A Deadly Game Read online

  As an avid equestrienne, I have four horses and six dogs; I’m al-ways scuffing myself playing with the puppies or working in the barn—or, even more hazardous, while cooking in the kitchen. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine trying to convince anyone that major droplets of blood can be found around my home on a regular basis, as Scott did.

  Just before 11:00 P.M., Detective Brocchini suggested that Laci’s mother go home for the night. Then he turned to Scott. “Is it all right if the ID Tech people go inside to take photographs and collect evidence?” Taking crime scene photos and gathering evidence a few hours into a missing persons case is quite unusual, but Brocchini was following his instinct. He wanted the scene preserved as quickly as possible.

  “That would be fine,” Scott replied.

  At 11:17, Brocchini and Evers drove Scott to his place of business, exactly four miles away. Scott sat in the passenger seat of the detective’s unmarked sedan; Evers followed closely behind in a patrol car. Scott was a fertilizer salesman for Tradecorp, a company headquartered in Spain. His territory spanned California, Arizona, and New Mexico, but the base of operations was a one-story warehouse in an industrial area of Modesto, at 1027 North Emerald Avenue.

  Just as they had searched the Petersons’ home, the detectives in-tended to scrutinize Scott’s place of business. They were particularly-interested in the boat he had taken on his afternoon fishing expedition, a fourteen-foot aluminum Sears Gamefisher stored inside his warehouse.

  The officers observed that there were two entrances to the ware-house, a single-car roll-up door and a door that led to an office area. “I’m the only one with the key, since I’m the only employee,” Scott told them as he unlocked the office door.

  “There’s no electricity,” he then announced as he led the men in-side. Neither officer flipped the light switches to test his assertion. Al-though Brocchini would be criticized for fingering Scott as early as he did, at this point he was still willing to take Scott’s word about the electricity. Grabbing a Streamline flashlight with a rechargeable battery, the detective spotted a computer and a fax machine with an in-coming fax in the tray. He noted the date, December 24, and the time it had been sent, 14:28, or 2:28 P.M. “Tell me about this fax?” he asked Scott.

  “I think I received it before I left to go fishing,” Scott replied. “It’s from New Jersey, so there’s a three-hour time difference.”

  Once again, Scott’s stories weren’t making any sense. “If you got it at 11:28, that would have been kind of late to go to Berkeley.” the detective mused. “It’s cutting it kind of close leaving Modesto at 11:28 and arriving in Berkley at 12:54.”

  “Well, maybe I got it when I got back from Berkeley, but I re-member getting it and reading it.”

  “Would you roll up the door so I can at least position my car in front of the shop, so I’ll have some light besides this flashlight?” Brocchini requested.

  “Sure.” Striding to the warehouse area, Scott heaved open the roll-up door while the detective repositioned his vehicle, using his high beams to illuminate the boat. Only later did it occur to him that if Scott’s computer and fax machine were working that morning, the electricity was certainly working then.

  The boat sat atop its trailer. It appeared dry on the outside, but there was water visible in the bow. The detective noticed a chunk of concrete with a rebar hoop on one end on the floor of the boat. Scott identified it as a homemade anchor, but there was no rope attached. Brocchini paused for a moment to examine what appeared to be con-crete debris along the rib line inside the boat. It was not on the actual rim, but on the edges inside of the vessel that ran horizontal to the bottom and up both sides. There did not appear to be any reason that concrete particles would be there or on the table nearby. He noticed scratches on one side as well.

  A pair of yellow rubber gloves and a short red docking line lay in-side the boat. Both were wet. One ultralight rod and reel, and a similar saltwater rig, were also in the boat. The freshwater rod was fitted with a small Mitchell reel spooled with braided line with a small lure tied to the end. The reel was missing its crank handle. The saltwater rig, a new-looking Master Brand rod and reel, was broken down into parts. The reel was spooled with what appeared to be seventeen-pound monofilament line. A small buzz lure, used for top water bass fishing, hung from the line. Both rod and reel had what appeared to be residue, possibly salt, on the exterior. A small tackle box sat nearby.

  As Brocchini photographed the boat, Scott said, “I hope you don’t show those to my boss,” apparently worried that he would get in trouble for using the warehouse to store his boat. Even granting that different people react differently under stressful conditions, any good investigator would have noticed the behavior as odd. As Brocchini noted, “This appeared to be suspicious concern from a hus-band of a missing woman.”

  After the warehouse search, Detective Brocchini and Officer Evers took Scott to the Modesto Police Department headquarters at 600 Tenth Street for a formal interview. The downtown building was just minutes from the Peterson home, around the corner from the county jail.

  “I haven’t been taking notes all night,” Brocchini told Scott as they pulled into the station house. “I’d like to sit down so I can take some notes and get a more thorough statement from you.”

  Scott agreed.

  The men went upstairs to an interrogation room and began the taped conversation at midnight. They would not finish until 1:30 that morning.

  What follows is the first complete rendering of the taped interview between Brocchini and Scott Peterson, including those portions not admitted at trial.

  Detective Brocchini started a tape recorder, then began to speak. “Pretty much, Scott, we’ll just go over what we already talked about so I can make some notes.”

  Scott mumbled his agreement.

  “Tell me about the morning?”

  Very matter-of-factly, Scott recited their activities. “Ah, okay. I don’t know what time we got up,” but he did say that Laci was up first and had cereal for breakfast. He noted that his pregnant wife got sick if she did not eat as soon as she got out of bed.

  “I laid around in bed longer, I got up at, I don’t know, eight o’clock or so.” Brocchini noted that Scott made no mention of any-body making the bed. “I showered. We were watching her favorite show, Martha Stewart [Living]. Watched a little bit of that.”

  “You didn’t watch the whole thing through?” Detective Brocchini interjected.

  “No.”

  “You remember what part you saw?”

  “I don’t know, some cooking deal, cookies of some sort. They were talking about what to do with meringue.” This trivial fact would become a crucial reference point at trial, one that would prove embarrassing for the prosecution but even more damning for Scott.

  “I can’t remember your house … the converted garage area, is that your TV room?” the detective asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you eat any breakfast?”

  “I had a bowl of cereal.”

  The events Scott described in that first interview struck me as odd when I first reviewed the transcript of this conversation. Police photographs in the kitchen showed no cereal bowls or other breakfast dishes in the sink. There were bowls in the dishwater, but no one looked in the refrigerator to see if Laci had begun marinating French toast for her brunch the next day, as Scott would later claim. This item would have been evidence that she was alive in the morning hours on Christmas Eve. Of course, if Laci had cleaned the kitchen that morning, that would have been one more activity—along with mopping the floor and possibly making the bed—that would have delayed her walk with McKenzie.

  “Okay,” the detective prompted. “When did you realize you were gonna go fishing?”

  “Ah, that was the morning decision, it either—”

  “That’s a morning decision?” Brocchini asked.

  “… Go play golf at the club or go fishin’ …” Scott said.

  “Okay.”

>   “It seemed too cold to go play golf at the club.” Scott chuckled. “So, ya know, decided might as well—”

  “Uh-huh.” For a passionate golfer, it is rarely too cold to play. However, Christmas Eve out on the bay in a fourteen-foot boat sounds awfully chilly.

  “Laci told me what she was gonna do for the day,” Scott volunteered.

  “And what was that?”

  “She was gonna finish cleaning up, like I said, she was mopping the kitchen floor, then take the dog for a walk and then she was going to the store to buy for Christmas morning breakfast tomorrow. That was gonna involve prepping the breakfast, and she was gonna make gingerbread cookies for tonight.” Scott explained.

  “What was she mopping?” Brocchini asked.

  “The tile in the entryway area.” When the detective pressed him to be precise, Scott specified that it was the back entryway area.

  “Right where the mop was outside?” Brocchini asked, his dark eyes peering over his glasses to watch the young man’s response.

  “No, no, no.” Scott said she was working in the area that led out to the back patio.

  “There was a lotta places she planned to go,” he continued. “She had me put the bucket by the front door.”

  “So she asked you to put the mop bucket by the front door?” Brocchini repeated.

  “Yeah, she’s, you know, eight months pregnant, can’t pick it up for anything, so I filled it up for her, put it in, ah, I think that’s the central place.” Scott didn’t seem aware of the mounting inconsistencies in his story. Laci wouldn’t have been able to move the bucket, yet he left it some distance from where she was cleaning? For that matter, the mops would have been very difficult for her to use in her condition, as they required someone to bend over and wring out excess water by hand before moving around the house.

  “Did you move the bucket back when you came home? How did it get outside?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “So you put it out there?”

  Scott mumbled his agreement. “The dog and the cat ran in. Yeah, she wasn’t about to lift anything heavy.”

  Brocchini shifted to another subject. “When you left, do you re-member what she was wearing?” Scott described black pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt without any printing on it. She had not been wearing a jacket or shoes at the time.

  “No shoes?” Detective Brocchini asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Later, Scott said that she usually wore white tennis shoes on her walks with the dog. As for her jacket, he commented, “She usually steals my stuff.”

  “She uses your stuff?”

  “Yeah, because you know… . Instead of maternity stuff, so 1 don’t really know.”

  “You don’t know?” Brocchini pressed.

  “She could have had hers or mine or nothing, I don’t know,” Scott continued. Brocchini never asked if these items were missing; he later learned that Scott hadn’t bothered to check.

  Detective Brocchini touched upon several more topics before turning to Scott’s fishing trip. “Okay, then you hooked your boat up?”

  Scott muttered in the affirmative.

  “About what time did you leave Modesto?”

  “Ah, gosh, I don’t know. Extrapolate what time I got the—you know, noon, is that right?”

  “Yeah … no, one.”

  “Which one is it, then?” Scott demanded, referring to the marina receipt he had provided earlier.

  “Shit, I don’t know,” Detective Brocchini admitted. “Tuesday, time twelve fifty-four on December twenty-fourth. Okay, so you got there at one o’clock.”

  “I got there at one?” Scott repeated. “Ah, that should take at least an hour and a half.”

  “Yeah, okay, it would be eleven-thirty or about,” Brocchini calculated.

  “Probably longer than that ’cause you can’t go over fifty-five with that trailer,” Scott explained.

  “Did you drive straight there?”

  “I did.”

  “You stop for lunch?” Detective Brocchini asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you buy bait?”

  “Nope, I’m not a bait fisherman,” Scott declared.

  “You didn’t buy no lunch, didn’t eat nothing?” the investigator persisted.

  “Nothin’’,” Scott insisted. “I was damn hungry with that pizza when I got home.”

  Having established that Scott had arrived at the marina at about five minutes to one, Brocchini asked how long he had stayed on the water.

  Scott could only estimate. “About an hour and a half.”

  Did he take a chart of the area with him? Scott said no.

  “What, you just winged it?” Brocchini asked.

  Scott nodded.

  “Did you go very far?”

  “No—I mean, probably a couple miles. I went north, found a, like, a little island kinda deal there.”

  “Uh-huh,” the detective nodded.

  “An island that had a bunch of trash on it. I remember a big sign that said NO LANDING. Looked like some broken piers around it. I just assumed it would be a decent, you know, shallow area.”

  “Did you troll?”

  “Little bit. I mean a lot of, lot of the reason I went was just to get that boat in the water to see, you know.” Scott had told the po-lice earlier that he was fishing for sturgeon, but they would soon learn that his experience with sturgeon fishing was limited at best. If that was truly what he’d been doing, he’d chosen the wrong season and the wrong equipment. Furthermore, it was actually illegal to troll for that fish.

  Scott’s cell phone rang. It was Laci’s younger half sister, Amy, calling to say that she and several other family members were back at his house.

  “Amy?” Brocchini inquired.

  “Yeah,” Scott replied without elaboration.

  “Is it Laci’s sister?”

  “Uh-huh. Different mothers, same father,” he said dryly.

  Brocchini was struck that Scott did not ask his sister-in-law a single question about the search for his wife. Reading the transcript, so was I. If my family member was missing, the first words out of my mouth on any new phone call would have been, “Did you find her?” or “Have you heard anything?” Yet Scott didn’t ask Amy a thing. He must have known the answers.

  “Okay, so you fish ninety minutes, then what? You go back to the marina?” the detective continued.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You see anybody, you talk to anybody out there?”

  “Talked to a couple guys fishing. They asked me, ’Did you catch anything?’ They didn’t either. Ah, the guys working, fixing ah, maintenance guys, got a good laugh from me trying to back down the trailer,” he explained, grinning. These individuals, if real, never emerged to testify at trial.

  “Okay, then what? You drive, how did you get there?” Scott described his route to the Berkeley Marina along Highway 580 to 50 North.

  “You come home the same way?”

  “Yeah,” Scott replied.

  “You have to stop for gas?”

  “Stop for gas in Livermore or Pleasanton … I think it was a Chevron station. There are buses around.”

  “How’d you pay?”

  Scott told the officer he used a credit card, but he had no receipt.

  “Debit or credit card?”

  “I don’t know which way they count it, debit or credit, when you stick it in there,” Scott answered.

  “Okay. When you got in the car, who did you call?”

  “I called Laci, ah, just as I was leaving the marina.”

  “Home phone?” Brocchini asked.

  Scott said he had called the home number and Laci’s mobile phone, leaving messages on both. He gave Brocchini her cell number and password, but said he didn’t know if the calls were time stamped. “Try it out,” Scott said.

  Brocchini listened to the messages, noting that the times were exactly as Scott said. He made no mention of his contemporaneous conversations with his father or his friend, Greg Reed. Both men
enjoyed fishing, but Scott said nothing to them about his new boat or his trip to the bay.

  After gassing up, Scott drove straight to the warehouse to drop off the boat and then went home.

  Brocchini cleared his throat before asking the next question. “When you left, ah, what where you wearing?”

  “Blue jeans and a blue T-shirt.”

  “And what shoes?”

  “Ah, Timberland.”

  “Which jacket?”

  Scott paused.

  “Did you leave your jacket in the truck?” the detective interrupted.

  “When I left the house, I didn’t have a jacket on. But I had a, when I was in the warehouse, I had that green pullover on that was in my truck. When it started raining, I had a camo jacket on in the boat and, ah, tan hat.”

  “Okay, so then you went back to the shop, you unhooked the boat?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you do anything else?”

  “No. I … I guess I saw that fax. And I was late getting home so I went straight home,” Scott responded.

  “Did you try to call anymore?” Brocchini pressed.

  “Just, ah, once from the marina, both phones, and then later on, I left a second message on her mobile.”

  “There was only one from you.”

  “Well, I left two at home, and I thought I left two on the mobile. Maybe I didn’t leave the second one on the mobile,” Scott conceded. “One was when I left Berkeley and the other one was, ah, when I was driving in Livermore. The traffic was pretty bad and I knew I wouldn’t be home by four, so I gave her a call.”

  When he got home, Scott backed his car into the driveway next to Laci’s SUV, then entered the house through the backyard. When he found McKenzie, dragging his leash, Scott removed the leash and placed it on the patio table. Entering the house through the French doors, he noticed that they were unlocked. He related his movements for Brocchini—dumping the mop water, then washing his clothes.

  “Were you calling for Laci?” Brocchini wanted to know.