The Megyn Kelly Show - 20211220_scott-peterson-a-megyn-kelly-show-true-crime-speci

All Episodes

Previous Next

Plain Text

Dec. 20, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show

01:37:21

20211220_scott-peterson-a-megyn-kelly-show-true-crime-speci

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
Welcome to True Crime Christmas 00:14:10
	Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show and our true crime Christmas week here on the program.
	My guest today is John Bueller, a retired detective for the Modesto, California Police Department.
	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.
	Her name was Lacey Peterson.
	John worked with others in the Modesto PD to find Lacey and the person responsible, her husband, Scott Peterson.
	John, so great to have you here.
	Thanks for coming on.
	Yeah, thanks for the invite.
	Appreciate it.
	Okay, so let's just start for our listeners who aren't familiar with the case with the story of Scott and Lacey Peterson.
	They were living in Modesto, California.
	How long had they been married at the time she disappeared?
	Oh, right about five years.
	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.
	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?
	You say, like, oh, he tortured the neighbor's cat.
	He did, you know, when he was grown up, things like that.
	Anything like that with him?
	Gosh, Megan, nothing at all.
	I mean, this guy was.
	He was the guy you want to marry your sister or your daughter.
	I mean, there was, you just couldn't find any flaws in this guy at all from outward appearances immediately when we met him.
	But, you know, it took a while before things started to fall into place and we saw that there was another side to him.
	But from all appearances, you know, he didn't have a criminal record.
	I mean, everybody liked him.
	You know, you'd have a barbecue, you want to make sure you invite Scott there because he's going to be part of the fun.
	So he wasn't that guy who people were like, there's something creepy about him.
	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.
	Although, A lot of Lacey's friends, then once Amber came forward, and I know you want to cover that, but once she came forward, then people, when they went away from talking to him as much as they were earlier, they started bringing up facts that were a little bit inconsistent with the all American boy, but nothing really alarming.
	It's nothing that you would think of on an individual basis.
	They're all anecdotal, 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.
	And you, I mean, how long have you been a detective for?
	How long were you?
	Doing that?
	Well, I did it for 17 years.
	I was probably 12th year at that time, probably my 12th year.
	And so I assume you've seen your fair share of homicide cases?
	Yeah, when I left, I'd been involved in about 140 of them, 26 of which were mine.
	So, you know, you have those, you have missing people, you have suicides, you know, you deal with family members that are under stress, 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.
	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.
	Like this is a guy who has no emotion, no feeling or empathy for others.
	Was there ever a defendant like that?
	Yeah, I can remember a couple of them.
	One in particular, he did actually the worst crime scene I ever went into was done with a knife and a claw hand.
	No guns involved or anything like that.
	And the guy who did that murder, he truly was TV quality evil.
	He was the guy that, you know, a scriptwriter would, you know, detail out.
	Even when you looked in his eyes, they were cold.
	Like it was like there was nothing behind them.
	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.
	Yeah.
	I was talking to Mark Garrigos on the program not long ago, and, you know, he said this about virtually everybody we talked about who he had represented.
	You know, he's like, I knew him and I can get a sense for whether somebody's capable of this.
	And I just don't think he was.
	He wasn't that guy.
	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 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.
	Well, no, I don't think he would.
	And that's the reason that he would be successful when it comes to committing a crime like this, because his suspicion level really wouldn't be there.
	It's a situation where he just doesn't look like a killer, which is the thing that made him, in this case, so dangerous because Lacey had no idea that this was coming.
	But over the years, you meet a lot of these guys.
	I've got to tell you, Megan, there were a lot of guys I met that committed murder.
	And the murder aside, I kind of liked them.
	And it's really the same thing with Scott.
	He was difficult not to like because he's so charming.
	He's so engaging.
	He's so polite.
	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.
	But at the same time, that was a picture for us that painted something different than maybe he expected.
	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.
	He didn't have that the entire time we dealt with him.
	Point.
	And then, of course, he would always draw the line in his cooperation because he'd only go so far.
	He'd pull out that attorney card and he'd say, Well, I got to talk to my attorney about that.
	So we definitely saw that in some of his public interviews.
	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 you told Lacy that you were cheating on her and then you continued the affair?
	Why would you do that?
	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.
	He was like, Oh, I'm not allowed to get into that, you know, and was really like, Let's keep the focus on Lacey.
	But to me, watching that interview with the local reporter, watching the interview with Diane Sawyer, you walk away thinking he never comes close to losing his composure.
	This is a man who's used to wearing this mask.
	Yeah, I think so.
	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.
	He told us that.
	You know, this is the fit of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder.
	He wouldn't go so far as to call him a sociopath or a psychopath.
	I mean, he could, you know, but he'd label you want on anybody.
	But in this case, he just, he was just a little bit different than us.
	But if you, 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.
	It was back in the kitchen.
	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?
	And he goes back, he finds a phone, he turns it off.
	Well, that could have been Brocchini or me or Grogan calling him and saying, Hey, we got Lacey down here in Bakersfield.
	But, you know, nothing like that.
	He didn't want to take the call.
	He just wanted to continue with the interview.
	So, you know, where's the concern?
	Where's the urgency on his part?
	It just was absent, at least at that moment.
	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.
	And she did not walk away with a favorable view of her half brother, who she wrote a whole book about.
	Okay, so there they are.
	They're living sort of, they call them an all American couple.
	You know, she's got the thousand watt smile.
	He's obviously a very good looking guy.
	They get pregnant with their first baby after five years of marriage.
	They've got the golden retriever, Mackenzie.
	She's nearby her mom, who's adoring.
	And everything's, you know, coming up roses, or so it would seem.
	And then.
	December 24th, we think, well, at least December 24th is when she was called in as missing.
	He says he went to fish in the local marina with a 14 foot fishing boat he only recently bought that Lacey had never stepped foot in because that's just what he does for entertainment.
	He says some guys would go golfing.
	I like to fish, so I went fishing.
	And Lacey was going to get together a couple of food items to share with her family later.
	He says he left the house at 9 30 that morning for his fishing trip.
	And what time does he say he returned home to find No Lacey?
	Yeah, it's late afternoon.
	I'm trying to remember exactly like 3 30 or 4, something like that.
	But if you recall, his original claim that he had told everybody is that he was going to be golfing that day.
	And he told us, of course, that he changed.
	Yeah, he changed his plan to go golfing because it was too cold to golf.
	But it wasn't too cold to go out in San Francisco Bay, which is certainly not the tropics, I can tell you that.
	So, you know, a lot of little things.
	And this is the 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, you know, the luxuries, the things that we all want.
	And of course, with Scott, you're never going to get a confession.
	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.
	But in Scott's case, although everybody else we dealt with in this case was pretty easy to clear, we couldn't clear him.
	We would always be conditional about that.
	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.
	Maybe not bright red, but it's certainly a red flag.
	And then he couldn't remember what kind of bait he used.
	That's weird.
	Yeah, there was, I think he was more of a freshwater fisherman than a saltwater fisherman.
	And so he wasn't sure what lures he had.
	And I think Albrochini 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.
	So You know, the fishing trip really wasn't much of a fishing trip.
	It was more of a trip so that, yeah, you mentioned earlier that Lacey had never set foot in that boat.
	Well, she had never set foot in that boat alive.
	She certainly was in the boat after he had killed her.
	Right.
	So he, on the way home from the marina, leaves what you guys, you and your partner, believe.
	Because you and the man you just mentioned was your partner.
	You were the main two detectives on the case.
	Well, actually, there were three of us Craig Grogan and then Al Brocchini and I.
	Now, Al started the case on Christmas Eve, when he was notified about the missing.
	And he knew that I always liked overtime, but he also knew I had my kids with me on Christmas Eve.
	So he called me on Christmas Day as I was taking them over to their mom's house.
	And of course, I was all too happy to jump on some Christmas Day overtime because I didn't have anything going that day anyway.
	But yeah, Al Brocchini, when he first started talking to him, he started gathering a lot of evidence from the beginning.
	And there goes your next three years completely devoted to this case.
	So when Scott Peterson was on the way home from the marina, He left what appears to be to, you know, I've said to my audience, I believe Scott did this, so I am on your side.
	Though open minded and like bring it on if you've got evidence to prove that he didn't do it, let's see it.
	What appears to be sort of a cover your rear end voicemail to his wife, Lacey.
	And here is how that sounded.
	This is Soundbite One.
	Hey, beautiful.
	I won't be able to get to the Villa Farms to get that basket for Papa.
	I was hoping you would get this message and go on out there.
	I'll see you in a bit, sweetie.
	Love you.
	Bye.
	Not unusual for a killer to do something like that.
	Yeah, it's, and you know, I mean, for me, that was one of the first things that Brochini did when I met with him on Christmas Day.
	I met him at the office and he played that tape for me.
	And of course, the first thing I said, How long have these guys been married?
	And he said, Five years.
	And I thought, I don't know, that seems kind of flowery for, you know, somebody married for five years.
	It just, yeah, it just seems sort of, you know, I mean, just like you said, you know, to me, it was a staged call to take the focus off of him.
	And it didn't mean he did it.
	But I mean, you know this stuff and your viewers know this stuff.
	How do we start a murder investigation?
	We start at the victim and we work outward.
	And who's the first one you check when you've got a You know, deceased girl.
	Well, you're going to look at her boyfriend or her husband.
	And especially when you've got a pregnant girl that goes dead or goes missing.
	And I think they had that 2001 study where murder was the vast majority by an overwhelming margin of the cause of death for pregnant girls.
	And so, oh, yeah, it's just, I thought you saw that.
	You probably did.
	You got too much going around in your head.
	So I forgot about that.
	Or I chose to ignore it because it's disturbing.
	It's very disturbing.
	And so, you know, but like again, you go back to Scott and It's easier to work a case when you don't despise the guy that you think didn't, you know, when he's polite to you and he's not saying anything bad about your mother or anything like that.
	And so you just kind of follow the evidence and, like, this is another strike against him.
	So when Al played that tape for me, I just thought, oh, this just doesn't sound quite right.
	But I've had other guys like this before that I've dealt with where it didn't seem right.
	I remember one in particular, he had no reaction whatsoever to his wife and daughter being missing.
	And I thought, gosh, this is kind of freaky.
	But we were able to clear him right away, not only through a polygraph, but we also verified his alibi.
	And he was just a cold fish guy.
	He just had a good point.
	Well, that's a good point.
	That's something that we should keep in mind as we go through this case over the next two hours could he just be that person, you know, that sort of oddball whose affect is different from what we're used to?
	And maybe he's not a cold blooded killer.
	Maybe he's just got a weird affect.
	So I have space in my head for that possibility, but there's a lot.
	Of evidence against Scott Peterson beyond his affect.
The Polygraph Question 00:03:41
	Can I ask you this?
	One of the things that seemed so weird about the case was who kills their wife on Christmas Eve?
	You know, it was like, if you want to kill your wife, your pregnant wife, like, wouldn't you choose a quieter date?
	Like, how cruel, how sadistic, like extra sadistic beyond killing a pregnant mother of your child?
	Well, you know, that's kind of an interesting, you know, question to ask, but.
	The thing is, is whether you're killing your wife on the 4th of July or you're killing her on Christmas Eve, I mean, it's still pretty, pretty nasty stuff, you know, to do that.
	So I think in a situation like this, you can't really apply the common sense things that we operate on our day to day basis and try to put those on somebody who does something like this because you're going to be disappointed every time because we don't do those things.
	And so to try and make sense of things that don't make sense, gosh, it's just, you know, you're going to be battling frustration the whole time you're batting that around in your head.
	So, you guys get involved in the case, and one of the first things you ask Scott Peterson is, Would you take a polygraph for us?
	Right.
	Is that standard procedure?
	And do you usually receive a yes in response to that?
	Well, yeah, the polygraph.
	I love the polygraph because it does a variety of different things.
	Okay, now, of course, it's not admissible in court.
	Well, I don't care about that because I'm not using it to go into court with it.
	But the first thing you do is, What's the person's cooperation level when you say the word polygraph?
	You know, do they run like a scalded cat away from you, or do they say, Oh, absolutely, I'll take it?
	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 so we're not spending time trying to clear you.
	But when he originally said yes to the poly on Christmas Eve when Brock asked him, 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, and then we went over to Scott's house, and that's when I first met him.
	Pleasant, nonchalant, you know, he greeted us, you know, and it's like he just didn't have any concern.
	I mean, he walked away, he had something else that he had to attend to.
	And I just kind of thought, well, gosh, how come you're not asking me 90 questions?
	Why aren't you asking me, what are we going to do next?
	Are you going to get helicopters up?
	Are you going to get a boat patrol?
	I mean, whatever he wants to come up with.
	He didn't have anywhere near the same emotional urgency that Sharon had or any of Lacey's friends or family.
	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, was the senior polygraph examiner for California Department of Justice.
	And Doug Mansfield.
	And so I called him, and he usually gets calls from me because I like doing the polygraph.
	It was a pretty good tool.
	And I, you know, of course, I hate to call him on Christmas Day, but he's always good for things like this.
	And so he said, Yeah, I'll come down.
	So he came down and with the intention of, you know, putting Scott on the box.
	And then between the time that Al had asked him the night before if he'd take the polygraph, and then that afternoon when Doug came down to, you know, get him hooked up, he apparently had talked to his father and Lee had told him, No, don't take it.
	Now I'm not sure what Lee's reasons for that is, but You know, Lee's a successful businessman from San Diego.
	Great.
	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 so we can start going towards, you know, better suspects than your son.
	But it is what it is.
	He did what he did.
	And I get it.
Evidence on the Blanket 00:10:30
	I get it too.
	What?
	This is December, at this point, 25th, 2002.
	It was too cold for him to golf.
	So he went out on the cold water.
	Was the swimming pool at the Peterson house still open?
	Oh, gosh, no, you wouldn't be swimming this time of year.
	So, do you remember?
	Was it closed up?
	Well, I mean, there was water in the pool, but it's way too cold in Northern California to go swimming that time of year.
	So, yeah, he wouldn't have been swimming in there.
	And obviously, we checked the pool, no Lacey in there.
	We checked all over the house.
	Well, the reason I ask is because his half sister, I guess he had a half sister who was given up for adoption and then she came back to the family and she got to know Scott and their mother, Jackie, well.
	Another sibling, I think.
	And she would write in the book that she would ultimately publish something like 33 Reasons Why He's Guilty.
	So her conclusion is right there.
	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, her own theory was he drowned her in that swimming pool.
	Gosh, I never heard that.
	I didn't read her book.
	It's an interesting take.
	I kind of don't agree with that because he would have had to, I mean, they both would have been soaked and wet and it would have been a Gosh, that would have been a violent fight to try and drown her in the pool.
	There would have been splash and a noise.
	And the houses were close together there.
	The house to the south where his neighbor Karen lived, I mean, that's right there.
	And I think that would have potentially attracted too much attention.
	Much easier to carry out suffocation or strangulation inside the residence itself, underneath a pillow or a blanket or whatever you would choose to use.
	And hopefully that, along with the walls of the house, would blank out the noise if there was any.
	But what about Zyla's.
	Mark Garrigo's this, and I said, What, you know, why couldn't, because he's like, there were no forensics at all tying him to the murder, which I think is pretty true.
	And I said, Well, why couldn't he have just suffocated her or strangled her?
	And he said there would have been secretions.
	Which would have provided, you know, some evidence that a murder had taken place there or something bad had happened to Lacey wherever he did that.
	Well, I don't totally agree with that.
	I mean, Mark's got his take, and I know, you know, what side he's on, and I respect him.
	He's, you know, he's walked the courtroom many, many times.
	So I get that, but I see it a little bit differently.
	There was a whole ton of evidence there.
	Now, if you take a look at this case and you think in terms of what if Scott didn't know Lacey and we went and processed the house as a crime scene, we would have found a Multitude of evidence that would have linked him to the victim.
	We would have found hair.
	We would have found fibers from clothes.
	We would have found maybe lipstick on a glass, all sorts of things, fingerprints all over the house.
	And one of the things that we did, just so that everybody wouldn't think that we were one sided on this, is when we did process the house for evidence of a stranger in abduction or intrusion, and there was no forced entry, of course, we had the FBI come down from Sacramento with their evidence response team, had them independent of the SOP.
	They processed the house.
	And when they did that, of course, you know, I think there was a saying that you attorneys use evidence of absence is absence of evidence.
	And there was no evidence that anybody else had come in that house.
	So when you look at this situation, well, of course there's evidence there, but it's not the type of evidence that you would think of on a movie or something like that because they lived together.
	They were married.
	So of course you're going to have her stuff there.
	There was one spot of blood that was on the comforter that probably wouldn't have been there if Lacey was alive.
	Because Lacey was known as a fastidious housekeeper.
	That blood spot was linked to Scott, of course.
	Scott had a cut on his finger.
	I don't remember which one it was, but one of them, which could be consistent with her scratching him or something like that as he's trying to suffocate her or strangle her in bed.
	Now, whether or not she would defecate, whether or not she would urinate, I mean, I don't know.
	It just all depends on the.
	I don't think he could rule that out.
	I don't think he could rule it in.
	And I certainly wouldn't say that the absence of those two things would suggest that he couldn't have done it.
	There.
	Do you remember, John, whether the bed, for example, had fresh linens on it?
	Did it look like he had cleaned up at all?
	Well, the only thing I remember from the bed is there was an indentation on the comforter at the foot of the bed that would be consistent with a human body, Lacey size, being on the foot of the bed and then moved from there.
	And, you know, I mean, it could have been a variety of different things.
	Maybe Scott sat there or laid back or something like that.
	I mean, it doesn't mean that she was there, but it is consistent.
	And once again, You know, Megan, these cases are built on, you know, circumstantial evidence.
	And you find a couple of things and, well, that's kind of interesting.
	And then it kind of becomes suspicious when you find a few more.
	And then when you've got, you know, two dozen, now it's kind of compelling.
	And that's really how we work these cases.
	You just follow what you have, you document it, and you look at it, you know, with an eye of experience and you say, gosh, this is not looking too good for this guy.
	And it's just a little bit of a problem.
	Well, I get that.
	There's plenty of stuff that pointed the finger at him.
	But I'm just, I'm kind of stuck in the forensics.
	Like, as an amateur, have you ever, Have you ever been to a scene where somebody was strangled or suffocated?
	And would there necessarily be urination or something by the person being killed?
	Do you have any idea whether that's true?
	Not at all.
	You can't say that there's an absolute on it, that there would be anything like that.
	And that's the thing with this case.
	It's not all the murders that happen to be able to say that everybody who is strangled, everybody who is smothered is going to either defecate or urinate or something like that.
	It doesn't really mean it.
	Of course, you'll remember that there was some.
	Laundry that was done by Scott after he got back from his fishing trip.
	And if there was anything that he discovered that might have been there, or maybe if she had left anything on a blanket or a towel.
	There's no reason he couldn't have taken that with him and disposed of that with her body up there in San Francisco Bay.
	So, you know, there's a lot of things.
	I remember that he had been mopping.
	Somebody said he'd been mopping the floor area.
	And he had said something earlier that Lacey was mopping when he left.
	Well, the cleaning lady had mopped the house the day before.
	She had noticed that Lacey was very tired at the time.
	So she even doubted that Lacey went for a walk.
	But for Scott to be doing any mopping or cleaning up seemed kind of suspicious.
	And even one of Lacey's friends, Stacey Boyer, the next night, I think.
	It was the 26th.
	She had said something about Scott was doing some vacuuming around the house to take his mind off of what was going on.
	Gosh, I mean, if I'm stressing about something, the first thing I'm not going to grab is my Hoover.
	You know, I'm going to do something else.
	But, you know, that seems kind of funky.
	And then you probably also remember there was a bunched up rug and the straight path from the bedroom to the side door that goes out to the carport where his truck was backed in.
	Unusual.
	Neighbors had never seen him back the truck in before.
	Bunched up rug.
	Scott gave the explanation the dog did it or something like that.
	Okay, maybe the dog did do it.
	But also, maybe he did it when he was dragging Lacey from the bedroom out to the carport to put her in the truck and then put the patio umbrellas on top of her that were in a blue tarp so nobody would see her underneath there.
	And people saw him drag out the patio umbrellas.
	Yeah.
	And even one of the neighbors, she was walking up, I think it was a chocolate lab gal named Kristen.
	And she was eight months pregnant.
	She was walking by at the time.
	She greeted Scott that morning, said, Good morning, how are you, or something like that.
	And, you know, he just, he reacted just like Scott normally does.
	You know, nothing suspicious there, but there really would be no reason for anybody to be suspicious of him because, again, we weren't looking at somebody that looked like Charles Manson.
	We're looking at somebody that's more resembling, you know, maybe Ted Bundy or something like that.
	Yes, I've thought about him many times.
	He has a lot of the same qualities.
	I mean, he was a charmer.
	There's a reason he was very good looking, and there's a reason so many women fell for his fake charm.
	And he truly was a sociopath.
	Okay, there's so much more to go over in terms of the investigation, the huge, huge bombshell of Amber Fry.
	Who John interviewed and worked with to get all those tapes, some of which we've heard.
	So we're going to get into that next.
	She changed the entire course of the investigation.
	Stay tuned.
	We'll be right back.
	John, so we'll get back to the forensics in one second, including Scott Peterson on tape showing his injured knuckles and hand.
	But as you guys were investigating this, the biggest bombshell, I think we would both agree, is the emergence.
	Of Amber Fry, 27 year old single mom, massage therapist who had started dating him only on November 20th.
	Now, you know, again, she goes missing, Lacey does December 24th, November 20th.
	So it's not a long term affair.
	But she comes in, and can you just walk us through, like, what was that like when you first talked to her?
	And you're thinking about Scott Peterson as a suspect, but you don't have him yet.
	So when you met with her for the first time, what was that like?
	Well, 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 that suggested that he was anything less than perfect.
	I mean, he just, you know, there was just no stain on this guy whatsoever.
	And we almost kind of lost Amber originally because her original call came in and she had volunteered to give the call taker 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.
	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.
	And then Amber was frustrated.
	She said, Well, I'm not looking for his.
	I got The date of birth of the guy I'm dating, if it matches up with the guy you're looking at, then I probably got information for your detectives.
	And so, anyway, she finally hung up in frustration.
	But the next day, she calls in.
	Yeah, you're lucky she was persistent.
	She calls in and Al Brocchini, he's standing at the clerk's desk that is right next to my desk as the clerk is taking Amber's call and she's typing it into the data bank thing that she had on her desk there.
	And Al's reading this as she's typing.
	And then Al says, Is she on the phone right now?
	And then Bev said, Yeah, she is.
Frustrated Caller Details 00:03:38
	And so, of course, Al grabs the phone and he starts talking to her and he gets some details and he goes, This is pretty cool.
	So he says, We'll be right down.
	So he hangs up and he grabs me.
	We go into the sergeant's office and We just said, hey, you know, this is what we've got.
	And he just says, go, don't tell anybody, just go.
	So, Fresno's, you know, 100 miles south.
	So, we drive down there, record time, no lights and siren.
	And we get there, and Amber's there with the friend that originally introduced her to Scott.
	And so, we interviewed both of them separately, and we got enormous detail from the friend about Scott's behavior at these conventions.
	I guess there was a convention in Anaheim that they had gone to.
	And he, of course, was representing himself as being single.
	And then this Sean decided that, you know, I've got this friend, Amber.
	She's pretty nice.
	And so she, you know, played Cupid.
	And then, of course, they met.
	Well, when we came time to interview Amber, and I think this is kind of true of most girls, you guys have a memory that's spectacular.
	And she had dates.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You know, especially everything men do wrong, which, of course, is a lot.
	But different show, different subject.
	Anyway, so she ends up giving us incredible detail on their dates and what they.
	Did and she, you know, she luckily she held on to souvenirs, so she had wine corks and she had tickets and all sorts of things that you know would back up what she was doing.
	And it was almost like she, I think she, you know, she didn't know us, it was almost like she had a concern that we wouldn't believe what she was saying.
	So she backed all these things up with you know real physical evidence of this stuff.
	She showed us a gift that he had bought for her daughter, this little star globe, and and some other stuff.
	And and it was it was just really interesting because now this this emerged, you know, this different kind of guy that we really didn't.
	No, it was there.
	Certainly, we were suspicious, but we had nothing to hang our hat on.
	So, when we left her house, we were hungry.
	It was mid afternoon.
	And so, we said, Well, we're going to go get a bite to eat.
	If you guys want to come with us, you need to come with us.
	And so, she said, Well, hey, would you want to stop by CVS or Walgreens or something like that?
	I don't remember which one it was because I've got some pictures.
	And we're thinking, Pictures?
	Yeah, we probably should have seen those.
	So, we go to the photo counter there at CVS or Walgreens, and she gives the claim ticket to the gal, and the gal brings out the And they're twin picks.
	There's two picks of each.
	And we're looking through these, and it's a famous picture of Scott and Amber at the holiday swarry.
	I think she's in the red dress, he's in the tux and everything like that.
	And we're looking at this, and it's like, yeah, this gal's probably telling the truth here.
	And they were just from a couple of weeks earlier.
	And I mean, it was pretty impressive.
	And I'm sure that the gal behind the counter had no idea what she had just handed us.
	And so, anyway, then we went over to Radio to buy a little device to hook up to a recorder because we always kept a couple of recorders in the trunk of our cars.
	In case, because we use these many times on cases, we'd give them to a victim or a witness and see if they could get the guy to talk to them.
	And so we retrieved a recorder out of my trunk along with like 10 tapes and some batteries.
	And then we went to Radio Shack, which was nearby, and Brock bought the connecting unit that would go to her phone.
	And the recorder itself showed her how to use it.
	And as he's showing her how to use it, the phone rings, and Brock goes, Gosh, that's Scott's number right there.
	So she's looking at us like, Take the call.
	And so she took the call, and that was like the first recorded conversation.
	And it was just very interesting.
	And this is the one thing that I don't understand why this case was so popular with everybody because we had many other murders that were actually more.
Recording the Conversation 00:08:21
	To me, more interesting than this one, although this one had you know TV quality victim and and you know responsible in it.
	You know, that I mean, definitely the made for TV, you know, cast on this one, other than the detectives, of course.
	But when it came to this, it was just gosh, we're here working this thing, everybody's looking at this, and it's just another Modesto murder.
	You know, I mean, it's important to us, it's important to the family, but it's it was kind of it was just difficult to believe how it was getting so much attention.
	And well, you know, it's got all the elements, it's got like these beautiful.
	People, a pregnant mom, again, like I said, with a thousand watt smile, the gorgeous affair partner who has been duped.
	But in the beginning days, you're wondering, was she duped?
	We don't know.
	Were they in on it?
	Did they both get rid of Lacey Scott, you know, this gorgeous guy who Lacey seems to have, you know, won the jackpot with, right?
	Like, it just, he's like, he's got a good job, he's got a seemingly nice family, he's a good looking, he treats her well.
	It's like every woman's worst nightmare that this man you meet and fall in love with and marry and get pregnant by.
	Turns out to be a sociopath who would murder you in your bed with your.
	It's like the worst thing you can imagine.
	So it taps into, I think, a lot of things for a lot of people, but especially women.
	So can I ask you, because Amber Fry, we've got that famous, and I'll play it part of it, the Happy New Year call on New Year's Eve that he calls Amber while he's at the vigil for Lacey.
	But did she start taping him before that?
	Yeah, she started taping him.
	Gosh, I think that was, well, it was right around that same time because it was within a week of the 24th.
	So it was the recorded call for New Year's Eve.
	Yeah, that was right after we had met her.
	Okay.
	Because we've been scratching the camera with him for several days.
	You know, it's like, gosh, is there nothing wrong with this guy?
	And, you know, other than his limited cooperation, we're thinking, well, maybe he didn't do it.
	And, you know, but, you know, we're still.
	Even though we were working, him, Craig and Al and I, you know, we weren't the only ones working this case.
	There were a lot of other detectives that were working on this, you know, detectives that were clearing out sex registrants and parolees that had violent criminal pasts that could shoot for this and verifying their alibi and stuff like that.
	And of course, as you guys paid more attention to this case and it became bigger, anybody that we looked at, you know, they wanted to be away from this thing big time.
	They did not want to be involved in this.
	They did not want to be linked to this as being in any way.
	Possibly related to Lacey's murder.
	So, the cooperation level that we got from a lot of people that ordinarily probably wouldn't have cooperated with us, probably wouldn't like us because we were cops, was a little bit different this time.
	And that was one of the good things that the media brought to us that made things easier in some ways, but in other ways, not so much.
	Well, it's the reason Amber Fry knew to call you.
	She saw all the media coverage of this guy who's missing his wife, and she was like, Holy, that's my guy.
	And he had told her that his wife was dead.
	Yeah, let me do a quick correction for you on that.
	Actually, she didn't see any of the coverage.
	Amber didn't watch TV, or she would have called us much earlier.
	She was alerted to Scott by a friend of hers.
	He was a Fresno cop.
	And I think his name was Richard.
	I can't remember his last name.
	But he caught the coverage and he thought, gosh, that sounds kind of like that girl or that guy that Amber's dating.
	And so he called Amber and said, he remembered.
	I mean, Scott hadn't even been in Amber's life that long.
	He remembered the description of him or that he would fit it.
	Well, she was, you know, I mean, you're a young girl, you're blonde, and you're dating Scott Peterson.
	You're going to flash him around like a nickel plated 38.
	And so she's telling all of her friends, you know, hey, look what I've got.
	And, you know, and I don't blame her.
	You know, I can see her doing that.
	So this, you know, this friend of hers, he, you know, platonic, he was just a friend.
	And he caught the, You know, the intense media coverage.
	And so he called her.
	He says, You might want to check with those guys up there in Modesto and see if this is the same guy.
	Because I can't remember for sure, Megan, if he had told her that he actually lived in Modesto or Sacramento.
	I know he told somebody at one time that he lived in Sacramento.
	But anyway, she hadn't seen any of this coverage.
	And of course, as you remember, there was great frustration with people in the media because they couldn't get Scott on camera hardly at all.
	He was always in the background at the center where they were coordinating the search outside of law enforcement.
	He talked to several of them, you know.
	People from the media, and he just said, Hey, I don't want to be a part of this.
	This is all about Lacey.
	This is the fine Lacey.
	I don't want to be the distraction.
	And of course, you know, you can interpret that both ways.
	Maybe he's sincere about that, or you can look at it that he didn't want his, you know, face out there because he didn't want Amber to see it or anybody else.
	So, you know, if you think about how he appeared on the, you know, on the audience, yeah, had there been other affairs besides Amber?
	Yeah, there'd been at least two that we knew of that were called in.
	Girls had called us and told us about things.
	You know, I hate to say that, but I mean, they are what they are.
	They're in the record, and, you know, it is what it is.
	But he lied about that, too, when he gave his interview to, I don't know if it was Diane or if it was Gloria Gomez, the Sacramento affiliate, but he told one or both of them that Amber's the only one he ever had an affair with.
	Yeah, he stretched the truth on a lot of things, a lot of things that he didn't have to stretch the truth on.
	So it was really difficult, you know, dealing with him to know where the truth ended and the lies started because he would lie sometimes for no reason on things that were inconsequential.
	And that was kind of difficult for us to kind of pick through.
	But it, you know, it was, he just, he was just, he was just interesting to work, you know, because he was there.
	Okay.
	So Amber Fry, she does put on the wire and she does start recording her calls with him.
	And the one that I remember just from covering it at the time, I was, you know, a very young reporter, was the one he's at the vigil for Lacey and Connor with the candles.
	This is before they found the bodies or know that they're dead.
	You know, Sharon Rocha, the whole family's there, like praying to God that they'll be a sighting, a return, a ransom demand, something.
	And, What's Scott doing?
	He's all smiles and he's on the phone with Amber.
	And here's a snippet of that conversation.
	Yeah.
	And he goes on to say the crowds are amazing.
	The crowds, he's looking at the crowd for his wife's vigil.
	I mean, it's like that's something wrong.
	There's obviously, he is a sociopath.
	That's like no normal person can do that, John.
	Well, and that kind of falls into why we don't really have any doubts that he did this.
	Now, yeah, again, it's a premeditated murder.
	There's no videotape, there's no eyewitness.
	He's never going to confess, at least I don't expect that he would.
	He could probably waterboard him.
	You're not going to get it out of him.
	But it's one of those things where, on one hand, he's telling us how worried he is and how he wanted to keep his face away from the media coverage because he was afraid that it would be a distraction, or if he was afraid that if Amber came forward, then we would no longer search for her, which, gosh, we were going to search for her regardless.
	It doesn't make any difference.
	If Amber's part of the equation or not.
	And so, you know, when he's doing that, you notice at the individual, he's got the baseball hat pulled down low.
	He's got the collar up on the jacket and everything like that.
	And, you know, from a distance, you might not even connect him as your boyfriend if you're Amber and you're, you know, cooking spaghetti and you just glance over your shoulder at the TV, which of course she didn't do because she didn't watch a lot of TV.
	Wow.
	Well, notwithstanding that, Gloria Allred got her hooks into Amber.
	And we've seen that show many times now.
	And that this was the moment that stunned.
	The world.
	I remember watching this thinking.
	OMG.
	Here it is, Amber Fry at the press conference coming forward and telling the truth.
	Sot 5.
	First of all, I met Scott Peterson November 20th, 2002.
	Scott told me he was not married.
	We did have a romantic relationship.
Telling Both Families 00:03:02
	I am very sorry for Lacey's family and the pain that this has caused them.
	And I pray for her.
	Her safe return as well.
	Now, why did she come out at that point, John?
	Because she had been working with you guys and she had gotten something like 27 or 29 hours of tape, as far as I read.
	So, what led her to go public?
	Yeah, there was a total of 29 hours of recorded phone calls between the two of them.
	But what happened with that is, you know, we were going to keep her on ice as long as we could.
	We didn't want to bring her forward.
	We, you know, we didn't necessarily expect that he was going to tell her that he killed his wife and he wanted to run off to Belgium with her or anything like that.
	But we were hopeful that we might be able.
	Able to get something else out of it.
	So we were going to keep working this for a while, but unfortunately, somehow the inquirer found out about her.
	And we got a tip that they were going to be running that photo of Amber in the red dress and Scott in the tux on whatever edition it was that came out.
	I don't know if it came out on Thursday or Friday or whatever that was.
	Well, of course, you know, out of consideration for both families, you know, Scott's family down in San Diego and of course Sharon and the family in Modesto, we knew that we couldn't, you know, let that happen.
	And, you know, they'd be in the Grocery store line, and then they see the inquirer there with this picture, and you know, then they drop their groceries and freak out.
	So, we knew we were going to have to tell both families about this.
	So, Craig Grogan and Phil Owen went down to San Diego to tell Lee and Jackie about this.
	And then, of course, Al and I, we called Sharon into the office to tell her about it.
	And she came down there with Ron Gransky, and you know, and that was one of the heartbreaking things of the whole case.
	You know, you could work a lot of murders, and you know, but you're touched by these victims, you know, they.
	They stay with you.
	I mean, there's some of them that stay with me even to this day that I still talk to.
	But she came down and they knew that there was something up because we didn't generally call them to come down to our office.
	But they came down, it was late afternoon, and they had a scheduled interview with Greta that was going to go on after our meeting.
	And so she sat down and you could see they were anxiety.
	So we said, Well, hey, we called you down here.
	Something's going on.
	We want to get you in front of it so that you're not surprised by it.
	And then I had this folder in front of me.
	It was on the table and I just opened it.
	Folder and split it across, and you know, Sharon looks at it and she just you know put her head in her hands and said, Why did you have to kill her?
	And I remember that like it was yesterday that she said that.
	And I think you know, the family wasn't you know, none of these families are stupid, and I think they all knew this, they knew it was coming, but they were hoping for that one little chance out of a billion that she would come back alive.
	And you know, this kind of you know, dashed those hopes.
	And it's really sad to see this, you know, to see a family have to go through this, and then you know, of course, now pick up.
	Pieces and hope for the best and the rest of it.
Rupturing Family Trust 00:04:45
	Can you catch the guy who did it?
	And can we ever recover our family member to give him a proper burial and things like that?
	But that was the moment Sharon realized he was behind this and that Lacey would not be returning.
	Yeah, I think she had a feeling about this beforehand, but she probably wouldn't even acknowledge it except deep in her mind.
	But yeah, this is pretty much.
	Showed her that was a deal.
	And then, of course, because publicly they'd been standing with Scott, there wasn't a public rift between the families until Amber.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And you'd expect that.
	I mean, there was nothing, they didn't have anything concrete.
	I mean, we look at the thing a little bit different.
	We don't tell people everything that we know when we're working one of these cases.
	You can't, because maybe you're wrong too.
	You're not going to disrupt the family and the relationships with your suspicions.
	You work your suspicions and you gather your evidence to prove your case and to present it to a jury.
	And you don't want them to slip up.
	I mean, even a well meaning family member could slip up and say something to Scott before you're ready for him to know you're working with Amber.
	And yeah, I understand that makes perfect sense to me.
	There's so much more to go.
	The trial gets started, and Scott's defenders to this day point to the lack of forensics.
	But is that fair?
	We're going to get into a bit more what the prosecution actually had, and now what the defense is saying we should take a new look at.
	Don't go away.
	There's much, much more to discuss with retired detective John Bueller.
	Don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
	And the full video show and clips when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.comslash Megan Kelly.
	If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free.
	If you leave a comment in the Apple comments, which you can do underneath by subscribing there, I will read it.
	I have read all 21,000 of them.
	I find them actually very helpful.
	People write the most thoughtful things.
	And I'd love to know what you think about this story in this case.
	And by the way, when you're there, you can find our full archives with all of our true crime Christmas shows.
	Don't go away.
	John, there was an incredible moment where Peterson sat down with Diane Sawyer of GMA and actually claimed that he told Lacey about Amber, his affair partner.
	Here was that moment.
	Did your wife find out about it?
	I told my wife.
	When?
	In early December.
	Did it cause a rupture in the marriage?
	It was not.
	A positive, obviously, it's inappropriate.
	But it was not something that we weren't dealing with.
	A lot of arguing?
	No, no.
	No, I can't say that even she was okay with the idea.
	But it wasn't anything that would break us apart.
	There wasn't a lot of anger?
	No.
	Bull.
	I mean, that's such an obvious pack of lies there.
	But my question is why?
	Why did he feel the need to say he disclosed the affair to Lacey?
	You know, that remains a mystery to me, but it also plays kind of against his claim about fishing.
	I'm sure, you know, okay, two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, she's baking gingerbread cookies and she's going to say it's okay for him to go fishing, thinking maybe he's going fishing or maybe he's going down to Fresno.
	I mean, I just don't see that.
	And then, you know, we get a lot of insight into Lacey and what she was about by, you know, her friend Lori and Renee and Stacy and Kim.
	You know, they tell us a lot of things, along with Amy and Brent and, of course, Sharon and Ron.
	But when, you know, when we talk to them about things like this, you know, there's no way on this planet that she would be okay with this.
	You know, she would have tossed him out of the house like a bag of garbage.
	You know, she wouldn't have put up with that.
	And she would have told someone.
	That's what all of her friends said.
	And any woman knows you've always got at least the one friend who you tell everything to.
	You know, you don't want to go blab your.
	Private marital problems around, but something like that, you tell somebody.
	And it's, I just, I never understood why he felt that lie was necessary.
	How he felt it was better that she knew.
	Like, did he think we thought the motive of killing her was she was going to say he was a cheater?
Two Versions of Hair Dye 00:05:00
	No, that's not what we thought.
	I'm going to pause it right there, squeeze in one more quick break.
	I got to pay the bills and then come back and we'll take a deep dive into forensics.
	Don't go anywhere.
	John Bueller stays with us and I hope you will too.
	John, so what was the final catalyst for the arrest of Scott Peterson?
	Well, of course, you remember the bodies were discovered in a two day period in April.
	And when the first body was discovered, I was just kind of, that might not have anything to do with our case.
	I really wasn't hopeful that that would be anything to do with what we were dealing with.
	But then when the second body came up, so you've got a female that doesn't have all the limbs attached and everything that shows it's been in salt water for three to six months.
	And then you have an almost full term baby that doesn't have the same marine activity on it and looks You know, essentially normal, you know, that kind of tells you a story of what you got there, especially when they're found so close in proximity to each other and to where Scott was fishing.
	So when you have that, that pretty much, oh, okay, well, we can figure this one out.
	And we put together an arrest warrant for Scott based on that information and other information that we had gathered to that point.
	And it was almost interesting the way this case went for that, you know, four month period, because it seemed like anytime we ran out of something or we're getting close to finishing up all the different.
	Things we were doing besides Scott.
	Then all of a sudden, something would pop up and it would like fill the tank with gas and we'd have more to go on.
	And so, this was a point before those bodies showed up, we were just about ready to charge him.
	But unfortunately, the DA in Stanislaw County said, Hey, if you don't have a body, I'm not going to give you a filing.
	Now, we had been working this case as a no body homicide from the start.
	And we were using a protocol that was developed by a prosecutor from Merced County, south of Stanislaw County, where we lived.
	And this case fit everything on the All the things that he had on the protocol with you have a victim that doesn't have any prior history of leaving, they've got ties to the community, they don't have any family problems, they didn't clean up the bank account, they don't, all these different things that are going on there.
	And so she's like the, you know, the victim that you want when it comes to putting one of those cases together.
	So, of course, when the body showed up, that got everything jumped up into high gear.
	So, arrest warrant was put together.
	We had a surveillance going on for Scott down in San Diego by agents from the Department of Justice, Ernie Lamone and his crew down there.
	Because we didn't have enough cops to help out on this.
	So we used help from a lot of different agencies throughout the state.
	So we drove down to San Diego and we hooked up with those guys, and then we were going to make the arrest the next day when the DNA results were going to be released.
	Bill Lockyer was the attorney general in California at the time, and he was going to be in charge of releasing those results to the media and to the public.
	And the instructions that we got from Judge Beauchamp, who gave us the arrest warrant, was, I know what you have here, but don't execute this arrest warrant until you get those DNA results.
	If you can, he didn't tell us we couldn't, but he wanted us to wait until we got those results.
	And so, when we started following Scott that next morning, he was a I don't know if he was NASCAR quality, but he was a pretty darn good driver.
	I mean, high speed and he could cut lanes and take an off ramp.
	And of course, we did drive like that, we'd roll our car or something, and so we'd have to miss some, you know, we'd drive down another off ramp.
	It was just a big.
	You know, it was kind of like a comedian of cars driving around.
	It was ridiculous.
	So they had a helicopter up.
	So luckily we were able to stay on him, but even the helicopter lost him at one point.
	Well, but was he fleeing?
	Because we all remember, our audience, I think.
	He had dyed his hair blonde.
	He had grown a goatee.
	He had $15,000 of cash on him.
	He had, I think, a fake driver's license?
	His brother's license.
	Yeah, okay.
	He had camping gear.
	It certainly seemed like he was about to flee, perhaps across the southern border.
	Well, you know, we couldn't rule that out.
	I mean, he knew San Diego well.
	He grew up down there, and, you know, that's not very far from Mexico.
	We didn't know if he was, if he thought the cops were after him or if he thought that you guys were after him, you know, trying to, you know, get an interview or, you know, get their hair for us, John.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, it's funny because on that hair dye thing, he had two versions of that.
	He told somebody that he dyed his hair because he wanted to be more anonymous.
	He didn't want to be spotted in public.
	And then he told us that he got dyed because he was swimming in a pool with too much chlorine.
	So, this is the thing.
	Every little brunette girl in America knows that's not true because we all tried to get our hair dyed that way and it doesn't work.
	I wish I was more of a dirty pond.
	But anyway, so he'd come up with these different versions of things, which were.
	You know, they're mildly amusing when you're working the case, but it's like you don't have to lie about this stuff.
	You know, just tell it straight.
Circumstantial Scent Evidence 00:15:19
	It's in his nature.
	All right.
	So, listen, so I want to move it along.
	So, you affect the arrest, the trial takes place, and what forensic evidence did you have?
	What was, I know it was circumstantial, but as I'm looking and getting ready for this interview, okay, scent sniffing dogs picked up Lacey's scent in the Berkeley Marina four days after she disappeared.
	Scott's team and Garagos was saying this just the other day.
	Say you cannot rely on that.
	Dogs fail two out of three of these tests under similar circumstances.
	That was a bunch of BS evidence the dogs sent.
	Your thoughts on the dogs?
	Well, I know a few dogs in the neighborhood.
	You know, I feed them some little milk bone treats, but I don't know dogs like canine handlers do.
	My understanding is that dogs have an incredible sense of smell that is multiple times better than humans.
	You know, I can't disagree with what Deragos is saying because I don't know enough about that subject to make the call on that.
	But once again, it was just one of those strands of physical evidence.
	And if you remember Vincent Gugliosi's book, Helter Skelter, he described a circumstantial case as a series of strands or cables or strands of wires on a cable that become increasingly big and strong.
	And okay, you can attack the dog.
	Well, get rid of that little strand, but you still have all the rest of these.
	And so when you add up all the circumstantial evidence, that paints a very compelling picture.
	It'd almost be like if you had a jigsaw puzzle on your table and you were missing three pieces in the middle, but you'd be pretty sure what the picture says.
	And that's what we had here with all the circumstantial evidence.
	So, when it comes to physical evidence, well, we've got Scott's behavior, and we can do a whole show on that.
	But you've got the absence of intrusion from another person coming in there.
	You've got the condition of the bodies and where they're found.
	You've got Scott's behavior when it comes to how he's dealing with everything involving this case, whether it's returning to the scene where the bodies were disposed, I think five or six times.
	And this is consistent with what killers generally do if they have little doubts about whether or not they hid the body or not.
	So, you've got all of those kinds of things.
	You've got Amber coming in.
	You've got the absence of anybody else involved in it.
	We've got the burglary across the street that we were able to clear those burglars from involvement in this.
	Ah, let's stop there.
	That's a big item being pushed by Scott's sister in law right now, saying there was a burglary in the neighborhood.
	She thinks that she says that there is proof that it happened.
	On the morning, Lacey went missing, which she says was definitively 1224 and not 1223, which was something the police had.
	Suggested could have been the case.
	She said, We believe Lacey was killed after she stumbled upon that burglary live.
	She said, A neighbor, Diane Jackson, said she saw.
	Three men in a van in front of a home there on December 24th.
	But then I understand that the two robbers apprehended denied any involvement in the case and they were cleared by the cops.
	Moreover, there was apparently a second person in the neighborhood, maybe, I don't know, maybe it was a woman you mentioned earlier who was pregnant and walking a dog that day.
	But you tell me why we shouldn't be putting much stock in the burglary theory that they nabbed Lacey because she saw them.
	Well, it's pretty rare that a guy doing a Property crime is going to turn into an abductor of a pregnant girl that's walking a dog.
	I mean, if everybody, if Diane Jackson sees a van at 11 40 in the morning with three guys in it, but she can't even tell us if it's white, tan, or black, it kind of falls into question her viability as a witness.
	In addition to that, one of the burglars, a guy named Stephen, we rode that route daily as he was sourcing a narcotic habit, but that would be his route when he went to his girlfriend's house.
	So on the 24th, He noticed that the house across the street looked like maybe people had left for the holidays.
	As he went over there on the 25th, he was pretty sure they did.
	So he broke into the house on the 25th and he took a bit of property on the 25th.
	But there was a safe and some tools and other things that he couldn't take on his bike.
	So he returns home and he's living in a shed behind his friend Don, who's living with his mother.
	And he tells Don, hey, there's a safe over there.
	We need to go back over and get that.
	So they return on the 26th.
	And the reason we know that they were there on the 26th is.
	They said they saw the media down the street when they were in the house, and it was a big hoopla, and they couldn't figure out what it was because they didn't know.
	But it was interesting to them that the media would be out in the street.
	Well, they're going in and out through the back of the house.
	So, you know, I mean, whether it's Geraldo or Greta or you or anybody else out there, they're not going to see these guys carting a safe out the back of the house.
	When they came under suspicion for this burglary, this is one of the things that we run into cooperation level from people that are doing property crimes.
	It's very rare that they cooperate with.
	But these two guys, not only did we arrest one of them on an active warrant, they both rolled on their involvement in the Berkeley because by that time they knew what was going on down the street.
	They wanted to be as far away from this case as humanly possible.
	If they could have gotten a flight to Burma, they would have gone, but that wasn't their option.
	So they begged to take a poly because they knew and they wanted to share the results of the polygraph because they knew if they went to jail, which they were going, that they wanted to be able to share that with the other inmates because the other inmates ain't going to take too kindly to two guys that they think might have.
	You know, killed this woman and her unborn child.
	So, not only did we recover property from that burglary, we recovered nothing of Lacey's, no jewelry, nothing at all.
	And we even recovered property from another burglary that wasn't even related.
	Everybody that these guys had sold or given property to in exchange for drugs turned stuff in.
	We even had one guy come in the police lobby and dumped off a bag of property from the burglary and run out before anybody could grab it.
	Of course, they didn't know what was in the bag until they opened it up.
	So, as far as these guys being involved in this, One of the things that I'm sure you remember is there was a $500,000 reward at the time leading to Lacey's recovery and locating her and everything like that.
	Well, in Modesto, when you've got guys that are using meth and two guys involved in an abduction, to try and convince me, I mean, I worked in a different world than maybe some of your viewers, but to try and convince me that one would roll on the other for $500,000, I mean, my gosh, that's pure Santa Claus.
	I mean, there's just no way.
	Well, what about this other thing?
	Let me, because there's a few things.
	I kind of jumped ahead there, but Janie, the sister in law of Scott Peterson, says there was evidence Lacey was alive on Christmas Eve morning past the point at which Scott left, which we've established was around 9 30.
	She said there were sightings of Lacey at 9 45 and 10 30.
	On Christmas Eve, she said that there are a couple of witnesses who saw the pregnant woman walking her golden retriever around the neighborhood.
	And what's your response to that?
	Well, there were two pregnant girls that were pregnant about the same stage as Lacey that walked dogs in the neighborhood.
	There was one named Michelle who was walking a golden retriever, and another one named Kristen that was walking a chocolate lab.
	And then there was a third girl, another attractive gal, all three attractive, that easily could have been mistaken for Lacey by somebody in the neighborhood who.
	Did not know Lacey.
	Now, and this is the interesting part none of these people that came forward and claimed they saw Lacey there actually knew her.
	They never had a barbecue with her, they'd never been to her house.
	So it's easy to misplace or misidentify somebody, especially with the coverage going on, with the thought of being helpful or maybe the thought that I want to be involved in this.
	But we couldn't find any evidence that anybody who actually knew Lacey had seen her in the neighborhood at that time.
	And as far as anybody identifying her as walking around there, it could have been an easy mistaken identity.
	With any of these other three girls.
	I interviewed two of them.
	And, you know, if you're looking out the blinds and you don't know who you're looking at, I mean, think about yourself.
	You know, you're at your home, you see somebody walk by in the morning, and then two days later, maybe something comes up, and that might have been the same person.
	But if you don't know them, yeah.
	I don't have that kind of memory.
	I could never, I would never now be able to do that.
	But let me throw another one at you.
	Sure.
	There is an allegedly prisoner confession overheard by an officer named Lieutenant Aponte at.
	Norco Prison in California.
	The lieutenant phoned in a tip in 2003 claiming he overheard an inmate's conversation about Lacey.
	Later, this lieutenant Aponte changed his story, saying, I don't really know what I heard.
	He was not called as a witness at trial, but this could become a thing, I suppose, that if he heard a prisoner confession of some sort.
	Do you know about this?
	Yeah, I know about what you said right there, because it apparently wasn't a big enough deal on our radar to have him.
	Called as a witness.
	And again, you know, when you look at Garagos, I mean, he, not only is he a skilled attorney, his staff, I mean, I don't know if you ever talked to any attorneys on his staff, but he had a bunch of great attorneys that were digging up every single thing they could.
	I don't think they missed anything.
	And if Aponte would have been something of value, I highly doubt that Mark would not have called him to the stand.
	Now, there might have been some tactical legal reasons for that.
	I don't know.
	Or maybe some information came up later.
	And if that's an appeal issue, Put him on the stand.
	Let's hear what he's got to say.
	You know, I mean, if Scott didn't do this, I don't want him in jail, but I have no doubts that he did it.
	What about back to the timeline?
	Apparently, a neighbor testified seeing the golden retriever, Mackenzie, inside the Peterson's gated yard around 10 15 a.m.
	Janie, Scott's sister in law, says the mailman was there.
	He arrived at 10 30 a.m. and said that he didn't believe the dog was there, or at least he heard no barking, which he would have if the dog had been outside.
	I guess it Barked at the mailman every day.
	She says this proves that Lacey was walking that dog at around 10 30, that it was in the yard at 10 15.
	It was gone by 10 30.
	Lacey would have been walking it at that point.
	And then at some point, it returned back to the house, just its leash attached.
	And Scott had left the house an hour earlier.
	Now, I will add, the mailman says he doesn't have a very clear recollection of the day.
	He didn't remember anything out of the ordinary, but that doesn't necessarily clear up the question of whether.
	At 10 30, he delivered the mail, and a dog that would normally have been there barking at him wasn't.
	Yeah, I look at that from a different aspect.
	There was Scott and Lacey had gone down to Disneyland in November, and for Part of the days that they were down there, she had to be in a wheelchair because she was having so much difficulty walking.
	Not only her yoga instructor, but of course also her doctor had told her at the tail end of this pregnancy, you just don't need to be out doing any walking.
	The day before, the housekeeper had mentioned that she was exhausted.
	Sharon had told us that she was exhausted.
	Sharon did not believe that Lacey had gone walking.
	And to think this girl that couldn't even move a mop bucket, according to Scott, would go down an uneven grade.
	Down to a park with a dog tugging at her when she's unstable on her feet and exhausted from everybody's account makes it sound to me like she didn't do that walk.
	Now, of course, I wasn't there.
	I can't make that call, but all I can do is I can compare the evidence of information that we received that seems valid and that doesn't really have a stake in this versus Janie's devotion to family and love for Scott.
	And I get that.
	I understand family members are like that.
	And I applaud her for her tenacity.
	But I don't believe that Lacey was ever walking that morning with the dog, just based on the other information that we have.
	So, when did he kill her and what did he do in the moments after?
	That's where I'm going to pick it up with John Bueller in one minute.
	Don't go away.
	So, John, what do you think actually happened inside that house and when?
	Well, of course, none of us are ever really going to know that other than Scott himself.
	But my take on it is he probably suffocated her with a pillow or strangled her.
	And then rolled her body up in maybe a sheet or something like that, moved her out to the truck, put her in the truck, put the umbrellas on top of her so that nobody could really see her in there, drove over to his warehouse, loaded her in the boat, used the tarp on the boat to cover the boat, and then, of course, hooked the boat up and drove her up to Berkeley Marina, launched the boat, took her out to Brooks Island,
	and rolled her into the water with four or five of the concrete anchors that we believe he made, judging from the Residue rings of cement powder that was on a flatbed trailer that was in his warehouse, one that would be used to deliver fertilizer or something like that.
	That's kind of the way I think it.
	It could be off slightly.
	I mean, I'd certainly buy Scott some imported ale if he wanted to tell me what really happened, but I don't think he's going to be doing that.
	Why wouldn't there be any forensics in his truck?
	Well, why would there not be?
	I mean, if he's ever wrapped up in a something.
	Well, don't you remember that hair that was found in the pliers that were in the boat?
	One hair of Lacey's in the pliers in his boat.
	But couldn't you make the argument, you know, my husband takes our boat out all the time.
	Like I'm rarely in it, but if my hair were there, I guess he could say, you know, I get Meg's hair on me all the time.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	The transfer of that is, you know, is easy.
	I can see where the hair came from in the boat.
	No problem there.
	And then, of course, it was concrete residue in the boat that was consistent with somebody rolling somebody.
	With anchors attached over the side into the water.
	So, you know, you have that.
	But as far as any more evidence in his truck, well, she's in the bed.
	You know, I can't say that there wouldn't be, but the mere fact that the scent dogs were able to trace her path essentially in the truck as he drove from there down to the south and then turned west and went over towards his warehouse, and they followed him over there.
	They followed the scent from the warehouse out to 132, which is the drive that you go up to San Francisco.
	Tracing it all the way up to Berkeley Marina.
	I mean, yeah, Mark Garagos can say that that's invalid.
	And okay, I get that.
	That's what he's paid to do.
	That's the side he's on.
	But it's all just additional circumstantial evidence that leads to the fingers pointing at Scott.
	But as far as evidence that you would expect, If he doesn't harm her to the point where she's leaking blood and he puts her in a position where she's wrapped up, where maybe saliva or any kind of purge that comes out of her mouth after death is not going to get through whatever he's got her wrapped up in, you're not going to find anything in the truck, especially since he was only in there for what I would estimate to be a short period of time from the house to the warehouse, loaded in the boat and gone.
	No one would have seen him loading up the boat with her body at the warehouse because your theory is he did that inside the warehouse.
	Yes.
The Sinking Boat Theory 00:09:42
	Okay.
	And so, the only way they would have seen her getting loaded into that truck would have been from the house into the truck.
	But as you said earlier, he had backed the truck all the way up to the house in an unusual move.
	Yeah, neighbors noticed that that was the first time they'd ever seen the truck backed in.
	And they also noticed that that was the first time that they can recall that the blinds weren't open on the front of the house in the morning to let the morning sun in.
	That was something that Lacey did all the time.
	That particular morning, those weren't open, which is really suspicious when you think that if she was home watching Martha Stewart or something like that, that she wouldn't have opened those blinds.
	Quick note on the boat.
	Though.
	There was a cover that went over the aluminum boat.
	And when Scott found out that we were doing more digging around, he took that cover and he put it in a shed behind his house underneath a leaking gas can that would put gasoline and leaf blower or something like that, that kind of two stroke oil on the boat cover itself.
	Now, Scott was fastidious about taking care of his property, whether it was his vehicles or the surface of his kitchen table or anything like that.
	But the thought that he would take a relatively nice boat cover and put a leaky leaf blower gas can on top of it for any other reason other than the Maybe destroy Lacey's scent seems kind of strange to me.
	So, again, just one more piece of circumstantial evidence, and by themselves, anecdotal, they don't mean anything.
	But when you add those things up, they become very, very convincing.
	And this is one of the things that I think a lot of people that don't think he did it are missing they're not making themselves available to all the individual circumstantial evidence because you have to ignore just a giant heap of this stuff to believe he didn't do it.
	I applaud Peterson's family for their love for Scott and what they're trying to do, but you're going to have to do something else.
	We understand their motive.
	Okay, let's talk about the boat because Garagos was lamenting that his experiment, trying to show a man Scott's size throwing a body, a pregnant, an eight and a half month pregnant woman's body overboard with a bunch of cement anchors, that he did that experiment and it showed the boat sinking.
	We've actually got that, the videotape that he tried to get in that the judge kept out.
	Let me ask you about it because as I watched it, I was like, you know, he does raise an interesting question.
	Could it Could a man as big as Scott Peterson get a pregnant woman that pregnant overboard with four anchors attached to her without the boat capsizing or sinking?
	Here's Garagos' clip from his would be evidence that was denied.
	And for our listening audience, it shows an exact replica of Scott's 14 foot fishing boat and a man in scuba gear.
	You know, they're not purporting that it's actually Scott, it's a reenactment, what they say is, and a dummy that is a pregnant woman.
	And he can't, the boat is sinking.
	He's basically, he can't get overboard without sinking the boat.
	The back of the boat is going down, down, down and under the water.
	So I get that the prosecution wasn't there when he filmed his experiment.
	And that's why the judge said no, because that didn't give them the chance to object to the currents weren't the same on the day you did this as they were on December 24th.
	Or who knows how heavy was that dummy that Mark used?
	Who knows, right?
	Like we don't know because they weren't there.
	But.
	Does he raise some good questions about whether it's possible, you know, given the laws of physics?
	Oh, yeah, of course, he raises good questions on that.
	And, you know, my whole thought on that is, gosh, if you're going to do that experiment, send us an invite.
	Let us come there and let us, you know, do it with you.
	I've seen that same tape.
	It's been a while since I've seen it.
	Of course, I can't see it on this, you know, device here, the way we're doing this.
	But I saw it and I thought, gosh, the guy could have tried a little harder to not let the boat go over.
	I'm of the belief that it could have been done.
	I don't think that there's anything.
	Unusual about that.
	But if it's a situation where they only want to show one version of it, that's why it was objected to.
	Let's do a scientific study.
	I mean, it doesn't mean you have to get a physicist there, but let's try it a couple of times.
	Maybe get somebody in there that wants to keep the boat from going over.
	Somebody that isn't really on that same scale.
	Well, you have to think if he believed that he could do it without the boat sinking, they tried it five times and every time it sunk, he would have said, you know what?
	Let's go back and do it.
	We'll do it.
	We'll do it tomorrow.
	Prosecution can come with me, right?
	There's a reason.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, he didn't round back and say, Oh, that's your objection and you're sustaining it, Your Honor?
	Okay, no problem.
	We can do it right now.
	The anchors.
	You believe he made four cement weights?
	Because I also read that they found planter pots at the bottom of the water and that they matched, that they were found by divers in the marina and that many believe that they were used to weigh down Lacey's body because they matched broken pots in his storage unit.
	Is that not the right anchor?
	It was those concrete blocks that he made?
	Well, I never heard about them finding planter pots up there.
	That's a new one for me.
	You know, of course, this case had, gosh, I think I got the note here on it, over 43,000 pages of reports.
	So there were a lot of people that could be nonsense.
	A lot of us, yeah.
	But at the same time, I remember the one anchor, the one concrete anchor that was in Scott's boat, it didn't even have a rope attached to it.
	Now, most people I know, if they're going to toss an anchor out to hold their boat, they usually have a rope.
	Attached there to that works better.
	Um, yeah, generally, but it was one of those things where the cement ring suggests that he made four or five of them, and I believe it was five.
	And the fact that one was found okay, cool.
	But if you remember, when Lacey was found, minus the head, minus the four extremity limbs, that suggests five anchors on her.
	Uh, when she goes in, and one of the things that was noted on her condition when she was recovered again, uh, the The forensic pathologist said it appeared that she'd been in the salt water for three to six months, that the limbs had been separated by either surgical precision or they had been weighted, and then the weights separated them.
	And then that she also had three broken ribs.
	Well, she talked to her mom the night before, you know, on the 23rd, and she didn't say anything about broken ribs.
	And Lacey probably would have told somebody if she had broken ribs.
	And so that also fits with Scott kneeling on top of her, you know, suffocating her or strangling her.
	And of course, the Way the limbs were separated supports that there were weighted devices, anchors, concrete anchors on each one of the four extremities and maybe around the neck.
	So it was not counting on her torso coming back up.
	And that torso had their baby in it for most of its time underwater, right?
	The forensic pathologist said the umbilical cord was still attached.
	And I mean, it's so sad, but that Lisey died still pregnant with her unborn son.
	And, and, um, They were put to a watery grave, but they came back up.
	They came back up to tell the tale.
	And it was first Connor's body and then Lacey's, the remains of it, that were found.
	And while it wasn't exactly.
	Evidence of Scott's involvement.
	You know, it didn't show whatever, a gun shot, like a bullet that was linked to him.
	It really was the final piece that you needed to bring him to justice.
	Well, it seemed like it to us.
	I mean, again, it's all circumstantial, but, you know, there's a lot of murder cases are circumstantial.
	You know, that's kind of the way we put them together if you don't have an eyewitness or a videotape.
	And it was compelling to us, and apparently it was compelling to the jury the first time around.
	You know, I.
	I wouldn't have any doubts that we would get another good verdict on a second trial.
	You wouldn't.
	I would not.
	I'm confident in the prosecutors that we have Beerget and Dave.
	And then, of course, they bring somebody else in because Rick is now a judge.
	But, you know, you can bring things up all these years later.
	I believe we had a good case.
	If you get a good jury, I think you get a good verdict.
	And if somebody gets on the jury, that, you know, maybe the jury's always a crapshoot, as you know.
	You've done this for a while.
	And you just never know what you're going to get with them.
	But you know what else?
	Here's the other element.
	Kind of goes back to what we discussed earlier, which is there is a part of me, and there's probably a part of a lot of people watching this that wants him not to have done it, that would like it to have been the burglars or some random sicko on the street.
	And that it's not possible for what appears to be a loving husband to strangle the mother of his unborn son a month before that son is going to be born, completely viable baby.
	And then anchor her, shove her in the back of a truck under a tarp and tie five concrete blocks to her neck and each limb, hoping she will stay in that watery grave.
	But he was so efficient that the torso broke free and that body floated in four months later.
	It's like, I would rather believe some random creepy boogeyman did it.
	You know, there's something about it that I think might be one of the biggest challenges at the trial, the need to believe that.
	Well, I think, you know, we all share in that.
Flirting with a Babysitter 00:04:30
	You know, you look at him and he just doesn't look evil, but evil does exist.
	And one of the reasons that evil is successful a lot of times is it comes disguised as, you know, a beautiful man or a beautiful woman.
	And so you never know what you're going to get with that.
	But the thing is, is, you know, people, you want to look at Scott and you want to think, he couldn't have done this.
	But gosh, he wanted to sell, you know, the house within two weeks of Lacey going missing.
	He sold Lacey's car a month or so after she went missing.
	Turned the nursery into a storage area.
	I mean, this is the guy that is wanting his wife to come home.
	This is the guy who's looking forward to the birth of his son.
	You know, you're going to have to give me some better evidence than that because I just can get past his looks, which are so disarming.
	And I can see what actually he did because his actions are speaking evil, even though it's coming out of an attractive package.
	All right, I'm going to squeeze in a break because up next we're going to talk about what the sister said.
	He was doing in that same time frame, John just referenced.
	And another piece of his Diane Sawyer interview that was very, very telling.
	More with John Bueller right after this.
	Stay tuned.
	The sister, her name is Amy Bird.
	And she wrote, John, that she, because she spent a lot of time apparently with Scott in the weeks after the disappearance and before his arrest.
	And she wrote in her book that he appeared smitten with her.
	Ann Bird's 22 year old babysitter.
	This is while they're looking for Lacey and Connor before the bodies came up.
	He was smitten with her 22 year old babysitter.
	On more than one occasion, he told his sister, Ann Bird, how attractive the sitter was.
	I mean, this is like the man's, in his world, his version, his wife is missing and so is their baby.
	How attractive the sitter was.
	With Lacey still missing, he plied the sitter with drinks that he called, quote, flirtinis, based on peach snobs.
	And she said he looked like a charming young man without a care in the world.
	She went on to write he seemed totally uninterested in any new leads or new information.
	He never once shed a single tear for Lacey or Connor or the situation.
	And that two weeks after Lacey's disappearance, he ordered.
	Two porn channels on his home TV, and she was a witness to that.
	I mean, like that alone would make me convict him.
	Well, yeah.
	I mean, and that's just consistent with his behavior.
	And this is one of the reasons that he, you know, we couldn't discount him because he just didn't show the interest in this case the way he would say on TV.
	He's waiting for the little guy to come home.
	He won't even refer to him as Connor, and he wants Lacey to come home.
	But when the camera's turned off, Then he's just not interested in any of this.
	And especially when you compare his reaction and the way he dealt with all of this with Sharon and all the other side of Lacey's family and friends, they were all just urgent, going crazy, wanting some solutions and suggestions.
	And they were always interested in this.
	And he just wasn't.
	And this is consistent with what I've seen on other guys that have done similar types of killings.
	They just don't have that interest in it.
	I remember Scott's dad said one time, Lee, he mentioned that grief doesn't have a playbook.
	And maybe it probably doesn't for people that haven't dealt with a lot of families that have suffered a loss.
	But when you deal with families and friends that have suffered a loss over a period of time, you kind of get a data bank of what reactions are from subdued silence to hysterical punching on the back of the one who gives them the death notification, how I remember that, and everything in between.
	But when Scott doesn't even move the needle on this, And he isn't asking the questions that you expect and that you get from sincere people.
	It just fits with what he did, you know.
	And by itself, it doesn't mean he did it.
	It just is one more strand that to me shows that he did.
	What kind of a man is flirting with a 22 year old babysitter, offering her flirtinis, and then downloading porn while his wife and unborn baby are at best for Scott Peterson at that point missing?
	I mean, it's just, it's so clear.
	That he was involved.
Building an Unbreakable Case 00:14:02
	Then he goes on with Diane Sawyer.
	And we talked with Garagos about what a mistake it is for these high profile defendants to give interviews to the press.
	You guys must love it.
	You're in the opposite seat than Garagos, who's like, no, you guys are like, go for it.
	Diane Sawyer's amazing.
	She's a great choice.
	And here is one of the things listen to this for the audience at home.
	Listen to him refer to Lacey before the bodies, long before the bodies were found in the past tense.
	Listen here.
	Tell me about the state of your marriage.
	What kind of marriage was it?
	Got it.
	I mean, the first word that comes to mind is glorious.
	I mean, we took care of each other very well.
	She was amazing.
	She is amazing.
	That's telling.
	Well, you know, it's interesting because he even referred to Lacey in the past tense twice during Brocchini's interview with him on the evening of Christmas Eve.
	So even from the start, he was doing that.
	And, you know, it was.
	You know, you can't hide that stuff.
	I mean, he's pretty slick for the most part, but, you know, those things slip out when you're doing it.
	And no matter how slick you are, you can't be that good.
	And then there was the interview with, Gloria Gomez of Sacramento.
	And in that, you referenced it earlier in the show.
	He slips in the fact that he had a cut on his hand.
	It reminds me of OJ.
	It reminds me very much of OJ, but we know OJ's murder was with a knife.
	Listen, I'll just let the audience hear it, but I don't think this was by accident.
	He knew somebody was going to notice it and he was laying the foundation for what happened.
	Here it is.
	It wouldn't surprise you if they found blood in your vehicles.
	Explain why.
	Well, Take a look at my hands.
	You can see cuts here on my knuckles, numerous scars.
	I work on farms.
	I work with machinery.
	I know I cut my knuckle that day.
	On what day?
	On Christmas Eve.
	Doing what?
	Reaching in the toolbox of my truck and then into the pocket on the door.
	I cut out my knuckle, and there's a blood stain on the door, on the driver's side door.
	What did you guys make of that?
	Well, a pretty good way to explain that away.
	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 her.
	And so, you know, those, again, without a witness in a videotape or a confession, you're never really going to know on that.
	But that was not accidental that he raised that.
	Well, you know, and that's all for the jury.
	You know, the jury, you know, listens to that and they've Draw their own conclusions on that.
	But just the fact that he's volunteering it and talking about it, it's almost like it's a guilty conscience coming out.
	And he wants to make sure he gets in front of that with this story.
	So I can't believe it.
	What of the toolbox, John?
	What of the toolbox?
	Because one of the things that one of the evidence rulings was that Garagos's boat video couldn't come in.
	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.
	Is this familiar to you?
	No, because it was a pickup.
	The flatbed was the trailer, but I know we did an experiment and it was submitted to the court where we had an eight month pregnant clerk in the investigation division at Stanislaw County District Attorney's Office and we took an overhead photo of her inside the boat between the seats.
	Now the seats go across the width of the boat and she easily fit in between those two seats and she was consistent in size.
	Lacey.
	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.
	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.
	But I liked Judge DeLugia.
	I thought he was pretty right down the middle.
	He gave some good, favorable decisions to the defense and then maybe some that they didn't like.
	But that's true in every trial, as you know.
	You get that, you get ones that you like, and you get ones that you don't.
	You're just hoping that the judge is doing it right.
	Well, and I mean, their big basis for appeal is not necessarily.
	Judicial misconduct.
	It's juror misconduct.
	Juror number seven, who called herself Strawberry Shortcake, did not disclose in her juror questionnaire that she had apparently been the victim of domestic violence while pregnant, which I agree the defense had a right to know whether it was enough error to allow, whether that was prejudicial enough to throw out a verdict in a case like this.
	It's a different story for the listeners and the viewers who don't remember her.
	We used to call her Pinky at the time.
	Here she is, along with another juror, celebrating their guilty verdict.
	You know, you don't always see the jurors talk in California.
	In this case, you did.
	It's a quick snippet of her.
	Watch.
	San Quentin's your new home.
	And it's illegal to kill your wife and child in California.
	So that's the gal.
	And I wonder what you think about now this push, because he's had his sentence reduced because of a different juror misconduct issue, not related to this gal.
	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.
	Yeah, well, that brings up two points.
	Number one, I had heard that 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, and she didn't see that as domestic violence.
	Now, there may be more to it than that, but that's what I had originally heard.
	The second thing is.
	Yeah, that's better for the prosecution than what I just said, for sure.
	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.
	So to even try somebody on a death penalty seems to be kind of a placebo.
	They're not going to get the needle, they're probably going to die in custody.
	I would rather have more flexibility in jury selection without a death penalty.
	Penalty case.
	So maybe you get a good juror that just doesn't want to, you know, do a death penalty thing, but they can be fair about it.
	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.
	Yeah, it doesn't.
	They're not serious about it.
	What kind of life does he have now?
	Like, what describe his prison life?
	Well, San Francisco or San Quentin Prison is a very interesting place.
	It's got an enormously interesting culture and heritage.
	It's not a very Pleasant place.
	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.
	It's a scary atmosphere.
	It's interesting.
	You talk to the correctional officers and we ask them, you know, how the hell can you do this?
	Be locked up with these guys all day.
	And they go, well, how the hell can you do what you do?
	At least we know who the players are.
	And I can see it from both sides.
	But it's death row, 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.
	And the 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.
	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.
	There's a National Geographic special that was on a couple of years ago that profiled San Quentin and even one of the inmates they interviewed.
	Talk specifically about Scott that he would be attacked if he was in general population.
	They'd even do it with a pencil.
	Pretty interesting show to watch if you get a chance to catch that one.
	Of course, it's not as good as your show, but it's nearly as good.
	Naturally.
	But the prison code of justice is so weird.
	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.
	I guess you're not allowed, what?
	I'm killing your wife.
	I don't know if that's a problem, but killing your unborn baby.
	Is that the thing that's going to get him the pencil on the neck?
	Yeah, it's a very interesting culture up there.
	There.
	Any of the state prisons in California are, you know, not everybody gets to go in unless you do something really bad, but it's a very interesting culture up there.
	I don't think Scott's days are very good.
	Now, Scott has an enormously impressive emotional control.
	And so he can, I'm sure he adapts better than I would.
	And, but it's not, you know, he's not ordering flirtinis up there.
	You know, he's stuck and he ain't going anywhere.
	And they don't smell good.
	They're noisy.
	And you're not there with the faculty at Stanford.
	So, you know, it's not a very pleasant place to be.
	What do you think?
	Because people debate this all the time in our society because the death penalty is still recognized as constitutional and implemented in certain states.
	I've heard people who oppose the death penalty say, I oppose it because I think it's too kind, it's too swift.
	That I'd rather see somebody, especially a young man like Scott Peterson.
	I mean, Sharon Rocha at the hearing just most recently was just saying Lacey would be, I think she said, 47 now and Connor would be 18.
	And it really does give you a flavor for the passage of time and how much they've lost.
	And Scott Peterson, too, is not getting any younger.
	But what a torturous existence.
	And I wonder what you think about.
	What would be worse, a death sentence or a life in prison without parole?
	Well, you know, that's kind of a flip of the coin.
	I mean, that's, you know, do you have the fish or do you have the steak?
	I mean, they both are, you know, kind of equal in some ways.
	I think the anxiety of knowing that the Grim Reaper is coming when you got that death sentence, if they're going to carry it out, would be very difficult to deal with.
	But again, most people that end up in there don't think the way we do.
	So their thought process is probably slightly different.
	There was some good things recently.
	There was a guy put to death recently in one of his closing statements before they gave him the needle.
	He solved another case for him.
	He did the last minute.
	He said something about another murder that had been committed and that they cleared him on that or cleared the case based on what he said.
	I guess he admitted it.
	So, I mean, for me, if they're not going to carry it out, don't bother with it.
	Don't cause additional problems.
	Don't make the trial longer by having a penalty phase.
	Just get by with your life without parole and leave it at that.
	And then you sit there and you think about it for the rest of your life.
	The concern, also, of course, you know, you put an innocent man to death.
	I wouldn't want to ever see that.
	And in this case, you know, you don't have a confession, you don't have an eyewitness, and you don't have a videotape.
	So, you know, there's always that.
	But well, 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, and the absence of tight forensics means you don't have a case, right?
	That all these things are challenges if this case has to be retried.
	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.
	Her body washed up in San Francisco Bay in July of 2002.
	That case considered, I think, unsolved as of a couple years ago, right?
	So there's so much that the defense could make hay with.
	You know, was there a serial killer?
	Were they wrong about the burglars?
	Was there something happening on December 24th?
	And I just wonder whether we're so obsessed with like armchair detective work in 2021, it would be a more of an uphill battle for the prosecution.
	I'll give you the last word.
	Well, it probably would be.
	But again, I have confidence in the prosecutors from Stanslaw County District Attorney's Office.
	They've got some incredibly bright trial attorneys there.
	And so I don't know who they would assign to it the second time around.
	With it going to trial again, hopefully not.
	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.
	And even for this.
	To come up for resentencing here in December.
	What a great time of the year to do that, to just open that wound again.
	Now, granted, every Christmas is going to be different from before Lacey went missing to now.
	And I get that.
	But then to have to add salt to the wound by having this thing happen now, why couldn't they have done this in February and put it off a little bit longer?
	But that is what it is.
	And this is what we're dealing with.
	As far as I'm concerned, I'm close to the case along with Craig and Al.
	We were in it from the start, and it is what it is.
	It was a team effort.
	I appreciate you referring to me as the one who solved it.
	I didn't solve it, 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, the other agencies, sheriff's departments, detectives from other agencies, the FBI that helped us out on it.
	Our crime analysis did a wonderful job putting things together.
	And the evidence clerks, the evidence technicians, and everybody that joined in on it, it was a big team effort.
	I just hope that if we go to trial again on it, that we get a good jury, they can see right through this stuff, and they see every strand of this circumstantial evidence makes an unbreakable cable, and they come back with the right verdict.
	I hope the same.
	John, thank you so much for your investigatory efforts and for being here to tell us the story.
	Wow, what a case.
	Joining us later this week, you've got to join us later this week.
	We've got a heartbreaking and infuriating story about the opioid crisis featuring the author of Dope Sick, the book, and then the creator of the incredible TV series.
Join Us Next Week 00:00:35
	If you haven't seen it, you need to.
	In the meantime, make sure you see the show by downloading The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
	You can watch it if you prefer at youtube.com.
	Thank you so much for listening, not just today, but always.
	We appreciate it.
	More later.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome to True Crime Christmas
00:14:10 The Polygraph Question
00:17:52 Evidence on the Blanket
00:28:23 Frustrated Caller Details
00:32:01 Recording the Conversation
00:40:23 Telling Both Families
00:43:25 Rupturing Family Trust
00:48:10 Two Versions of Hair Dye
00:53:11 Circumstantial Scent Evidence
01:08:31 The Sinking Boat Theory
01:18:13 Flirting with a Babysitter
01:22:43 Building an Unbreakable Case
01:36:46 Join Us Next Week