REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (KRON) — The star prosecutor of Scott Peterson’s infamous murder trial is urging a San Mateo County judge to deny attempts from the Innocence Project to revive his decades-old case.
A jury convicted Scott Peterson in 2004 of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son, Conner, before dumping their remains into the San Francisco Bay.
The trial’s original prosecutor, former Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager, is now serving as a special prosecutor for fighting against Peterson’s attempt to reopen his case with a new investigation.
The Los Angeles Innocence Project is representing Peterson. LAIP filed more than one thousand pages of discovery motions in San Mateo County court earlier this year requesting DNA testing, Modesto police records, and other evidence. According to the Innocence Project, evidence that was allegedly mishandled or overlooked by investigators could possibly exonerate Peterson.
A suspicious stolen orange van was torched near Peterson’s home on the morning after his wife went missing, but police never connected it to the murder case, court documents state. Parts of the burned van contained blood and should be tested for DNA, according to LAIP.
Fladager and fellow special prosecutor David Harris filed an opposition motion on May 29 urging the judge to reject all requests from Peterson’s defense team for DNA testing. Unless ordered by the judge, the District Attorney’s Office said it will not hand over evidence from the case.
The convicted killer’s newest legal maneuver was “cobbled together,” prosecutors assert in their opposition motion. They wrote, “There is no valid new evidence. The testing for DNA would not raise a reasonability probability of a different outcome and would just subject the victims’ family to grief and hardship. The People ask this court to deny all of the defendant’s requests for DNA testing. Defendant’s resulting theory is based entirely upon conjecture and speculation.”
While LAIP claims it found new witnesses for his defense, the majority of statements from witnesses are riddled with speculation, hearsay, improper opinion, irrelevance, and lack of personal knowledge, the motion states.
Last year, Peterson wrote a letter to the Innocence Project from prison asking its legal team to investigate his “wrongful conviction,” and find the true killer. In the letter he wrote, “Additional information will assist in determining what happened to my family and prove that I am innocent and had nothing to do with these horrible crimes that were committed against my wife and son.”
Peterson is seeking to DNA test 17 items: four items associated with the burned orange van found the morning after Laci went missing; 11 items found near or with Laci and Conner’s bodies; and two items from a burglary across the street from his home.
His supporters wrote on the Facebook group, Scott Peterson Appeal, “The DA is wasting time and resources by bringing in Special Prosecutors to oppose this testing. It’s long past time to correct these failures.”
Peterson, 51, is serving a life prison sentence without possibility of parole.
Fladager and Harris both served as prosecutors for the high-profile 2004 trial that resulted in Peterson’s conviction. In new court documents, Fladager and Harris assert that circumstantial evidence presented to the jury was so “overwhelming,” there is no justification for reviving the case.
Their opposition motion contains more than 300 pages of trial exhibits, photographs, and testimony outlining the trial’s strongest evidence that Laci’s husband murdered her on December 24, 2002, and her body was dumped into the San Francisco Bay.
The following is a timeline of Laci Peterson’s murder, according to the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s opposition motion:
December 8, 2002: Scott used Internet search engines to research marine tides, fishing, nautical charts, water currents, and boat ramps in the Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay.
December 9, 2002: Scott bought a 14-foot aluminum boat for $1,400 in cash and did not tell anyone about it. “Over the next fifteen days, the defendant told no one that he purchased an aluminum fishing boat. Numerous witnesses testified that they knew nothing about the defendant’s new boat,” the DA’s Office wrote.
On the same day that he bought the boat, Scott talked to his secret mistress, Amber Frey. He told her that he had “lost his wife,” and it was entirely too painful for him to talk more about. He said this was the first holiday that he would be spending without his wife. Frey asked if he was ready for a relationship with her, and Scott answered, “absolutely.”
Dec. 14, 2002: Scott and Frey went to a formal Christmas party and snapped photos together.
December 23, 2002: Laci’s final phone call was made at 8:30 p.m. when she called her mother. Laci confirmed that she and her husband would attend a Christmas Eve family dinner at her parents’ house, which was planned for the following night.
December 24, 2002: Laci, 27, was eight months pregnant and she vanished from her Modesto home. Her husband told police that he went fishing in the San Francisco Bay on Christmas Eve, and when he returned home, Laci was gone.
At 5:17 p.m., he called his mother-in-law and said that Laci’s car was in the driveway, their dog was in the backyard with its leash on, and Laci was missing. Her disappearance triggered a massive search effort by law enforcement and volunteers from the community in the weeks that followed. At the time, police and family members did not know that Scott was having a secret romantic affair with Frey.
December 30, 2002 at 1 a.m.: Frey attended a party with her friend, Shawn Sibley. “She received a phone call from her friend who told Amber that there was a Scott Peterson from Modesto who was the husband of a missing pregnant woman. Amber immediately called the Modesto Police Department and spoke to a dispatcher in an attempt to determine if it was the same Scott Peterson,” the DA’s Office wrote.
Two Modesto police detectives drove 100 miles from Modesto to Frey’s house in Madera to interview her. Frey agreed to work with the police and secretly record her phone conversations with Scott.
December 31, 2002: Laci was still missing. Family members held a candlelight vigil at the East La Loma Park in Modesto beginning at 4:30 p.m. Nearly 1,300 people showed up to pray for Laci’s safe return. Scott called Frey at 4:20 p.m. and she recorded the call for police. Scott told her that he was calling from Paris and described what the New Year’s Eve atmosphere in Paris was like. He said, “It’s pretty awesome. Fireworks there at the Eiffel Tower.” Scott was not in Paris. Instead, he was attending the candlelight vigil in Modesto that evening.
“Several friends of (Laci’s) family, who also knew the defendant, noticed his cheerful demeanor that evening. The defendant seemed like he was ‘very relaxed,’ ‘in a very good mood,’ and ‘somewhat jovial,'” the DA’s Office wrote.
January 1, 2003: Scott called Frey to wish her happy New Year one minute after midnight. She recorded their long phone conversation. “Amber asked the defendant when he was coming back home from Europe and the defendant responded that he was trying to reschedule his return trip for the end of January, but that he needed to travel to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a few days at the end of January and beginning of February,” the DA’s Office wrote.
January 6, 2003: Frey confronted Scott during a recorded phone call and asked about Laci. She asked, why did he say in early December, before Laci went missing, that he had “lost his wife” and this would be his first holiday without her?
The District Attorney’s Office wrote, “Peterson’s lies in this case were extensive, presented to the jury through statements and captured recordings, previously reviewed by multiple courts and clearly preclude any support for additional DNA testing. Weeks prior to Laci’s disappearance, defendant Peterson told Amber Frey and her friend that he had ‘lost his wife.’ Peterson told some witnesses he was golfing when Laci went missing, then he told law enforcement he went fishing, but could not recall what fish he was trying to catch.”
“Laci’s body could have been placed in the defendant’s boat, concealed under the boat cover and transported undetected to the Bay,” the DA’s Office wrote.
April 13 and 14, 2003: After a strong wind storm, Laci’s remains washed up at the Point Isabel Regional Park, and Conner’s body was found in the tidal flats on the shore of Richmond. Investigators suspect that anchors were used to keep her body from floating up. Her head and arms were missing from the remains. The only internal organ still within her body was the uterus.
A coroner testified at trial, “My thinking was that Conner had likely been protected by that uterus, and ultimately, with time in the water and with tidal action, the uterus was abraded open. At that time Conner was released and ended up washing ashore very shortly thereafter. My opinion is that when Laci was deposited in the marina environment, Conner was still within Laci.”
