Scott Peterson - Disappearance of Laci Peterson

Disappearance of Laci Peterson

On December 24, 2002, Laci Peterson was reported missing from their Modesto, California, home. She was eight months pregnant with a due date of February 10, 2003, and the couple had planned to name the baby boy Conner. The exact date and cause of Laci's death was never determined. Peterson initially reported his wife missing on Christmas Eve, and the story quickly attracted nationwide media interest.

Modesto police did not immediately identify Peterson as a suspect, largely because Laci's family and friends maintained their faith in his innocence during the month following Laci's disappearance. Eventually, police grew more suspicious due to inconsistencies in his story. On January 17, it became known that Peterson had had numerous extramarital affairs, most recently with a massage therapist named Amber Frey. Frey approached police about Peterson, whom she had just begun to date, after discovering he was actually married to a missing woman. At this point, Laci's family announced that they had withdrawn their support of Peterson. They later said that they were angered not by the affair, but that Peterson had told Frey that he'd "lost" his wife and that he would be spending his first Christmas without his wife — 14 days before Laci disappeared. To the Rochas, this meant that Peterson had already planned to kill Laci long before her disappearance.

Frey became a key witness in the case against Peterson when she agreed to let the police tape their subsequent phone conversations in hopes of getting him to confess. Despite this, Peterson was not recorded making any confession to Frey.

Frey told the police that two weeks before Laci's disappearance, Peterson had implied to her that he was a widower by saying that he had "lost his wife." During the trial, the audio recordings of Peterson and Frey's telephone conversations were played, and the transcripts were publicized. Their contents proved to be both revealing and, ultimately, damning to Peterson's character. For example, they revealed that in the days after Laci went missing, Peterson claimed to Amber that he had traveled to Paris to celebrate the holidays, in part with his new companions Pasqual and François. In reality, Peterson made one of these phone calls while attending the New Year's Eve candlelight vigil in Modesto for his missing wife.