We the Jury: Deciding the Scott Peterson Case

By Greg Beratlis

Nearly two years after the disappearance of 27-year-old Laci Peterson, her husband Scott was found guilty for the murder of his wife and their unborn son. According to the jurors, it wasn't one thing that condemned Scott Peterson— it was everything. Despite a series of internal battles that brought them to the brink of a mistrial, the jurors ultimately decided Peterson' s fate. We, the Jury is the dramatic story of seven jurors who delivered the guilty verdict. This is also the story of seven average Americans who never imagined the horrors they would face or the phantoms that would haunt them after they convicted the enigmatic murderer and recommended that he be put to death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phoenix Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781614670636

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The 2002 Christmas Eve murders of Laci Peterson and her unborn son, Conner, quickly emerged as the first major criminal trial to capture the imagination of the American public in the 21st Century. Scott Peterson, a handsome but enigmatic fertilizer salesman from Modesto, wasn’t a celebrity like Michael Jackson or Robert Blake, both of whom were embroiled in legal battles at the same time, but he became the center of a vortex of events that culminated in his murder convictions and death sentence. Peterson was not a charismatic football star like O.J. Simpson, but his bad boy sex appeal was evident to anyone sitting in the courtroom. Although they were repulsed by his actions, many female reporters were drawn to his physical presence. He was tall, dark and handsome, and an outlaw. These are compelling ingredients that stirred the public’s fascination.

Peterson and his wife, Laci, were from Modesto, not big cities like Los Angeles or New York where the murder of a pregnant woman at Christmas would generate tabloid fury. Yet, there was something about this case that touched people in a different way. This was a quintessential American story, perhaps even the dark side of the American Dream. Scott and Laci seemed like the perfect couple, but as this murder mystery unfolded, their love story became a gothic nightmare that sold magazines and newspapers and became a headline story for cable news channels night after night. More than two years after Peterson’s conviction, news that a female juror had become the convicted killer’s pen pal generated a flurry of attention in the media. Little things like the sale of the Peterson home in Modesto still make news.

By comparison, Michael Jackson’s child molestation case faded into obscurity just as quickly as the singer disappeared into the sands of the Middle East. Jackson and the crimes he was accused of had the ick factor, something so ugly that the public tuned out, especially after he was acquitted. The abrasive Robert Blake was just another out of work actor in a city of out of work actors and waiters. Peterson may be in jail, but he still receives bags of fan mail and marriage proposals. Like Darth Vader, he has become the dark side of stardom.

Peterson’s killings haunt us, just as they haunt the 12 strangers from San Mateo County who formed the jury that convicted him and banished him to death row. These strangers, six men and six women, never imagined the effects this trial would have on them. It is doubtful the media ever anticipated the Peterson case would become the sensation that it did. When it did, coverage became non-stop.

‘Timing is everything, said Loyola Law Prof. Laurie Levenson. ‘This case happened during Christmas. A whole town went out looking for Laci instead of having Christmas dinner.

There was much more, though.

You had an attractive victim, a whodunit, sex and an affair, Levenson said. It became a moment that captured the history of what was going on in California.

For Bay Area defense lawyer Daniel Horowitz, the Peterson case was like a medieval passion play, a biblical battle between good and evil. With such allegorical characters, it is no surprise the trial captured the imagination of the American public.

The casting was perfect. You had Laci, the angelic, perfect woman, as the victim, a Mother Mary kind of figure, said Horowitz. Then you had the seductive girlfriend, who Gloria Allred ultimately spun as a good person but who didn’t have to be. Finally, you’ve got Scott Peterson who is the smiley-faced, sweet devil but he’s pure evil. It hit all the hot buttons. They’re the elements that novels and soap operas are made of. I don’t think there were any grays. That’s the whole point.

The jury, Horowitz said, became like a Greek chorus, especially after convicting Peterson and recommending the death penalty. The Peterson case also shattered the myth of the storybook marriage.

Women identified overwhelmingly with Laci, beyond belief really, Horowitz said.

Stan Goldman, a Loyola Law Professor who analyzed the case for Fox News, stated whenever a Peterson story aired the ratings at Fox News Channel spiked, mostly among young women, a highly prized demographic the channel rarely attracted.

This saga of good and evil also shattered the American Dream of the perfect couple in their perfect little house. Juror Richelle Nice considered the murders a betrayal. Who could you trust? she wondered. Others wondered too.

He was a very good-looking guy, Goldman said. Especially the one picture of Laci with that big smile made her very appealing. There’s something about it. It’s the cautionary tale. It’s what your mother warned you about if you were a little girl. Don’t trust a man just because he smiles at you and looks good. Hence the interest from young women. I think it was a typical kind of cautionary tale with a tragic ending.

When an eight-month pregnant woman disappeared on Christmas Eve, the search for her heightened media attention and hooked the audience.

Then to find out that the grieving husband was the primary suspect made the case very personal for a lot of women, Goldman said. It’s the classic cliché. It’s the car wreck you can’t take your eyes off of. Once you get into it, you’ve got to find out how it ends.

Goldman recalled sitting next to a seasoned 40-something female reporter during the preliminary hearing. He is a hunk, the reporter told Goldman when Peterson walked into the courtroom.

Bemused, Goldman said, If these were homely people, this case would have never had legs.

Like the slow speed chase in the O.J. Simpson case or the film clips of JonBenét Ramsey as a beauty queen, people were mesmerized by the images of Scott, Laci and Amber Frey.

It was like a sitcom with these good looking people that they started to care about, Goldman said. ‘They cared about Laci. Maybe a few people cared about Scott, although I doubt that many. They were fascinated."

Peter Shaplen, the veteran TV news producer who was the media coordinator at the Peterson and Jackson trials, said the story of Laci and Scott became a complex and unfolding drama, driven by a young woman with a captivating smile. She and Scott also fit the media’s ideal for a perfect victim and villain.

She was pretty, she was white, she was pregnant, she was suburban and she was middle class, he said, and it was Christmas and Scott was the perfectly handsome villain. Even women in the media found him sexy and irresistible and you would hear them saying, ‘I’d like to do him.’ And there was a lull in the news.

But what the story had most of all was Laci, and it was not merely her smile on her missing persons poster that captivated the country. It was Laci, herself.

She was everyone’s kid sister, he said. She was every woman’s best girlfriend or the date every guy wanted to take home to his mother. To women, she was pretty, but not too pretty. To men, she had a certain allure that made her desirable. She was approachable and she was vulnerable. She had that old time glamour that Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had and that made them stars for decades. She was real.

Peterson also had his role in the psychodrama. If Laci was the perfect heroine, Scott was the villain.

Scott was a cad to women and an SOB, Shaplen said. Even during his trial, he never lost his smirk. You wanted to rub sand in his face.

Shaplen said the media and the public didn’t respond to Michael Jackson and his troubles because of his alleged crimes of child abuse and his own lifestyle. People couldn’t relate to him the way they could to the middle class couple from Modesto.

Michael was always weird, he said. He had a weird lifestyle; his ranch was weird and so were the sycophants around him.

But for reporters who met Peterson shortly after his wife’s disappearance at a media center at the Red Lion Inn in Modesto, Peterson was a man on the run. He was ice, emotionally detached, always suspiciously darting away from the cameras. His excuse was, It’s about Laci, not about me. The conclusion that most journalists began to make was simply something was wrong, and that feeling came across to the public that followed his elusive moves. This isn’t the way a grieving husband behaves after his wife has vanished. Moreover, many reporters wondered how a man whose pregnant wife was so close to birth would claim to have gone fishing when his wife could have easily gone into labor. It was villainy and easy to understand.

Some journalists began to reach a chilling conclusion, typified by questions shouted out at Peterson such as, Why did you kill Laci? The icy Peterson never answered, but the public, especially women, were hooked, just as if he had become a star.

There are different kinds of lures with these cases, said USC Prof. Leo Braudy, a pop culture expert and author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. Stars like Michael Jackson and Robert Blake are people you think you know already. They are the seamy side of show businesses, the world of glitz and glamour.

For Braudy celebrities are distant, one to two steps removed from the common man; the Petersons weren’t.

The Peterson case is more of a suburban world filled with the good family, Braudy said. They were the nice couple down the street, but you now find out what was going on behind the curtains. It hits closer to home. When it comes to celebrities, people are more detached. It’s about sins and malfeasance. They sort of deserve what happens to them in some way. To maintain their adoration for a celebrity, the celebrity has to walk the straight and narrow, and if they breach this agreement, there is a desire to stomp on them.

The Petersons were an American ideal on the surface—a nice home, good looking and a child on the way at Christmas. It was a postcard.

They seemed to have a good life, but there were maggots underneath that façade, said the cultural historian. Scott was like a member of your family, but he has disappointed you. Suddenly, some horrible family secret is erupting at Christmas.

Even these jurors were captivated by the ideal look that the Petersons presented, at first, but after more than six months of weighing the evidence, the men and women who were going to decide Peterson’s fate contemplated the same question the media had been asking for months: Why did you kill Laci?

This book is an inside look at the Peterson trial through the eyes of seven jurors, two women and five men. These were decent people, plucked out of their daily lives, never really aware of what they would face during the trial and the traumatic effect it would have on their lives.

Their story is filled with twists and turns that not even a Hollywood scriptwriter could have created. Three of their colleagues on the panel were dismissed, including a foreman who was a doctor and a lawyer. Those who remained became prisoners of the judicial system they were trying to serve. It was as if they were criminals themselves. A bailiff constantly monitored their movements in the jury box to see if they were taking too many notes or too few or whether they were dozing. During deliberations, they were driven to and from the courthouse in a sheriff’s van filled with shackles for prisoners. They lived in a kind of judicial version of solitary confinement. They were unable to speak about the trial to anyone, even their families. They had to be constantly on guard for private eyes who might be shadowing them, ready to pounce and cause a mistrial if they discovered an indiscretion.

After the jurors reached that cataclysmic decision about the fate of Peterson, they continued to be victims of the jury system. They are wracked by nightmares, flashbacks, and physical pain from the traumatic stress they suffered. Shockingly, San Mateo County does not offer counseling to aid jurors who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

These seven jurors have no regrets about what they faced and their decision to convict Peterson and send him on a journey to his death. Unlike the Jackson jury, they have never second-guessed their decisions. They don’t waffle. Despite arguments, disagreements and philosophical differences, they concluded unequivocally that Peterson committed a double murder and deserved the ultimate punishment the state reserved for such heartless killers.

This book tells the reader why a man they originally perceived as the All-American Boy was actually a cold-blooded killer. There was no rush to judgment. Throughout the trial, they looked for every possible avenue that would acquit him. But after scrutinizing and listening to the evidence, they came to the same resounding conclusion that the prosecution did. He did it.

The All-American Boy was the personification of evil. If they thought he was innocent, despite what the public or the media thought, Peterson would have walked out of the courtroom a free man.

Anne Bremner, a former Seattle prosecutor and a frequent TV legal analyst on the Peterson case, isn’t surprised by this jury and its decisions.

When picking a jury, Bremner says, pick bowlers. I want common sense, grounded, middle class and no nonsense people. In a murder trial, you want people with common sense.

This is the story of the common sense of seven jurors—a Teamster, a Marine veteran, a mother of four, a biotech clinical trial inspector, a retired airline mechanic, a retired postman and an engineer who coaches youth football.

This is the dark side of the American dream, said Prof. George Bisharat, a criminal procedure specialist at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. People saw the unfolding tragedy as if their own lives could take a wrong turn into a morbid and bizarre environment. It is as if their fundamental values were betrayed. This is because they could relate to Laci and Scott and so could these jurors.

CHAPTER 1

VERDICT DAY

"I looked down. My tears were hitting the floor.

When he said the word ‘unanimous,’ we all cried."

—Richelle Nice, Juror No. 7

In the Redwood City courtroom where Scott Peterson awaits the verdict in a murder trial that had captivated the nation for more than five months, even the toughest-looking bailiff turns white.

I can’t breathe, the courtroom cop gasps as he tugs at the collar of his wool tunic.

He’s right. The drama sucks the air out of the room. Within minutes, a jury of six men and six women from San Mateo County would reveal their verdict in the murders of Peterson’s wife Laci and his unborn son, Conner.

Just before the lunch break on that warm and sunny Friday, Nov. 12, 2004, Judge Alfred Delucchi announced that the jury had reached a verdict. Everyone understood the gravity of the situation. More than a dozen bailiffs were inside the packed courtroom in case trouble erupted once the decision was read.

It had been a tough trial. Peterson’s charismatic defense attorney, Mark Geragos, dominated the opening months of the saga of lust, obsession and personal irresponsibility. Would the prosecution led by Rick Distaso xxx and co-counsel Dave Harris become The Little Engine That Could and relentlessly chug over the mountain and win over a jury that had been wracked by disputes that led to the dismissal of three jurors? Or would the jury agree with Geragos that there was no evidence, except for one strand of hair that might have been Laci Peterson’s, to connect Scott to the crime?

Geragos needs a big win. Then in early 2004, Geragos abruptly left the Michael Jackson child molestation case and was replaced by Thomas Mesereau, Jr. He had lost the Winona Ryder shoplifting case in Beverly Hills in 2002. Geragos, who came from a family of LA lawyers, used his baritone voice to keep spectators and the media awake during the early days of the case. The prosecution presented a phalanx of expert witnesses who would discuss such scintillating subjects as the history of concrete. Geragos, who wore designer suits and flashy ties, was the ringmaster; all eyes went to him when he spoke. He even told jokes and made quips, which would come to haunt him as the trial progressed.

At night, he smoked cigars with reporters and sipped $20 shots of single malt Scotch at Vino Santo, an Italian restaurant near the courthouse. He would adjourn to the posh Marriott hotel in San Mateo for more smokes and cocktails. Geragos was living large in his suite while Scott Peterson sat locked away in his cell.

In the courtroom, sitting behind Geragos in the gallery, were a number of beautiful young women in miniskirts. After the trial, some of the jurors would remark that they thought Geragos might have been attempting to distract them during key testimony by prosecution witnesses. Johnny Cochran had played the race card. Was Geragos playing the sex card?

One woman came in and sat down on the edge of her seat with a short skirt, and one bent down one time and her thong was showing, Richelle Nice, Juror No. 7, said. There was the one day she walked in with those high-heeled boots on.

I guess it was Geragos’ idea of a distraction, but it didn’t work, said Mike Belmessieri, Juror No. 4.

Geragos relentlessly turned prosecution witnesses into defense witnesses with his rapier-like cross-examinations.

Conversely, the prosecutors, from the farmlands of Modesto, didn’t crack jokes or trade quips with the judge; to them there was nothing funny about a double murder. Grim and low-key, Distaso, the monkish-looking senior deputy district attorney from Stanislaus County, and his team delivered their case methodically and often tediously. The prosecutors kept away from the media, working steadily on their case every afternoon at the more modest Marriott Towne Place Suites in Redwood City.

The view from their hotel overlooked San Francisco Bay that was a constant reminder of their duty. This was where the horrifying remains of Laci and her baby had been found amidst the flotsam and jetsam on a desolate beach along the Richmond shore.

It all began when Laci went missing on Christmas Eve, 2002. Her husband Scott, a handsome, enigmatic Modesto, Calif., fertilizer salesman, the Willy Loman of manure, said he had driven 90 miles to go fishing while his eight-and-a-half-month pregnant wife prepared their home for Christmas and the arrival of the son whom she desperately wanted.

The Peterson trial turned Redwood City into a center of national media attention with its non-stop cable news reports and punditry about the murder of Laci. Laci’s iconic missing persons posters featured her as a smiling and bubbly, 27-year-old substitute teacher. But now, after listening to scores of witnesses, opening and closing arguments, DNA reports and after staring at the chilling photographs of the victims’ remains, the jury had reached its verdict.

If Peterson is found guilty in the first degree for the murders, there would be a second phase in the case—penalty. The jurors would have to decide if Peterson should be sentenced to death or spend life in prison. There were no other options. If Peterson is acquitted on this autumn afternoon, he would walk out the doors of the courthouse and into the sunlight a free man, perhaps with the kind of arrogant smirk he flashed throughout the trial.

Some media cynics were stunned when Judge Delucchi said the verdict would be read at 1:15 p.m. They thought that Delucchi, who had already dismissed three members of the jury, might possibly drop another one. Some wags began mocking the trial, calling it a new reality show, Survivor: Redwood City.

The winner is the last juror on the island, one reporter quipped.

Most legal observers anticipated the jury, riddled with strife since beginning deliberations nine days earlier, would reach a decision the next week. But this was a Friday, and juries are notorious for coming back with a verdict at the end of the week to avoid another weekend of sequestration.

Now Geragos, who is in Santa Ana, Calif., working on another case, looks as uncaring as his client. His lieutenant, Pat Harris, would have to take the verdict. As the verdict approaches, the public begins filling the courtyard outside the courthouse. Many followed the trial; some had even waited in line during the dewy early morning hours each day to get one of the rare public seats.

Peter Shaplen, the media coordinator during the trial, recalled an eerie mood. It was a cross between Times Square after VE-Day and Madame La Farge at the guillotine, the veteran news producer said. It was kind of a carnival. This was the big event and they wanted to be present; they wanted to hear it first; they wanted to be there physically, and not hear it on the news. They somehow felt Laci’s murder was personal and they were connected to the outcome. It was pro-guilty. ‘Vengeance is ours,’ sayeth the Lord.

Shaplen estimated that the crowd was about 60 percent women and predominantly middle-aged. One woman wheeled her paraplegic son into the throng. She put her child in the midst of this jostling crowd, which is like putting him into a crowded New York City subway, Shaplen said.

But what if the verdict went the other way? What if the jury decided that the prosecution’s circumstantial case against Peterson was empty? Would there be violence, a riot?

Deputies in the courtroom were already fearful that Laci’s father, Dennis Rocha, might try to attack Peterson, or that Ron Grantski, Sharon Rocha’s longtime companion, might strike out at Peterson, too. The opposing families might come to blows.

But in the courtyard, which was lined with media tents from such news organizations as NBC, CNN, Fox and Court TV, the authorities played a different hand. Unlike what would happen at the Michael Jackson trial months later where metal fences and barbed wire turned the Santa Barbara County Courthouse into a stalag, San Mateo authorities used a single strand of yellow crime scene tape to keep the crowd from the courthouse steps. Air One, a lone police helicopter, hovered above to monitor the crowd.

"Deputies were out in the plaza, but