The Megyn Kelly Show - September 04, 2026


The Double Life of Scott Peterson： Defending Scott Peterson — Ep. 4 ｜ MK Confidential


Episode Stats


Length

58 minutes

Words per minute

158.8

Word count

9,323

Sentence count

551


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 If you turn on CNN at 9 o'clock at night in the month of April 2003, you get one thing, Scott Peterson.
00:00:08.340 Larry King is running a Peterson segment almost every night.
00:00:11.900 One lawyer, and seemingly only one lawyer at that table, keeps taking a most unpopular position.
00:00:19.640 Condemn him as a narcissist. Condemn his character flaws, but that does not make him a murderer.
00:00:25.080 You condemn him because he might be guilty of adultery.
00:00:28.000 That is Mark Garagos.
00:00:33.680 Some nights, he hits Scott Peterson, but most, he defends him.
00:00:37.620 He does not represent Scott Peterson, not yet.
00:00:41.440 On April 18th, police arrest Scott Peterson.
00:00:44.520 That evening, the state's attorney general announces that the bodies that washed ashore in San Francisco Bay
00:00:49.600 are Lacey Peterson and her son, Connor.
00:00:53.200 That night, Garagos tells Larry King that their bodies washing ashore within two miles of Scott's fishing trip alibi is, quote, devastating.
00:01:02.420 Even still, Garagos criticizes how the case against Scott Peterson is being framed.
00:01:07.660 And at no point does he say Peterson is guilty.
00:01:12.460 Twenty three years after defending him in court, Mark Garagos spoke with us about his former client.
00:01:18.500 Mark is now the co-host of the show In the Well on our MK True Crime podcast channel.
00:01:23.820 Does he think Scott Peterson is a killer?
00:01:26.320 You know whether somebody is good for it. He's not good for it.
00:01:29.220 I said it then. I've said it consistently with much blowback since, in the 20-some-odd years since.
00:01:36.760 The guy I met does not have the capability, the wherewithal, the ability to do it.
00:01:42.980 When Garagos was making those rounds on cable news, he had not yet met Scott Peterson.
00:01:48.740 He later says of those appearances, quote,
00:01:51.340 Maybe I was one of the media pundits who jumped on a bunch of misleading information and convicted the guy.
00:01:56.920 That's not how Lee and Jackie Peterson saw it.
00:02:00.380 In San Diego, Scott's parents are watching Garagos on TV almost every night.
00:02:05.080 They had retained lawyer Kirk McAllister to represent their son after Lacey went missing.
00:02:10.880 Once Scott is arrested, McAllister tells them that a case of this size is going to get expensive very fast.
00:02:18.200 They should just let the public defenders take it.
00:02:21.000 In 2017, Lee Peterson tells A&E why they did not take that advice.
00:02:26.060 We contacted Mark Garagos because he was on a Larry King show just about every night, and he was defending Scott.
00:02:35.880 I finally said, well, what's it going to cost, Mark?
00:02:38.880 And he said, a million bucks.
00:02:41.480 And I said, wow, you know.
00:02:44.880 They cannot afford him.
00:02:47.080 They hire him anyway.
00:02:49.460 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:04:12.860 Promo code MKC. We began our conversation with Mark Garagos where his relationship with the
00:04:20.360 Peterson family started on television talking about Scott weeks before Mark had met the man
00:04:26.300 he was arguing about. So before you actually got hired as counsel for Scott Peterson, what did you
00:04:32.600 think of the case, Mark? You know, famously, in fact, because of my smart aleck tendency,
00:04:39.840 I had said on a show, I think it was Larry King, who was back on CNN when CNN actually had more
00:04:47.540 than four viewers. I said something to the effect of there are guys in state prison on a lot less
00:04:55.120 evidence than what was facing Scott. And what I meant by that was the sheer coincidence,
00:05:03.820 so to speak, of Lacey and Connor washing up at exactly the location. It wasn't really exactly,
00:05:10.900 but in the basically the bay for all intents and purposes was enough to get uh him convicted and
00:05:18.820 sure enough at the end of the day fast forward i don't want to um step over everything else
00:05:24.500 a couple of the jurors said they never would have convicted but for that fact so you before
00:05:30.200 the petersons called you were you looking at this saying he did it i was commenting virtually
00:05:37.380 nightly i mean people have to remember we're we're almost in a return from 20 to 25 years ago
00:05:45.640 20 to 25 years ago every summer there was always a trial of the century there was always some
00:05:52.640 what i used to call the axis of evil of true crime which was cable shows at night the morning shows
00:05:59.440 and then back then it was people magazine and if you got into that kind of axis um you were done
00:06:06.200 for it was awful because before you even walked into a courtroom you were you were done that media
00:06:12.180 machine would soon come for garagos by friday may 2nd 2003 garagos had now signed on as scott
00:06:20.560 peterson's lawyer and walks out of the stanislaus county courthouse to face the cameras reporters
00:06:26.080 immediately ask about what looks like a change of heart garagos waves it off saying i think i
00:06:33.200 succumbed to the media buzz mark's telling starts with scott's mother jackie peterson scott's mom
00:06:41.160 reached out to me and said she wanted to see me and i think came in initially at least just to
00:06:48.120 try to correct the record so to speak and and make sure that i understood that she believed
00:06:54.200 fervently that he was innocent i met with her and we had a long talk and i was so taken with her
00:06:59.040 She asked me to go meet with him. I met with him. I was convinced of his innocence after meeting him in Modesto. I went to the Modesto or Stanislaus County Jail and that I took the case.
00:07:13.400 I will tell you, virtually everybody, virtually everybody, including lawyers in my office, lawyers who ended up working on the case, told me, do not take this.
00:07:23.960 I was coming off of basically a seven-year streak of not losing a case.
00:07:29.300 I had won back-to-back Susan McDougall on both coasts, not guilty against kind of all odds.
00:07:35.380 I had had an incredible streak, and everybody said, look, if you win the case, you're a pariah, a la Johnny Cochran.
00:07:45.280 You know, Johnny, people forget.
00:07:47.120 After OJ, Johnny didn't want to do another criminal case again.
00:07:52.340 He was kind of verboten.
00:07:54.180 Johnny used to sit at jury selection.
00:07:56.300 He would rent himself out to mass tort lawyers and to PI lawyers because jurors would raise their hand and say, I can't be fair because Johnny Cochran is the lawyer.
00:08:06.880 I think he was that he was that much hated.
00:08:09.520 Here's what Pat Harris, a colleague of Mark's, tells him.
00:08:13.360 Pat retold it to A&E in 2017.
00:08:16.420 Mark, you are a very popular attorney.
00:08:19.400 That's all going to end because Scott Peterson is the most hated man in America.
00:08:22.620 And if you take this case, you're going to be the second most hated man in America.
00:08:26.300 One voice, however, calls Mark with a very different perspective.
00:08:30.020 My father, who was my mentor, partner, and hero, he said to me,
00:08:36.180 look, if you're not going to take this case because of the absolute blowback you're going to get,
00:08:43.680 and he knew there would be blowback, then you should be selling oranges on the side of the freeway.
00:08:48.840 What are you doing?
00:08:49.560 If you're more concerned about your reputation, then you shouldn't be doing this.
00:08:53.660 And that scene outside of the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Station, when they had arrested Scott, brought him in, and people were surrounding the sheriff's station with placards asking that he'd be hung and man or monster and all that stuff, that kind of roiled me to the point where I said, okay, I'm going to jump in.
00:09:13.640 Garagos takes the case with Scott's reputation already in tatters.
00:09:17.920 Scott has just wrapped an ill-advised interview spree,
00:09:21.180 which includes a train wreck sit-down with Diane Sawyer.
00:09:23.980 Do you really expect people to believe that an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant woman
00:09:29.100 learns her husband has had an affair and is saintly and casual about it?
00:09:39.100 Accommodating? Makes a peace with it?
00:09:41.920 Well, yeah, you don't know.
00:09:44.600 No one knows our relationship but us.
00:09:52.240 And that's at peace with it.
00:09:57.560 Not happy about it.
00:09:59.680 In the wake of exchanges like that, what convinced Garagos that Scott was actually innocent?
00:10:05.900 I'm kind of the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 reps, 10,000 hours.
00:10:10.060 I talk about this with Carole all the time, too.
00:10:12.640 you get a sense you know you have I mean you're not infallible when it comes to that but you know
00:10:19.960 nothing in his background shows that he could have done it you have to understand it's the only time
00:10:26.180 that I can think of in any case and I've tried hundreds of case I stopped counting to 300 that
00:10:31.200 I've ever called a nun onto the stand as a character witness and even she talked about
00:10:38.180 She had grown up or watched him grow up and said he had no violence in his background.
00:10:44.440 He had no indication whatsoever that he could ever hurt anybody.
00:10:48.440 In fact, it was quite the contrary.
00:10:50.400 He was the most docile kind of laid back kid.
00:10:55.740 Garagos maintains it's not the evidence against Scott that has convinced most people he's guilty, but something else.
00:11:02.400 I do know why this thing has fascination, in my humble opinion.
00:11:06.720 I and I talked to you about this before and don't take this don't be insulted because you fall into
00:11:14.320 the category and I love you dearly but I would be sitting at the gym before court each morning
00:11:21.500 and inevitably I would get approached by and it was almost always a white professional woman
00:11:28.560 and they would ask me questions and I would say no if you would watch if there was tv in the court
00:11:34.360 you would understand that didn't happen and then i would explain it and then the same question and
00:11:39.800 it would happen over and over and over again and inevitably across the board every single one of
00:11:45.160 them said to me i don't care what the evidence was i had an ex-boyfriend and if he was cheating on me
00:11:51.180 with that uh that hussy or whatever name they would call amber fry he would have done the same
00:11:56.700 thing and I can see it. And so there is this kind of just guttural reaction where you can't get past
00:12:04.740 that. It is just the picture of Lacey sitting in the chair at the Christmas party, pregnant,
00:12:12.700 beautiful, resplendent, and then placed side by side with the picture of him with his arm around
00:12:19.820 the masseuse therapist from Fresno, California, who fits the archetype of many a wife.
00:12:27.360 And you can't get past that for a certain demographic or a certain constituency.
00:12:33.140 There is also the matter of Scott Peterson standing in a Modesto park on New Year's Eve
00:12:38.460 at a vigil for his missing wife, three blocks from his own home, telling his lover, Amber Fry,
00:12:44.720 that he is in Paris celebrating New Year's with a huge French crowd.
00:12:49.820 I'm going to take a wild guess that Megyn Kelly has a real problem with that.
00:12:55.900 100%. He looks like a sociopath.
00:12:58.040 And I do wonder, as you talk about, you get a sense sitting across from somebody.
00:13:04.300 Do you think you'd know if you were across from a sociopath?
00:13:08.560 I think, I don't know that this is something I want on my tombstone.
00:13:14.280 I don't think anybody has handled as many murder cases as I have.
00:13:19.820 And that and if I were to tack on, I mean, you know, my first 13 years of my life, my father was a homicide prosecutor in the LADA's office.
00:13:29.780 That's all I watched. I used to follow him around the court and watch him do murder cases.
00:13:34.040 I watched him while waiting for bar results. He had three murder cases pending.
00:13:38.240 And I watched all three trials while waiting for them back to back to back.
00:13:42.020 I've handled I can't tell you how many murder cases I I don't know that it's a skill set that that anybody.
00:13:49.600 wants to brag about but i will tell you i know who is capable of this i know who's got it in them
00:13:57.200 and i can also tell you just from working with somebody what triggered it um i had at one point
00:14:06.000 in fact it's how i got susan mcdougall's case i had at 1.4 women on what we called murderers row
00:14:13.040 in the old Sybil Brand Jail.
00:14:15.580 Sybil Brand Jail was this notorious women's prison,
00:14:19.140 jail, not a prison, in L.A.
00:14:21.420 And those, I've never had before
00:14:24.560 since four women charged with murder.
00:14:27.300 But I will tell you, all four of them
00:14:30.200 I knew had committed the act.
00:14:32.360 All four had killed another human being in various ways.
00:14:37.420 But all four were ultimately not convicted of murder
00:14:41.600 because there was a backstory to it.
00:14:44.940 And I knew that, and I did not have to reinvent the facts, so to speak.
00:14:50.620 Scott, I never had that.
00:14:53.260 Despite Mark's gut feelings on Peterson,
00:14:56.160 the jury that decided the case did look at the evidence.
00:15:00.080 Well, the jurors, two of the jurors who sat on the case,
00:15:04.140 gave an interview to Netflix for their most recent special.
00:15:06.980 And they were pointing to not the affair. Both of those guys said the affair did not move us. We understood that men cheat. It was, they said, the tapes, Amber's tapes of Scott and what he was saying to her while people were searching for Lacey.
00:15:28.440 obviously he's trying to keep this woman on the line and they i think couldn't get past
00:15:36.320 how cold he was about the fact that his wife was quote missing during those uh tapes jurors
00:15:43.900 mike belmessieri and mark baratlas described the impact of those recorded phone calls to netflix
00:15:49.820 in 2024 a lot of people believe that the affair was a big deal
00:15:55.020 I didn't see it as a big deal, and I don't think anybody on a jury did either.
00:15:59.960 What we did see as a big deal is what he said and what he did.
00:16:04.940 It was damning. It was absolutely damning.
00:16:08.220 And not only the phone calls, but the lies.
00:16:11.700 Yes, the charade.
00:16:13.400 Geragos says his co-counsel, Pat Harris, understood the danger of those tapes immediately.
00:16:18.560 And in trying to explain Scott's behavior,
00:16:20.760 they kept coming back to another disappearance
00:16:23.340 that had consumed Modesto, California only a few years earlier
00:16:28.140 and one familiar to MK Confidential fans.
00:16:31.840 Pat Harris, who I tried that case with,
00:16:33.760 who had been my partner for many years.
00:16:35.920 In fact, I met Pat.
00:16:38.180 Fun story.
00:16:39.500 Pat was Susan McDougal's fiancé
00:16:42.320 when I first met Susan McDougal during Whitewater.
00:16:46.400 And Pat came in to try to fire me
00:16:49.300 because Susan had hired me, and he ended up becoming my partner,
00:16:54.600 law firm partner, for 15 years, and he ended up dumping Susan.
00:16:58.100 When Pat first heard those tapes, because he was deep into the case,
00:17:02.000 in the prep of it, and he called me up and he said,
00:17:04.980 we're never getting past these tapes.
00:17:07.360 And I said, why?
00:17:08.320 And he says, even though I know why he did it,
00:17:12.160 there's no way we can capture that or present that to the jury.
00:17:16.340 And I explained to him what I was going to try to do.
00:17:21.100 And we were not, I think, entirely successful.
00:17:24.720 Two or three years before Lacey went missing, in Modesto, there was a congressman.
00:17:31.760 His name was Gary Condit.
00:17:33.700 Gary Condit was a client of mine.
00:17:36.620 And so I was very familiar with that case.
00:17:40.020 Gary was admitted to having an affair with Chandra Levy.
00:17:44.560 Chandra Levy was from the Modesto area.
00:17:47.800 Chandra Levy went missing, and Gary conned it.
00:17:51.420 As soon as they discovered the affair, and Gary had disclosed it to the investigators,
00:17:56.280 that was it.
00:17:57.100 They were off to the races.
00:17:58.340 The investigators didn't care about any other lead.
00:18:01.800 They were focused like a laser on Gary.
00:18:05.060 And because the prosecutors were so fixated on Gary, they lost all kinds of opportunities.
00:18:13.160 I tell you that story because Scott was well aware of that.
00:18:18.440 He understood completely, living in Modesto, Gary Condit was a beloved congressman.
00:18:24.760 Everybody there understood that Gary's career was torched because of admitting the fair
00:18:31.640 with Chandra.
00:18:32.600 Scott knew the minute that Amber surfaced, Modesto, who had already, all you have to
00:18:39.180 do is take a look at that first or second interview in the Modesto Police Department,
00:18:44.300 or Stanislaus County, where they're already suspicious of him. They're already in his face.
00:18:49.820 He knew that if Amber surfaced, he was done. They'd stop looking for Lacey and it was over with.
00:18:55.760 Unfortunately, the jurors, I'm sure, had an enormous amount of problems with when the vigil,
00:19:03.380 he's sitting at the vigil, that he's talking about the rooftops of Paris.
00:19:07.300 But the jury never heard that explanation. Scott Peterson would never take the stand.
00:19:14.480 In San Mateo County, the bias against Scott Peterson shows up before the trial even begins.
00:19:20.160 Nearly every prospective juror has already heard about the case, and almost 45 percent say they believe Scott Peterson is guilty.
00:19:28.060 We went through 1,600 jury questionnaires. And people, I used to say people who were illiterate were writing Gity, G-I-T-Y, you know, and the Buddhists up there, because we were in San Mateo as a large community there, would say, you know, I'm against the death penalty conceptually, but for Scott Peterson, I'll make an exception.
00:19:51.860 I mean, it was the wildest thing I've ever seen.
00:19:55.140 There was a billboard truck circling the courthouse during the jury selection as jurors are coming into the courthouse.
00:20:03.840 And it's got a giant poster of Scott in his orange jumpsuit.
00:20:08.400 And it's you had people vote man or monster.
00:20:12.460 And it was a, like I said, it reminded me in some ways of the Jim Crow South, or at least of what I always used to imagine.
00:20:24.080 You know, I grew up reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and it had that kind of a feel to it, at least from my standpoint.
00:20:31.620 During death penalty questioning, prospective jurors are brought in one at a time so that one person's answers do not influence the rest of the pool.
00:20:40.280 Garagos is looking for what lawyers sometimes call a stealth juror,
00:20:44.560 someone trying to get onto the jury with a verdict already in mind.
00:20:48.900 He gets at least two prospective jurors excused.
00:20:52.820 One had reportedly bragged during a bus trip to Reno
00:20:55.280 that the fertilizer salesman was going to get what was coming to him.
00:20:59.140 The second is more striking.
00:21:01.520 She tells Garagos and prosecutor Rick DeStasso
00:21:04.440 that she can put aside her feelings about Scott and be fair.
00:21:08.560 Garagos believes her.
00:21:10.000 So does Distasso.
00:21:11.320 There was one woman who came in,
00:21:13.780 and I remember talking to Distasso.
00:21:16.000 She said something to the effect,
00:21:18.100 you know, Mr. Garagos, yeah, I didn't think I could be fair,
00:21:21.080 but then I talked to my dad, and my dad said,
00:21:23.180 what if it was your brother?
00:21:24.540 And I thought, you know what?
00:21:25.940 Intellectually, I'm going to put aside
00:21:27.380 the animus I have towards Scott, your client,
00:21:30.320 and I think I can be fair.
00:21:31.880 And I remember she left, and I turned to Distasso,
00:21:34.960 and I said, we should order her back.
00:21:36.900 she's good. And the Sasa said, I thought the same thing. And I went back to the hotel afterwards.
00:21:42.980 And back then there were things called fax machines. And somebody had faxed me a chat
00:21:50.500 that she was in or some kind of a conversation. And it basically said, I really pulled one over
00:21:56.740 on that dumb shit defense lawyer. I'm going to get on. I'm going to get onto this jury and I'm
00:22:01.640 to fry his client. And we brought her back and I confronted her. She had also had a restraining
00:22:08.280 order in the same courthouse and he had never found it. So she was excused. After that, once
00:22:14.880 the jury is chosen, Garagos asks the judge to sequester them, to keep the jurors and alternates
00:22:20.840 together and away from the coverage for the duration of the trial. Quote Judge DeLuki again
00:22:26.400 when I would complain bitterly about the atmosphere around it. He would say, what do you want me to do?
00:22:31.160 put the jurors in a in a time capsule or put them in a spaceship and have them circle the
00:22:37.120 earth? And I said, no, what I want you to do is sequester this jury because the community is,
00:22:43.800 you know, in an outrage over this case. The judge says no. For the next five months,
00:22:50.120 the jurors go home each and every night into the same media environment Garagos has been warning
00:22:55.080 about since jury selection. The trial begins June 1st, 2004, in courtroom 2M in Redwood City,
00:23:03.300 California. The Peterson and Rocha families sit on opposite sides of the room. Reporters fill the
00:23:09.680 seats between them. Outside, members of the public begin lining up before dawn for a lottery system
00:23:15.620 that will decide who gets inside the courtroom that day. Prosecutor Rick DeStasso goes first.
00:23:22.660 His opening takes the full day.
00:23:25.120 Among the things he tells the jury is that Scott lied about watching Martha Stewart on TV with Lacey on Christmas Eve morning.
00:23:32.740 Scott had told police they were watching a segment about meringue.
00:23:36.400 DeStasso says the episode airing December 24th never mentioned meringue.
00:23:41.440 The next morning belongs to Mark Garagos.
00:23:44.520 He does not try to make Scott Peterson likable.
00:23:47.860 He calls his client a cad and describes some of his behavior as boorish.
00:23:53.000 Then he turns to the physical evidence.
00:23:56.060 Investigators have taken more than 100 bags of evidence from the Peterson home
00:23:59.820 and Scott's warehouse and sent it for testing.
00:24:03.260 Garagos picks up the Department of Justice lab reports and gives the jury his summary of it.
00:24:09.100 Zip. Nada. Not a thing.
00:24:12.560 No physical evidence, he argues, connects Scott Peterson to Lacey's murder.
00:24:18.540 Garagos then goes further.
00:24:20.300 He makes promises about what the defense will prove.
00:24:24.420 He will call witnesses, he says, who saw Lacey Peterson alive
00:24:28.060 and walking her dog after Scott had already left the house.
00:24:32.540 He says an expert will show that baby Connor lived beyond Christmas Eve.
00:24:37.480 And he tells the jury that Scott Peterson is not just not guilty,
00:24:42.520 that he is, quote, stone-cold innocent.
00:24:46.560 Then Garagos goes after one of the prosecution's opening day claims.
00:24:51.220 He plays the Martha Stewart tape from Christmas Eve.
00:24:54.780 So what are we going to do with all the egg white story?
00:24:57.140 Ooh, you want to make little meringues?
00:24:59.160 Oh, that would be nice.
00:25:00.540 Garagos plays the tape a second time, saying, quote,
00:25:03.580 just in case the Modesto PD couldn't hear it.
00:25:06.780 people laugh. On the second day of the trial, one of the prosecution's opening claims
00:25:12.140 that Scott killed Lacey on the evening of December 23rd and spent the next morning
00:25:18.180 moving her body takes a massive hit. Garagos gets the state's computer expert to confirm that
00:25:24.860 at 8.40 a.m. on Christmas Eve, someone logged on to the Peterson's home computer using Lacey's
00:25:31.680 password, sunflower, and searched for a sunflower umbrella stand and women's clothing. If that was
00:25:38.460 Lacey, then she was alive the morning of the 24th, and the timeline DeStasso had given the jury in
00:25:43.960 his opening could not be right. The prosecution adjusts its timeline. Garagos remembers the
00:25:50.580 moment this way. Rick DeStasso started this trial with the theory that the killing had taken place
00:25:58.340 on the 23rd, not on the day before. I mean, on the day before, not on the day she went missing.
00:26:04.220 By the time we got to closing, they abandoned that. They agreed. And he argued in closing,
00:26:11.480 it doesn't matter because I think we had definitively proved it. The cross-examination
00:26:16.460 of the forensic expert showed that she had logged in to her computer on the morning of the 24th.
00:26:25.320 Their whole search warrant affidavit that said Martha Stewart had not been on the 24th, but on the 23rd, when Scott told her that was debunked, we showed that Martha Stewart was on the 24th.
00:26:39.820 We showed that she had that Lacey, somebody had used Lacey's password.
00:26:45.960 Somebody had accessed some sunflower related, which she had a tattoo of on the morning of the 24th.
00:26:52.780 The dog was out with the muddy leash.
00:26:56.380 Garagos says it was Lacey who logged in.
00:26:58.700 The evidence establishes only that someone using her password did.
00:27:03.700 By closing, however, the prosecution is no longer committed to December 23rd as the night Lacey was killed.
00:27:11.320 Telling the jury, quote, it's very simple.
00:27:13.740 The defendant strangled or smothered Lacey Peterson the night of December 23rd or in the morning while she was getting dressed on the 24th.
00:27:22.780 I can't tell you when he did it. I can't tell you if he did it at night. I can't tell you if he did
00:27:28.400 it in the morning. I'm not going to try to convince you of something that I cannot prove.
00:27:32.780 I don't have to prove that to you. I only have to prove that he did it.
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00:28:51.400 On the 13th day of testimony, the state calls Detective Al Brocchini.
00:28:56.320 He will spend much of the next week on the stand.
00:28:59.380 While he is testifying, the jury loses one of its members.
00:29:03.120 A courthouse camera catches juror number five, Justin Falconer, speaking with Lacey's brother near the security checkpoint.
00:29:11.040 Judge DeLuke looks into it and decides the conversation was harmless.
00:29:15.280 But after the incident draws media attention,
00:29:17.820 Falconer admits that he discussed the coverage with his girlfriend,
00:29:21.780 despite the judge's orders to stay away from the news and not discuss the case.
00:29:26.180 Two days later, DeLuke removes him from the jury.
00:29:29.740 Falconer walks out of the courthouse and directly into the arms of reporters.
00:29:33.280 They ask him the question everyone wants answered.
00:29:36.660 After what he has heard so far, does he think Scott Peterson is guilty?
00:29:40.700 Well, the prosecution hasn't given me any reason to believe that he is.
00:29:43.060 All the prosecution witnesses have pretty much been just as good a witness for the defense as they were for the prosecution,
00:29:49.280 if not in some cases better, for the defense.
00:29:51.760 And I haven't heard any testimony whatsoever that would lead me to believe that he was guilty.
00:29:56.160 Asked how he would vote if he had to decide the case that day, Falconer says not guilty.
00:30:01.920 So far, Garagos isn't doing too badly.
00:30:04.940 Garagos, meanwhile, has been fighting over discovery almost from the day he took over the Peterson case,
00:30:10.960 arguing that prosecutors are consistently turning over evidence late or only after repeated requests.
00:30:17.420 And he is convincing the judge.
00:30:20.100 I will tell you that I think in real time, not now, but in real time, I knew the facts better than anybody.
00:30:27.720 I knew the discovery better than anybody.
00:30:29.800 It's one of the reasons during that trial, we had not one, not two, three separate recesses, and the late, great Al DeLuki, who was the judge, had excoriated the prosecution for their discovery compliance, for not turning over discovery, for not following up on exculpatory leads.
00:30:52.160 And I was bellyaching about that every single day, making motions for mistrials, the whole bit.
00:31:00.820 Journalist Catherine Cryer covered the trial from inside the courtroom and writes that Judge DeLuki took to chastising prosecutors in open court about discovery issues.
00:31:11.520 But while Garagos may be scoring points, there are facts that will prove insurmountable for him.
00:31:17.820 Let me ask you my the things that convinced me he did it. The tapes with Amber are bad for sure.
00:31:26.660 Right. I accept your I accept that there is an explanation for them.
00:31:31.280 There is a version of him doing that stuff with Amber that doesn't have Scott as a murderer.
00:31:35.520 However, the fact that he bought that boat after the affair began, he did not tell anybody that he bought that boat.
00:31:43.120 He went out fishing on Christmas Eve.
00:31:47.420 He went out fishing on Christmas Eve.
00:31:49.620 I feel like I'm in the gym right now.
00:31:51.440 He places himself at the scene.
00:31:52.560 Wait, I didn't interrupt you.
00:31:55.440 He places himself at the scene where the bodies wash up.
00:32:00.340 And on top of that, Lacey's body washes up without her head, her arms, or the lower legs.
00:32:08.300 And he clearly, the killer, clearly weighted the body down in an effort to keep it at the bottom of the sea.
00:32:14.460 And sure enough, they found what looked like the molds for four concrete anchors.
00:32:20.660 His boat had some concrete remnants on the inside of it.
00:32:24.280 And it matched the little picture that the detectives found on that boat perfectly.
00:32:30.040 And yet those anchors were never found.
00:32:32.560 And to me, that is absolutely devastating for Scott Peterson.
00:32:37.040 Okay.
00:32:37.680 So like I said, I feel like I'm in the gym.
00:32:40.600 Number one, what was your first point?
00:32:43.060 Because that was the one where you-
00:32:45.540 He bought this boat after the affair began
00:32:47.480 and didn't tell anybody.
00:32:48.400 Which she didn't know about, right.
00:32:50.140 During the trial, they put on the lead detective,
00:32:53.400 Al Brocchini, guess what?
00:32:55.240 And mind you, I had spent one week
00:32:57.900 doing mitochondrial in California at the time.
00:33:01.280 It shows you how long ago this was.
00:33:02.660 mitochondrial dna was not admissible in california in order to have the the prosecution be able to
00:33:10.260 introduce mitochondrial dna which is dna that is linked to the maternal lineage and they had a hair
00:33:17.680 and they wanted to show that the hair was in the boat so aha lacy was in the boat lacy didn't know
00:33:23.540 about the boat your your kind of aha moment well guess what happened during the cross-examination
00:33:29.140 of Al Brokini. I had, they didn't realize Al Brokini had whited out a paragraph in his report.
00:33:36.780 I had him produce the original report. What he had whited out was Al Brokini himself had interviewed
00:33:45.020 a witness at the warehouse who saw Lacey in the boat, actually saw her in the boat. He had whited
00:33:52.220 it out. So I spent a week contesting mitochondrial DNA so that we could get it admitted when all
00:34:00.580 along Modesto PD knew that she was in the boat and they had a witness who was at the warehouse.
00:34:06.240 Stop there because what Mark just said leaves out an important part of what happened.
00:34:11.420 The witness is a woman named Peggy O'Donnell, who runs a business a few doors down from Scott
00:34:16.460 in the same warehouse complex. Peggy tells police that Lacey had come by the warehouse complex
00:34:22.580 and asked to use her bathroom a few days before she disappeared. This happens on either December
00:34:28.560 20th or December 23rd. Peggy isn't sure which date. If true, that places Lacey at the warehouse
00:34:35.920 complex, not in Scott's boat. But Garagos is right about one important part of this.
00:34:43.280 Burkini had removed witness information about Peggy O'Donnell from his report.
00:34:49.300 One sentence has been removed.
00:34:51.460 It is about O'Donnell's claim that Lacey visited the warehouse complex on either December 20th or December 23rd and asked to use O'Donnell's bathroom.
00:35:01.780 On cross-examination, Garagos produces a page of Brokini's notes, which include a line that reads, quote,
00:35:09.740 Lacey used restroom on 12-23, Peggy, end quote.
00:35:15.460 Garagos then asks the detective, can you tell me how that particular piece of information got excised out of your police report?
00:35:23.740 I excised it, Brokini answers.
00:35:26.300 You did it? Yes, I did.
00:35:28.860 The reaction in the courtroom is immediate.
00:35:31.780 Garagos asks the judge whether they might stop for the weekend and let that exchange sit with
00:35:37.260 the jury for three days. But Burkini has an explanation, and after the weekend, the jury
00:35:43.580 hears it. Prosecutors ask him about the missing sentence, and Burkini says the information had
00:35:49.360 not disappeared from the case, that another detective named Dennis Holmes included Peggy's
00:35:55.580 account in his report from that day, and that unlike Bruckini, Holmes had interviewed Peggy
00:36:01.620 O'Donnell directly. In 2024, Bruckini explained his reasoning to Netflix and conceded the optics
00:36:08.920 in court. What happened was on this one day, after I dictated, turn it in, now we all sit down
00:36:15.120 together and I tell all the detectives what I heard. And Detective Dennis Holmes, he said,
00:36:21.160 whoa, I interviewed Peggy. So he could testify to what Peggy said. Mine was through the grapevine.
00:36:30.120 And so I deleted that sentence because it was in his report. Could look wrong to the jury. It could
00:36:36.860 look wrong to the, you know, roaches. Burkini's explanation does not end the argument. Garagos
00:36:42.640 still sees the missing sentence as part of a larger pattern. Evidence, he says, was mishandled,
00:36:47.820 minimized or disclosed too late but when i pressed him on what that evidence actually proved
00:36:54.020 the argument quickly moved back to the boat he whited it out because another detective
00:37:00.000 put it in his report and had interviewed this person how we found it and he whited it out
00:37:05.600 so it wouldn't be wouldn't get to the defense but it was in the public record because another cop
00:37:10.500 put it in his report that's how we found that's how we found it he had yes so i mean how is it
00:37:15.420 nefarious for brockini to have taken it out when he understood his report was hearsay but he had
00:37:19.620 the actual cop who had interviewed the woman because he was doing it in an affidavit he was
00:37:25.020 doing it in the affidavit to be presented to the judge and he had whited it out okay and the other
00:37:30.060 thing is there's no proof that lacy was ever in that boat and scott also said he was taking he
00:37:34.340 told investigators he was taking that boat out allegedly half the reason was so he could just
00:37:38.160 see how it how it went so we're to believe that lacy went to the warehouse she just sat in the
00:37:43.460 boat just sat there they didn't go out and hit this was it's test run by the way she the it's
00:37:49.140 funny you say that and i'm glad you do she got in the boat and she did exactly what the jurors did
00:37:54.660 do you know what the jurors did during deliberation they had we had the boat it was in the courthouse
00:38:00.040 the jurors went down they wanted to see the boat day three or day four of deliberation
00:38:04.340 they actually got in the boat and started doing what lacy did to see about his buoyancy i turned
00:38:09.700 to deluki and i said okay do you remember when i did a demonstration i actually and it's somewhere
00:38:16.080 somebody put it in the internet because it was an exhibit i put this poor kid who worked for me
00:38:21.440 in the boat i gave him a dummy that weighed approximately what lacy did and i tried to have
00:38:27.840 him re reenact what actually happened he sunk every time unfortunately for rafi who was the
00:38:34.320 guy in the boat he didn't swim and i had to save him each time but that judge would not allow that
00:38:40.440 into evidence that was one of the first things the jurors wanted to do was get in and test the
00:38:45.340 buoyancy of the boat number two before you go off on where's your witness who said she saw lacy get
00:38:52.000 in the boat did she testify i know she did not testify they admitted that they were wrong during
00:38:57.900 the trial the witness did that came into evidence that's what i'm saying if this did you call the
00:39:04.100 witness no why didn't you call the witness to testify to that he admitted that yes she had
00:39:09.740 been in the boat and he had whited it out i didn't need it at that point i thought no no no if you
00:39:15.760 had a witness who saw lacey peterson get into that boat and you felt good about that when this
00:39:19.580 you mark garagos would have called churchgate to testify trial you know it i know it and the
00:39:24.200 american people know it let me tell you what happened in this case this case started in
00:39:28.760 opening statements with them saying scott had killed lacy on the 23rd that where we are dodging
00:39:35.740 where was your witness why didn't you call the magical witness who could place lacy in the boat
00:39:40.960 because they admitted afterwards they abandoned that the same way they abandoned that she was
00:39:46.900 killed on the 23rd we would knock down every single theory and it came down really where
00:39:54.020 Why didn't you call all the witnesses who saw Lacey walking her dog after 1030 that
00:39:58.900 morning?
00:39:59.460 For the exact same reason.
00:40:01.120 The case started that she-
00:40:03.580 So much magical evidence that would have gotten your client off that just, you just decided
00:40:08.440 not to call in front of the jury because somehow it had been admitted.
00:40:11.360 It had all been admitted and the jury was just too dumb to understand it.
00:40:14.160 No, I don't think the jury was dumb.
00:40:16.600 I really don't.
00:40:17.440 I don't think it was a dumb jury.
00:40:20.280 I think that the jurors did what the community wanted, which was to convict, because at the end of the day, there wasn't a coherent theory.
00:40:30.320 I would give you another example.
00:40:31.660 How about Scott's four little anchors?
00:40:33.820 OK, they never found the anchors.
00:40:36.660 The most I know because they're at the bottom of the sea holding down Lacey's arms and her head.
00:40:41.460 OK, now when you say bottom of the sea, you're conveying to people that somehow this is a very deep area.
00:40:49.140 You realize that the bay that was searched, that on low tide, they found they not only had sonar subs, they not only had all kinds of searches out there, they found Snapple bottles, they found boots, they found tires, they found everything in the world.
00:41:08.460 They did not find anchors, they did not find Lacey, they did not find Connor.
00:41:12.700 The reason for that is because they weren't there.
00:41:15.080 And yet we know they were in there.
00:41:16.100 No, it was after a large storm.
00:41:18.060 Because the real killer dumped the bodies.
00:41:19.940 I don't know.
00:41:20.720 Is that your theory?
00:41:21.660 No.
00:41:21.920 My theory is that wherever they were, they were washed up into that area by the storm.
00:41:29.040 The jury never sees Garagos' boat demonstration.
00:41:33.140 Instead, prosecutors call a commercial fisherman and ask whether a 153-pound fish weighted
00:41:39.920 with four 10-pound weights could be pushed over the side of a 14-foot aluminum boat without
00:41:45.620 capsizing it.
00:41:46.560 Without hesitation, his answer is yes.
00:41:51.140 Juror John Guinasso later called the fisherman the star witness of the trial.
00:41:57.120 Then Garagos catches Burkini in another error.
00:42:01.000 Burkini tells the jury about a tip from Miguel Espadilla, one of Scott's former college classmates.
00:42:07.440 Miguel had said that years earlier, in 1995, Scott had talked hypothetically about how someone might dispose of a body.
00:42:16.560 cover the head, weight the body down, and put it in salt water,
00:42:21.340 where the water and marine life would eventually destroy the evidence.
00:42:25.100 From the witness stand, Burkini adds another detail.
00:42:29.020 He says Scott had talked about wrapping the head in duct tape.
00:42:32.940 That matters because there was duct tape on Lacey Peterson's remains when she came ashore.
00:42:38.800 Garagos goes back to the original tip report.
00:42:42.320 Espedia never mentions duct tape.
00:42:45.880 Burkini acknowledges that he supplied that detail,
00:42:49.200 the duct tape, from memory, and that he got it wrong.
00:42:52.620 He has not reviewed the original police report on the tip in months,
00:42:56.460 so the alleged conversation about the duct tape did not happen.
00:43:01.120 But Scott, fantasizing about disposing of a body at sea, did,
00:43:05.300 or so the jury hears.
00:43:07.580 Garagos moves to have the case dismissed,
00:43:09.460 and Judge DeLuki denies the motion.
00:43:13.120 But what about the hair?
00:43:14.880 Police reports log a single hair collected as evidence from the nose of those pliers in the
00:43:21.380 boat. But by the time the envelope was examined, two hairs turned up inside. Garagos grills the
00:43:28.520 detective over the exact number of hairs found at Scott's warehouse in the boat. Prosecutors
00:43:33.460 claim the single hair broke in half in the envelope. But Garagos says that theory is made
00:43:38.780 up, and that it was made up after the defense began asking tough questions. One hair went in,
00:43:45.220 Bruckini says, and two hairs came out. Is this a magic envelope? Asks Garagos.
00:43:52.020 FBI analyst Constance Fisher testifies about the hair during the trial. Fisher estimates that
00:43:58.480 one in 112 people in Modesto share the same profile as the hair found in Scott Peterson's
00:44:04.920 boat, less than 1%. The defense calls Dr. William Shields, who challenges that figure. Shields says
00:44:12.900 the DNA could be as common as one in nine people in Modesto, and points out the size of the FBI
00:44:18.580 database and the error rate for mitochondrial DNA testing. Both experts agree that the DNA proves
00:44:25.400 the hair from the pliers is not from Scott Peterson, but that it could be from Lacey.
00:44:31.000 The trial moves on into August. On August 10th, 2004, Amber Fry walks into courtroom 2M.
00:44:40.460 Years later, she described that moment to A&E.
00:44:43.940 I remember the doors opened. You could hear a pin drop. It was so quiet.
00:44:50.280 You could hear everybody's body shifting as I'm walking in.
00:44:54.780 But the most important evidence Amber brings into the courtroom is not what she says from the witness stand.
00:45:00.280 It is what Scott said to her on those secret tapes.
00:45:04.980 Scott Peterson never testifies.
00:45:08.260 But for days, the jury hears his voice through Amber's undercover recordings,
00:45:13.340 following along on printed transcripts as the calls are played in court.
00:45:18.480 Defense co-counsel Pat Harris had seen this problem coming while reviewing Discovery.
00:45:23.540 He later tells A&E that he believed those tapes alone could sink the entire defense.
00:45:29.480 Then we got the actual tapes.
00:45:31.620 I started listening to the tapes.
00:45:33.780 And after I'd finished, I went into Mark's office and I said, we're screwed.
00:45:38.780 Because when you hear them, it's a whole different thing.
00:45:42.020 Because Scott is on the phone with Amber and you hear giggling and you hear sort of the tones of voice.
00:45:48.760 And it changes the whole dynamic.
00:45:51.480 Take New Year's Eve, for example.
00:45:54.000 Three blocks from Scott and Lacey's home,
00:45:56.140 roughly 1,000 people gather for a candlelight vigil for Lacey.
00:46:00.840 Tears are shed for the missing mother and child.
00:46:03.960 And Scott is on the phone with Amber.
00:46:07.040 I'm like, you're the Apple Tower.
00:46:09.540 We are celebrating, this is unreal.
00:46:11.580 For juror number one, Greg Baratlas,
00:46:13.840 those calls would be a turning point.
00:46:17.040 Years later, he explained why to A&E.
00:46:20.340 When I started to think that Scott was guilty
00:46:24.240 was when Amber Fry came.
00:46:28.120 To hear the tapes, he saw that it wasn't hard for him to lie.
00:46:32.240 He was trying to have both a wife disappeared
00:46:36.320 and he's trying to find her, supposedly,
00:46:38.400 and at the same time, he's still trying to lead Amber Fry on.
00:46:43.020 Seven court days later, on August 23rd,
00:46:45.400 23rd, Garagos begins his cross-examination of Amber Frye. Go ahead, Mr. Garagos, Judge DeLuki
00:46:53.040 tells him. No questions, Your Honor. The courtroom gasps. What? DeLuki says. Just kidding, Garagos
00:47:01.140 says, trying to lighten it up a little. There is laughter in the courtroom. Outside, afterward,
00:47:07.580 Sharon Rocha tells reporters she sees nothing funny about the murder of her daughter, Lacey.
00:47:12.600 The defense begins its case on October 18th, 20 weeks into the trial.
00:47:19.480 Garagos builds his argument, and on the 21st, he produces one of the witnesses he promised the jury,
00:47:25.620 an expert who he says will prove that baby Connor was alive on Christmas Eve and beyond.
00:47:33.200 Dr. Charles March, a fertility specialist, dates Connor's death to December 29th.
00:47:39.200 That would mean Connor and Lacey were alive five days after Christmas Eve, which would blow apart the prosecution's timeline.
00:47:47.800 Then Prosecutor Dave Harris gets up.
00:47:50.560 Dr. March's date depended on an assumption.
00:47:54.060 He had assumed Lacey took a pregnancy test on June 9th, 2002, because she had not announced her pregnancy at a friend's baby shower the day before that.
00:48:05.540 His reasoning out loud on the stand is that women talk.
00:48:10.480 Of course, sometimes they don't talk about things like their own pregnancy
00:48:14.260 at another woman's baby shower where one's friend is supposed to be the center of attention.
00:48:20.040 He concedes he has done no testing himself
00:48:22.640 and that the state's expert, Dr. Gregory DeVore, is better qualified to read the ultrasound.
00:48:29.460 Dr. DeVore estimated that Conner died on either December 23rd or 24th,
00:48:34.460 with a few days' margin of error on either side.
00:48:37.160 He mapped the measurements from Lacey's first and second trimester ultrasounds forward,
00:48:43.040 and then compared them to Conner's size when he was found.
00:48:46.820 Garagos attacked his methodology on cross,
00:48:49.400 but for prosecutors, DeVore's testimony is enormously important.
00:48:54.320 The state had already called forensic anthropologist Dr. Allison Galloway.
00:48:59.560 Based on measurements of Conner's remains,
00:49:01.700 she could only put his age at somewhere between 33 and 38 weeks in the womb,
00:49:07.500 too broad to pinpoint a particular date of death.
00:49:11.540 DeVore gives them a calculation that points directly at the day Lacey disappeared.
00:49:16.680 And the jury listens.
00:49:19.420 DeVore's testimony would later be described as one of the most persuasive pieces of scientific evidence in the state's case.
00:49:26.440 That leaves Garagos' promise about the eyewitnesses.
00:49:31.200 Garagos' own investigator, Matt Dalton, found six people who said they saw Lacey walking that morning
00:49:37.700 and later than the time Scott allegedly left with her body in his truck.
00:49:43.500 Garagos promised them to the jury in his opening statement.
00:49:47.100 He calls none of them.
00:49:49.240 Matt Dalton, the investigator who found those witnesses and interviewed every one of them,
00:49:53.380 still says he does not know why Garagos never called them.
00:49:57.200 The defense calls a total of 14 witnesses.
00:50:01.300 Five of them are police officers, and through them,
00:50:04.600 Garagos does elicit testimony repeating what the uncalled eyewitnesses claimed they had seen.
00:50:11.240 The judge tells the jury to only consider the officers' actions in response to those reports, however,
00:50:17.760 not the actual sightings themselves.
00:50:20.120 In other words, these testimonials were hearsay, as told by the officers,
00:50:24.980 and could not be considered for the truth of what the eyewitnesses actually said.
00:50:30.620 For that, you would need to call the witnesses, but Garagos did not.
00:50:36.540 Three of the defense witnesses are subject matter experts,
00:50:39.920 one in cement, one in finance, and one in dog tracking.
00:50:44.720 Garagos also calls Scott Peterson's parents to the stand.
00:50:48.700 When police arrested Scott 30 miles north of the border,
00:50:51.680 they found nearly $15,000 in cash in his car.
00:50:56.080 His mother, Jackie Peterson, tells the jury the money came from her.
00:51:00.280 Ten days before the arrest, she had been arranging to buy Scott's truck
00:51:04.700 to give to his brother, she says,
00:51:07.300 and in the process, she accidentally withdrew $10,000 from an account belonging to Scott.
00:51:14.140 She gave him extra cash to make up for the mistake.
00:51:18.560 Journalist Catherine Cryer, watching from the courtroom,
00:51:21.300 wrote that the explanation sounded illogical, bordering on the absurd.
00:51:27.180 Lee Peterson had been called by the prosecution earlier in the trial,
00:51:31.000 told the jury, Scott's the fisherman, he says, I'm more the golfer.
00:51:35.660 Under Garogos' questioning, Lee Peterson confirmed Scott was staying in San Diego
00:51:41.140 the week he was arrested, not far from a golf course where his father had an 8 a.m. tea time.
00:51:47.800 Eight days into its case, on October 26, 2004, the defense rests.
00:51:54.240 I asked Mark for his best proof that Scott Peterson is innocent.
00:51:59.400 Not reasonable doubt, but stone-cold innocent, like he told the jury.
00:52:04.420 There's no time of death. There's no place of death. There's no manner of death.
00:52:09.680 You say, obviously, the body was held under.
00:52:12.960 And it's a I you know, you gave a kind of a synopsis of what the prosecution was.
00:52:18.480 Take any single one of those. The body was held underwater.
00:52:21.740 That's not what the pathologist testified.
00:52:25.220 The prosecution witness was that the body was not underwater, that the condition of the body.
00:52:30.920 And I was at the autopsy. And it's without getting grotesque.
00:52:35.240 I will tell you that there is no way that body was underwater and no scientist nor no prosecution witness.
00:52:42.680 ever said that that body was held underwater it could not have been held underwater because of
00:52:48.340 the condition that the body was in so that debunks that in terms of going fishing on that day up until
00:52:55.480 the cross-examination of ron gransky who was married to sharon up until trial itself it was
00:53:04.580 never disclosed that guess where ron gransky was on the day before christmas at the exact same time
00:53:11.100 scott was fishing he too was fishing so us bi-coastal elites may not go fishing on christmas
00:53:18.600 eve but if you're a fisherman and so was scott scott wanted to be scott was there he's you
00:53:25.420 he wanted to be he wanted to be started that desire on the day he murdered his wife really
00:53:30.320 wanted to get out there we'll get to whether the body was underwater in one minute but first
00:53:35.480 a response to Garagos's theory of the case. You and I both know that burglars who get spotted
00:53:42.680 by a neighborhood pregnant lady are not known for, let's abduct the pregnant lady. Let's kill
00:53:49.600 the pregnant lady. Let's hold the body and wait, and then we'll dump it in the bay when we find
00:53:53.220 out that the husband took the boat out. They leave. If they're going to do anything to the
00:53:57.180 eyewitness, they're going to hurt her and move on. The notion that these guys came to rob,
00:54:01.940 Got spotted by the pregnant lady, captured the pregnant lady, held the pregnant lady, did something with the pregnant lady, then killed the pregnant lady, then held the bodies, then made sure the bodies would wash up, as opposed to the guy who was married to the pregnant lady, who is the most likely to kill her on the face of the earth.
00:54:19.160 That is when a woman is most vulnerable to domestic violence when she's pregnant with a baby who's having an affair, who's already told the affair partner that his wife has been lost, that he's lost his wife, who's bought a boat without telegraphing it to the family, who goes out, tells a neighbor he was golfing, tells other people he was fishing, produces the receipt that he actually was at the bay where the bodies would ultimately wind up and magically has four anchors that he produced that we can't find.
00:54:46.880 and this body has been held down underwater by something heavy.
00:54:50.540 The two scenarios, it's so clear if you're not representing Scott Peterson.
00:54:55.640 The forensic pathologist who examined Lacey's body did testify
00:54:59.880 that it had been in the water for, quote, months.
00:55:03.420 His name is Dr. Brian Peterson, no relation to the defendant.
00:55:07.320 Dr. Peterson also testifies that there were no tool marks on Lacey's joints.
00:55:13.240 Dr. Galloway, the forensic anthropologist, examined Lacey's body as well.
00:55:18.180 She offers a more specific timeline in court, three to six months in the water.
00:55:25.380 Galloway found barnacles on one of Lacey's exposed bones.
00:55:30.100 Galloway testifies that decomposition alone could explain how Lacey's limbs separated from her body.
00:55:36.840 She found no evidence to the contrary.
00:55:39.840 According to Catherine Cryer, the medical examiner who performed Lacey's sealed autopsy
00:55:45.000 suggests the limbs were either cut with surgical precision
00:55:49.060 or they were weighted down and pulled apart by the currents of the bay.
00:55:54.920 Prosecutor Dave Harris asks pathologist Dr. Peterson about the weights directly on the stand.
00:56:01.620 Dr. Peterson says either natural decomposition or weights on the limbs
00:56:06.200 could explain how Lacey's body came apart.
00:56:08.880 Her remains were consistent with both explanations.
00:56:13.480 Finally, Dr. Peterson confirms that Lacey's body showed no evidence of a vaginal birth.
00:56:19.660 There was a rip in her abdominal wall big enough that Connor's body could have passed through.
00:56:25.320 This can happen when a mother dies as gases build up and eventually burst through her body in what is known as a coffin birth.
00:56:34.020 No cause of death for Lacey Peterson is ever firmly established.
00:56:38.880 Despite the Garagos charm and lovable swagger about this case, he does have one big regret, and I asked him about it.
00:56:47.800 Okay, let me ask you this. At this point in time, because there is still a contingent trying to find a way to get Scott Peterson a new trial, if he got one and you were to handle it, what would you do differently?
00:57:03.080 Well, number one, the biggest mistake I made is it wasn't televised.
00:57:06.720 if it had been televised that we wouldn't have the urban legends of what the case involved.
00:57:14.500 The people who weren't in the courtroom would tell you that this case fell apart during the
00:57:23.500 entire time. What didn't fall apart was the hatred, the animus, and this idea that he was a bad,
00:57:33.580 bad man that needed to be punished. That did not fade away. But if you had seen the evidence in
00:57:39.980 real time, and there was over 100 witnesses, and when the kind of cherry picking of what
00:57:46.440 the urban legends are were debunked in real time by what actually happened in the courtroom. So
00:57:53.280 the first thing I would suggest to whoever retries this case is you have to have a camera in the
00:58:01.500 courtroom. Judge DeLuki had barred cameras from the courtroom. So for five months, anyone who
00:58:07.300 wanted to see the trial Garagos believed he was winning had to be in the room. The only way in
00:58:13.600 was as a juror, an alternate, a reporter, or one of the lucky few who won a public seat in the
00:58:18.880 morning lottery. On November 1st and 2nd, 2004, both sides give their closing arguments. On the
00:58:26.800 third, a jury of 12 people, goes behind a closed door to decide Scott Peterson's fate. And the
00:58:33.520 drama in that jury room will become yet another twist in this case. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is
00:58:41.300 MK Confidential.