PCT: The Murders of Laci & Connor Peterson

[Music] good evening everybody i'm jesse webber and welcome to prime crime tonight this is where we do a deeper dive into the most high profile and memorable true crime cases tonight one of the biggest stories of the last 20 years december 24 2002 modesto california ron gransky calls 9-1-1 to report that his step-daughter has disappeared her name is lacey peterson the case of this missing woman took the nation by storm with a massive search expanding to southern california family and friends of lacey would plead for her safe return whoever has her please please please let

her go bring her back we love her so much we want her back please but the focus and suspicions would soon turn to lacy's husband scott peterson scott sat down with police and explained the morning's events we were watching her favorite show martha stewart watch a little bit of that he said when he returned home from a fishing trip at berkeley marina his pregnant wife was gone authorities would conduct a search of the peterson home however the public and especially those closest to lacey questioned scott's seemingly casual and strange behavior and felt he might be

holding back did you murder your wife no no i just thought and i had absolutely nothing to do with her disappearance about a month after lacey's disappearance a woman named amber frye comes forward and says she unknowingly was having an affair with scott little did he know that fry had been working with police and recording their phone calls on april 14 2003 the bodies of lacey peterson and her unborn son connor were found washed up ashore in richmond california four days later fearing he may flee the country police arrest scott peterson near the mexican border

he's sporting newly dyed hair a beard carrying ten thousand dollars in cash and a passport peterson would ultimately be charged with two counts of murder the trial of scott peterson began on june 1st 2004 lasting five months and with over 170 witnesses taking the stand the trial was a media frenzy that's still talked about to this day in terms of just the trial itself it was an absolute circus prosecutors allege that peterson killed lacey on or around christmas eve transported her body in his boat and tossed her into the san francisco bay the bodies are

found right in the bay where he was fishing that day the state though couldn't identify how or where lacey was killed and they didn't even have a murder weapon the jury though convicted peterson of murdering lacey and connor and he would be sentenced to death yet after years of fighting through appeals on august 24 2020 the california supreme court reversed peterson's death sentence for a possible retrial on the penalty while peterson's convictions remain intact supporters say they have proof exonerating him all scott's activities on december 24th are accounted for in a case defined by circumstantial

evidence there are those who still ask what exactly happened to lacy [Music] let's start with the moment that sparked everything the search the theories the whole case ron gransky's 9-1-1 phone call my son-in-law called he was playing golf morning 9 30. my daughter's been listening to this morning she's eight months pregnant she took her dog for a walk in the heart the dog came always just believed but scott hadn't actually gone golfing that day lacey's sister and mother would testify that he told them he was planning on playing golf when in reality he went fishing

also when he went out from berkeley marina he called his father and didn't tell him he was out on the water in fact his dad didn't even didn't even know that scott owned a boat so it raises questions if he was lying about what he was up to but scott never concealed the fact that he went fishing he was always consistent about that whether he was talking to police or his family just said it was too cold for golf and he switched plans all right maybe it was a misunderstanding maybe it was misinformation the problem

for scott peterson was that the things he said or didn't say and generally his overall behavior during the investigation wound up hurting him for instance let's take a look at when scott sat down with detective albronkini from modesto pd the day after lacey went missing you guys had any problems marriage problems everything's good you've been married four years four or five so you're married in the 97 what concerns me the most is the fact that your dog came home with a leash on that bothers me i mean question yeah um what concerns me most is

doing anything i can to further progress i appreciate that and i don't want you to hold i don't want you to hold it against me i mean sometimes i hate asking him so you got to do it but i do i really do have to do it aside from him having trouble remembering when he got married which is you know not that great that kind of nonchalant casual almost aloof attitude when put when his wife is missing didn't really go over so well with people and some say that maybe he tried too hard to come

off as innocent watch what happened when he sat down with diane sawyer i think everybody sitting at home wants the answer to the same question did you murder your wife no no i just thought and i had absolutely nothing to do with her disappearance and and use the word murder and yeah i mean that is a possibility um it's not one we're ready to accept and it creeps in my mind late at night and early in the morning and during the day all we can think about is the right resolution resolutions to find her what

kind of marriage was it god i mean the first word that comes to mind is you know glorious i mean we took care of each other very well um she was amazing he was amazing so it's kind of weird that you know because lacey hasn't been found yet she hasn't been found dead that it's weird that he uses the word was but listen i got a chance to sat down with laura yaretzian and she was on scott peterson's defense team and i asked her all about this you know what people behave in all sorts of

ways when they're when they've just lost a someone close to them there's no right or wrong way of behaving and we are very quick especially law enforcement very quick in judging people if he had been crying a lot they would say oh look he's putting on the show i've seen that argument too if you're too calm and you're in shock oh see he doesn't care he's not crying i believe many of the jurors and everyone pretty much in the public was preconditioned to really convict him i've always said it scott was convicted before he stepped

foot in that courtroom for that trial i'm joined now by long crime legal analyst julie renderman and forensic death investigator from jacksonville state university joseph scott morgan julie i want to start with you i wonder if scott didn't speak to police or the media and you just looked only at the evidence would we have seen a different result for peterson look you know one never knows what the result would be we can only guess i you know i say this and i've said this to you a million times if you are the person that has

lost your wife and you are potentially the subject of an investigation let alone you're having an affair with another woman of which you're lying to that woman also the best bet is to keep your mouth shut because the problem is the minute you speak all that's going to happen is the prosecutors are going to tear apart every single word you say every move you make every smile every grimace and they're going to use it to their advantage there's nothing to be gained and there was nothing to be gained for him speaking to anyone uh in

regards to this investigation and we can't forget that at the end of the day though it seemed that scott had an answer for everything for example he spoke to cbs 13 and he said that all the injuries on his hand they were from working on farms and machinery including on the day that lacey vanished he claims that he reached into a toolbox hit cut himself and that was maybe why it appeared that there was blood in the car although that hasn't been positively identified now joseph let me turn to you other than the possibility of

his wife's hair found on a pair of pliers how could scott have killed his wife and left no physical evidence at the house the warehouse the car or the boat hey you know jesse one of the one of the threads that's run through this whole case over the years has been what what methodology was employed in order to end her life well it's very simple it's it's almost like the perfect murder because a lot of people think that this is a smothering or a suffocation therefore you're not going to have a bunch of bloodletting if

you will it won't be a totally graphic scene where there's blood spattered all over the place and this sort of thing there's not much to clean up so in the grand scheme of things this was a very simplistic methodology think about think about just for a second we're talking about a woman who is eight and a half months pregnant jesse she doesn't have the ability to defend herself and that's a really good point and that's the thing that kind of straggles people a little bit about this i mean how is it possible there's nothing there

and yet while that was the prosecution's weakness in the end it really didn't hurt them but there's a lot we do have to get to and i'll tell you what when we come back we're going to get into scott's alibi the timeline and i know what you're waiting for the recordings with his mistress amber fry we'll be back would you be willing to take a polygraph sure so what you're telling me scott is there's no you have no idea where this is scott peterson never did end up taking that polygraph but he always maintained that

he never murdered his wife lacey and their unborn son connor let's go back to his alibi for a second because he says he went to a warehouse where he stored his boat he checked his email he assembled the machine and then he went out to the marina now the evidence actually supports that story but joseph going back to you if this is the timeline it seems that he would have had to kill lacey and then put her body in his truck while he was working in the warehouse in broad daylight for everyone to see and

that's a big criticism of the prosecution's case does this make sense to you yeah it is it is very difficult for the prosecution to overcome i think probably what we're looking at also jesse is the fact that uh you know lexi's body was so badly decomposed from a forensic standpoint it's very difficult for us to you know hang a definitive timeline uh let's keep in mind all of her internal organs were essentially missing the only thing that was intact was the uterus we've also got the head and the limbs that have been for lack of

a better term dismembered from the body uh even the forensic pathologist could not make a determination as to when some of this trauma had occurred so it leaves us out there kind of hanging uh from a thread as we always have been because there's nothing definitive that we can actually hang our hat on right and look he goes out on his boat for about what he says is an hour and a half and you remember the bodies of lacey and connor are ultimately found near the area where he claims he went fishing and i want

you to listen to what he says he did the minute he came home what did you do put my clothes in the washer check out those rags threw my clothes in there were you calling for lacey or oh yeah of course but she wasn't home no assuming she's at her mom's your you put your jeans your blue t-shirt anything else in there i think that green pullover was in there too wasn't it yeah did you did you use did you start the washer yeah did you put soap okay then what uh grab some pizza from

the fridge took the box out yeah put it on the counter like it was lots of milk and jump in the shower joseph peters peterson said it was normal for someone who goes fishing to wash up nothing crazy there but others said that is incredibly suspicious your take hey listen remember what we said earlier relative to cause of death when we talk about this idea of suffocation and smothering there's no blood left behind but let's keep this in mind uh she lacy her body was missing the head and the limbs this is messy business okay

now maybe he didn't dismember her but that would be a point where uh you know this nastiness could have occurred relative to transfer of evidence onto clothing so that has to be left out there to think about you know why would you purpose to wash your clothes maybe it's just a neat guy but again that question uh you know for us has been asked but i don't know if it's sufficiently been answered and you just again look at his demeanor throughout that says he's eating pizza not a care in the world and that was probably

one of his biggest downfalls but one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the state were the wiretap phone calls between scott and his mistress amber frye who agreed to work with police and try to catch scott on the phone let's go back to new year's eve because scott was at a candlelight vigil for lacey but guess where he told amber he was thank you [Music] [Music] he eventually comes clean about the affair and says that he was lying about being a widower when he met her you deserve so much better there's no questions so

much better yeah and i deserve to understand an explanation of why you told me you lost your wife and this was the first holidays you'd spend without her that was december 9th you told me this and now all sudden your wife's missing [Applause] of course you couldn't tell me the story about your wife because it hadn't happened yet and you were hoping to resolve in january that would be resolved and you'd have a story to tell me do you think i had something to do with versus apparently how are you feeling well let's see how

can i believe that how can i believe that how could i believe anything for i am not evil like that i would hope not i am oh my god are you lying to me now and he would even tell her that lacy knew about the affair and was fine with it julie what role did amber play in scott's gill so amber i think we would describe as the epicenter of this case she comes forward i think a month after lacey goes missing and she basically quite frankly makes this case explode and we say that because

she finally gave investigators the motive they needed for why scott peterson would not want his wife in the picture anymore and everyone knows unfortunately when a person goes missing and they're married the first person you're going to look at is the husband and you know they were already looking at him i think amber just gave them you know gave such a frenzy even to the media that everyone became even more and more focused um and the word she got from him being able to establish that he not only lied um to everyone else he lied

to her about what was happening in regards to his wife being alive or dead um to me goes straight into an issue of motive yep deception and motive those are the two big things here now scott peterson's death penalty may have been overturned mostly because of there were errors in jury selection but his supporters say that his conviction should be tossed out too now scott's sister-in-law went on dr phil and she describes some of the evidence that she says proves he's innocent newly found evidence is that the mayo man came down the street between 10

35 and 10 50 the morning of december 24th the mailman signed an affidavit that said if mckenzie was in the yard or in the house he would bark at the mailman and on december 24 the mailman came by and mckenzie was not on the property basically what this means is that lacy grabbed mckenzie and went on her walk here's scott peterson's former attorney on his future and other suspects you know anything is possible we've seen many cases overturned and it all depends on what the courts decide but i'm keeping hopeful and i'm staying hopeful that

it does happen again i strongly believe just like many other on the defense team and his family that scott didn't do this and he deserves another trial so that there was a burglary across the street on the day of her disappearance and there was there was also some conversation between an inmate and his brother about accomplices involved in that burglary and having said that they saw lacy and lacy basically tried to stop them so there was talk obviously on the defense side that there's a great likelihood that they actually took they're the ones who kidnapped

lazy because she caught him red-handed julia you're listening to this idea of other evidence and i know prosecutors have to decide if they want to retry peterson on the death penalty and the supreme court has said that his convictions stand as of now but could all of this change one day could peterson ever go free you know look i'm guessing no but could he yes i mean we have not only just the issue regarding um the you know the fact that the jurors um were chosen basically only those that agreed with the death penalty which

may have an impact on their ability to be fair with regards to the guilt or non-guilt of the individual i think the second issue that came out also was the issue of publicity even though they moved the case at least once in that second jurisdiction there were so many jurors that still believed he was guilty even before they heard all the evidence and then lastly what we talk about right now in regards to other evidence it is true that if if the defense is able to establish there's other evidence that wasn't able to be shown

that would show that he is not guilty that may open the door to a possibility of him getting a new trial and julie real quick following up on that about 30 seconds you heard uh his sister-in-law mentioned this idea of that there were people who weren't interviewed that's a big deal right not necessarily um you know not every single person has to be interviewed in order for um for there not to be a new trial the question is if there's some someone that wasn't interviewed that has real evidence that will change the course of this

case right and look here's what we do know while the trial of scott peterson may have ended years ago the discussion has not and with a possible new trial this story is far from being over well that's all we have for you tonight on prime crime tonight tell you what you should give us your comments on scott peterson or in any of the other cases we've covered you can go on twitter and facebook with the hashtag primecrimetonight thank you for joining us and until next time be safe [Music] you