Evidence from bay prompts speculation in Peterson case

When authorities recovered Laci Peterson's remains on the shore of San Francisco Bay, they also found tape and clear plastic sheeting nearby.

The significance is unknown, given a court-imposed gag order on the double-murder case that prevents either side from discussing evidence.

But that hasn't prevented a host of theories from pundits, observers and experts on what the plastic may or may not mean. There appear to be equal numbers of scenarios presented that support the prosecution's contention that Scott Peterson murdered his pregnant wife and their unborn son, Conner, or that the Modesto man is innocent of the charges.

Connecting the plastic to Scott Peterson could bolster the prosecution's claim that he killed his wife on Dec. 23 or 24, when she was about eight months pregnant, and dumped her body in the bay.

But others argue that a link to Conner could cast doubt on that charge by suggesting that the boy was born before he was killed. Scott Peterson presumably wouldn't have had the opportunity to commit that murder because he came under heavy police surveillance soon after Laci Peterson was reported missing Christmas Eve.

A sizable bundle of the distinctive clear plastic with what appeared to be a length of black electrical tape attached to it was recovered 50 yards from Laci Peterson's remains and was forensically analyzed, according to a source. Results of those tests are not known.

A separate length of black plastic similar to roofing material also was found about 50 yards from the body. The objects appear to be among at least 31 items the defense has asked to examine after they were recovered from the East Bay and logged as potential evidence.

Conner's body was recovered with a thin circle of plastic tape wrapped 1 1/2 times around his neck, extending in another loop that resembles a bow knot.

A theory benefiting Scott Peterson's defense considers that as evidence of someone else's involvement, while others have speculated that the body became entangled in ocean debris.

Walkers found Laci Peterson's badly decomposed torso and lower body April 14 among the rocks at Point Isabel Regional Shoreline south of Richmond. The body was missing its head, feet and hands. The baby's relatively well-preserved body had been found the day before just more than a mile north in marshy grassland, about 15 feet inland from the shoreline, officials said.

A body in plastic would be expected to decompose slower than one exposed to the elements, said Harry J. Bonnell, a San Diego forensic pathologist.

But there are several other reasons that the body of a woman would deteriorate faster if neither was wrapped in plastic, Bonnell said. They include:

Adult stomachs contain bacteria, "a large element in decomposition," Bonnell said, while the stomachs of fetuses do not.

Cold water preserves small bodies better. Adults have more fat, which keeps bodies warmer, allowing bacteria to break down tissues.

Predators like crabs and fish would be expected to seek large food sources first.

The plastic sheeting and plastic material around Conner's neck "may be just normal garbage in the bay," Bonnell said.

Other experts have speculated that the boy was expelled from the womb when the mother's body sufficiently decomposed. He would have been partially protected from predators while in her body.

The wad of clear plastic found near Laci Peterson's remains sports a logo for Target Products Ltd., a Canada-based company that manufactures items such as concrete, grout and stucco for use in building, mining and golf industries.

The polyethylene sheeting appears consistent with plastic commonly used to cover items on pallets.

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In this May 21, 1990, file photo, Janice Keson reacts to the news of her daughter's death in Salida. BART AH YOU/THE BEE

Then-Deputy District Attorney James Brazelton, left, watches as defendants David Beck, Ronald Willey, Gerald Cruz, Michelle Lee Evans and Ricky Vieira are arraigned in connection with the Salida murders on May 24, 1990. BART AH YOU/THE BEE

Both cases have been colored with questions of ritualistic murder by Satan worshippers. Some are debating if the current high-profile proceeding could have a connection to the 1990 slaughter of four people in Salida.

Scott Peterson's legal team six weeks ago laid out a strategy relying on the theory that his wife, Laci Peterson, may have been kidnapped in Modesto and slain by Satan worshippers. She was eight months pregnant with a son, Conner, when she disappeared at Christmastime.

Sources close to the case say that in June, Peterson's defense team acquired a coat worn by a Modesto resident allegedly affiliated with an occult group. The man bragged about being involved in Laci Peterson's death, a source said.

The defense submitted the trenchcoat-type jacket for forensic analysis. The jacket bore an Oakland Raiders logo, had a downward rip from one side pocket, and had been torn and sewn in other places.

Also, authorities are consulting with Randy Cerny, a local expert on ritualistic crimes whom they directed not to speak to the media because he may testify in Peterson's proceedings, he said. Cerny had testified in the Salida killers' cases.

TV personalities such as talk show host Larry King and NBC reporter Dan Abrams have discussed a seeming similarity between the Peterson case and the one that shined regional attention on Salida in the early 1990s. The Salida case ended with three defendants on death row and two others with life sentences.

One survivor and two former cult members not involved in that massacre -- all three admittedly scarred by the butchery -- aren't willing to rule out a possible connection.

Some lawyers involved in the Salida case, however, and other experts scoff at the notion. They chalk it up to a trial balloon floated by Peterson's defense camp.

Observers may find out next month whether his attorneys will raise the issue in court. A preliminary hearing is scheduled to begin Oct. 20.

However, such proceedings typically focus on the prosecution's evidence. Defense strategy often doesn't become apparent until the actual trial, which might be a year or more away.

Peterson has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder in the deaths of his wife and unborn son. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Locals were horrified 13 years ago at the gruesome details of the Salida murders, committed by a paramilitary cult whose charismatic and sadistic leader had a deep interest in the occult.

"It was very serious, not just dabbled in," said former group member Angela Young of their unconventional worship. She broke away from the group before the murders, but her younger brother, Ricky Vieira, stayed and was sentenced to death.

Leader Gerald Cruz manipulated group members through bizarre activities that included indoctrination into various forms of the occult, sleep deprivation and brainwashing. At his direction, witnesses said, some members beat, raped and tortured each other.

Cruz eventually led his followers from their living compound in Salida to a nearby duplex where they bashed and slashed the occupants to death with baseball bats and knives. At least some of the victims were disassociated members of Cruz's circle.

Killed were Darlene Paris, 23, Frank Raper, 51, Dennis Colwell, 35, and Richard T. Ritchey, 25.

James Brazelton, a deputy district attorney at the time, steered the prosecution. A few years later, he became district attorney and now oversees the Peterson case, although his senior prosecutors are handling courtroom proceedings.

Sentenced to death in the Salida case were Cruz, now 41; his "enforcer," David Beck, 47; and Vieira, 34. Jason LaMarsh, 36, and Ronald Willey, 37, received prison sentences of 64 years to life. All remain under appeal.

Their trials were sprinkled with testimony on the occult, including blood-letting rituals and black magic.

But many details were excluded from parts of the proceedings, sometimes because Brazelton protested, sometimes at the request of Cruz's lawyer.

In a recent interview, Brazelton said, "There was no evidence of any cult or rituals, though the defense tried to make it seem that way."

Cruz's Van Nuys lawyer, Seymour Amster, agreed, saying, "It didn't come out (in court) because it wasn't a cult murder in any sense, in my opinion."

Ramon Magana of Modesto, who represented LaMarsh, remembers stories of rituals under the full moon at midnight along the Stanislaus River. Diaries and letters by group members made reference to desecrating graves, forced sodomy and beatings for disobedience, and even murder, Magana said, calling the writings "chilling."

"My recollection is that Brazelton wanted to focus only on the (Salida slayings) themselves," Magana said. "If the case got cluttered up with anything else, it might hurt his case."

Amster fought to exclude evidence of the occult from much of the proceedings, arguing that the group's worship was irrelevant to the quadruple murder.

Modesto attorney William Arthur Miller, who represented Willey, recalled many of the same things as Magana, plus allegations of animal sacrifice. He said group members listened to heavy metal music just before the murders, and remembered talk of group members dancing at one point, as if in a ritual............

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Stockton attorney Douglas Jacobsen represented Jerry Bunyard in a 1981 trial when he faced charges of paying a friend to murder his wife and unborn child in 1979. Bunyard was the first person sent to death row under the state's fetal murder law. BART AH YOU/THE BEE

His wife was pregnant with their first baby, and he was having an affair. He killed her, and their unborn child. Jurors sent the unrepentant, 30-year-old husband to death row in what eventually was recognized as California's first test case of its fetal murder law.

Twenty-two years later, prosecutors are using the same law to seek the death penalty for Modesto's Scott Peterson, 30, if he is convicted in the slayings of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son, Conner.

People vs. Bunyard generated little media interest when that grisly 1981 case was tried in Stockton.

"It's unfair to those who don't get the publicity," said Douglas Jacobsen, a Stockton attorney who represented Jerry Bunyard then. "It's like they're less worthy or something."

Bunyard's wife of three years, Elaine, a nurse's aide in Manteca, was days shy of delivering their baby girl in 1979. In anticipation of a stay in the maternity ward, she had packed a bag and kept it by the front door.

But Jerry Bunyard wasn't as excited. The good-looking, well- spoken carpenter had been carrying on with a Tracy woman and thought his wife would "take him for everything he had" if he divorced her, a witness said.

Enter Earlin Popham, a biker-type boyhood friend who had been helping the Bunyards build a home in Patterson. When Elaine Bunyard was alone in the kitchen, Popham broke an iron skillet on her skull. He then shot her in the head with a shotgun and tried to make the crime look like both a robbery and a suicide.

Popham later testified that his buddy had promised him $1,000 to kill Elaine Bunyard. Popham received a sentence of 25 years to life in exchange for his testimony against Bunyard.

California law requires special circumstances for a death sentence. They include multiple murder and murder for hire.

Murder-for-hire prosecution parameters still were evolving, so Stockton prosecutors chose to go after Bunyard for multiple murder. A 1970 law -- which resulted from the prosecution of a Stockton man who had killed his ex-wife's fetus -- makes no differentiation between children who are born and those who aren't.

Jacobsen doesn't recall any significance attached to the Bunyard trial as a test case for the fetal murder law. He does recall that prosecutors played up evidence that Elaine Bunyard struggled mightily against her attacker, as if "fighting to stay alive for her unborn child."

William Murray, who prosecuted the case, now is a San Joaquin County Superior Court judge and recently was appointed to the prestigious California Judicial Council.

Murray refrained from commenting on the Bunyard case, citing its pending status before the Supreme Court. Death sentences are considered on appeal until carried out.

The case was among the first the California Supreme Court considered under the fetal murder law. In a 1988 appellate ruling, Justice John Arguelles cited "the unique relationship between a pregnant woman and her unborn fetus" in rejecting Bunyard's claim that no one intended to kill the unborn child.

Arguelles cited "the Legislature's determination that viable fetuses receive the same protection under the murder statute."

Bunyard also had claimed that a death sentence for killing an unborn child was tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment, noting that at the time, only four states allowed death for such a crime. The state Supreme Court rejected those contentions as well.

The same court since has upheld similar sentences, including the 1984 Halloween slayings of a San Jose woman and her unborn child by her former husband..........

Check this out:

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	Posted on Sun, Sep. 21, 2003

	VIRTUAL GUMSHOES STRANGERS MEET ONLINE TO UNFOLD PETERSON CASE By Julia Prodis Sulek Mercury News They both stay up late, taking their meals at their desks and putting their social lives on hold, to pore over the Laci Peterson murder case. He has studied tidal charts and the location of navigational buoys around the Berkeley Marina to try to unravel Scott Peterson's alibi. She has staked out Laci's neighborhood, taking photographs of streets and parks where witnesses say they may have seen Laci walking her dog the day she vanished. But Buzz Mills and Amelia Gloria are not Modesto police detectives. They're not forensic investigators or private eyes. And they're not tabloid reporters snooping for a scoop. Mills is a 63-year-old retired Silicon Valley missiles telemetry engineer with time on his hands. Gloria is a 45-year-old private security guard in Modesto looking for a little adventure. They are Laci Peterson addicts. Meeting through an Internet forum, the unlikely pair have become amateur sleuthing part ners trying to nail the murder case against Scott Peterson. Do these people need to get a life, or what? Well, if they do, then so do scores of others across the country and around the world who, instead of watching reality TV each night, are logged onto their home computers, trying to solve a puzzle: How were Laci Peterson and her unborn son killed, and how did their bodies end up on the banks of San Francisco Bay this spring? ``We're junkies,'' said Angela Rock, who lives deep in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and nightly logs onto Websleuths.com. ``We know the ins and outs, the backwards and forwards, every single detail that the guy next door to me would never know.'' The mystery is all the more intriguing because information is so scarce. Arrest and search warrants are sealed. A gag order is keeping all lawyers and law enforcement officials mute. The public has little more to work with than Scott Peterson's story about fishing on Christmas Eve, his affair with a massage therapist, and people in the neighborhood who say they saw Scott, Laci or a suspicious brown van that morning. The preliminary hearing, where the prosecution will lay out its case for the first time, was postponed from early September to Oct. 20. Until then, in this virtual community, any tidbit of information generates wild speculation and irrepressible enthusiasm -- like a neighbor's account that Peterson loaded something wrapped in a blue tarp into the back of his truck Christmas Eve morning. ``We won't know until the pre-lim/trial, exactly WHAT he was un-loading or loading!!!!!!,'' writes one poster on Websleuths, tthoman from Alabama. ``SO EXCITING! PLOT THICKENS!'' Just since August, the Laci Peterson forum on Websleuths has received more than 9,000 postings -- many from as far away as Australia and England. The rape case against basketball star Kobe Bryant, on the same site, had a mere 162 as of late Saturday. Though most of the Websleuthers insist Peterson is guilty, over on aimoo.com more posters are giving him the benefit of the doubt. For example, barbdouglas finds it fishy that after the district attorney ``begged Scott to produce the bodies to spare the death penalty,'' the bodies happened to wash up where Peterson had gone fishing. ``The desperate D.A. was looking for a reason to arrest Scott and the kidnappers handed it to him on a silver platter,'' barbdouglas wrote. ``The fact that Scott Peterson is the target of a sophisticated plot to frame him does not get any clearer than that.'' Mills had been hooked on the Peterson case for months before he met Gloria online. Fresh out of a four-year romantic relationship, Mills found the case to be a perfect obsession. Just as he had uncovered defects in missile systems for 35 years as an engineer at Lockheed, he looked for holes in Scott Peterson's story. A fitness nut who starts each day eating pure, plain, non-fat yogurt with dried fruits and nuts, Mills found it hard to pull away from the computer to take his routine vigorous hikes. For days at a time, he stayed online from morning until after midnight studying the wind velocity off Point Richmond where the bodies were found, plotting the lighted buoys that he theorized Peterson used to navigate into the bay after dark to dump the bodies, and logging the astronomical, nautical and civil twilight times. He even traced the route the bloodhounds took through Modesto following Laci's scent. He plugged all the information, with links to maps and charts, into ``Scott's 24-Hour Timeline.'' It goes on in minute detail for 31 printed pages. ``Laci's 16-Hour Timeline'' fills 14 pages. ``Truly, things got a little unbalanced there,'' Mills said in a recent interview at his Cupertino ranch-style home, nearly empty of furniture except for a computer desk and folding chairs since his girlfriend moved out nearly a year ago. ``A lot of my personality is spending an inordinate amount of time perfecting things. Call it an affliction or an obsession, but that's my nature. That's who I am.'' In Modesto, Gloria, a grandmother of seven with black hair that hangs below her waist and a rose tattoo on her forearm, became intrigued by the case the day Laci Peterson disappeared. She heard about it on a police scanner while working in a county government building in Modesto. Her job as a private security guard paid the bills, but her 13 years patrolling parking lots and office buildings lacked excitement. She had once dreamed of a career in law enforcement, but by the time she had raised her children, ``I was too old and out of shape,'' she said. ``I would never have made it around the obstacle course.'' While surfing the Internet looking for updates about the Peterson case in June, she came across one of Mills' queries on the Websleuths forum. To flesh out his timeline, Mills wanted to know whether a footbridge crossed Dry Creek through La Loma Park, where Peterson said his wife planned to walk the dog the morning she disappeared. Gloria, who lives near the park, confirmed to him that a bridge, indeed, crossed the creek there. And from that moment on, the life of the security guard who admits she gets ``scared easy'' got a little more thrilling. With a list of questions from Mills and a disposable camera in hand, Gloria headed to the Petersons' neighborhood. To try to prove that witnesses actually saw a different pregnant woman walking in the neighborhood instead of Laci, Mills asked Gloria to take pictures of the witnesses' houses and intersections where they say they saw Laci. Gloria would get so nervous sometimes -- afraid someone would think her suspicious -- she would stick her arm out the car window to take pictures. Once, she scribbled an address so quickly, she wrote it incorrectly and had to go back a second time. ``It's fascinating, but it's scary at the same time,'' she said. ``I didn't want somebody to call the police on me.'' Mills has sent his timelines to Modesto police, and is disappointed he hasn't heard from them because he is so sure his information would help their case. (``If it was any other case,'' he says, ``they would have contacted me.'') Modesto police detective Doug Ridenour says a gag order prevents him from even acknowledging whether he received the timeline. He says he forwards all information to investigators, adding, ``I take everything seriously.'' Mills and Gloria have never met. They know only each other's gender and online names -- buzzm1 and royalpurple209. But that's all they need to know because it's all business to them. And business that Gloria, at least, keeps mostly to herself. ``I don't tell my family,'' she said. ``They're going to think I'm nuts.''

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