I think you're right. Only my opinion, but if things keep on going the way they are, SP won't need many possessions soon.
Good info. As told on Websleuths, Scott said he also spent some time at work (probably the warehouse) before his "fishing" trip on Dec 24. DUH! That's where he keeps his cement anchors. I was wondering if his warehouse would have electronic card readers that would state he was there sometime between Dec 23 and 24. I guess so. Laci probably sorta kinda went with him. That's probably where he lost track of the dog...
yeah, I read that one too.. thought I was putting much ... glad you posted it... ;o)
Thanks! I thought I'd copy it here.
MODESTO -- In the city where Laci Peterson planned to have her baby, they wait. They can do nothing -- the neighbors, the strangers, the shy man pushing a shopping cart who stops to dust off the teddy bears left on a street-side memorial. So they wait
One month has passed since the 27-year-old Peterson, eight months pregnant, disappeared on Christmas Eve from her home on a quiet street where the trees stand shorn and silent. An exhaustive search drags on, but Peterson remains missing. Suspicion now bears down on her husband, Scott, who reportedly had a girlfriend in the Fresno area and took out a $250,000 life insurance policy on Laci Peterson.
Susan Medina, who lives across from the Petersons on Covena Street, passes the days with a hopeful heart. She talks of Laci Peterson in the present tense, the tense of the living. "Should I not?" she says this week, leaning against her rose-colored front door. "My husband calls me the eternal optimist."
Jim Velarde, librarian at Modesto's Downey High School, where Laci Peterson graduated in 1993, says his instincts, sadly, tell him something else: Laci Peterson is dead. "There aren't going to be any happy endings," Velarde says in the quiet of the library.
In the first month of a fresh year, residents of this city of 198,000 nurture their hopes or nurse their suspicions in the latest missing woman case to hit Modesto. The fog and gray skies of January do nothing to lift the community spirit as the days pass and Laci Peterson's due date draws near. She was -- and maybe still is -- expected to deliver a boy in early February.
"We have this gray pall over the city, which matches the high clouds," Velarde says. Everywhere one looks, on street signs, on doors of public buildings, on back windows of cars, the smiling face of Laci Peterson appears.
Velarde, 51, says it is a smile of an attractive young woman. Her brown eyes smile, too. Velarde says Peterson's photo makes people want to know her, which only deepens the impact of her case: "It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma involving a person you can't help but feel sympathy for."
For many years, Modesto was best known as the birthplace of filmmaker George Lucas and his inspiration for the 1973 film "American Graffiti."
Today, a drive around Modesto reveals little real graffiti. Half the size of Fresno, Modesto bustles with growth endemic to California's great interior Valley. A shiny, new 15-story hotel reaches to the sky in a rebounding downtown. Many older neighborhoods retain a sense of pride.
Laci Peterson lived in one of those older areas, in a green house with two palm trees in the front yard and a new swimming pool behind the fence. She and her husband moved in two years ago. They came in the middle of Modesto's association with notorious crime. In 1999, Carole and Juli Sund and their Argentine friend, Silvina Pelosso, were murdered in the Sierra. Modesto became the home base for the FBI and the murdered women's families.
Then in 2001, Modesto resident Chandra Levy disappeared in Washington, D.C., and later was found murdered. Modesto's then-congressman, Gary Condit, was linked romantically to Levy and lost his re-election in the ensuing scandal.
Then came Laci. "It just breaks your heart, dang it," says Robert Markillie, pausing during an afternoon walk in the neighborhood he shares with the Petersons. He hopes Scott Peterson had nothing to do with his wife's disappearance. Markillie, 36, doesn't know Scott Peterson. It's just that even in this jaded age, some things are too ugly to imagine. Markillie's sentiment: My God, the woman was eight months pregnant.
As the clouds begin to spit out rain, Markillie says he hopes the police aren't focusing too much on Scott Peterson and ignoring other possibilities. The rain makes a cold day colder.
The rainfall forces Peter Werve and Shelley Landes to scurry to a white pickup after an excursion along Dry Creek, the meandering stream that cuts across southern Modesto, providing a riparian respite in the middle of the city. Laci Peterson was reportedly headed to a park along Dry Creek with her golden retriever on Dec. 24.
Scott Peterson has told police he went fishing that morning in Berkeley and could not find his wife when he returned home that evening. Peterson, 31, has not been named a suspect in his wife's disappearance, but Modesto police say he has not been eliminated in the investigation.
Werve, 26, says he thinks Scott Peterson is guilty. Of course, he adds, rubbing the stubble of his unshaved, young face, other theories circulate in Modesto. Some are plausible. Some are ludicrous. Everyone has a favorite theory. Sources are everywhere: Someone knows someone who knows something, says Landes, 20.
Neighbors of the Petersons who answer a reporter's knock at the door favor giving Scott Peterson the benefit of the doubt -- at least for now. It has been a media circus along Covena Street. The neatly printed words on a paper tacked to one neighbor's door greet advancing reporters. "Do not disturb please," it reads.
Susan Medina, who lives across from the Petersons, shuffles through the reporters' cards that have been left at her door. She ticks off the organizations: ABC News in Los Angeles, CBS News in San Francisco, Fox 2 in Oakland. "Inside Edition." The National Enquirer and MSNBC have visited the neighborhood, too.
Medina, 50, tells this story about Scott Peterson. It is a good story for people who want to believe good things. On Dec. 5, Medina comes outside in the morning to find the right rear tire on her Mercedes dangerously low. Medina, a nurse recruiter, has a business appointment to keep and she worries she will be late.
She circles the car. Scott Peterson sees her and comes to help. He ends up taking Medina to her appointment. As they drive, he talks by cell phone, rearranging a business date so he can go with his wife to an appointment. Medina assumes it is a checkup with her obstetrician. She asks who Laci Peterson's OB is and assures Peterson that his wife is in good hands. They talk some more about the baby. Peterson says they have the nursery almost ready. He seems excited. Medina reminds him that she is a nurse and if Laci needs any help, they need only to call across the street.
Medina last sees Laci Peterson on Dec. 22, the Sunday before Christmas. Laci comes outdoors as her husband finishes mowing the lawn and fires up his leaf blower. Medina is pruning a front-yard bush.
The two women wave to one another.
Now a month later, Medina says softly: "She needs to come home." Her voice sounds stronger as she says the court of public opinion that now indicts Scott Peterson is unfair.
As she speaks, Scott Peterson arrives with three men in a gray Lincoln Town Car. They park, get out and walk into his house. Medina believes the men are police officers. She is wrong.
Peterson, in a long, dark overcoat, will answer no questions from a reporter: "I'm not interested in talking to any media."
The Modesto newspaper identifies one of the men as Peterson's boss, Eric Van Innis, executive director of Tradecorp. Peterson is a salesman for the speciality fertilizer company. Van Innis is visiting from Portugal.
That evening, Peterson and the men stop in the quiet lounge at the Red Lion Hotel. Peterson wears casual clothes.
His every move, every gesture is now analyzed. Callers to radio talk shows probe the hidden messages of his body language, as they perceive it. Kim Petersen, executive director of the Modesto-based Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, says she has no comment about Peterson visiting a lounge with business associates as the search goes on for his wife.
Petersen (no relation to Scott Peterson) has spent many hours in the past month with Laci Peterson's family. Petersen says she could not help but be "impacted emotionally" by the ordeal and at one point refers to Laci Peterson as "our daughter."
Kim Petersen says the family now knows that Scott Peterson had a girlfriend and that he lied to Laci Peterson's stepfather about that. "He may have lied about other things," Petersen says. "So they want him to fully cooperate with the police and tell everything. ... They can't keep living like this. They just want to know where she is."
Petersen says Laci Peterson had difficulty getting pregnant and wondered whether she would ever have a baby: "She was ecstatic when she found out she was pregnant." Petersen heard Scott Peterson also was happy about the baby.
They had picked a name for their son. It was to be Connor. Or maybe Conner.
At the intersection of Buena Vista and LaLoma, Sam tidies up the street-side memorial near the park where Laci Peterson was headed on Dec. 24. People have left teddy bears and other stuffed animals, plus votive candles and notes. "I don't know you, Laci, but I hope you are alive and will be found safe," writes someone named Amy. "Whoever did this to you should serve their time." Amy signs the note with a penmanship of soft curves and flourishes.
Sam says he comes every day. He will not give his last name, this man with a salt-and-pepper long beard and green suspenders. "With God's help, they will find her," Sam says, his head bowed, his words slipping away into the cold. "I pray three times a day for her."
Wine is detectable on his breath.
Sam suspects Scott Peterson, bringing up news reports about Peterson taking out the life insurance policy. Sam speaks in riddles, saying Scott Peterson might have been jealous of his wife, but then refusing to offer an explanation.
Sam seems to take no pleasure in concluding that Scott Peterson harmed his wife. Neither do others. Velarde, the high school librarian, says the revelations about the affair and life insurance confirmed his initial suspicions about the husband.
But Velarde does not want to feel like he is gloating. "I'll be real happy if they find her body and he had nothing to do with it," he says.
As the media clamor for details, television news trucks maintain a vigil at the Modesto Police Department on G Street. A police spokesman, detective Doug Ridenour, says the vehicle of one Sacramento TV station seems to have become a permanent fixture.
"Dad gum, it's been here ever since the beginning. We're going to have to tow it away," he says with a weary smile.
Ridenour has routinely worked 15-hour days, weekends included, during the past month. He has been the contact for national, regional and local media.
Ridenour brushes aside the question of whether he was the one who told Laci Peterson's family last week about Scott Peterson having an affair and taking out the $250,000 life insurance policy. Ridenour says he will neither confirm nor deny whether the police did that. A family member has said the Modesto police came to the family with the information and also photos of Scott Peterson with the other woman.
At the Modesto Police Department, a poster of a smiling and pregnant Laci Peterson greets anyone walking in the front door. The poster says "MISSING" in bold, black letters and lists a $500,000 reward.
Ridenour looks at the photos of Laci Peterson and feels a sadness. "I wish we could find her," he says, "I really do. For her family's sake and for Scott's sake. That's really our hope."
Like all of Modesto now, Ridenour waits. He works. But he waits, too.
He has learned to pace himself in the last, long month in the face of the steady media barrage. So a few days ago, "things got a little silly" and he shut off the phone and took his wife to see a movie.
Ridenour sat in the dark and enjoyed the film playing on the screen. It was "Catch Me If You Can."
The reporter can be reached at
dhoagland@fresnobee.com or 441-6354.
NE was a web forum on the Laci stuff too.. Under today's stories.. (national enquirer)
LOl.. maybe we should give yo a daily briefing.... ;o)
LOL.. maybe we should give yo a daily briefing.... ;o)
Fox said 5:30 ET a few minutes ago, so the truth will out eventually, I suppose!
"She circles the car. Scott Peterson sees her and comes to help. He ends up taking Medina to her appointment. As they drive,he talks by cell phone, rearranging a business date so he can go with his wife to an appointment. Medina assumes it is a checkup with her obstetrician."
I would like to know if he was at Laci's doctors appt or if this was a fabrication so he could meet up with his GF.