.720 gal named Kristen, and she was eight months pregnant.

00:25:30.760 She was walking by at the time.

00:25:32.040 She greeted Scott that morning, said, good morning, all right, or something like that.

00:25:35.600 And, you know, he just he reacted just like Scott normally does.

00:25:39.480 And, you know, nothing suspicious there.

00:25:41.060 But there really would be no reason for anybody to be suspicious of him.

00:25:44.400 Because, again, we weren't looking at somebody that looked like Charles Manson.

00:25:48.560 We're looking at somebody that's more resembling, you know, maybe Ted Bundy or something.

00:25:52.640 Yes, I've thought about him many times.

00:25:54.940 He has a lot of the same qualities.

00:25:57.240 I mean, he was a charmer.

00:25:58.780 There's a reason he was very good looking.

00:26:00.200 And there's a reason so many women fell for his fake charm.

00:26:04.120 And he truly was a sociopath.

00:26:06.200 OK, there's so much more to go over in terms of the investigation.

00:26:09.240 The huge, huge bombshell of Amber Frye, who John interviewed and worked with to get all those tapes, some of which we've heard.

00:26:16.700 So we're going to get into that next.

00:26:18.940 She changed the entire course of the investigation.

00:26:21.540 Stay tuned.

00:26:22.120 We'll be right back.

00:26:30.400 John, so we'll get back to the forensics in one second, including Scott Peterson on tape showing his injured knuckles and hand.

00:26:36.220 But as you guys were investigating this, the biggest bombshell, I think we would both agree, is the emergence of Amber Frye, 27-year-old single mom, massage therapist who had started dating him only on November 20th.

00:26:51.160 Now, you know, again, she goes missing, Lacey does, December 24th, November 20th.

00:26:55.200 So it's not a long-term affair, but she comes in.

00:26:59.620 And can you just walk us through, like, what was that like when you first talked to her?

00:27:04.200 And you're thinking about Scott Peterson as a suspect, but you don't have him yet.

00:27:07.600 So when you met with her for the first time, what was that like?

00:27:11.100 Well, it was it was really groundbreaking for us because until, you know, she called, we didn't have anything that we could find in Scott's background and suggested that he was anything less than perfect.

00:27:20.960 I mean, he just, you know, there was just no stain on this guy whatsoever.

00:27:24.500 And we almost kind of lost Amber originally because her original call came in and she had volunteered to give the call, call takers, Scott Peterson's date of birth of the one that she was dating to see if it matched up with the one we were investigating.

00:27:40.900 And the call taker, I guess, just couldn't connect the dots on that one and said, well, I can't give you his date of birth.

00:27:45.380 And then Amber was frustrated.

00:27:46.620 She said, well, I'm not looking for his.

00:27:47.940 I got the date of birth of the guy I'm dating.

00:27:50.940 If it matches up with the guy you're looking at, then I probably got information for your detectives.

00:27:55.120 And so anyway, she finally hung up in frustration.

00:27:57.280 But the next day, she calls in.

00:27:59.660 Yeah, you're lucky she was persistent.

00:28:02.060 She calls in and Al Brochini, he's standing at the clerk's desk that is right next to my desk as the clerk is taking Amber's call.

00:28:11.480 And she's typing it into the databank thing that she had on her desk there.

00:28:15.860 And Al's reading this as she's typing.

00:28:18.520 And then Al says, is she on the phone right now?

00:28:20.540 And Bev said, yeah, she is.

00:28:23.300 And so, of course, Al grabs the phone and he starts talking to her and he gets some details and he goes, oh, this is pretty cool.

00:28:28.640 So he says, we'll be right down.

00:28:30.540 So he hangs up and he grabs me.

00:28:32.660 We go into the sergeant's office and we said, hey, you know, this is what we've got.

00:28:36.480 And he just says, go.

00:28:37.260 Don't tell anybody.

00:28:37.860 Just go.

00:28:38.160 So Fresno's, you know, 100 miles south.

00:28:41.280 So we drive down there, record time, no lights and siren.

00:28:44.620 And we get there and Amber's there with the friend that originally introduced her to Scott.

00:28:50.200 And so we interviewed both of them separately.

00:28:52.420 And we got enormous detail from the friend about Scott's behavior at these conventions.

00:28:58.140 I guess it was a convention in Anaheim that they had gone to.

00:29:01.240 And he, of course, was representing himself as being single.

00:29:05.300 And then this Sean decided that, you know, I've got this friend, Amber.

00:29:09.320 She's pretty nice.

00:29:09.940 So she, you know, played Cupid.

00:29:12.660 And then, of course, they met.

00:29:14.200 Well, when it came time to interview Amber, and I think this is kind of true of most girls,

00:29:20.400 you guys have a memory that's spectacular.

00:29:23.780 And she had dates.

00:29:24.280 For certain things.

00:29:25.820 Yeah.

00:29:27.220 You know, especially everything men do wrong, which, of course, is a lot.

00:29:30.580 But different show, different subject.

00:29:32.680 Anyway, so she ends up giving us incredible detail on their dates and what they did.

00:29:38.800 And she, you know, luckily she held down to souvenirs.

00:29:41.260 So she had wine corks and she had tickets and all sorts of things that, you know, would

00:29:45.960 back up what she was doing.

00:29:47.120 And it was almost like she, I think she, you know, she didn't know us.

00:29:50.200 It was almost like she had a concern that we wouldn't believe what she was saying.

00:29:54.060 So she backed all these things up with, you know, real physical evidence of this stuff.

00:29:58.220 She showed us a gift that he had bought for her daughter, this little star globe and some

00:30:02.720 other stuff.

00:30:03.300 And it was just really interesting because now this emerged, you know, this different

00:30:09.680 kind of guy that we really didn't know was there.

00:30:13.340 And certainly we were suspicious, but we had nothing to hang our head on.

00:30:16.820 So when we left her house, you know, we were hungry.

00:30:21.480 It was mid-afternoon.

00:30:22.940 And so we said, well, you know, we're going to go get a bite to eat.

00:30:25.120 If you guys want to come with, you need to come with us.

00:30:27.020 And so she said, well, hey, would you want to stop by CVS or Walgreens or something like

00:30:32.020 that?

00:30:32.300 I don't know which one it was, because I've got some pictures.

00:30:35.280 And we're thinking, pictures?

00:30:37.000 Yeah, we'd probably be interested in those.

00:30:38.860 So we go to the photo counter there at CVS or Walgreens, and she gives a claim ticket to

00:30:44.220 the gal, and the gal brings out the envelope, and they're twin pics.

00:30:46.800 There's two pics of each.

00:30:48.260 And we're looking through these, and it's a famous picture of Scott and Amber at the holiday

00:30:53.360 soiree.

00:30:54.040 I think she's in the red dress.

00:30:55.020 She's in the tux and everything like that.

00:30:56.440 And we're looking at this, and it's like, yeah, this gal's probably telling the truth

00:30:59.180 here.

00:30:59.900 And they were just from a couple of weeks earlier.

00:31:02.480 And I mean, it was pretty impressive.

00:31:04.140 And I'm sure the gal behind the counter had no idea what she had just handed us.

00:31:08.400 And so anyway, then we went over to Radio Shack to buy a little device to hook up to a recorder,

00:31:14.740 because we always kept a couple of recorders in the trunk of our cars in case, because we

00:31:18.660 use these many times on cases.

00:31:20.060 We'd give them to a victim or a witness and see if they could get the guy to talk to them.

00:31:23.660 And so we retrieved a recorder out of my trunk, along with like 10 tapes and some batteries.

00:31:29.220 And then we went to Radio Shack, which was nearby, and Brock bought the connecting unit

00:31:33.900 that would go to her phone.

00:31:35.180 And the recorder itself showed her how to use it.

00:31:37.680 And he's showing her how to use it.

00:31:38.680 The phone rings.

00:31:39.440 And Brock, he goes, gosh, that's Scott's number right there.

00:31:42.500 So she's looking at us like, take the call.

00:31:45.480 And so she took the call.

00:31:46.640 And that was like the first recorded conversation.

00:31:49.620 And it was just very interesting.

00:31:52.900 And this is the one thing that I don't understand why this case was so popular with everybody,

00:31:58.380 because we had many other murders that were actually more, to me, more interesting than

00:32:02.400 this one.

00:32:02.860 Although this one had TV quality victim and responsible in it.

00:32:08.420 I mean, definitely the made for TV cast on this one, other than the detectives, of course.

00:32:12.360 But when it came to this, it was just, gosh, we're here working this thing.

00:32:17.120 Everybody's looking at this.

00:32:18.100 And it's just another Modesto murder.

00:32:20.180 You know, I mean, it's important to us.

00:32:21.580 It's important to the family.

00:32:22.640 But it was kind of, it was just difficult to believe how it was getting so much attention.

00:32:28.340 And we left forever.

00:32:30.300 It's got all the elements.

00:32:31.500 It's got like these beautiful people, a pregnant mom.

00:32:36.260 Again, like I said, with a thousand watt smile, the gorgeous affair partner who has been

00:32:41.460 duped, but in the beginning days, you're wondering, was she duped?

00:32:44.440 We don't know.

00:32:45.060 Were they in on it?

00:32:45.820 Did they both get rid of Lacey Scott?

00:32:48.660 You know, this gorgeous guy who Lacey seems to have, you know, won the jackpot with, right?

00:32:55.560 Like it just, he's like, yeah, he's got a good job.

00:32:57.720 He's got a seemingly nice family.

00:32:59.200 He's a good looking.

00:32:59.820 He treats her well.

00:33:00.620 It's like every woman's worst nightmare that this man you meet and fall in love with and

00:33:05.980 marry and get pregnant by turns out to be a sociopath who would murder you in your bed

00:33:13.220 with your, it's like the worst thing you can imagine.

00:33:16.660 So it's, it taps into, I think, a lot of things for a lot of people, but especially women.

00:33:21.580 So, so can I ask you, cause Amber Fry, we've got that famous and I'll play it, uh, part of

00:33:27.120 it, the happy new year call on, on new year's Eve that he calls Amber while he's at the vigil

00:33:33.700 for Lacey, um, but did she start taping him before that?

00:33:41.000 Yeah.

00:33:41.660 Um, she started taping him, um, gosh, I think that was, well, it was right around that same

00:33:50.060 time because it was within a week of, uh, the 24th.

00:33:53.340 So it was the, the, uh, recorded call for, uh, new year's Eve.

00:33:58.180 Yeah.

00:33:58.360 That was right after we had met her because we've been scratching for several days.

00:34:03.420 You know, it's like, gosh, there's nothing wrong with this guy.

00:34:05.760 And, you know, other than his limited cooperation, we're thinking, well, maybe he didn't do it.

00:34:09.460 And, you know, but you know, we're still, even though we were working him, Craig and Al

00:34:14.660 and I, you know, we weren't the only ones working this case.

00:34:17.660 There were a lot of other detectives that were working on this, you know, detectives

00:34:21.040 that were clearing up sex registrants and parolees that had violent criminal pasts for this

00:34:26.640 and verifying their alibi and stuff like that.

00:34:29.500 And of course, as you guys, as you paid more attention to this case and it became bigger,

00:34:34.100 anybody that we looked at, you know, they wanted to be away from this thing big time.

00:34:38.700 They did not want to be involved in this.

00:34:40.360 They did not want to be linked to this as being in any way, possibly related to Lacey's murder.

00:34:45.320 So the cooperation level that we got from a lot of people that ordinarily probably wouldn't

00:34:49.600 have cooperated with us, probably wouldn't like us because we were cops was a little bit

00:34:53.620 different this time.

00:34:54.380 And that was one of the good things that the media brought to us that made things easier

00:34:58.200 in some ways, but in other ways, not so much.

00:35:00.740 Well, it's the reason Amber Fry knew to call you.

00:35:02.560 She saw all the media coverage of this guy who was missing his wife and she was like,

00:35:07.140 holy, that's my guy.

00:35:09.680 And he had told her that his wife was dead.

00:35:12.500 Yeah, let me do a quick correction for you on that.

00:35:14.200 Actually, she didn't see any of the coverage.

00:35:16.240 Amber didn't watch TV, although she would have called us much earlier.

00:35:19.540 She was alerted to Scott by a friend of hers.

00:35:22.980 He was a Fresno cop and I think his name was Richard.

00:35:26.640 I can't remember his last name, but he caught the coverage and he thought, gosh, that sounds

00:35:31.140 kind of like that girl or that guy that Amber's dating.

00:35:34.220 So he called Amber and said, hey.

00:35:35.740 He remembered?

00:35:36.260 I mean, Scott hadn't even been in Amber's life that long.

00:35:39.000 He remembered the description of him or that he would fit it?

00:35:42.380 Well, she was, you know, I mean, you're a young girl, you're blonde and you're dating

00:35:46.540 Scott Peterson.

00:35:47.240 You're going to flash him around like a nickel plate at 38.

00:35:49.820 And so she's telling all of her friends, you know, hey, look what I've got.

00:35:53.480 And, you know, and I don't blame her.

00:35:54.860 You know, I can see her doing that.

00:35:56.160 So this, you know, this friend of hers, he, you know, platonic, he was just a friend and

00:36:00.540 he caught the, you know, the intense media coverage.

00:36:04.540 And so he called her.

00:36:05.380 He says, you might want to check with those guys up there in Modesto and see if this is

00:36:08.200 the same guy.

00:36:09.040 Because I can't remember for sure, Megan, if he had told her that he actually lived in

00:36:12.100 Modesto or Sacramento.

00:36:13.680 I know he told somebody at one time that he lived in Sacramento.

00:36:16.460 But anyway, she hadn't seen any of this coverage.

00:36:19.780 And of course, as you remember, there was great frustration with people in the media because

00:36:24.300 they couldn't get Scott on camera hardly at all.

00:36:26.660 He was always in the background at the center where they were coordinating the search outside

00:36:32.280 of law enforcement.

00:36:33.760 He talked to several of them, you know, people from the media and he just said, hey, I don't

00:36:37.880 want to be a part of this.

00:36:38.640 This is all about Lacey.

00:36:39.820 This is the fine Lacey.

00:36:40.780 I don't want to be the distraction.

00:36:42.440 And of course, you know, you can interpret that both ways.

00:36:44.820 Maybe he's sincere about that.

00:36:46.160 Or you can look at it that he didn't want his face out there because he didn't want

00:36:49.580 Amber to see it or anybody else.

00:36:51.660 So, you know, if you think about how he appeared on the...

00:36:54.900 I'll just finish this up real quick with you.

00:36:57.000 Yeah.

00:36:57.260 Had there been other affairs besides Amber?

00:37:01.740 Yeah, there'd been at least two that we knew of that were called in.

00:37:05.760 Girls had called us and told us about things.

00:37:07.940 And, you know, I hate to say that, but I mean, they are what they are.

00:37:10.460 They're in the record and, you know, it is what it is.

00:37:13.720 But he lied about that, too.

00:37:15.420 When he gave his interview to I don't know if it was Diane or if it was Gloria Gomez and

00:37:20.600 the Sacramento affiliate, but he told one or both of them that Amber's the only one he

00:37:24.540 ever had an affair with.

00:37:26.500 Yeah, he's he stretched the truth on a lot of things, a lot of things that he didn't

00:37:30.260 have to stretch the truth on.

00:37:31.440 So it was really difficult, you know, dealing with him to know where the, you know, the truth

00:37:35.220 ended and the lies started because he he would lie sometimes for no reason on things that

00:37:39.840 were inconsequential.

00:37:40.880 And that was kind of difficult for us to kind of pick through.

00:37:43.400 But it you know, it was he just he was just he was just interesting to work, you know.

00:37:49.200 Yeah.

00:37:49.940 OK, so Amber Fry, she does put on the wire and she does start recording her calls with

00:37:55.280 him.

00:37:55.680 And the one that I remember just from covering it at the time, I was, you know, very young

00:37:59.880 reporter, was the one he's at the vigil for Lacey and Connor with the candles before they

00:38:07.080 found the bodies or know that they're dead.

00:38:09.500 You know, Sharon Rocha, the whole family's there like praying to God that there'll be

00:38:13.120 a sighting, a return of ransom demand, something.

00:38:16.860 And what's Scott doing?

00:38:18.400 He's all smiles and he's on the phone with Amber.

00:38:22.520 And here's a snippet of that conversation.

00:38:24.880 And there are three years here, are you there?

00:38:29.140 Yes, I'm having a good time.

00:38:31.000 I'm near the Eiffel Tower.

00:38:33.500 Meet yourself, it's unreal.

00:38:36.760 Yeah.

00:38:37.240 And he goes on to say the crowds are amazing.

00:38:39.780 The crowds.

00:38:41.000 He's looking at the crowd for his wife's vigil.

00:38:44.320 I mean, it's like that's that's something wrong.

00:38:47.280 There's obviously he is a sociopath.

00:38:48.920 That's like no normal person can do that, John.

00:38:50.820 Well, and that kind of falls into why we don't really have any doubts that he did this.

00:38:56.680 Now, yeah, again, it's a premeditated murder.

00:38:58.600 There's no videotape.

00:38:59.520 There's no eyewitness.

00:39:00.300 He's never going to confess.

00:39:01.360 At least I don't expect that he would.

00:39:02.920 He could probably waterboard him.

00:39:04.040 You're not going to get it out of him.

00:39:05.000 But it's one of those things where when on one hand he's telling us how worried he is

00:39:09.440 and how he wanted to keep his face away from the media coverage because he was afraid

00:39:14.020 that it would be a distraction.

00:39:16.320 Or he was afraid that if Amber came forward, then we would no longer search for her, which

00:39:20.760 gosh, we were going to search for her regardless.

00:39:22.820 It doesn't make any difference if Amber's part of the equation or not.

00:39:26.700 And so, you know, when he's doing that, you notice at the vigil, he's got the baseball

00:39:31.360 hat pulled down low.

00:39:32.740 He's got the collar up on the jacket and everything like that.

00:39:35.780 And, you know, from a distance, you might not even connect them as your boyfriend if

00:39:39.400 you're Amber, you know, cooking spaghetti and you just glance over your shoulder at the

00:39:43.100 TV, which, of course, she didn't do because she didn't watch a lot of TV.

00:39:46.000 Wow.

00:39:47.420 Well, notwithstanding that, Gloria Allred got her hooks into Amber.

00:39:52.500 And we've seen that show many times now.

00:39:55.080 And that this was the moment that stunned the world.

00:39:59.060 I remember watching this thinking, OMG, here it is.

00:40:03.640 Amber Frye at the press conference coming forward and telling the truth.

00:40:08.280 SOT 5.

00:40:08.780 First of all, I met Scott Peterson, November 20th, 2002.

00:40:16.200 Scott told me he was not married.

00:40:19.440 We did have a romantic relationship.

00:40:22.840 I am very sorry for Lacey's family.

00:40:27.600 And the pain that this has caused them.

00:40:32.960 And I pray for her safe return as well.

00:40:35.940 Now, why did she come out at that point, John?

00:40:39.560 Because she she had been working with you guys and she had gotten something like 27 or

00:40:44.240 29 hours of tape as far as I read.

00:40:47.860 So what what led her to go public?

00:40:50.900 Yeah, there was.

00:40:51.600 Yeah, there was a total of 29 hours of recorded phone calls between the two of them.

00:40:55.220 But what happened with that is, you know, we were going to keep her on ice as long as

00:40:59.280 we could.

00:40:59.800 We didn't want to bring her forward.

00:41:01.260 You know, we didn't necessarily expect that he was going to tell her that he killed his wife

00:41:04.720 and he wanted to run off to Belgium with her or anything like that.

00:41:07.200 But we were hopeful that we might be able to get something else out of it.

00:41:10.440 So we were going to keep working this for a while.

00:41:13.340 But unfortunately, somehow the inquirer found out about her and we got a tip that they were

00:41:20.240 going to be running that photo of Amber in the red dress and Scott in the tux on the

00:41:25.460 whatever edition it was that came out.

00:41:27.280 I don't know if it came out on Thursday or Friday or whatever that was.

00:41:29.560 Well, of course, you know, out of consideration for both families, you know, Scott's family

00:41:33.880 down in San Diego and, of course, Sharon and the family in Modesto, we knew that we

00:41:38.240 couldn't, you know, let that happen.

00:41:40.240 And, you know, they'd be in the grocery store line and then they see the inquirer there with

00:41:43.860 this picture and, you know, then they drop their groceries and freak out.

00:41:46.780 So we knew we were going to have to tell both families about this.

00:41:49.960 So Craig Grogan and Phil Owen went down to San Diego to tell Lee and Jackie about this.

00:41:56.460 And then, of course, Al and I, we called Sharon into the office to tell her about it.

00:42:02.100 And, you know, she came down there with Ron Gransky and, you know, and that was one of

00:42:06.120 the heartbreaking things of the whole case.

00:42:08.380 You know, you can work a lot of murders, you know, but you're touched by these victims.

00:42:12.940 You know, they they stay with you.

00:42:14.660 I mean, there's some of them that stay with me even to this day that I still talk to.

00:42:18.200 But if she came down and they knew that there was something up because we didn't generally

00:42:22.760 call them to come down to our office, but they came down.

00:42:26.620 It was late afternoon and they had a they had a scheduled interview with Greta that was

00:42:32.560 going to go on after our meeting.

00:42:35.260 And so she sat down and you could see, you know, they were, you know, anxiety.

00:42:39.180 So we said, well, hey, you know, we called you down here.

00:42:40.880 We got something's going on.

00:42:41.980 We want to get you in front of it so that you're not surprised by it.

00:42:44.460 And then I had this folder in front of me.

00:42:46.420 It was on the table and I just opened the folder and split it across.

00:42:49.200 And, you know, Sharon looks at it and she just, you know, put her head in her hands

00:42:53.020 and said, why did he have to kill her?

00:42:54.740 I remember that like it was yesterday that she said that.

00:42:58.200 And I think, you know, the family wasn't, you know, none of these families are stupid.

00:43:03.660 And I think they all knew this.

00:43:06.700 They knew it was coming, but they were hoping for that one little chance out of a billion

00:43:11.940 that she would come back alive.

00:43:14.480 And, you know, this kind of, you know, dash those hopes.

00:43:17.320 And it's really sad to see this, you know, to see a family have to go through this.

00:43:20.980 And then, you know, of course now pick up the pieces and, you know, hope for the best

00:43:24.020 and the rest of it.

00:43:25.080 Can you catch the guy who did it?

00:43:26.240 And can we ever recover our family number to give them, you know, a proper, you know,

00:43:30.420 burial and things like that.

00:43:31.920 But that is, that was the moment Sharon realized he was behind this and that Lacey would not be

00:43:40.200 returning.

00:43:41.780 Yeah, I think she had a, you know, she's pretty bright.

00:43:44.520 I got a feeling she had a feeling about this beforehand, but she probably wouldn't even

00:43:48.900 acknowledge it except, you know, deep in her mind.

00:43:51.380 But yeah, this pretty much showed her that was the deal.

00:43:54.400 And then, of course.

00:43:55.120 Because publicly they'd been standing with Scott.

00:43:57.300 There wasn't a public rift between the families until Amber.

00:44:02.440 Yeah, exactly.

00:44:03.320 And, you know, you'd expect that.

00:44:04.820 I mean, that's, there was nothing, they didn't have it in concrete.

00:44:07.240 I mean, we look at the thing a little bit different.

00:44:08.820 And, you know, we're not going to, we don't tell people everything that we know when we're

00:44:12.280 working one of these cases.

00:44:13.300 You can't, you know, because maybe you're wrong too.

00:44:16.040 And it might, you know, you're not going to disrupt the family and the relationships

00:44:18.600 with your suspicions.

00:44:19.680 You know, you work your suspicions and you gather your evidence to prove your case, you

00:44:23.620 know, and to present it to a juror.

00:44:25.120 And you don't want them to slip up.

00:44:26.420 I mean, even a well-meaning family member could slip up and say something to Scott before you're

00:44:30.440 ready for him to know you're working with Amber.

00:44:33.340 And yeah, I understand.

00:44:34.220 That makes perfect sense to me.

00:44:35.660 Um, there's so much more to go.

00:44:37.780 The trial gets started and Scott's defenders to this day point to the lack of forensics.

00:44:45.100 But is that fair?

00:44:46.340 We're going to get it into a bit more, um, what the prosecution actually had and now what

00:44:51.620 the defense is saying, uh, we should take a new look at.

00:44:54.420 Don't go away.

00:44:55.120 There's much, much more to discuss with retired detective John Bueller.

00:44:58.440 And don't forget folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM triumph channel

00:45:02.340 one 11 every weekday at noon East and the full video show and clips.

00:45:06.380 When you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.

00:45:10.360 If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher,

00:45:15.960 or wherever you get your podcasts for free.

00:45:18.180 If you leave a comment in the Apple comments, uh, which you can do underneath the, by subscribing

00:45:23.720 there, I will read it.

00:45:25.140 I have read all 21,000 of them.

00:45:26.720 I find them actually very helpful.

00:45:27.840 People write the most thoughtful things.

00:45:29.440 Um, and I'd love to know what you think about this story in this case.

00:45:33.420 Uh, and by the way, when you're there, you can find our full archives with all of our

00:45:36.960 true crime Christmas shows.

00:45:38.360 Don't go away.

00:45:45.560 John, there was an incredible moment where Peterson sat down with Diane Sawyer of GMA and

00:45:50.180 actually claimed that he told Lacey about Amber, his affair partner.

00:45:57.860 Here was that moment.

00:46:00.020 Did your wife find out about it?

00:46:02.780 I told my wife.

00:46:04.780 When?

00:46:05.340 Um, early December.

00:46:09.300 Did it cause a rupture in the marriage?

00:46:12.300 It was not, um, a positive, obviously.

00:46:19.300 It's, uh, you know, inappropriate, um, but it was not something that we weren't, um, dealing

00:46:29.640 with.

00:46:31.460 A lot of arguing?

00:46:33.000 No.

00:46:33.820 No.

00:46:35.800 No.

00:46:36.440 Um, I, I, you know, I can't say that, that even, you know, she was okay with the idea.

00:46:45.360 But, uh, it wasn't anything that would break us apart.

00:46:50.600 There wasn't a lot of anger?

00:46:53.160 No.

00:46:54.860 Bull.

00:46:55.560 I mean, that's such an obvious pack of lies there.

00:46:58.280 But my question is, why?

00:47:00.040 Why did he feel the need to say he disclosed the affair to Lacey?

00:47:03.440 You know, that remains a mystery to me, but it also plays kind of against his claim about

00:47:08.800 fishing.

00:47:09.340 I'm sure, you know, okay, two weeks later, he's, on Christmas Eve, she's baking gingerbread

00:47:14.060 cookies, and she's going to say it's okay for him to go fishing, thinking, well, maybe

00:47:18.080 he's going fishing, or maybe he's going down to Fresno again.

00:47:20.540 I mean, it's, I just don't see that.

00:47:22.560 And then, you know, this, we get a lot of insight into Lacey and what she was about by, you know,

00:47:27.360 her friend Lori and Renee and Stacey and Kim, you know, they tell us a lot of things,

00:47:31.500 along with Amy and Brenton, or Sharon and Ron.

00:47:34.220 But when, you know, when we talk to them about things like this, you know, there's no way

00:47:38.020 on this planet that she would be okay with this, you know?

00:47:40.380 She would have tossed him out of the house like a bag of garbage, you know?

00:47:44.260 She wouldn't have put up with that.

00:47:45.640 And she would have told someone.

00:47:47.980 That's what all of her friends said.

00:47:49.400 And any woman knows, you've always got at least the one friend who you tell everything

00:47:53.360 to.

00:47:53.700 You know, you don't want to go blab your private marital problems around, but something

00:47:57.700 like that, you tell somebody.

00:47:59.820 And it's, I just, I never understood why he felt that lie was necessary, how he felt

00:48:04.420 it was better that she knew.

00:48:06.960 Like, did he think we thought the motive of killing her was she was going to say he was

00:48:10.300 a cheater?

00:48:10.900 No, that's not what we thought.

00:48:12.700 I'm going to pause it right there, squeeze in one more quick break, got to pay the bills,

00:48:15.860 and then come back and we'll take a deep dive into forensics.

00:48:19.660 Don't go anywhere.

00:48:20.340 John Buehler stays with us and I hope you will too.

00:48:27.700 John, so what was the final catalyst for the arrest of Scott Peterson?

00:48:33.320 Well, of course, you remember the bodies were discovered in a two-day period in April.

00:48:37.240 And when the first body was discovered, I was just kind of, eh, that might not have anything

00:48:42.640 to do with our case.

00:48:43.460 I really wasn't hopeful that that would, you know, be anything to do with what we were

00:48:47.600 dealing with.

00:48:48.080 But then when the second body came up, so you've got a female that doesn't have all

00:48:54.860 the limbs attached and everything that shows it's been in salt water for three to six months.

00:49:00.560 And then you have a almost full-term baby that doesn't have the same marine activity on it

00:49:06.700 and looks, you know, essentially normal.

00:49:09.860 You know, that kind of tells you a story of what you got there, especially when they're

00:49:13.400 found so close in proximity to each other and to where Scott was fishing.

00:49:17.020 So when you have that, that pretty much, oh, okay, well, we can figure this one out.

00:49:21.700 And we put together an arrest warrant for Scott based on that information and other information

00:49:27.460 that we had gathered to that point.

00:49:28.960 And it was almost interesting the way this case went for that, you know, four-month period

00:49:33.660 because it seemed like anytime we ran out of something or we're getting close to finishing

00:49:37.840 up all the different things we were doing besides Scott, then all of a sudden something would

00:49:42.260 pop up and it would like fill the tank with gas and we'd have more to go on.

00:49:45.560 And so this was a point before those bodies, you know, showed up, we were just about ready

00:49:49.760 to charge him.

00:49:50.520 But unfortunately, the DA in Stanislaw County, he said, hey, if you don't have a body, I'm

00:49:54.380 not going to give you a filing.

00:49:55.560 Now, we've been working this case as a no body homicide from the start.

00:49:59.260 And we were using a protocol that was developed by a prosecutor from Resend County, south of

00:50:04.700 Stanislaw County, where we lived.

00:50:06.280 And this case fit everything on the, all the things that he had on the protocol with, you

00:50:13.160 have a victim that doesn't have any prior history of leaving, they've got ties to the

00:50:16.640 community, they don't have any family problems, they didn't clean up the bank account, they

00:50:19.680 don't, all these different things that are going on there.

00:50:22.420 And so she's like the, you know, the victim that you want when it comes to putting one of

00:50:26.820 those cases together.

00:50:28.220 So of course, when the body showed up, that got everything jumped up into high gear.

00:50:32.600 So arrest warrant was put together, we had a surveillance going on for Scott down in San

00:50:37.760 Diego by agents from Department of Justice, Ernie Lamone and his crew down there, because

00:50:43.280 we didn't have enough cops to help out on this.

00:50:45.020 So we used, you know, help from a lot of different agencies, you know, throughout the state.

00:50:49.300 So we drove down to San Diego, and we hooked up with those guys.

00:50:53.680 And then we were going to make the arrest the next day, when the DNA results were going

00:50:59.180 to be released.

00:50:59.820 Now, Bill Lockyer was the Attorney General in California at the time, and he was going

00:51:04.120 to be in charge of releasing those results, you know, to the media and to the public.

00:51:07.800 And the instructions that we got from Judge Bo Shane, who gave us the arrest warrant was,

00:51:12.560 I know what you have here, but don't execute this arrest warrant until you get those DNA results,

00:51:18.980 if you can.

00:51:20.540 He didn't tell us we couldn't, but he wanted us to wait until we got those results.

00:51:25.420 And so when we started following Scott that next morning, he was a, I don't know if he

00:51:32.580 was NASCAR quality, but he was a pretty darn good driver.

00:51:35.480 I mean, high speed, and he could cut lanes and take an off-ramp.

00:51:39.480 And then, of course, we didn't drive like that.

00:51:41.180 We'd roll our car or something, and so we'd have to miss him.

00:51:43.720 You know, we'd drive down another off-ramp.

00:51:45.280 But it was just a big, you know, it was kind of like a comedian of cars driving around.

00:51:50.320 It was ridiculous.

00:51:51.000 So they had a helicopter up.

00:51:52.160 So luckily, we were able to stay on him, but even the helicopter lost him at one point.

00:51:56.280 But was he fleeing?

00:51:57.440 Because we all remember, our audience, I think, he had dyed his hair blonde.

00:52:02.680 He had grown a goatee.

00:52:03.780 He had $15,000 of cash on him.

00:52:06.460 He had, I think, did he have a fake driver's license?

00:52:10.120 His brother's ID.

00:52:11.040 Yeah, okay.

00:52:11.720 He had camping gear.

00:52:13.160 It certainly seemed like he was about to flee, perhaps, across the southern border.

00:52:18.220 Well, you know, we couldn't rule that out.

00:52:19.820 I mean, he knew San Diego well.

00:52:21.100 He grew up down there, and, you know, that's not very far from Mexico.

00:52:24.440 We didn't know if he thought the cops were after him or if he thought that you guys were

00:52:28.620 after him, you know, trying to, you know, get an interview or, you know, get a photo.

00:52:32.200 They don't dye their hair for us, John.

00:52:35.380 Well, you know, it's funny because on that hair dye thing, he had two versions of that.

00:52:38.420 He told somebody that he dyed his hair because he wanted to be more anonymous.

00:52:42.640 He didn't want to be spotted in public, and then he told us that it got dyed because

00:52:46.780 he was swimming in a pool with too much chlorine.

00:52:48.960 Oh, please.

00:52:50.420 Every little brunette girl in America knows that's not true because we all tried to get

00:52:55.080 our hair dyed that way, and it doesn't work.

00:52:58.240 I wish I knew about that.

00:52:59.280 I was more of a dirty blonde.

00:52:59.400 I was straight.

00:52:59.860 It's kind of old.

00:53:00.540 But anyway, so, yeah, he'd come up with these different versions of things which were,

00:53:04.580 you know, they're mildly amusing when you're working the case, but it's like, you don't

00:53:08.860 have to lie about this stuff.

00:53:10.120 You know, just tell it straight.

00:53:11.220 It's in his nature.

00:53:11.960 All right, so listen, so I want to move it along.

00:53:14.840 So you affect the arrest.

00:53:17.040 The trial takes place, and what forensic evidence did you have?

00:53:22.640 What was, I know it was circumstantial, but as I'm looking and getting ready for this

00:53:26.280 interview, okay, scent-sniffing dogs picked up Lacey's scent in the Berkeley Marina four

00:53:32.240 days after she disappeared.

00:53:33.720 Scott's team, and Garagos was saying this just the other day, say you cannot rely on that.

00:53:39.400 Dogs fail two out of three of these tests under similar circumstances.

00:53:43.600 That was a bunch of BS evidence the dogs sent.

00:53:47.480 What are your thoughts on the dogs?

00:53:48.660 Well, I know a few dogs in the neighborhood.

00:53:53.200 You know, I feed them some little milk bone treats, but I don't know dogs like canine handlers

00:53:57.800 do.

00:53:58.060 I, my understanding is, is dogs have an incredible sense of smell that is multiple times better

00:54:04.080 than humans.

00:54:05.620 You know, I can't disagree with what Garagos is saying because I don't know enough about

00:54:09.420 that subject to make the call on that.

00:54:11.080 But once again, it was just one of those strands of physical evidence.

00:54:14.360 And if you remember Vincent Bugliosi's book, Helter Skelter, he described the circumstantial

00:54:19.980 case as a series of strands or cables or strands of wires on a cable that become increasingly

00:54:25.740 big and strong.

00:54:26.640 And okay, you can attack the dog.

00:54:28.160 Well, get rid of that little strand, but you still have all the rest of these.

00:54:31.600 And so when you add up all the circumstantial evidence, that paints a very compelling picture.

00:54:36.860 It'd almost be like if you had a jigsaw puzzle on your table and you were missing three pieces

00:54:41.840 in the middle, but you'd be pretty sure what the picture says.

00:54:44.720 And that's what we had here with all the circumstantial evidence.

00:54:47.340 So when it comes to physical evidence, well, we've got Scott's behavior and we could do a

00:54:51.980 whole show on that, but you've got the absence of intrusion from another person coming in there.

00:54:58.860 You've got the condition of the bodies and where they're found.

00:55:01.320 You've got Scott's behavior when it comes to how he's dealing with everything involving

00:55:07.040 this case, whether it's returning to the scene where the bodies were exposed, I think five

00:55:11.140 or six times.

00:55:12.420 And this is consistent with what killers generally do if they have little doubts about whether

00:55:16.440 or not they hit the body enough.

00:55:18.140 So you've got all of those kinds of things.

00:55:19.940 You've got Amber coming in.

00:55:21.300 You've got the absence of anybody else involved in it.

00:55:23.880 We've got the burglary across the street that we were able to clear those burglars from

00:55:27.500 involvement in this.

00:55:28.700 Ah, let's stop there.

00:55:29.640 That's a big item being pushed by Scott's sister-in-law right now, saying there was a

00:55:35.120 burglary in the neighborhood.

00:55:37.080 She says that there is proof that it happened.

00:55:40.640 On the morning, Lacey went missing, which she says was definitively 1224 and not 1223, which

00:55:48.780 was something the police had suggested could have been the case.

00:55:52.300 She said, we believe Lacey was killed after she stumbled upon that burglary live.

00:55:57.960 She said a neighbor, Diane Jackson, said she saw three men in a van in front of a home

00:56:03.920 there on December 24th.

00:56:06.780 But then I understand that the two robbers apprehended, denied any involvement in the

00:56:12.720 case, and they were cleared by the cops.

00:56:14.760 Moreover, there was apparently a second person in the neighborhood.

00:56:18.160 Maybe I don't know.

00:56:19.220 Maybe it was a woman you mentioned earlier who was pregnant and walking a dog that day.

00:56:22.820 But you tell me why we shouldn't be putting much stock in the burglary theory that they

00:56:28.160 nabbed Lacey because she saw them.

00:56:31.240 Well, it's pretty rare that a guy doing a property crime is going to turn into an abductor

00:56:36.660 of a pregnant girl that's walking a dog.

00:56:39.140 I mean, if everybody, you know, if Diane Jackson sees a van at 1140 in the morning with three

00:56:44.620 guys in it, but she can't even tell us if it's white, tan or black, it kind of calls into

00:56:49.680 question her, you know, viability as a witness.

00:56:53.280 In addition to that, one of the burglars, a guy named Steven, he rode that route daily

00:56:59.440 as he was sourcing a narcotic habit.

00:57:02.160 But that would be his route when he went to his girlfriend's house.

00:57:05.100 So on the 24th, he noticed that the house across the street looked like maybe people

00:57:09.740 had left for the holidays.

00:57:11.500 As he went over there on the 25th, he was pretty sure they did.

00:57:14.460 So he broke into the house on the 25th and he took a bit of property on the 25th.

00:57:18.740 But there was a safe and some tools and other things that he couldn't take on his bike.

00:57:22.660 So he returns home and he's living in a shed behind his friend, Don, who's living with

00:57:28.180 his mother.

00:57:28.920 And he tells Don, hey, there's a safe over there.

00:57:31.240 We need to go back over and get that.

00:57:32.860 So they returned on the 26th.

00:57:34.560 And the reason we know that they were there on the 26th is they said they saw the media

00:57:38.320 down the street when they were in the house and it was a big hoopla and they couldn't

00:57:41.680 figure out what it was because they didn't know.

00:57:44.360 But it was interesting to them that the media would be out in the street.

00:57:46.760 Well, they're going in and out through the back of the house.

00:57:49.200 So they're, you know, I mean, whether it's Geraldo or Greta or you or anybody else out

00:57:53.180 there, they're not going to see these guys carting a safe out the back of the house.

00:57:57.360 When they came under suspicion for this burglary, this is one of the things that we've run into

00:58:02.920 is cooperation level from people that are doing property crimes.

00:58:06.780 It's very rare that they're cooperators.

00:58:08.580 But these two guys, not only did we arrest one of them on an active warrant, they both rolled

00:58:13.300 on their involvement in the Berkeley because by that time they knew what was going on down

00:58:16.640 the street.

00:58:17.340 They wanted to be as far away from this case as humanly possible.

00:58:21.180 If they could have gotten a flight to Burma, they would have gone.

00:58:23.780 But that wasn't their option.

00:58:25.460 So they begged to take a poly because they knew and they wanted to share the results of

00:58:29.800 the polygraph because they knew if they went to jail, which they were going, that they

00:58:33.500 wanted to be able to share that with the other inmates because the other inmates are going

00:58:36.520 to take too kindly to two guys that they think might have killed this woman and her

00:58:40.580 unborn child.

00:58:41.900 So not only did we recover property from that burglary, we recovered nothing of Lacey's,

00:58:47.560 no jewelry, nothing at all.

00:58:49.400 And we even recovered property from another burglary that wasn't even related.

00:58:53.420 Everybody that these guys had sold or given property to in exchange for drugs turned stuff

00:58:58.080 in.

00:58:58.260 We even had one guy came in the police lobby and dumped off a bag of property from the

00:59:02.740 burglary and run out before anybody could grab it.

00:59:05.120 Of course, they didn't know what was in the bag until they opened it up.

00:59:07.440 So as far as these guys being involved in this, one of the things that I'm sure you remember

00:59:13.260 is there was a $500,000 reward at the time leading to Lacey's recovery and locating her

00:59:20.180 and everything like that.

00:59:21.380 Well, in Modesto, when you've got guys that are using meth and two guys involved in an

00:59:27.040 abduction to try and convince me, I mean, I worked in a different world than maybe some

00:59:31.600 of your viewers, but to try and convince me that one wouldn't roll on the other for

00:59:35.180 $500,000, I mean, my gosh, that's, that's, you know, pure Santa Claus.

00:59:38.960 I mean, there's just no way.

00:59:40.580 What about, well, what about this other thing?

00:59:42.320 Let me, cause there's a few things.

00:59:43.720 Um, I kind of, I kind of jumped ahead there, but there, Jenny, Janie, the sister-in-law

00:59:48.200 of Scott Peterson says there was evidence Lacey was alive on Christmas Eve morning past the

00:59:53.920 point at which Scott left, which we've established was around nine 30.

00:59:57.160 She said there were sightings of Lacey at nine 45 and 10 30 on Christmas Eve.

01:00:03.720 Um, she said that, um, that, uh, there are a couple of witnesses who saw the pregnant woman

01:00:10.560 walking her golden retriever around the neighborhood.

01:00:13.380 And, and what's your response to that?

01:00:16.280 Well, there were two pregnant girls that are, were pregnant about the same stage as Lacey that

01:00:20.720 walked dogs in the neighborhood.

01:00:21.840 There was one named Michelle who was walking a golden retriever.

01:00:24.880 And another one named Kristen that was walking a chocolate lab.

01:00:28.360 And then there was a third girl, another attractive gal, all three attractive that easily could

01:00:32.700 have been mistaken for Lacey by somebody in the neighborhood who did not know Lacey.

01:00:37.200 Now, and this is the interesting part is none of these people that came forward and claimed

01:00:41.060 they saw Lacey there actually knew her.

01:00:44.020 They didn't, they never had a barbecue with her.

01:00:46.060 They'd never been to her house.

01:00:47.340 So it's easy to misplace or misidentify somebody, especially with the coverage going on when,

01:00:53.160 with the thought of being helpful, or maybe the thought that I want to be involved in

01:00:56.420 this.

01:00:56.780 But we couldn't find any evidence that anybody who actually knew Lacey had seen her in the

01:01:01.400 neighborhood at that time.

01:01:02.660 And as far as anybody identifying her as walking around there, it could have been an easy mistaken

01:01:07.520 identity with any of these other three girls.

01:01:11.000 I interviewed two of them.

01:01:12.480 And, you know, if you're looking out the blinds and you don't know who you're looking at,

01:01:17.140 I mean, think about yourself, you know, you're at your home, you see somebody walk by in the

01:01:21.160 morning and then two days later, maybe something comes up and that might have been the same

01:01:24.920 person.

01:01:25.440 But if you don't know them, yeah, I don't have that kind of memory.

01:01:29.400 I could never, I would not be able to do that.

01:01:31.300 But let me throw another one at you.

01:01:33.500 Sure.

01:01:33.860 There is an allegedly a prisoner confession overheard by an officer named Lieutenant Aponte

01:01:40.080 at Narco Prison in California.

01:01:43.320 The lieutenant phoned in a tip in 2003, claiming he overheard an inmate's conversation about

01:01:48.420 Lacey.

01:01:49.460 Later, this Lieutenant Aponte changed his story, saying, I don't really know what I heard.

01:01:55.920 He was not called as a witness at trial, but this could become a thing, I suppose, that if

01:02:01.440 he heard a prisoner confession of some sort.

01:02:03.940 Do you know about this?

01:02:05.800 Yeah, I know about what you said right there, because it apparently wasn't a big enough deal

01:02:10.620 on our radar to have him called as a witness.

01:02:13.260 And again, you know, when you look at Garagos, I mean, not only is he a skilled attorney, his

01:02:19.500 staff, I mean, I don't know if you ever talked to any attorneys on his staff, but he had a bunch

01:02:23.640 of great attorneys that were digging up every single thing they could.

01:02:27.380 I don't think they missed anything.

01:02:28.720 And if Aponte would have been something of value, I highly doubt that Mark would not have

01:02:34.160 called him to the stand.

01:02:35.260 Now, there might have been some tactical legal reasons for that.

01:02:37.660 I don't know.

01:02:38.260 Or maybe some information came up later.

01:02:40.380 And if that's an appeal issue, put him on the stand.

01:02:42.980 Let's hear what he's got to say.

01:02:44.400 You know, I mean, if Scott didn't do this, I don't want him in jail.

01:02:46.800 But I have no doubts that he did it.

01:02:49.160 What about back to the timeline?

01:02:50.700 Apparently, a neighbor testified seeing the golden retriever, McKenzie, inside the Peterson's

01:02:56.960 gated yard around 1015 a.m.

01:03:01.120 Janie, Scott's sister-in-law, says the mailman was there.

01:03:05.700 He arrived at 1030 a.m. and said that he didn't believe the dog was there, or at least he heard

01:03:11.700 no barking, which he would have if the dog had been outside because it barked at the mailman

01:03:16.140 every day.

01:03:16.520 Uh, she says this proves that, um, Lacey was walking that dog at around 1030, that it was

01:03:23.660 in the yard at 1015.

01:03:25.460 It was gone by 1030.

01:03:26.820 Lacey would have been walking it at that point.

01:03:29.200 And then at some point it returned back to the house, just its leash attached.

01:03:33.260 And Scott had left the house an hour earlier.

01:03:36.460 Now, I will add the mailman says he doesn't have a very clear recollection of the day.

01:03:41.260 He didn't remember anything out of the ordinary, but that doesn't necessarily clear up the question

01:03:45.940 of whether at 1030 he delivered the mail and a dog that would normally have been there barking

01:03:50.700 at him wasn't.

01:03:53.460 Yeah, I look at that from a, from a different aspect.

01:03:56.420 There was, um, Scott and Lacey had gone down to Disneyland in November and for part of the

01:04:01.940 days that they were down there, she had to be in a wheelchair because she was having so

01:04:05.680 much difficulty walking, uh, not only her yoga instructor, but of course, also her doctor had

01:04:11.220 told her at the tail end of this pregnancy, you just don't need to be out doing any walking.

01:04:15.120 The day before the housekeeper had mentioned that she was exhausted.

01:04:19.140 Sharon had told us that she was exhausted.

01:04:21.080 Sharon did not believe that Lacey had gone walking.

01:04:23.920 And to think this girl that, that couldn't even move a mop bucket, according to Scott,

01:04:28.620 would go down a, a, uh, uneven grade down to a park with a dog tugging at her when she's

01:04:34.380 unstable on her feet and exhausted from everybody's account makes it sound to me like she didn't do

01:04:39.360 that walk.

01:04:39.980 Now, of course I wasn't there.

01:04:41.100 I can't make that call, but all I can do is I can compare the evidence of information that we

01:04:45.500 received that seems valid.

01:04:47.580 And it doesn't really have a stake in this versus Janie's, you know, devotion to family and love

01:04:53.600 for Scott.

01:04:54.160 And I get that.

01:04:55.000 I understand family members are like that.

01:04:57.040 And I applaud her for her tenacity, but I don't believe that Lacey was ever walking that

01:05:03.020 morning with the dog just based on the other information that we have.

01:05:07.200 So when did he kill her and what did he do in the moments after?

01:05:12.280 That's where I'm going to pick it up with John Buehler in one minute.

01:05:15.600 Don't go away.

01:05:16.160 So John, what do you think actually happened inside that house and when?

01:05:26.320 Well, of course, none of us are ever really going to know that other than Scott himself.

01:05:29.960 But my, my take on it is he probably, uh, suffocated her with a pillow or strangled her

01:05:36.840 and then rolled her body up in maybe a sheet or something like that, moved her out to the

01:05:43.300 truck, put her in the truck, put the umbrellas on top of her so that nobody could really see

01:05:49.120 her in there, drove over to his warehouse, loaded her in the boat, used the tarp on the

01:05:54.640 boat to cover the boat.

01:05:56.160 And then of course, hooked the boat up and drove her up to Berkeley Marina, launched the

01:06:01.060 boat, took her out to Brooks Island and rolled her into the water with four or five of the

01:06:06.440 concrete anchors that we believe he made is judging from the residue rings of cement powder that

01:06:12.460 was on a, a flatbed trailer that was in his warehouse, one that would be used to deliver

01:06:17.800 fertilizer or something like that.

01:06:20.220 That's kind of the way I think it, it could be off slightly.

01:06:22.940 I mean, I, I'd certainly buy Scott some imported ale if he wanted to tell me what really happened,

01:06:28.180 but I don't think he's going to be doing that.

01:06:30.480 Why wouldn't there be any forensics in his truck?

01:06:34.660 Well, why would there, why would there not be?

01:06:37.360 I mean, it's if, if he's wrapped up in something, well, don't you remember that here that was

01:06:42.900 found in the pliers that were in the boat, one hair of Lacey's in the pliers in his boat,

01:06:47.000 but I mean, couldn't you make the argument, you know, my husband takes our boat out all

01:06:50.700 the time.

01:06:51.200 Like I'm not, I'm rarely in it, but if my hair were there, I guess he could say, you

01:06:56.560 know, I get Meg's hair on me all the time.

01:06:59.220 Right.

01:06:59.700 Yeah.

01:06:59.860 The transfer of that is, is, you know, is easy.

01:07:02.100 I can, I can see where the, you know, where the hair came from in the boat, no problem there.

01:07:05.900 And then of course it was concrete residue in the boat that it was consistent with somebody

01:07:10.080 rolling somebody with anchors attached over the side into the water.

01:07:13.980 So, you know, you have that, but as far as any more evidence in his truck, well, she's

01:07:18.520 in the bed.

01:07:20.140 You know, it, I can't say that there wouldn't be, but the mere fact that the scent dogs were

01:07:26.460 able to trace her path essentially in the truck as he drove from there down to the South

01:07:32.860 and then turned West and went over towards his warehouse and they followed him over there.

01:07:36.660 They followed the scent from the warehouse out to 132, which is the drive that you go

01:07:40.780 up to San Francisco, tracing it all the way up to Berkeley Marina.

01:07:44.560 I mean, yeah, Mark Garagos can say that that's invalid and, and okay, I get that.

01:07:50.040 That's what he's paid to do.

01:07:51.140 That's the side he's on, but it's all just additional circumstantial evidence that leads

01:07:56.800 to the fingers pointing at Scott.

01:07:58.860 But as far as evidence that you would expect, if he doesn't harm her to the point where

01:08:03.080 she's leaking blood and he puts her in a position where she's wrapped up with maybe saliva or

01:08:08.600 any kind of purge that comes out of her mouth after death, it's not going to get through

01:08:12.020 whatever he's got her wrapped up in.

01:08:13.700 You're not going to find anything in the truck, especially since he was only in there for what

01:08:18.420 I would estimate to be a short period of time from the house to the warehouse loaded in

01:08:22.600 the boat and gone.

01:08:23.580 No one would have seen him loading up the boat with her body at the warehouse because your

01:08:27.560 theory is he did that inside the warehouse.

01:08:30.380 Yes.

01:08:31.160 Okay.

01:08:31.680 And so the only way they would have seen her getting loaded into that truck would have been

01:08:34.740 from the house into the truck.

01:08:36.560 But as you said earlier, he had backed the truck all the way up to the house in an unusual

01:08:41.020 move.

01:08:42.480 Yeah.

01:08:42.840 Neighbors noticed that, that, that he, you know, you, it was the first time they'd ever

01:08:45.940 seen the truck backed in.

01:08:46.840 And they also noticed that there was the first time that they can recall that the blinds were

01:08:49.860 open on the front of the house in the morning.

01:08:51.520 They let the morning sun in.

01:08:52.540 That was something that Lacey did all the time.

01:08:54.020 That particular morning, those weren't open, which is really suspicious when you think

01:08:58.180 that if she was home watching Martha, Martha Stewart or something like that, that she wouldn't

01:09:01.980 have opened those blinds.

01:09:03.040 Quick note on the boat though, that there was a cover that went over the aluminum boat.

01:09:06.660 And when Scott found out that we were doing more digging around, he took that cover and

01:09:11.420 he put it in a shed behind his house underneath a leaking gas can that would put gasoline and

01:09:16.780 leaf floor or something like that, that kind of two stroke oil and on the boat cover itself.

01:09:22.980 Now, Scott was fastidious about taking care of his property, whether it was his vehicles or the

01:09:28.220 surface of his kitchen table or anything like that.

01:09:31.140 But the thought that he would take a relatively nice boat cover and put a leaky leaf floor or gas

01:09:36.120 can on top of it for any other reason other than the, maybe destroy Lacey's scent seems kind of

01:09:41.300 strange to me.

01:09:42.180 So again, just one more piece of circumstantial evidence and by themselves anecdotal, they don't

01:09:46.180 mean anything.

01:09:46.820 But what you have those things up, they become very, very convincing.

01:09:50.260 And this is one of the things that I think a lot of people that don't think he did it

01:09:53.240 are missing is they're not making themselves available to all the individual circumstantial

01:09:58.420 evidence because you have to ignore just a giant heap of this stuff to believe he didn't

01:10:04.140 do it.

01:10:04.900 I applaud Peterson's family for their love for Scott and what they're trying to do, but

01:10:08.780 you're going to have to do something else.

01:10:10.800 We understand their motive.

01:10:12.200 Okay.

01:10:12.400 Let's talk about the boat because Garagos was lamenting that his experiment trying to show

01:10:19.160 a man Scott's size throwing a body, a pregnant, an eight and a half month pregnant woman's

01:10:24.920 body overboard with a bunch of cement anchors that he did that experiment and it showed the

01:10:30.820 boat sinking.

01:10:31.620 We've actually got that, the videotape that he tried to get in that the judge kept out.

01:10:36.820 Let me ask you about it because as I watch it, I'm like, you know, he does raise an interesting

01:10:40.520 question.

01:10:41.100 Could a man as big as Scott Peterson get a pregnant woman that pregnant overboard with four anchors

01:10:47.180 attached to her without the boat capsizing or sinking?

01:10:50.660 Here's Garagos is a clip from his would be evidence that was denied.

01:11:08.940 Okay.

01:11:09.540 Okay.

01:11:09.840 Okay.

01:11:10.420 Okay.

01:11:10.940 Okay.

01:11:10.980 Okay.

01:11:11.020 Okay.

01:11:11.040 Okay.

01:11:11.120 Okay.

01:11:11.520 Okay.

01:11:11.540 Okay.

01:11:11.620 Okay.

01:11:12.120 Okay.

01:11:12.620 Okay.

01:11:13.120 Okay.

01:11:17.180 And for our listening audience, it shows, uh, an exact replica of Scott's 14 foot fishing

01:11:21.780 boat and a man in scuba gear, you know, they're not purporting that it's actually Scott.

01:11:26.900 It's a reenactment that what they say is, and, uh, a dummy that is a pregnant woman and

01:11:33.300 he can't, the, the boat is sinking.

01:11:35.060 He's basically, he can't get overboard without sinking the boat.

01:11:37.380 The back of the boat is going down, down, down and under the water.

01:11:41.460 So I get that the prosecution wasn't there when he filmed his experiment and that's why

01:11:45.700 the judge said no, because that didn't give them the chance to object to the currents

01:11:50.280 weren't the same on the day you did this as they were on December 24th or who knows

01:11:54.900 how heavy was that dummy that Mark used to who knows, right?

01:11:58.520 Like we don't know cause they weren't there, but does he raise some good questions about

01:12:02.700 whether it's possible, you know, given the laws of physics?

01:12:05.660 Well, yeah, of course he raises good questions on that.

01:12:09.100 And, you know, my whole thought on that is, gosh, if you're going to do that experiment,

01:12:12.560 send us an invite, let us come there and let us, you know, do it with you.

01:12:16.180 Um, I, I, I've seen that same tape.

01:12:18.900 I, it's been a while since I've seen it.

01:12:20.340 Of course, I can't see it on this, you know, device here, the way we're doing this, but

01:12:24.220 I saw it and I thought, gosh, the guy could have tried a little harder to not let the boat

01:12:27.980 go over.

01:12:29.160 Uh, I, I'm, I'm of the belief that it could have been done.

01:12:31.780 I don't think that there's anything unusual about that, but if it's a situation where

01:12:35.640 they only want to show one version of it, that's why it was objected to, let's do a

01:12:39.840 scientific study.

01:12:40.760 I mean, it doesn't mean you have to get a physicist there, but let's try it a couple of times.

01:12:44.160 Maybe get somebody in there that wants to keep the boat from going over somebody that

01:12:47.780 isn't really on that same side.

01:12:49.700 Well, you have to think if he believed that he could do it without the boat sinking, they

01:12:54.400 tried it five times.

01:12:55.540 And every time it sunk, he would have said, you know what, let's go back and do it.

01:12:58.880 We'll do it.

01:12:59.300 We'll do it tomorrow.

01:13:00.120 Let's prosecution can come with me, right?

01:13:02.140 There's a reason he didn't, yeah, he didn't round back and say, oh, that's your objection

01:13:07.480 and you're sustaining it, your honor.

01:13:08.980 Okay, no problem.

01:13:09.680 We can, we can do it, uh, right now.

01:13:12.160 Um, the, the, uh, the anchors, you believe he made four cement weights?

01:13:20.900 Because I also read that they found planter pots at the bottom of the, the water and that

01:13:28.780 they matched, that they were found by divers in the marina and that they, they, many believe

01:13:33.600 that they were used to weigh down Lacey's body because they match broken pots in his

01:13:37.000 storage unit.

01:13:37.740 Is that not the right anchor?

01:13:39.240 It was those concrete blocks that he made.

01:13:41.780 Well, I never heard about them finding planter pots up there.

01:13:45.680 That that's a new one for me.

01:13:46.820 Uh, you know, of course this case had, gosh, I think I got the note here on it, um, over

01:13:52.240 43,000, over 43,000 pages of reports.

01:13:56.160 So there were a lot of people that could be a lot of us.

01:13:59.300 Yeah.

01:13:59.720 But at the same time, I remember the one anchor and one concrete anchor that was in Scott's

01:14:04.700 boat.

01:14:04.900 It didn't even have a rope attached to it.

01:14:06.780 Now, most people I know, if they're going to toss an anchor out to pull their boat, they

01:14:10.520 usually have a rope attached there to.

01:14:12.640 Yeah, it works better.

01:14:13.800 Um, yeah, generally, but it was one of those things where the, the cement ring suggests that

01:14:20.860 he made four or five of them.

01:14:22.540 And I believe it was five.

01:14:23.940 And the fact that one was found, okay, cool.

01:14:27.080 But if you remember when Lacey was found minus the head, minus the four extremity limbs that

01:14:34.360 suggest five anchors on her, uh, when she goes in.

01:14:37.120 And one of the things that was noted on her condition, when she was recovered, again, uh,

01:14:41.640 the, the, uh, forensic pathologist said it appeared that she'd been in the salt water

01:14:46.740 for three to six months, that the limbs had been separated by either surgical precision

01:14:51.980 or they had been weighted and then the weights separated.

01:14:54.860 And then that she also had three broken ribs.

01:14:57.580 Well, she talked to her mom the night before, you know, on the 23rd, and she didn't say anything

01:15:02.140 about broken ribs and Lacey probably would have told somebody if she had broken ribs.

01:15:06.340 And so that also fits with Scott kneeling on top of her, you know, suffocating her or

01:15:11.120 strangling her.

01:15:12.340 And of course, the way the limbs were separated supports that there were, uh, weighted devices,

01:15:19.080 anchors, concrete anchors on each one of the four extremities and maybe around the neck.

01:15:23.400 So it's not counting on her torso coming back up.

01:15:26.720 And that torso had their baby in it for most of its time underwater, right?

01:15:33.280 The forensic pathologist said the umbilical cord was still attached.

01:15:36.780 And that, and I mean, it's so sad, but that Lacey died still pregnant with her unborn son.

01:15:45.100 And, and, um, they were, they were put to a watery grave and they, but they came back up.

01:15:52.140 They came back up to tell the tale and it was first Connor's body and then Lacey's, the remains

01:15:57.560 of it that were found.

01:15:58.840 And while it wasn't exactly, uh, evidence of Scott's involvement, you know, it didn't show

01:16:05.080 whatever a gun shot, like a bullet that was linked to him.

01:16:10.180 It really was the final piece that you needed to, to bring him to justice.

01:16:14.840 Well, it seemed like it to us.

01:16:17.580 I mean, again, it's, it's all circumstantial, but you know, there's a lot of murder cases

01:16:21.660 are circumstantial, you know, it's, that's kind of the way we put them together.

01:16:25.220 If you don't have an eyewitness or a videotape and, um, it's, it was compelling to us and apparently

01:16:31.160 it was compelling to the jury the first time around.

01:16:33.520 I, you know, I, I, I wouldn't have any doubts that we would get another good verdict on a second

01:16:38.560 trial.

01:16:39.520 You wouldn't, you would not.

01:16:40.540 Uh, I'm confident in the prosecutors that we have, uh, beer getting Dave.

01:16:45.120 And then of course they bring somebody else in because Rick is now a judge, but you know,

01:16:49.980 you can bring things up all these years later.

01:16:52.440 I believe we had a good case.

01:16:54.260 If you get a good jury, I think you get a good verdict.

01:16:56.500 And if somebody gets on the jury that, you know, maybe the jury's always a crapshoot as

01:17:01.820 you know, you, you've done this for a while and you just never know what you're going to

01:17:05.560 get with them.

01:17:06.400 But well, you know, you know what else?

01:17:07.800 Here's the other, here's the other element kind of goes back to what we talked about.

01:17:10.540 Discussed earlier, which is there is a part of me and there's probably a part of a lot

01:17:15.940 of people watching this that, that wants him not to have done it, that would like it to

01:17:20.780 have been the burglars or some random sicko on the street.

01:17:25.080 And that it's not possible for what appears to be a loving husband to strangle the, the

01:17:32.600 mother of his unborn son a month before that son is going to be born completely viable baby.

01:17:38.560 And then anchor her, shove her in the back of a truck under a tarp and tie five concrete

01:17:45.520 blocks to her neck and each limb, hoping she will stay in that watery grave.

01:17:50.960 But he was so efficient that the torso broke free and that body floated in four months later.

01:17:56.760 It's like, I would rather believe some random creepy boogeyman did it.

01:18:02.720 You know, there's something about it that, that I think might be one of the biggest challenges

01:18:06.760 at the trial that the need to believe that.

01:18:10.940 Well, I think, you know, we all share in that, you know, you look at him and he just doesn't

01:18:14.920 look evil, but evil does exist.

01:18:16.820 And one of the reasons that evil is successful a lot of times is it comes disguised as, you

01:18:21.160 know, a beautiful man or a beautiful woman.

01:18:22.880 And so you never know what you're going to get with that.

01:18:25.300 But the thing is, is, you know, people, you want to look at Scott and you want to think

01:18:30.300 he couldn't have done this, but gosh, he wanted to sell, you know, the house within two weeks

01:18:35.200 of Lacey going missing.

01:18:36.540 He will be sold Lacey's car a month or so after she went missing.

01:18:40.280 He turned the nursery into a storage area.

01:18:43.200 I mean, this is the guy that is wanting his wife to come home.

01:18:45.920 This is the guy who was looking forward to the birth of his son.

01:18:48.220 Uh, you know, you're, you're going to have to give me some better evidence of that because

01:18:52.460 I just, I, I can get past his looks, which are so disarming and I can see what actually

01:18:59.180 he did because his actions are speaking evil, even though he's coming out of an attractive

01:19:04.400 package.

01:19:05.940 All right.

01:19:06.540 I'm going to squeeze in a break because up next, we're going to talk about what the

01:19:10.540 sister said he was doing in that same timeframe John just referenced.

01:19:14.800 And another piece of his Diane Sawyer interview that was very, very telling, uh, more with

01:19:20.980 John Bueller right after this.

01:19:22.160 Stay tuned.

01:19:25.780 The sister, uh, her name is Amy Bird and she wrote John that, uh, she, cause she spent a

01:19:32.720 lot of time apparently with Scott in the weeks after the disappearance and before his arrest.

01:19:37.680 And she wrote in her book that he appeared smitten with her and birds 22 year old babysitter.

01:19:45.200 This is while they're looking for Lacey and Connor before the bodies came up smitten with

01:19:49.300 her 22 year old babysitter on more than one occasion.

01:19:52.280 He told his sister and bird how attractive the sitter was.

01:19:55.820 I mean, this is like the man's in his world, his version, his wife is missing.

01:20:00.060 Um, how attractive the sitter was with Lacey still missing.

01:20:05.880 He plied the sitter with drinks that he called quote flirtinis based on peach schnapps.

01:20:12.360 And she said, he looked like a charming young man without a care in the world.

01:20:18.340 She went on to write, he seemed totally uninterested in any new leads or new information.

01:20:23.900 He never once shed a single tear for Lacey or Connor, the situation, uh, and that two

01:20:30.540 weeks after Lacey's disappearance, he ordered two porn channels on his home TV and she was

01:20:38.000 a witness to that.

01:20:39.240 Uh, I, I mean like that alone would make me convict him.

01:20:47.120 Well, yeah, I mean, and that's, that's just consistent with his behavior.

01:20:50.280 And this is one of the reasons that he, he, you know, we couldn't discount him because

01:20:54.980 he just didn't show the interest in this case, the way he would say on TV, he's waiting for

01:20:59.580 the little guy to come home.

01:21:00.640 He won't even refer to him as Connor and he wants Lacey to come home.

01:21:03.820 But when the cameras turned off, then he's just not interested in any of this.

01:21:07.960 And especially when you compare his reaction and the way he dealt with all of this with Sharon

01:21:12.960 and all the other side of, you know, Lacey's family and friends, they were all just urgent

01:21:19.380 going crazy and wanting some solutions and suggestions.

01:21:22.880 So they were, they were always interested in this and he just wasn't.

01:21:25.920 And this is consistent with what I've seen on other guys that have done similar types

01:21:30.220 of killings.

01:21:30.760 They just, they don't, you know, they don't have that interest in it.

01:21:34.080 I remember Scott's dad said one time, you know, Lee, he mentioned that, you know, grief

01:21:38.200 doesn't have a playbook and, you know, maybe it probably doesn't for people that haven't

01:21:43.140 dealt with a lot of families that have suffered a loss.

01:21:46.740 But when you, when you deal with families and, and, and friends that have suffered a

01:21:52.300 loss over a period of time, you kind of get a, you know, a data bank of what reactions

01:21:57.620 are from subdued silence to hysterical, you know, you know, punching on the back of the

01:22:04.020 one who gives them the death, death notification.

01:22:06.000 How do I remember that?

01:22:07.260 And everything in between.

01:22:08.620 But when Scott doesn't even move the needle on this and he isn't asking the questions

01:22:13.120 that you expect and that you get from sincere people, it just fits with what he did, you

01:22:18.300 know, and by itself, it doesn't mean he did it.

01:22:21.400 It just is one more strand that to me shows that he did.

01:22:25.640 What kind of a man is flirting with a 22 year old babysitter, offering her flirtinis and

01:22:32.000 then downloading porn while his wife and unborn baby are at best for Scott Peterson at that

01:22:38.260 point missing.

01:22:39.720 I mean, it's just, it's so clear that he was involved.

01:22:43.720 Then he goes on with Diane Sawyer.

01:22:46.040 And we actually talked with Garagos about what a mistake it is for these high profile defendants

01:22:50.320 to give interviews to the press.

01:22:51.660 You guys must love it.

01:22:52.760 You're, you're in the opposite seat than Garagos, who's like, no, you guys are like, go for it.

01:22:57.960 Diane Sawyer is amazing.

01:22:59.620 She's a great choice.

01:23:01.180 And here is one of the things, listen to this for the audience at home.

01:23:04.420 Listen to him refer to Lacey before the bodies, long before the bodies were found in the past

01:23:09.600 tense.

01:23:10.560 Listen here.

01:23:11.880 Tell me about the state of your marriage.

01:23:14.720 What, what kind of marriage was it?

01:23:18.660 God, I mean, the first word that comes to mind is, you know, glorious.

01:23:22.700 I mean, we took care of each other very well.

01:23:28.680 She was amazing.

01:23:30.040 He is amazing.

01:23:30.700 That's telling.

01:23:36.560 Well, you know, it's interesting because he even referred to Lacey in the past tense twice

01:23:40.300 during Brochini's interview with him on the evening of Christmas Eve.

01:23:44.420 So even from the start, he was doing that.

01:23:47.340 And, you know, it was, you know, you can't hide that stuff.

01:23:51.360 I mean, he's, he's pretty slick for the most part, but, you know, those things slip out when

01:23:55.360 you're doing it.

01:23:56.040 And no matter how slick you are, you, you can't be that good.

01:23:59.380 And then there was the interview with Gloria Gomez of Sacramento.

01:24:04.200 And in that, you referenced it earlier in the show, he, he slips in the fact that he

01:24:10.700 had a cut on his hand.

01:24:12.640 Remind me of OJ.

01:24:13.720 Remind me very much of OJ, but we know OJ's murder was with a knife.

01:24:18.780 Listen, I'll just let the audience hear it, but I don't think this was by accident.

01:24:22.500 He knew somebody was going to notice it and he was laying the foundation for what happened.

01:24:25.760 Here it is.

01:24:26.120 It wouldn't surprise you if they found blood.

01:24:30.460 Sure.

01:24:30.940 In your vehicles.

01:24:31.720 Explain why.

01:24:32.780 Well, take a look at my hands.

01:24:35.340 And you can see, you know, cuts here on my knuckles, numerous scars.

01:24:40.860 I, I work on farms.

01:24:42.400 I work with machinery.

01:24:43.240 Um, I know I, I cut my knuckle that day.

01:24:47.080 On what day?

01:24:48.500 On Christmas Eve.

01:24:49.780 Doing what?

01:24:50.880 Um, reaching in the toolbox of my truck and then into the, uh, pocket on the door.

01:24:56.380 I cut out my knuckle and there's a blood stain on the door.

01:25:01.280 On the driver's side door.

01:25:03.480 Hmm.

01:25:03.920 What did you guys make of that?

01:25:07.680 Well, pretty good way to explain that away.

01:25:10.100 And, and, you know, I can't rule out the fact that it's possible he could have cut it that way, but it's also possible that Lacey may have scratched him as he was killing him.

01:25:18.380 And so, you know, those, again, without a witness in a videotape or a confession, you're never really going to know on that.

01:25:25.220 But, but that was not accidental that he raised that.

01:25:29.940 Well, you know, and that's all for the jury.

01:25:31.820 You know, the jury, you know, listens to that and they draw their own conclusions on that.

01:25:35.560 But just the fact that he's volunteering it, talking about it, it's almost like he, it's a guilty conscious coming out and he wants to make sure he gets in front of that with this story.

01:25:44.300 So I can't rule out.

01:25:45.900 John, what of the toolbox?

01:25:46.640 Because one of the things that, one of the evidence rulings was that Garagos' boat video couldn't come in.

01:25:52.720 But as I understand it, there was a ruling that the prosecution introduced showing that he could have fit a body the size of a pregnant woman in the toolbox of his flatbed truck.

01:26:05.080 Is this familiar to you?

01:26:07.200 No, because it was a pickup.

01:26:09.060 The flatbed was the trailer.

01:26:10.540 But I know we did an experiment and it was submitted to the court where we had a eight month pregnant clerk in the investigation division at Stanislaus County District Attorney's Office.

01:26:23.100 And we took an overhead photo of her inside the boat between the seats.

01:26:27.300 Now, the seats go across the width of the boat and she easily fit in between those two seats.

01:26:32.880 And she was consistent in size with Lacey.

01:26:35.140 So that was one of the things that we did to show that that was possible, that she could have easily been hidden in the boat.

01:26:40.560 But I don't even remember if we were able to get that in at trial or not because it's been too long ago.

01:26:44.960 But, you know, I like Judge DeLugge.

01:26:48.840 I thought he was pretty right down the middle.

01:26:50.880 He gave some good, favorable decisions to the defense and then maybe some that they didn't like.

01:26:56.140 But that's true in every trial, as you know.

01:26:58.580 You know, you get them, you get ones that you like and you get ones that you don't.

01:27:01.420 You're just hoping that the judge is doing it right.

01:27:03.700 Well, and I mean, their big basis for appeal is not necessarily, you know, judicial misconduct.

01:27:08.940 It's juror misconduct.

01:27:11.280 Juror number seven, who called herself Strawberry Shortcake,

01:27:14.640 did not disclose in her juror questionnaire that she had apparently been the victim of domestic violence while pregnant,

01:27:22.100 which I agreed the defense had a right to know whether it was enough error to allow whether that was prejudicial enough to throw out a verdict.

01:27:32.640 In a case like this is a different story for the listeners and the viewers who don't remember her.

01:27:37.280 We used to call her Pinky at the time here.

01:27:40.060 She is, along with another juror, celebrating their guilty verdict.

01:27:44.160 Like, you know, you don't always see the jurors talk in California.

01:27:47.000 In this case, you did.

01:27:48.160 It's a quick snippet of her.

01:27:49.640 Watch.

01:27:51.380 San Quentin's your new home.

01:27:52.880 And it's illegal to kill your wife and child in California.

01:27:56.940 So that's the gal.

01:27:58.980 And I wonder what you think about now this push, because he's been he's had his sentence reduced

01:28:03.680 because of a different juror misconduct issue not related to this gal.

01:28:07.660 And now in February, we will have a hearing to see whether Scott Peterson gets a new trial on the guilt or innocence phase of the whole thing because she that juror did not disclose this fact on her questionnaire.

01:28:20.800 Yeah, well, that brings up two points.

01:28:24.040 Number one, I had heard that her her lack of coming forward with that information on the juror questionnaire was that she was the victim of a threat from a boyfriend's ex-girlfriend.

01:28:35.240 And she didn't see that as domestic violence.

01:28:37.760 Now, there may be more to it than that, but that's what I had originally heard.

01:28:41.320 The second thing is that's better for the prosecution than what I just said.

01:28:44.480 For sure.

01:28:44.820 Yeah, and then, of course, when it comes to the death penalty thing, I'm not a huge death penalty guy, because I think it's been 17 years since California has carried one out.

01:28:55.140 So to even try somebody on a death penalty seems to be kind of a placebo.

01:28:59.720 They're not going to get the needle.

01:29:00.720 They're probably going to die in custody.

01:29:02.880 I would rather have more flexibility in jury selection without a death penalty case.

01:29:07.860 So maybe you get a good juror that just doesn't want to do a death penalty thing, but they can be fair about it.

01:29:13.620 And to me, that's a better way to go, because I just my personal feeling is the death penalty in California is kind of a joke.

01:29:20.680 Yeah, it doesn't.

01:29:21.660 They're not serious about it.

01:29:23.660 What kind of life does he have now?

01:29:25.940 Like what? Describe his prison life.

01:29:28.560 Well, San Francisco or San Quentin Prison is a very interesting place.

01:29:33.160 It's got an enormously interesting culture and heritage.

01:29:37.020 It's not a very pleasant place.

01:29:38.540 It's frightening, even to us, when you go there, when you're a cop and you go into one of the prisons for an interview or whatever you have to do up there.

01:29:48.600 It's a scary atmosphere.

01:29:50.320 It's interesting.

01:29:50.820 You talk to the correctional officers and we ask them, you know, how the hell can you do this?

01:29:54.100 Be locked up with these guys all day.

01:29:55.840 And they go, well, how the hell can you do what you do?

01:29:57.820 At least we know who the players are.

01:29:59.280 And I can see it from both sides, but it's a death row.

01:30:03.540 I think if I had to be in San Quentin, I'd want to be on death row because I'm not really exposed to that many of the other inmates.

01:30:10.220 And general population in San Quentin can get you hurt pretty quick, especially if they don't like you for killing your wife and your child.

01:30:16.540 So, you know, if they do stay with the verdict of guilt and he does get, you know, life without parole, we call it L-LOP, and he stays in there, they're going to have to assure his safety by keeping him isolated because he would be a target for other inmates.

01:30:32.720 There's a National Geographic special that was on a couple of years ago that profiled San Quentin.

01:30:38.200 And even one of the inmates that they interviewed talked specifically about Scott, that he would be attacked if he was in general population.

01:30:44.880 They'd even do it with a pencil.

01:30:46.440 Pretty interesting show to watch if you get a chance to catch that one.

01:30:49.500 Of course, it's not as good as your show, but it's nearly as good.

01:30:52.440 Naturally.

01:30:52.920 But the prison code of justice is so weird.

01:30:55.520 It's like you don't get into San Quentin for being a Boy Scout, but like there's certain lines they won't cross.

01:31:00.660 I guess you're not allowed.

01:31:01.680 What?

01:31:02.060 I'm killing your wife.

01:31:02.860 I don't know if that's a problem, but killing your unborn baby.

01:31:04.720 Is that the thing that's going to get him the pencil on the neck?

01:31:06.980 It's, yeah, it's a very interesting, it's a violent, but a very interesting culture up there.

01:31:13.420 Any of the state prisons in California are, you know, not everybody gets to go in unless you do something really bad.

01:31:19.920 But it's a very interesting culture up there.

01:31:21.900 I don't think Scott's days are very good.

01:31:23.900 Now, Scott has an enormously impressive emotional control.

01:31:28.340 And so he can, I'm sure he adapts better than I will.

01:31:32.460 And, but it's, it's not, you know, he's not ordering flirtinis up there.

01:31:36.500 You know, he's, he's stuck and he ain't going anywhere and they don't smell good.

01:31:41.260 They're noisy.

01:31:42.580 And you're not there with the faculty of Stanford.

01:31:45.100 So, you know, it's not a very pleasant place to be.

01:31:47.740 What do you think?

01:31:48.280 Because, you know, people debate this all the time in, in our society because the death penalty is still recognized as constitutional and implemented in certain states.

01:31:56.980 But I've heard, I've heard people who oppose the death penalty say, I oppose it because I think it's too, it's too kind.

01:32:06.580 It's too swift that they'd, I'd rather see somebody, you know, especially a young man like Scott Peterson.

01:32:12.300 I mean, Sharon Rocha at the hearing just most recently was just saying Lacey would be, I think she said 47 now.

01:32:17.900 And Connor would be 18 and it really does give you a flavor for the passage of time and how much they've lost.

01:32:23.900 And Scott Peterson too is not getting any younger, but what a tortuous existence.

01:32:28.540 And I wonder what you think about what would be worse, a death sentence or a life in prison without parole?

01:32:34.680 Well, you know, that's kind of a flip of the coin.

01:32:38.980 I mean, that's, you know, do you, you know, do you have the fish or do you have the steak?

01:32:42.360 I mean, I, they both are, you know, kind of equal in some ways.

01:32:45.840 I, I, I think the anxiety of knowing that the grim reaper is coming when you got that death sentence that they're going to carry it out would be very difficult to deal with.

01:32:54.660 But again, most people that end up in there don't think the way we do.

01:32:58.480 So their, their thought process is probably slightly different.

01:33:01.220 There was some good things recently.

01:33:03.340 There was a guy put to death recently in one of his closing statements before they gave him the needle was he, he solved another case for him.

01:33:10.500 He did the last minute.

01:33:11.580 He, he said something about another murder that had been committed and that they cleared him on that or cleared, cleared the case based on what he said.

01:33:19.300 I guess he committed it.

01:33:20.580 So, I mean, for me, if they're not going to carry it out, don't bother with, don't, don't cause additional problems.

01:33:26.440 Don't make the trial longer by having a penalty phase.

01:33:29.160 Just get by with, you know, your life without parole and leave it at that.

01:33:32.760 And then you sit there and you think about it for the rest of your life.

01:33:35.820 The concern also, of course, you know, you put an innocent man to death.

01:33:38.940 I wouldn't want to ever see that.

01:33:40.900 And in this case, you know, you don't have a confession.

01:33:43.380 You don't have an eyewitness and you don't have a videotape.

01:33:45.620 So, you know, there's always that.

01:33:47.460 Well, we have the we have the fear that, you know, he's good looking, that we live in a celebrity obsessed culture and he is, for better or for worse, sort of a celebrity that the jurors of 2021 or this would be 22 have been completely trained to expect CSI like investigations where the proof is always there.

01:34:07.040 And the absence of tight forensics mean you don't have a case, right, that all these things are challenges if this case has to be retried.

01:34:14.580 We didn't even talk about this woman, Evelyn Hernandez, who she was up in San Francisco and she went missing in May of 2002.

01:34:22.700 Her body washed up in San Francisco Bay in July of 2002.

01:34:25.820 That case considered, I think, unsolved as of a couple of years ago.

01:34:30.180 Right. So there's so much that the defense could make hay with.

01:34:33.440 You know, was there a serial killer?

01:34:34.620 Were they wrong about the burglars?

01:34:35.720 Was there something happening on December 24th?

01:34:38.820 And I just wonder whether we're so obsessed with like armchair detective work in 2021.

01:34:45.960 It would be a more of an uphill battle for the prosecution.

01:34:49.500 I'll give you the last word.

01:34:50.280 Well, it probably would be.

01:34:52.580 But again, I have confidence in the prosecutors from Stanislaw County District Attorney's Office.

01:34:56.700 They've got some incredibly bright trial attorneys there.

01:34:59.460 And so I don't know who they would assign to it the second time around.

01:35:02.920 With with it going to trial again, hopefully not.

01:35:05.760 The big thing for me is the torture for the family, for Sharon and the rest of the family, for them to have to go through this again.

01:35:12.100 And even for this to come up for resentencing here in December.

01:35:15.040 What a great time of the year to do that, to just open that wound again.

01:35:18.360 Now, granted, every Christmas is going to be different from before Lacey went missing to now.

01:35:24.900 And I get that.

01:35:25.740 But then they have to add, you know, salt to the wound by having this thing happen now.

01:35:29.480 Why couldn't they have done this in February and put it off a little bit longer?

01:35:32.480 But, you know, that that is what it is.

01:35:34.440 And this is what we're dealing with.

01:35:35.980 As far as I'm concerned, I'm close to the case, along with Craig and Al.

01:35:43.360 We were in it from the start.

01:35:44.840 And, you know, it is what it is.

01:35:46.300 It was a team effort.

01:35:47.280 I appreciate you referring to me as the one who solved it.

01:35:49.880 I didn't solve it.

01:35:50.660 We worked it together from those of us that were on the core unit, investigating it from the beginning to the other detectives that came and helped with us.

01:35:57.740 The other agencies, sheriff's departments, detectives from other agencies, the FBI that helped us out on it.

01:36:03.120 Our crime analysis did a wonderful job putting things together.

01:36:06.040 And the evidence clerks, the evidence technicians and everybody that joined in on it.

01:36:11.000 It was a big team effort.

01:36:12.680 I just hope that if we go to trial again on it, that we get a good jury.

01:36:16.020 They can see right through this stuff.

01:36:17.400 And they see every strand of this circumstantial evidence makes an unbreakable cable.

01:36:22.360 And they come back with the right verdict.

01:36:23.600 I hope the same.

01:36:26.100 John, thank you so much for your investigatory efforts and for being here to tell us a story.

01:36:31.380 Wow, what a case.

01:36:32.740 Joining us later this week.

01:36:34.480 You've got to join us later this week.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - December 20, 2021

Scott Peterson： A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special ｜ Ep. 225

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