REDWOOD CITY — Scott Peterson’s lawyers are again searching for evidence that someone else killed his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son 22 years ago and insist prosecutors are refusing to hand over at least 645 pieces of it.
In a Redwood City courtroom Monday, lawyers for the Los Angeles Innocence Project that recently took up the case said there was a “mountain” of evidence that “appears to be missing either because it was never investigated or it was suppressed or has gone missing.”
It’s an assertion that prosecutors from Stanislaus County, where Laci disappeared from her Modesto home, say is nothing more than a “fishing expedition” based on rumor and speculation. Most of the evidence the defense is requesting, they say, already was presented at trial and discounted by the jury that convicted him of murder.
Peterson, now 51, appeared remotely on a courtroom screen from the Mule Creek State Prison northeast of Stockton, wearing a blue prison shirt and occasionally donning reading glasses.
Stanislaus County Deputy District Attorney Birgit Fladager, who helped try the original case against Peterson in 2004, read a letter in court Monday from Laci’s mother, Sharon Rocha. In it, Rocha said the repeated efforts by the defense to overturn Peterson’s conviction felt like “ripping the scab from the wound.”
“Laci was murdered by the man she loved with all her heart, the man she trusted to love and protect her, Scott Peterson,” Rocha said in the statement. “I believe this is not about proving his innocence but, instead, his relentless pursuit of freedom from prison.”
San Mateo Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Hill said she would rule later on whether prosecutors should turn over evidence. The original trial was moved from Modesto to Redwood City because of pretrial publicity.
The Peterson case has been the subject of endless fascination since the substitute teacher with a bright smile disappeared from their Modesto home sometime the morning of Christmas Eve 2002. After a storm churned up the San Francisco Bay four months later, mother and son washed up separately along the Richmond shoreline, close to where Peterson said he was fishing the day she disappeared.
In a trial that attracted international attention, the jury convicted him of first degree murder and sentenced him to death, convinced that Peterson would rather kill his wife than leave her while having an affair with a Fresno massage therapist. Before Laci disappeared, he had told his mistress Amber Frey that he had already “lost” his wife and would be spending his first Christmas without her.
With the help of devoted relatives and defense lawyers, Peterson, a Cal Poly graduate who sold fertilizer for a living, has been appealing his conviction ever since. The California Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 2020, finding that jurors who said they were personally opposed to the death penalty but could impose it if warranted were improperly excluded from the jury. Since then, his family has been trying to have his conviction overturned as well and force a new trial.
In May, a key attempt by the defense to prove someone else killed Laci failed when Judge Hill ruled against their effort to re-test a mattress found in the back of a burned van. Defense lawyers had hoped a lab would find Laci’s DNA, which would suggest that Laci was kidnapped by someone robbing the house across the street from her home. The mattress had already been tested several times before, however, and no human DNA ever was found.
In court on Monday, Innocence Project lawyer Paula Mitchell returned to the subject of the burglary at the Medina house, which they believe occurred the same morning Laci disappeared. Prosecutors say it happened two days later and they have alibis from the burglars. But Mitchell insisted she doesn’t have all the evidence from prosecutors to put that to rest. It’s some of more than 645 pieces of evidence, listed in a 25-page report, she is seeking.
“All evidence related to that burglary and who committed it should have been given to the defense,” Mitchell said.
She also wants evidence about a Croton watched pawned at a Modesto pawn shop they believe could have been Laci’s, witness statements from neighbors who say they saw Laci walking her dog that morning, and evidence from hound dogs who smelled Laci’s scent from Peterson’s warehouse where he picked up his fishing boat and at the Berkeley Marina where he launched.
Stanislaus Deputy District Attorney Ahnna Reicks said in court that the defense over the years has received all of that evidence and suggested it was defense lawyers who lost it.
“If something is lost, yes, we will help provide it,” Reicks said. “The problem is you’ve accused the people of suppressing and withholding evidence so many times, we need to show we’ve never suppressed” evidence.
None of it, they say, will help Laci’s family overcome their grief.
“This is not justice for Laci and Conner,” Laci’s mother said in her letter. “He is guilty of murdering them. When will this end?”
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