Posted on 02/07/2003 5:36:54 AM PST by runningbear
Edited on 04/12/2004 2:10:07 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
MODESTO -- First Laci Peterson's side of the family announced a weekend search for her, and now her husband's family apparently has done the same. Thursday, a faxed statement from the "Laci Peterson Family" called for people nationwide to search for the Modesto woman Saturday: "With your help ... we can cover a tremendous amount of territory in hopes of bringing Laci home."
(Excerpt) Read more at fresnobee.com ...
The 30-year-old has come under intense scrutiny after revelation that he had an affair that started about a month before his pregnant wife disappeared. Police have not named him as a suspect in his wife's disappearance, nor have they ruled him out.
Hey Scott, give up!
LOL... Lee talks about seeing Amber in a thong....lol...
January proves luckless and cruel for police, family, friends in Laci Peterson case
January proves luckless and cruel for police, family, friends in Laci Peterson case
By JIM WASSERMAN, Associated Press Writer
(Published Saturday, January 25, 2003, 11:10 AM)
MODESTO, Calif.(AP) - In her typical American hometown, she was the girl next door, the high school cheerleader and softball player who went off to college and returned years later in a storybook romance and marriage. Now Laci Rocha Peterson, 27, is that familiar expectant mother and extrovert who smiles from thousands of fliers, posters and television screens across the world.
More than a month has passed since the substitute school teacher vanished, becoming one of the nation's most widely known missing persons. Peterson's baffling disappearance has left a trail of few facts, yet a multitude of bizarre twists have fueled relentless speculation and innuendo inside a superheated media frenzy.
But none, including Friday's dramatic surprise appearance of a woman admitting to an affair with Laci Peterson's husband, Scott, have produced answers or arrests.
Meanwhile, Scott Peterson, 30, has become a hunted man, in the words of one media commentator, "a pariah," accused of lying by the Peterson family and by the woman who claimed an affair with him. Police, who have remained tightlipped through their investigation, said they don't consider him a suspect, but haven't ruled him out.
Peterson is reportedly in San Diego this weekend, planning to pass out missing person fliers.
Modesto Police Chief Roy Wasden, asked late Friday if the department is closer now to solving the case than two weeks ago, said, "I don't believe there's a significant change we can articulate. Are we closer? I hope so."
For family, friends and a police department that's already spent more than $100,000 on overtime pay to search and investigate, January is proving luckless and cruel. And an even more emotionally charged anniversary is coming into view: the Feb. 10 due date for Laci Peterson's baby boy - already given the name Conner.
"I miss listening to the excitement in her voice when she talks to me about her baby," said an exhausted and tearful Sharon Rocha, Peterson's mother.
Rocha, making a heartbreaking media appearance Friday with her other daughter and son on the one-month anniversary of her middle child's disappearance, begged for an anonymous call or letter to police saying where to find her daughter.
"There are no words that can possibly describe the ache in my heart or the emptiness in my life," she said.
Stacy Boyers, 27, friend of Laci Peterson's since third grade in Modesto schools, said, "We're just trying to get by every day. We want to know what happened to Laci and who did this. We just want to know."
In a nation of cable television with almost nonstop talk about the case, Laci Peterson's disappearance amid allegations, then admissions of an affair by another woman, and the endless focus on Scott Peterson, has become a live televised soap opera.
Laci Peterson vanished only hours before plans to spend Christmas Eve with her husband and family members in Modesto. Her husband, a specialty fertilizer salesman, told police he last saw her about 9:30 a.m. when he left to go fishing for the day at Berkeley Marina. He said she was taking the family dog, McKenzie, for a walk at nearby La Loma Park.
Ever since, one bizarre, dramatic turn has followed another.
Late Friday, Amber Frey, 28, of nearby Fresno, stood shaken before dozens of cameras and reporters, confessing to a "romantic relationship" with Scott Peterson after meeting him last Nov. 20.
In an appearance bordering on tragedy, Frey, a single mother of a 23-month-old child, expressed sorrow for "the pain this has caused" and said Scott Peterson told her he was single. Frey said she called Modesto Police on Dec. 30, six days after Laci Peterson's disappearance, upon learning that Scott Peterson was her husband.
Police have ruled Frey out as a suspect.
During January, the Modesto Police Department also fished an anchor, not a body, out of the Berkeley Marina. It hurriedly had to show Laci Peterson's family photos of Scott Peterson with Frey - just before The National Enquirer published allegations of an affair. Headlines flared when police said they were looking at Peterson in connection with a coed's 1996 disappearance in San Luis Obispo. The next day they said there was no connection.
Then burglars broke into Laci and Scott Peterson's house, making a baffling case even stranger.
Modesto Police Det. Doug Ridenour says burglary investigators have identified suspects, but haven't made arrests.
"It doesn't appear at this point to be connected with the missing person," he said.
Burglars also broke into a house across the street from the Petersons just before Christmas, fueling stories that they might have kidnapped Laci Peterson. But police downplayed the theory amid reports of two stolen handguns, tools, cameras and jewelry from the house across the street. Since, they arrested two men for that burglary, but have not made any arrests in the burglary of the Peterson house.
Neither Scott Peterson nor police said what the burglars took, triggering even more speculation in a Central California city that now abounds in theories and guesses.
"There's lots of rumors. Rumors circulate daily," said Carol Whiteside, former mayor of this city surrounded by orchards, vineyards and dairies.
Modesto is familiar with such turbulence. The city of 200,000 people was the hometown of Chandra Levy, a Washington, D.C. intern who disappeared in 2001 and was later found dead. It also served as the 1999 command center for three women missing in Yosemite National Park and found murdered by a motel handyman a month later.
Now, just as Chandra Levy's mother, Susan, urged former U.S. Rep. Gary Condit - who acknowledged an affair with the intern - to tell police all that he knew, Laci Peterson's mother, Sharon, has urged Scott Peterson to do the same.
Though Laci Peterson's family and friends initially stood by Scott Peterson, telling of a happy couple eagerly awaiting their first baby, the husband's story quickly attracted suspicion and scrutiny. Even as Modesto Police began a widening search of city and area creeks, irrigation ditches, rivers and reservoirs, they impounded his 2002 Ford 150 pickup and 14-foot aluminum boat for investigation.
Police spokesman Ridenour has continually remained mum about most aspects of the investigation, refusing to say where detectives are searching or talk about Scott Peterson's relationship with police investigators.
"All those things," he said, "We're not going to go into that for a number of reasons. We're investigating the case."
Former Mayor Whiteside said the case has attracted such widespread interest because it's a "woman who was competent and accomplished and bright and happy and pregnant. She wasn't hanging out in the wrong place, hanging out in wrong company, dealing drugs or anything. That's something a lot of people can relate to."
Which from yesterday's Land Rover issue, here is an update from the Fresnobee.com
"Modesto police used a search warrant to seize his truck, 14-foot boat and trailer on Dec. 26.
"We're not through with the truck or the boat," said Doug Ridenour, the Modesto police spokesman. "We'll keep it as long as we need to."
Police also seized the Land Rover, but it was later returned."
I guess Scott is searching the Guadalajara Hilton.
Was linked on Lacipeterson.com site
Posted on Sun, Feb. 02, 2003
`NO-BODY' MURDERS
GUILTY VERDICTS CAN HAPPEN EVEN WITHOUT PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF DEATH
By Glennda Chui
Mercury News
Gilroy restaurant owner Young Kim disappeared more than four years ago. Now, in a Santa Clara courtroom, prosecutors are trying to prove his wife paid $100,000 to have him killed.
But they lack a key piece of evidence: Kim's body, which has not been found.
It's the kind of predicament authorities may face if they fail to find Laci Peterson, the pregnant Modesto woman who vanished on Christmas Eve, and if they decide to charge someone with her murder.
To win a conviction in a case like this, prosecutors have to prove a series of things beyond a reasonable doubt: First, that the missing person is dead. Second, that he or she died as a result of foul play. And third, that the defendant did it.
As far back as colonial times, juries have been convicting killers based on witness testimony or a defendant's own bragging. Nowadays, they may consider high-tech tests on decade-old bloodstains.
Santa Clara County prosecutor Randy Hey said he considers one of his career highlights a conviction in a so-called ``no-body'' case. While trying a San Jose man for a drug-related murder, Hey realized the defendant's 19-year-old girlfriend had vanished years earlier.
He went back and investigated Adrienne Gilliam's disappearance and, in 1988, got a conviction against Gary Johnson, then 38.
``I was never able to establish how he killed her, where he killed her, what happened when he killed her,'' Hey said.
But he turned up one key piece of evidence. Years after Gilliam's disappearance, Johnson attacked another woman and told her ``he would do to her what he had done to Adrienne,'' Hey said.
``That was the extent of my evidence,'' he said.
No one keeps statistics on ``no-body'' murder charges or convictions. But there are a lot of them on the books, said Peter Keane, dean of the Golden Gate University Law School and a former criminal defense attorney.
Santa Clara County prosecutor Peter Waite is using circumstantial evidence to try to prove his case against one of the people accused of killing Young Kim.
Financial records
The evidence includes financial records and witnesses who say the defendant, 39-year-old Gustavo Covian, told them about the killing, Waite said.
Young Kim was last seen driving away from the Gavilan Restaurant, the Hollister truck stop he owned with his wife, in November 1998. His wife, Kyong Kim, reportedly told police she found his car at their house later that day, but she did not report him missing for 16 days.
Covian went on trial last week in Santa Clara County Superior Court. His wife, Maria, and brother, Ignacio, are also charged in the case and will be tried separately; so will Kyong Kim.
Evidence of death?
In opening arguments, defense attorney Thomas Worthington insisted that there is no evidence that Young Kim is dead -- let alone that Gustavo Covian killed him.
While police searched Covian's home and dug up a creek bed where Kim's body was supposedly buried, Worthington said, they never found one bit of evidence -- not a hair or a fiber or a spot of blood.
He said Kim and his wife had been having marital problems and financial difficulties. Both of them were having affairs. It's entirely possible, Worthington said, that Young Kim took off and is hanging out with a girlfriend in Mexico.
The Kim case is among at least three ongoing cases in California in which a victim's body was never found.
Bruce Koklich, 43, is scheduled to go on trial in Los Angeles County on Monday on charges of killing his wife, Jana Carpenter-Koklich, 41, daughter of the late former state Sen. Paul Carpenter, D-Cypress. She vanished 18 months ago.
And Joseph Eli Morrow, 54, was arrested in the Philippines last month and charged in the murder of his wife, Donna Morrow, who vanished 11 years ago after a violent argument in Menlo Park.
In civil court matters, a person who goes missing for seven years is generally presumed dead. But there is no such rule when it comes to criminal cases, legal experts say.
Due date is key
In the case of Laci Peterson, where no suspect has been named or charges filed, investigators will be watching to see what happens as the due date for her baby, which is around Valentine's Day, approaches this month. She was eight months pregnant when she vanished -- the day her husband, Scott Peterson, told police he was fishing in Berkeley.
``We're all going to look for that due date,'' said Karyn Sinunu, a Santa Clara County prosecutor who is not involved in the case. If Peterson got mad at her husband over his now-publicized affair and took off -- a possibility that can't be ruled out -- ``it seems pretty unbelievable that she would not make contact with her sister, her mother, her friend, when it's time to deliver that baby,'' Sinunu said.
When San Francisco attorney John O'Sullivan took the job of defending Mark Christopher Crew, a 33-year-old truck mechanic accused of killing his new bride in 1982 after fleecing her out of her life savings, ``people said it was a piece of cake because there was no body,'' O'Sullivan recalled.
He found out otherwise.
In gruesome testimony, a friend of Crew's said that Crew had told him about the murder: He had taken Nancy Jo Crew to a remote area, shot her and left her to die. Later, he returned with another friend and found her still alive; they cut off her head, put the head and body in separate barrels, filled them with cement and dumped them off the Dumbarton Bridge.
``There were very diabolical, almost surrealistic statements as to how they tried to get rid of the body,'' said O'Sullivan, whose client was convicted and sentenced to death. ``I think when jurors hear that, their apprehensions about not having a body are overcome.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Glennda Chui at gchui@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5453
" He said Kim and his wife had been having marital problems and financial difficulties. Both of them were having affairs. It's entirely possible, Worthington said, that Young Kim took off and is hanging out with a girlfriend in Mexico."
Hey, is SP looking for or hanging with KIM?
Oops, by "her", I mean Amber.
Grantski then addressed the issue of the toll-free tip line (1-866-LACI-INFO) that Scott and his family set up and first announced during the second part of his exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC's Good Morning America program on Tuesday, January 28, 2003,"We've heard there's another tip line for information about Laci he said. The only tip line that we support and encourage the public to use is the Modesto Police number which is (209) 342-6166, and the Laci Peterson Web Site at www.lacipeterson.com".
Scott Peterson was in Guadalajara. He reportedly checked out of his hotel three days early.
Police say that because Scott is not a suspect in his wife Laci's disappearance, he is free to leave the country.
They say reviewing the tapes is just another part of their ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Laci Peterson, "It's just like any other investigation. We're interested in everything about the investigation ... we would love for him to cooperate to that end, to try and eliminate him from the investigation, but at this point we have not been able to do that."
From ABC Channel 30 Fresno TV..
That is excellent! You should call that in to the Scott Petereson "find laci" toll free ph number!
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