Laci's things in tug of war

Laci Peterson's brother Brent Rocha loads a rocking chair from her Modesto home into the back of a truck Friday morning.

Laci Peterson's family and friends removed truckloads of items from the slain Modesto woman's house on Friday, touching off controversy between her family and that of her husband.

Police responded to the Covena Avenue home at about 10 a.m. after a security company reported that the alarm had been triggered, Capt. Greg Savelli said.

Officers determined that Laci Peterson's family and friends were removing items that belonged to Laci, said Savelli, who added that officers documented what was taken.

"We're treating this as a civil dispute over property," he said. "It was clear to the Police Department that this was not a burglary.

Peterson's husband, Scott, 30, has been charged with double murder and faces the death penalty in the killings of his 27-year-old wife and their unborn son, Conner.

Savelli said the fallout from Friday's property removal "was best handled between the families and their attorneys."

Adam Stewart, an attorney for Laci Peterson's family, said the family had been in contact with Scott Peterson's defense team, who had agreed to allow Laci's mother, Sharon Rocha, to go through the house on Tuesday. She was to be accompanied by representatives of the defense team, and all items taken were to be photographed and videotaped.

Scott Peterson's parents and lawyers expressed outrage that the Rochas did not follow the agreement.

Jackie Peterson said the people who went into the home Friday had "absolutely no permission to be in that house. I have a lot of empathy for Sharon, but she does not have a right to go in our house and take what she wants."

Rocha did not appear to be among the packers. Calls placed to the Rocha home were not accepted.

Among the items loaded into seven vehicles were a crib, a rocking chair and a box with Graco printed on the outside. Graco makes such products as strollers, highchairs and car seats.

Laci Peterson's family announced Wednesday that it had hired attorneys to help recover items from the house. A list included her wedding dress, jewelry and Conner's crib.

Jackie Peterson told The Bee that the security company notified her by telephone in San Diego County that the house alarm had been tripped.

The property removal appeared to take Scott Peterson's defense team by surprise.

Matthew Dalton, an attorney with lead defense attorney Mark Geragos' law firm, drove to the house and asked reporters if someone had reported a burglary.

Dalton went to Stewart's Modesto law office Friday morning and dropped off some items requested by the Rocha family, Stewart said.

Monday, the defense team moved other items, including what appeared to be gifts, to the Modesto office of defense co-counsel Kirk McAllister, for transfer to Laci Peterson's family. But the items had not been picked up by Friday morning, McAllister said.

Stewart said in front of the home that it would be "ridiculous" to suggest that the Rochas broke into the home.

"I apologize for it coming down to this," he said. "This is not the way we operate. This is for Laci, for Conner and Laci's family. It is not for the media or Mr. Scott Peterson's defense in any way, shape or form. It's depressing that it's come down to this."

Stanislaus County Chief Deputy District Attorney John Goold said prosecutors had no legal authority over the house.

"It's not a crime scene," Goold said. " This is a civil problem between the Rochas and the Petersons."

The house title is in Laci and Scott Petersons' names, county records show. In such a joint tenancy, when one titleholder dies, the title goes to the other.

Incident brings Peterson case close to home
Victim's family moves items from house, raising the issue of ownership.

MODESTO -- Laci Peterson's family and friends removed truckloads of items from the slain Modesto woman's house Friday, touching off controversy between her family and that of her husband.

Police officers were dispatched after a security company notified them that the alarm at the Covena Avenue home had been triggered, Capt. Greg Savelli said.

Officers determined that members of the Rocha family and friends of Laci Peterson were removing items that belonged to the slain woman and documented what was taken, Savelli said.

"We're treating this as a civil dispute over property," he said. "It was clear to the police department that this was not a burglary. It was a dispute over property and was best handled between the families and their attorneys."

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A Stanislaus County judge on Friday ordered that arrest and search warrants remain sealed in the case against Scott Peterson, who is accused of murdering his pregnant wife and unborn son.

Superior Court Judge Al Giro-lami's ruling also ordered the autopsy reports for Laci and Conner to stay sealed.

Thursday, District Attorney James Brazelton reversed his position and asked to have the autopsy reports made public, and the matter is set for hearing June 6.

Brazelton's about-face came after part of the fetus's autopsy report was leaked to the media. Prosecutors said that portion was clearly "skewed in favor of the defense."

Defense attorneys, coroner's officials, police and prosecutors have denied leaking the information.

Friday, in his ruling on all the documents, Girolami said releasing them "might irreparably harm the continued investigation into this criminal matter."

"Despite the fact that the complaint has been issued and a suspect has been arrested, the investigation and search for both incriminating and exonerating evidence in this matter continues," Girolami wrote.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys argued that releasing the documents could impede Peterson's right to a fair trial and damage an ongoing investigation.

Girolami agreed, saying in his ruling that releasing the documents "might result in the evidence being destroyed and witnesses being reluctant to step forward."

A group of newspapers, including The Bee, are seeking to have the documents unsealed.

Charity Kenyon, an attorney representing the newspapers, argued that the public's right to view court documents was fundamental in an open legal system.

MODESTO, Calif. (AP) - A judge ruled Friday that an autopsy report on the deaths of Laci Peterson and her unborn son should remain sealed along with other search warrant and arrest records.

Superior Court Judge Al Girolami said releasing the information could hamper the murder investigation and prejudice public opinion before a trial begins.

Girolami is scheduled to hear more arguments June 6 from prosecutors preparing a murder case against Peterson's husband, Scott Peterson. Prosecutors on Thursday asked that the autopsy reports be released to the public. They argued that media leaks of the reports are biased toward the defense.

Girolami also ordered that leaks of sealed information stop and indicated he would consider a gag order to stop the prosecution and defense teams from talking to the media.

Scott Peterson, 30, is accused of killing his wife and unborn son, whom the couple had planned to name Conner, last December in their home. Laci, 27, was eight months pregnant at the time. The bodies washed ashore in San Francisco Bay last month.

Contra Costa County authorities concluded their autopsy report earlier this month, but did not disclose the cause of death.

Several media outlets have released details of the coroner's report, and a spokeswoman for Laci Peterson's family members said Thursday they were "devastated" at hearing autopsy reports without warning on television.

The leaked reports indicated the unborn son had plastic tape wrapped around his neck and a significant cut across the shoulders.

Meanwhile, friends of Laci Peterson removed several personal articles Friday from the single-story Modesto home where she and Scott Peterson lived.

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May 31, 2003 -- Laci Peterson's mother - shattered by the graphic details leaked from the 25-page autopsy of her unborn grandson - yesterday began removing her slain daughter's belongings from the home she had shared with her accused murderer husband, Scott.

Sharon Rocha, accompanied by several friends and relatives, was seen at the Modesto, Calif., house removing the rocking chair Laci had bought to use when she nursed her infant son, as well as unopened Christmas gifts, clothing, chairs, lamps and artwork.

In doing so, she ignored the advice of her lawyer, Al Clark, that she wait until he, Scott Peterson's lawyers and court officials work out the procedures to be followed when she entered the house.

Modesto police arrived while Rocha was there, and she and her entourage left a short time later after packing seven cars full of Laci's belongings.

Hours later, lawyers representing Laci's family and Scott Peterson started haggling over whether removing the items was legal.

Scott Peterson's mother, Jackie, expressed outrage that the items had been removed since Laci's family had "absolutely no permission to be in that house."

Laci's family said Wednesday that they had hired lawyers to help them retrieve a baby crib and jewelry from the home.

Meanwhile, Clark told Fox News his client's anger over the grisly revelations leaked from her daughter's and grandson's sealed autopsy reports drove her to go get her daughter's possessions.

A family spokeswoman said Rocha was "devastated" by the reports describing how the near full-term fetus of her grandson Conner had plastic tape wrapped around the neck and a large cut across the chest when he was found in the shallow waters of San Francisco Bay last month.

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Thank you very much Tapu!! I do remember the West Memphis 3!! Good job in reminding me.

Below is the ABC News article about them. The photographs aren't still available from their website, but the article is still able to be uncovered.!

The article itself wants to attack the "Satanic Panic" but if a reasonable person reads the article, the article shows the effort by law enforcement to arrtrbute the killing to anythiing other than Satanism. The "scholars" would rather explain the Satanism aspect away rather than accept the statements given by the perpetrators.

I think the article provides enough information that the reader can make up his own mind---at least on this case.

Law Enforcement Struggles With Cult Crimes
Little Proof for 'Satanic Panic'

RELATED STORIES

Pearl Teens Face Trial

A Satanic Past

Son of Sam Interviews

U.S. NEWS added

E-mail ABCNEWS.com

“I don’t know what these kids in Pearl are yet, dabblers or semi-
organized, but it’s the same bottom line: people were killed.”
—Police officer Marcus Quinones

By Jackie Cooperman
ABCNEWS.com
Oct. 24

—A 16-year-old admirer of Adolf Hitler stabs his mother to death with a kitchen knife, shoots and kills two fellow students in a Mississippi high school, and belongs to a group that “hates the accursed god of Christianity.”
    Three teenage fans of Heavy Metal music and “white magic” are convicted of murdering and mutilating three eight-year-olds in Arkansas. Two New York teens are accused of murdering another student, gouging out his eyes and forcing him, in his final breaths, to swear allegiance to Satan. A Mexican drug-smuggling group offers 13 human sacrifices, hoping the murders will improve marijuana sales.
     Grisly crimes, to be sure, many of which have sent communities into what some have called a “satanic panic”—fear that an underground devil cult was operating in their midst, ready to steal their children. But experts caution that even when pentagrams, satanic texts or animal carcasses are found at crime scenes, psychosis, not satanism, is often to blame.
     “It’s so easy to blame the belief,” said Dr. J. Douglas Crowder, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “We want some abstract villain to attribute problems to, but if you have a psychopathic kid, the core problem is in the personality…rather than cultic systems or beliefs.”

Satanism in the Eye of the Beholder

Conflicting definitions of satanic and cult practices complicate the issue.
     “There are three kinds of satanism. There’s religious satanism. It’s a bonafide religion and they usually don’t present a problem,” said Dr. Herbert Nieburg, a psychologist specializing in adolescent satanism at the Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, New York.
     “The second group are the bad guys. They are criminal cultists. They can’t experience remorse and they commit crimes using Satanism as an excuse. Everyone else, about 90 percent, are adolescent satanic dabblers. They are disturbed, dysfunctional, disenfranchised people, mostly male, who do ritual borrowing.”
     The rituals, experts say, often include animal sacrifices, chants and praises of the occult, but rarely do they lead to violence.
     Investigators are faced with the challenge of distinguishing when belief in non-traditional and satanic religions is relevant to crimes.
     “It is easy to get caught up in these cases and begin to see ‘satanism’ everywhere,” special supervisory FBI agent Kenneth Lanning wrote in Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective. “Oversensitization to this perceived threat may cause an investigator to ‘see’ satanism in a crime when it is really not there.”
     Still, satanic beliefs can hold the key to some criminal cases.
     “It’s all about group dynamics,” said New York City police officer Marcus Quinones, an expert on cult and gang crimes. “You must define the characteristics of a destructive cult and a those of non-threatening cult. When psychological and physical coercion is used, then you may have a problem.”

Experts Call Students ‘Dabblers’

In Pearl, Miss., 16-year-old Luke Woodham is charged with stabbing his mother to death, then fatally shooting two girls at Pearl High School on Oct. 1. Six of Woodham’s friends, said to have joined Woodham in a cult called “the Kroth,” are charged with conspiracy in the deaths.
Many experts said they suspected the students were “dabblers” in satanism before becoming more extreme.
“Dabblers, or ‘the buffet,’ I call them, they take a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The dabbler is dangerous because he doesn’t have control,” Quinones said. “I don’t know what these kids in Pearl are yet, whether they’re dabblers or semi-organized, but it’s still the same bottom line: People were killed.”

‘Satanic Panic’ Skews Issue

Cult watchers cautioned against public panic, discounting theories that the violent adolescents were members of a larger group.
     “Some people have the theory that there’s a big nationwide organized cult, but police evidence does not support that theory,” said Carol Giambalvo, a director of the American Family Foundation, a cult education organization.
     “Young people can go manufacture an ad-hoc, do-it-yourself ideology but it doesn’t mean they have a hierarchy or deep, philosophical, well-developed beliefs, and calling them a cult adds nothing to our understanding,” said Jeffrey Victor, author of Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend and a sociologist at the State University of New York, Jamestown.
     Prosecutors sometimes play upon community panic to gain quick convictions, say Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who produced Paradise Lost, a documentary about the murders of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. Police charged three teens with the crime and accused them of belonging to a satanic cult, but the filmmakers say the teenagers were wrongly convicted, blamed because they wore black and listened to Metallica music.
     “Clearly some kids are doing evil things and taking their inspiration from evil sources and we’re not downplaying that,” Berlinger said. “But what we are saying is you have to be very careful to jump to the cult conclusion.”

Substance Abuse Also a Factor
Often, adolescents drawn to satanic ideas also abuse drugs and alcohol, experts say.
     In 1984, two teens were charged with torturing another adolescent to death in what investigators initially called a “satanic killing” in Northport, Long Island. Later, the trial focused on the teens’ addiction to the drug LSD, with the defense calling hallucinogens “the devil in this case.” One of the accused hung himself while awaiting trial, and the other was acquitted.
     In Matamoros, Mexico, drug smugglers said they killed 13 people because they thought the human sacrifices would grant them divine protection for their marijuana ring. Religious experts said the group was observing a corrupted form of santeria, a blend of Roman Catholic and Yoruba beliefs which sanctions animal but not human sacrifices.
     Some experts predicted the satan-inspired incidents may eventually wane, but even if that’s true, many said, the seemingly endless horror stories point to a larger problem.
     “We’re horrified about kids killing kids,” said Berlinger, who has four children. “The bigger issue is why has our society gone this way? What is it about the current generation of kids that makes them so insensitive to violence?”

Did The Devil Make Them Do It?

Oct. 1997, Pearl, Miss.
Luke Woodham, 16, walked into Pearl High School and shot and killed two students while wounding seven others. Prior to the shooting incident, Woodham had stabbed his mother to death. Woodham has been indicted on murder charges, while six others in a group that called themselves "the Kroth" have been charged with murder conspiracy.

May 1994, Matamoros, Mexico
The "godfather" and four fellow members of a cult were sentenced to more than 60 years in prison for the ritual murders of 13 people in 1989. The victims, according to authorities, were killed becauses the cult sought magical protection from the law and rival drug smugglers.

March 1994, West Memphis, Ark.
Damien Echols, 19, and Charles Jason Baldwin, 16, were convicted on three counts of capital murder in the brutal slaying of three 8-year-olds, whose bodies were found nude and hog-tied in a drainage ditch. Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., 18, also involved in the incident, was found guilty in a separate trial on one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder.

June 1988, Sedalia, Mo.
Three teens, Theron Roland II, Ronald Clements and James Hardy, were sentenced to life in prison for the gruesome death of Steven Newberry, 19, whose body was found in an abandoned well with several squirrel and cat carcasses. The attack was attributed to drug use, a fascination with violent rock music and satanism.

June 1984, Northport, N.Y.
Ricky Kasso and James Troiano were accused of killing Gary Lauwers, 17, by gouging his eyes out and stabbing him 17 times during a three-hour torture session. At the end of the ordeal, Kasso and Troiano forced Lauwers to say, "I love you Satan." Police claimed Kasso and Troiano killed Lauwers in a dispute over stolen drugs. Kasso confessed to the murder and later hanged himself, while Troiano was acquitted of second-degree murder.

There have been posts made regarding attorney Mark Geragos "reneging" on an agreement between the parties to allow Sharon Rocha to enter the Peterson home and retrieve some of Laci's property. It has been presented that this was some kind of "last straw" and Sharon Rocha, in desperation, entered the home without the defense's permission. This is not exactly true.

On Wednesday night Sharon Rocha appeared on Greta's show on FNN. She complained that she was not being allowed to enter the Peterson home by Scott Peterson's mother. She offered a very sad story designed to ellicit sympathy, not only from Greta, but from the audience as well. She accomplished that goal.

What she did not reveal to Greta or the public was that there was already an agreement in place for her to enter the home and retrieve items she had listed as belong to Laci that she would like to have. The date, and presumeably the time, was set for Tuesday, June 3. Instead, she stated that Scott's mother was refusing to allow entry. Scott's mother called in and denied that she was blocking the entry.

The agreement was between the parties was designed to eliminate a media farce. Geragos did not want or need any more negative press and controversy. The negotiations and the agreement itself was kept confidential and was not announced to the press or public prior to the appearance of Rocha on Greta's show.

The following morning, Thursday, Geragos responded to Rocha's attack on Mrs. Peterson by calling Rocha's attorney and in complaining made the "if you want war" statement. He was outraged, I believe righfully so, and responding to the deception and dishonesty of Rocha in light of the agreement. He then apparently, withdrew the agreement.

Sharon, taking advantage of her breech, then entered the home on Friday morning complete with attendant press who were obviusly told there would be an entry prior to the event itself. The press witnessed the arrival of the vehicles and the police as their video reveals.

I think a fair and objective review of the agreement, the statements made by Sharon Rocha and the reports by the press will reveal that this was a pre-planned event orchestrated by Sharon Rocha to accomplish her own ends. In the process she slandered Jackie Peterson to her own advantage.

IMO............

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