Original subtitles

A woman who was eight months pregnant disappeared Christmas Eve and hasn't

been seen since.

27-year-old Lacey Peterson.

Dozens of people searched for Lacey. There could be a body somewhere.

There were questions about husband Scott.

Scott said he left for fishing the day that Lacey disappeared.

We have claims of an affair.

Scott admitted he was cheating on Lacey. Scott Peterson now admits to both lying

and cheating.

Detectives have focused their investigation on Lacey Peterson's

husband, Scott.

It's one of the most famous cases in this country's history.

For me, the Peterson case has been that category of unresolved things in your

life. In the case of Lacey Peterson, police identify her body and arrest her

husband for her murder.

I've always believed that there are huge problems in this case. I'm a dependent,

Scott Lee Peterson, guilty of the crime of murder.

The world knew that Scott was a philanderer who murdered his wife.

But what if everything we knew about the case was just wrong?

Nearly 20 years after being convicted of killing his wife and their unborn child,

Scott Peterson was back in court today seeking a new trial.

The Los Angeles Innocence Project has taken on Scott Peterson's defense.

Good morning, Your Honor. Paula Mitchell, Los Angeles Innocence Project,

for Scott Peterson.

When an organization like the Los Angeles Innocence Project takes on a

case, it means that they believe that this is a wrongful conviction.

And they are arguing that Scott Peterson is absolutely innocent.

Paula Mitchell is an appellate attorney. She has deep knowledge of the facts and

the evidence and the science. And when I read the filings, I was blown away.

They have brought out so many new aspects of this case that were

previously unheard of, undiscussed, and they are putting forward new evidence.

that suggests that Lacey Peterson's disappearance was completely unrelated

to Scott Peterson.

I'm going to really deeply investigate the Los Angeles citizen's projects

filing. It appears the detectives just decided to destroy this evidence.

He's the walking, talking incarnation of junk science.

This is crazy.

He did not do this.

Do I think that we'll be able to answer this, whether Scott Peterson is guilty

or innocent?

I think we're going to get a lot closer than anyone ever has.

The trial of Scott Peterson is finally underway.

Scott Peterson was a cold calculating person.

I think he intended to kill Lacey.

If you ask people about this case.

They'll just tell you that Scott did it.

Do I think Scott Peterson is the person responsible?

Absolutely.

You think justice is served? Yeah.

Why does the public find this case fascinating if it's so open and shut and

it's just about a philandering husband who found a way to kill his wife so he

could be with his mistress? If it was just that, it would have come and gone.

This has been a mystery from day one.

My name is Chris Pixley. I'm an attorney, and for over 30 years, I've

been doing trial practice.

I'm a third-generation attorney in my family, and I was raised to believe,

actually, that law is a noble profession and that it can do a lot of good.

I've done work on behalf of individuals like the Menendez brothers.

I represented Eric Menendez for over 10 years.

But the Scott Peterson case has always bothered me. I always believed that this

was not a thorough investigation.

A man is in prison for the murder of his wife. I'd like to find out if he belongs

there.

Police in Modesto, California have very few leads in the search for Lacey

Peterson. Lacey, Denise, if you're hearing Dad, we love you very much and

we want you home.

At the time of Lacey Peterson's disappearance, I was a legal analyst for

ABC's Good Morning America, Court TV, and CNN's Larry King Live.

The prosecution may not only have to prove that Scott Peterson is a murderer,

they may have to prove that he's a sociopath. I commented on the Peterson

case from early 2003 all the way through the trial.

Obviously, the judge did not agree with the DA. There wasn't evidence of scratch

marks. Nobody called them scratch marks. It was a genuine mystery.

For every piece of evidence that you marshaled against Scott Peterson, most

of which had to do with his character, there were these unexplained questions

about the actual physical scene of the crime.

There were unexplained questions about how he could have gotten away with it.

We don't know when she was killed, where she was killed, how she was killed.

Bodies turn up in the chilly waters of the bay. They are identified as Lacey

Peterson and her unborn son.

Scott Peterson says he launched his boat here to go fishing the day before

Christmas.

Scott Peterson always maintained his innocence.

And now the Los Angeles Innocence Project is arguing to the federal court

that the constitutional basis of his conviction is not viable.

that he was wrongfully prosecuted and convicted.

First, they're arguing that new fetal biometric science suggests that Lacey

Peterson likely didn't die on December 24, 2002, that she may not have died for

many days or even weeks later.

If they're right, it means that Scott Peterson is innocent.

Secondly, new computational hydrodynamic modeling suggests that if Lacey

Peterson's body had been placed in the bay, in the location where Scott

Peterson was fishing, her body and Connor's body would not have been

recovered where they were.

The new science is really the game changer.

But they also are raising the possibility that this is a malicious

prosecution.

They are challenging the integrity of the criminal investigation, arguing that

not only did the Modesto police not investigate the many, many witnesses

that came forward with sightings of Lacey on the morning of December 24th,

they also destroyed evidence in the case.

If the Los Angeles Innocence Project's new evidence is reliable, it raises

dramatic questions about the viability of the state's entire story.

I'm going to talk to experts, some from the original prosecution, some who had

nothing to do with the case, to get their unbiased views of the case.

It's an exciting proposition to be able to really stress test both the factual

evidence and the new science.

This is the first time that we've really started to get an honest evaluation of

what went on 20 years ago surrounding the Peterson case.

Prosecutional contentions that Scott Peterson killed his wife Lacey and their

unborn son Connor on Christmas Eve 2002.

What bothered me most about this case is that we're supposed to believe that he

murdered his wife. He left absolutely no forensic evidence.

He moved her body multiple times across the great distance in broad daylight.

I want to try to retrace.

Scott Peterson steps at the time of day and the time of year that he was there.

Good morning. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. Thank you for doing

this with me. My pleasure.

I'm Nanette Toosby. I'm a retired LAPD detective. I was with LAPD for almost 25

years.

After my retirement, I became involved with the L.A. Innocence Project as an

expert, providing them with insight on police procedures.

So the thing that we want to do today is go to all the locations that Scott

Peterson is alleged to have traveled to in the course of disposing of his wife's

body and just determine how plausible that is with your expert eye on all

this. You know, you can read about something in a file, but it is never the

same as when you go there and you actually get an understanding of the

layout.

One of the things that's important in terms of our starting point is that the

events of December 23rd, the night before Lacey Peterson's disappearance,

are undisputed.

Scott and Lacey go to Lacey's sister's hair salon to get Scott a haircut.

They get pizza, they bring it home, and they start a movie, and then Lacey calls

her mother late night.

She was looking forward to it.

See, and Scott are just so much in love. They just, they're just, I think

everybody envies their relationship. They're just perfect together.

It's what happens after Lacey's phone call to her mother where the stories

diverge. And that's when the investigation really starts.

The state theory is that Scott, through means that are unknown, murdered his

wife.

And the next morning that he had the presence of mind to make searches on the

computer for things that only Lacey would be searching for, to load her body

into the back of his truck, cover it with some umbrellas, wave to the

neighbors.

And, of course, the defense has always argued this is entirely implausible.

And I want to see for myself.

This is the Peterson home. This is essentially the same physical setup that

it was back in 2002 when Lacey Peterson went missing.

Generally the same time of day, the same general time of year.

What do you first notice about this in terms of the alleged crime?

It's not a particularly deep driveway, you know, so it's very close to the

street. And it's very close to the house across the street because it's a narrow

street. And then also how close the garage is to the neighbor.

It was a one-story house then, so there isn't really a huge amount of privacy

between the homes and just this whole area in general.

Christian Deppenwolf was one of the witnesses who reported seeing Scott that

morning. Deppwood says she had a brief chat with Scott Christmas Eve morning.

She saw him putting umbrellas in the back of his truck.

She reported that his truck was facing into the driveway.

If I were planning on carrying a body out, I probably would have backed in the

truck. But even so, let's just say, you know, the truck was parked the way it

was parked.

To carry a body out and get that body into the bed of the truck in an area

that is...

All intents and purposes, quite open.

It's a very rifty endeavor if you want to go unnoticed.

Even if the body was completely wrapped, it's going to look like a body. It

doesn't mean it cannot happen. It's just how likely is it that you could

successfully do that without detection.

Honestly, the state theory, and it was what Scott... Peterson was convicted on

is the idea that he loaded Lacey's body in the back of his pickup truck. Doesn't

make sense.

Sheriff's office.

I don't know what it is, but it's not a person.

That's an alligator.

I would suggest you get out of the water, sir.

You're being detained.

He's in the water.

Hands up now.

Watch your crossfire.

Sir,

you got wet, but fantastic job. Watch now.

Part of crime and investigation on A&E.

Dispatch, we got a homicide.

We have no other witnesses right now.

We got a blood trail.

We got two fingerprints off the car. We're going to confirm that that is the

victim's blood.

That was not the time to mess with me. I promise you, it was not me.

You have a dead guy in your apartment.

You're lying.

Step out with your hands up.

Then go beat the ride to jail.

The first 48 new episodes watched now are a crime and investigation only on A

&E.

Detectives remove Scott Peterson's new Dodge pickup truck.

Prosecution theory that Scott put her body in there to dump it in the bay.

So we've left Peterson home. We're now on the way to Scott Peterson's

warehouse.

This is where he is said to have moved his wife's body from his pickup truck

into the back of his fishing boat.

Scott Peterson's boat didn't fit in his warehouse, and neither did the truck. So

he would have been transferring the body from the truck into the boat outside of

his warehouse in broad daylight, right out in the open.

So the back wall of buildings is where Peterson's warehouse is located.

Again, same time of day. Right.

As I look at the units, one after the other is open.

He would have had no way of knowing who would be here and who would not be here.

And so just to pull up with a dead body.

Just seems like a huge gamble.

And do it right out in the open. I mean, you've got, what, a car length or two

space. So it's a tight space. If he had the boat in here and he pulls up to it,

he's filling most of that space and he's carrying a body physically from one

location to another.

Yeah, it just seems crazy to me.

You know, on the other hand, he had this affair out in the open with Amber Fry.

Amber Fry?

came forward to say she and Scott had been having an affair.

Even as the search continued for his missing wife.

Maybe he is a risk taker.

So let's say he didn't really think it out so far, right? So he's kind of

reckless. Right. So if that's his personality profile, then how likely is

it that he went on the Internet and looked up whatever it was that he was

looking up? Those two, they seem kind of incongruent.

Right. The state argues that Scott Peterson had the foresight to...

do computer searches looking for items that only his wife would have been

looking for on the morning of her disappearance on the computer so that

there was a record of that. If you're going to go with a theory, you've got to

go with one or the other, like the two don't add up.

Right. At the 2004 trial, the prosecution presented to the jury two

Scott Petersons, these two completely different people. On the one hand,

somebody who isn't a very smart guy, who didn't have really any sense of the

risks that he was taking, that he's reckless enough to have an affair.

And to continue that affair, you know, while there were visuals being held for

his missing wife and at the same time, the state wants you to believe that he's

someone that devised this perfect crime, that he somehow had the otherworldly

ability to commit this crime and then wipe his home, his truck, his warehouse,

the boat, all of it clean of even a stitch of forensic evidence of any kind.

Investigators return time and again to search waters off the Berkeley Marina.

Scott Peterson says he launched his boat here to go fishing the day he says Lacey

disappeared.

Scott claims he went to the Berkeley Marina on December 24th to test a boat,

a boat that he's giving to his father-in-law as a gift.

Well, the reason I'd wait was just to get that boat in the water.

I question the reasonableness of Scott Peterson choosing to drive 90 miles from

Modesto to the Berkeley Marina to make this three-hour round trip for, what,

maybe an hour out on the water. Right.

I struggle with the fact that he drove 90 minutes to go for an hour fishing

trip in a little boat out on a choppy San Francisco Bay.

The prosecution's position is that he's only at the bay to dump Lacey Peterson's

body.

You have this sort of evidentiary accretion where the more layers you peel

back, you find these arguments that are potentially important both to the

prosecution and the defense.

The boat is problematic in a number of ways. First of all, if Peterson drove

the shallow-bottomed boat from his warehouse to the Berkeley Marina with

his wife's body lying in the back, The state's theory requires Scott to have

used a boat cover to conceal Lacey's body.

But the physical evidence doesn't support that argument.

The LAIP says that the boat straps showed no real sign of wear or tear.

Meaning that the boat cover looks like it's never been taken out of its

container and that the straps aren't stretched and everything.

Even if it was used, you'd have to take the cover off when you launch the boat

into the bay.

If you're going to do something suspicious here, he would have no way of

knowing that in any of those boats there could be potential witnesses.

The visibility at the Berkeley Marina at 5 o'clock when we were there was high.

It would have been even brighter earlier in the day when Scott Peterson was

there.

It's hard to accept that someone would be as bold as to move

their wife's dead body into a flat-bottomed boat.

dragged that flat-bottomed boat two hours down to the San Francisco Bay, in

all likelihood without any cover on the boat and without being seen.

But in fact, there were people there who saw Scott Peterson launch the boat.

He was seen

by witnesses in broad daylight in the middle of the day.

And they somehow didn't see a body.

Talk to me a little bit about the difficulty of moving a body from a 14

-foot boat into the bay and a single person doing that.

How reasonable is that?

You've got a body in addition to an adult male.

How buoyant is that boat going to be?

The defense actually tested it out just physically.

I went so far as to put one of my law clerks in the same boat. I put him out

in the bay at the same time of day. I had him take a dummy to try to send it

over. In this particular case, the boat sank.

They filmed it with the hope that they would present that to the jury.

Judge wouldn't let that in to evidence.

He said that it was not scientific. There was no basis for it.

Because there's not enough data points to establish that what happened was

anything close to what the videotape demonstrated.

So the boat raises so many more questions than answers.

And as a first-time criminal, it's not only difficult to pull off a perfect

crime like this.

What is the likelihood that you're going to be able to...

Move the body multiple times from the home to your truck, from your truck to

your boat, from the boat to the marina, all without leaving any forensic

evidence behind.

We know that Lacey Peterson's DNA, her hair, her blood, her bodily fluids, none

of them wound up anywhere on the cover or on the boat.

I find it...

Really striking that there is no DNA evidence found on the boat and none on

the boat cover.

Another part of the prosecution's theory is that he didn't just clean up one, but

he ultimately cleaned up four crime scenes.

That would be a tall order even for an experienced CSI technician.

So you would have expected to find DNA or other forensic evidence?

Absolutely. Things like blood or hair or anything like that.

When you add up all the different steps that...

had to take place, it's sort of like it's luck after luck after luck that

nobody caught him doing that.

And that, to me, is rather striking.

Because how many times can you be lucky?

Season 3 of LFG is a real-as-real death.

You won't make it. Get him out of here.

No team.

Everybody working towards the same thing. What are you doing that for? I'm

disappointed in myself.

I'm not going to be able to go to sleep tonight.

You're either moving forward or you're going home.

Everything is on the line. This is what it takes to be a WWE superstar.

WWE LFG. New episodes. Watch now. Only on A&E.

Lacey was a loving, happy, generous, vivacious person.

Lacey loves life. She loves people.

Her family and friends all painted this picture of this girl that was so looking

forward to giving birth.

And she was planning on the nursery that she was finishing the construction of

and looking forward to being a mother.

This is Lacey.

Can you tell she's pregnant? Look at that stomach. It's really sticking out.

She was structured. She was organized. She had things planned out. She was

social. And so when she comes up missing and there's no explanation to it, it

signals there's something bad happened.

Modesto Police begin the search for clues in the bizarre disappearance of 27

-year-old Lacey Peterson.

There's so many inconsistencies in this case, so many small but important items

that just don't add up that I want to go back to day one of the investigation and

examine everything from the beginning.

December 24th in the morning, Lacey was last seen by her husband, Scott, and we

started an investigation on the 24th about 5.47 p.m.

After Lacey Peterson was reported missing, one of the first investigators

to come to the Peterson home was Detective Brocchini of the Modesto

Police Department.

One thing that's interesting to me about the early interactions on December 24th

with Scott Peterson is how cooperative he was.

He agreed to searches of his home, of his place of business, the warehouse

where he worked.

He gave over his phone. He agreed to searches of his truck and his personal

belongings.

It's a good sign when somebody is cooperative with the police.

But there are people who are guilty who will cooperate with the police. The

reason for that is because they're guilty, they're afraid that if they

don't cooperate, it'll make them look guilty.

So as an investigator, you have to be careful to not read into it too much.

We're not being responsible if we don't ask the question whether this is error

in the course of the investigation or whether this is actual misconduct.

Not only did Brokini focus on Scott Peterson from day one, but he did some

highly unusual things in his investigation.

One of the things that the LAIP filing shows is that Scott Peterson was asked

on the evening of December 24, 2002, as to whether or not he had weapons.

He told the investigator that he did have weapons. He took him to a location

in his home that he kept his hunting rifles locked up.

He also told him that he had a .22 caliber pistol in the glove compartment

of his car.

Unbeknownst to Scott Peterson, that investigator, Detective Brocchini, went

to his truck and confiscated that .22 pistol.

To remove a piece of property, irrespective of whether it's a gun or

anything else, to me is not a sanctioned investigative practice.

The practice is either you get consent or you have a search warrant.

And as an investigator, if I thought, hmm, there's something I want to check

out about this gun, then I would have asked, do you mind if I book this gun?

And then if Scott Peterson had said no, well, then I probably would have

probable cause to get a search warrant.

I saw things in the back of his truck that first night that just didn't seem

right.

Burkini was done with Scott from minute one.

There's no doubt that he had an agenda.

Another problem is that the notes from Detective Burkini for December 24th, as

well as his notes for December 25th, went missing.

And he testified at trial that he destroyed those notes.

I cannot come up with a single explanation why any investigator would

destroy notes, particularly on a high-stakes case like a missing person.

I mean, it makes no sense to me.

And I don't want to try to read into his rationale for doing it.

It's just a bizarre thing to do.

And there's an inherent risk, is there not, that you have exculpatory evidence

in there that's lost when...

police investigative notes or any materials are destroyed.

Not only is that a risk, but the other risk is also that you sort of

haphazardly, as an investigator, decide, well, I'm going to keep these notes, but

I'm going to destroy those notes over there. Now the integrity of your

investigation is being put into question, particularly when you go to

trial, because it's bad optics.

Scott Peterson has no criminal record, and he has no history of violence.

Right. If there had been a history of Scott being violent and abusive towards

Lacey Peterson, that would point to a much higher likelihood that, in fact, he

was the one who killed her.

This is a guy who has lived his entire life without any kind of violence.

It's just not in his makeup.

Just because you're having an affair doesn't make you a murderer.

Douchey, a very unlikable, unsympathetic character for sure, but being that and

being a murderer are two different things.

There was no evidence to suggest that Scott Peterson had killed his wife,

other than the fact that he happened to be having an affair and he was her

husband.

That's essentially it.

I want to do this. I can do this.

It's time to raise the bar on the bizarre. Someone urinated in the middle

of the store.

Might as well make it worse.

With real arrests. They were honking at me.

And very unreal behavior.

My first naked Florida man, for sure.

It was criminal wearing that bathing suit.

Stop running.

My Strange Arrest. New episodes, watch now.

Police have not been able to rule out Scott as a possible suspect.

The shocking news of Scott's affair flipped two families.

Is there anything you'd like to say? No, there's nothing. Thank you.

When was the moment you knew Scott Peterson was your man? First day, I had

a gut feeling that something isn't right.

From the jump, police were suspicious of Scott, and they have justified those

suspicions on the grounds of his demeanor. All along, he had a very

nonchalant attitude with me.

They were suggesting that his behavior was not the behavior of a grieving or

panicked husband whose wife has gone missing.

You have no idea where this is.

It was just a lot of things that added up that said to me,

I better talk to this guy with a tape recorder running.

Scott was a person of interest from the start because he didn't do all the

things that we asked him to do. And, of course, there was a stark contrast in

Scott's behavior with everybody else that was so close to Lacey.

The Los Angeles Innocence Project argues that the police are conducting an

investigation that is not a missing person investigation, but a death

investigation, and they are focused with tunnel vision on Scott Peterson

right out of the gate.

Late detective Craig Grogan turns up the heat on Scott Peterson.

I'm not telling you that there's anything that's pointing any direction

right now other than you, Scott.

They were determined to get a conviction.

They had tunnel vision that it was Scott to the exclusion of any logical,

rational explanation otherwise.

We're on our way to meet with Mark Godsey.

Mark is a former federal prosecutor, and he is now one of the co-founders of the

Ohio Innocence Project.

Mark Godsey, I think, may be one of the people who can best speak to this idea

that investigators and, for that matter, prosecutors can very quickly be caught

up in one narrative and the impact that that has on their ability to look

objectively at the remaining evidence as it comes in.

With the Scott Peterson case, I was very much like the member of the public at

the time I thought he was guilty.

It didn't occur to me, at least, that he was innocent.

But I wasn't there. And guess what? Neither was the judge, neither were the

prosecutors, neither were the detectives. The idea that the

investigators had on the first day was that Peterson's our guy.

That's crazy, right? You can't know that that quickly.

But how quickly can the investigators get caught up in tunnel vision?

Very quickly.

You know, it's not because they're bad people saying, I think I want to convict

an innocent person. It's because they're good people who see themselves playing a

crucial role in protecting the public.

We've taken the entire focus of the department.

If not 99%, 100% of the investigation unit is out currently working on this

case. And the more high profile it is, the pressure it is to solve the case

because of the media attention.

And so that first thing comes in that suggests that somebody did it, and boy.

That's the best news I've heard all day. It's human nature. You're going to roll

with it, particularly if the evidence is weak.

And you start ignoring signs and evidence that start coming in and start

pointing the other way.

And you just see that repeatedly in this case. This case is starting out in the

press. And he's already...

Guilty. He is such a despised individual in the public's eye.

This was a nationally covered case. You couldn't escape it. And so because of

the media coverage, there was a lot more dramatization that led to roles being

played, and Scott was definitely the bad guy.

The way I look at it, he's guilty 100%. Confirmation bias is the human tendency

to interpret information in a way that... confirms our pre-existing

belief. If they're coming in with this default that it's probably the husband

and somebody close to her, that's what their experience tells them

statistically. Before they've seen any of the evidence.

Absolutely. How do you take a polygraph test? What about the allegations of a

girlfriend?

So when you look at the Peterson case, it's clear that they latched onto his

demeanor. I don't really care.

what those people out there think. Do you really expect people to believe that

an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant woman learns her husband has had an affair and

is casual about it?

Yeah, we don't know.

No one knows our relationship but us.

We don't know what Scott Peterson was thinking.

Maybe he was in shock.

Maybe he wasn't that upset.

Maybe he's a jerk.

There's a million things that might have contributed to his demeanor. And the

demeanor evidence is frequently used because the evidence is weak. The

prosecutor will get up and say, like, look at his demeanor. That's not how

somebody acts who just lost their wife. And that sometimes seems very compelling

to the jury. But human beings are about 54% accurate, so barely better than a

coin flip at determining whether someone is telling the truth or not.

He's lying to her about being on business while a community prayer vigil

is being prepared for his then-missing wife, Lacey.

From your perspective, why is the Scott Peterson case

so important?

It's a microcosm of what goes on everywhere.

You see them consistently ignoring evidence that contradicts their theory

and sort of shaping it to fit their theory.

Cops are trained to believe that they can make up their mind very early on.

This person's lying.

It's baked into the system.

They don't like his demeanor. They don't like the way he's acting. They're making

up their mind pretty early. This is probably our guy.

There was not enough evidence to make that conclusion.

When it comes to the conversation, like the one we had with Professor Godfrey,

is that we have to be open to the possibility that there are many

wrongfully convicted people.

who, because of our biases, are sitting behind bars.

And, of course, the question here is whether Scott Peterson is one of those

guys.

I'm starting to get a feeling that the investigation was infected by bias and

tunnel business.

That kind of conduct is enough to turn the tide of the game.

Do I think that we'll answer the question whether Scott Peterson is

guilty or innocent?

We're going to get a lot closer than anyone ever has. Scott Peterson, the new

evidence. Available now on Amazon Prime Video or wherever you stream.

For the first time, the jury got to hear Scott Peterson speak in a taped

interrogation with Detective Al Brocchini.

One of the things that was presented as part of the state's case at trial was

the custodial interrogation of Scott Peterson the same day that his wife went

missing.

The state argued that the portions of that tape they showed suggested that

this was not a grieving husband who was concerned at the disappearance of his

wife, but instead that it was a man who lacked any affect.

At times he leaned back in his chair with his hands in his pocket. He even

took a cell phone call.

Amy, what's going on?

What the public hasn't been made aware of is the fact that that phone call was

coming in from Lacey's sister, Amy.

What the state did was roll out very limited pieces

of Scott's on-camera interview, and his answers and responses just

seemed out of line with the gravity of the circumstances.

When the state argues that Scott Peterson isn't acting like a grieved

husband who's worried about the disappearance of his wife, they are

leaving out important facts about the number of hours that this man spent

answering questions before he actually went on camera.

Peterson reports that in the day of her disappearance, he was interrogated four

separate times, and it was only the fourth time at the station on camera

that the rest of us had been able to see.

Detectives met with Scott at the home, and they went with Scott to his

warehouse. Scott Peterson says police drove him around for hours, peppering

him with questions to the point of exhaustion.

Would it have made sense to take a suspect, asking the same questions over

and over again, taking them around to different locations and so forth? Back

in the early 2000s, in any kind of high-stakes case, it was not unusual for

detectives to conduct lengthy, multiple interviews of a person that they maybe

thought was the suspect.

If you had a person in the room, the presumption was, he's the one, he did

it. What the Los Angeles Innocence Project has pointed out is that by the

time Scott got into his custodial interrogation at the police office in

front of the camera, the guy was so exhausted and tired of the same

questions over and over again that he lacked the affect and emotion that he

would have had spontaneously.

You have no idea where this is.

I only have a couple of concerns.

When it came to Scott, of course, always polite to deal with, always easy to talk

to. But Scott's cooperation level was always a little bit short of 100%.

Peterson's comments and behavior have put him under the microscope from the

very beginning. Scott Peterson may be his own worst enemy.

When I say Scott Peterson's cooperation with the police is significant, what am

I talking about? Well, he agreed to multiple interviews on the day of her

disappearance. Did you check neighbors?

I did.

Who do you leave the note with?

Care and service.

What concerns me the most is the fact that your dog came home with a leash on.

That bothers me. I mean, no question.

Yeah.

What concerns me most is doing anything I can to further progress. I appreciate

that.

Peterson also agreed to turn over to them all of his devices, the phones and

computers. He agreed.

to give them a lie detector test.

Just to eliminate you as a suspect, would you be willing to take a

polygraph? For a suspect to say right out of the gate, go, sure, I'll take a

lie detector test, is a good sign.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's not that I can use the issue, but yeah, I believe

they're accurate.

No, I'm certainly willing.

Nothing is an absolute, but particularly because most people really believe that

the test is infallible. To agree to go through that process is a much stronger

indicator that this is a person who has nothing to hide.

Later on, his father told him, I'm not comfortable with you taking lie detector

tests. No polygraph was ever administered.

And there's the question of why Scott Peterson would not think that the police

would discover that he was having an affair.

It's reasonable to argue that the reason he didn't tell him he was having an

affair was it's just another fact that would have led them to believe that

they've got their man and stopped looking for.

There's also the more common human explanation that when we're doing

something wrong, we're not quick to admit it.

The fact that Scott Peterson cooperated with the police extensively on the day

of his wife's disappearance and in the days that followed lays the groundwork

for a pretty decent argument that this guy was doing everything he could to

find his wife.

It wasn't long after Lacey Peterson disappeared that there were questions

about husband Scott.

From the jump, the criminal investigators in Modesto are focusing on

Scott Peterson as the sole defendant.

They believed that this was a premeditated crime and they treated it

that way out of the gate.

Scott says he left off his missing wife Lacey on Christmas Eve when he left to

go fishing. Police yesterday released photos of his pickup truck and boat in

the hopes that someone may have spotted it.

The theory of the boat is that he had bought it and that it was part of his

master plan to go dispose of the body. And it just never made any sense.

So if you got to about five minutes to one, you get your boat in, how long do

you think you stayed in the water?

Felt like an hour and a half or so.

About two weeks before Lacey Peterson went missing, Scott purchased a 14-foot

aluminum fishing boat.

The prosecution's position at trial was that Scott Peterson got the boat with

the express purpose.

of murdering his wife and using the boat to deposit her body in the San Francisco

Bay. He keeps the boat quiet from everybody. He doesn't tell anybody that

he bought the boat. It seemed to us that there was some premeditation going on.

But Scott Peterson said he was taking the boat out to test it and try it out

because he had purchased that boat for his father-in-law and it was going to be

a Christmas gift.

The prosecution throughout the trial, they argued to the jury that the

purchase of the boat absolutely was not known to Lacey.

Nobody knew Scott had bought a boat, and we asked various members from the

Peterson family and the Rocha family. Nobody knew about it.

But just in 2024, the Los Angeles Innocence Project has found handwritten

notes that were in the Peterson's home that were not turned over to the

defense.

The notes had the phone numbers of local marine supply stores written on them.

And the LAIP has looked to a forensic document examiner, handwriting expert,

Dr. Linton Muhammad, because they believe that it's Lacey, not Scott's,

handwriting on those notes that were found in the home.

It's true. That means that she was not only aware of the boat, but that she

participated in the purchase of accessories for the boat.

If she knew about Scott's boat, the whole argument at the time of trial that

he premeditated her murder and purchased a boat in order to carry out the

disposal of the body is false.

I want to stress test this with an independent handwriting examiner who can

tell us whether or not this is Lacey Peterson's handwriting.

I began my career with the United States Secret Service.

I completed a two-and-a-half-year training program there under the

tutelage of experienced examiners.

I'm wondering if you'll just tell me what you see and how you go about your

analysis. So after I look at the question document, I'm now looking at

the known sample set.

So first we have Scott Peterson's sample set. And these are pages from a diary?

Yeah.

Do you notice anything particular about the writing style of all the entries in

the journal?

He prints.

Block print the entire time.

We don't see lowercase style of printing, which is what we do see on the

question document.

So the style of writing is inconsistent with his known writing.

Now, does that mean that he did not write the document? No.

it may mean that we just don't have that particular style of writing represented

in his known sample set.

We really only have a few letters that are comparable.

The R that's represented in the question document on Richard, the loop is very

narrow. It meets in the middle.

In the known writing, that loop of the R is usually very wide and round.

The other is the B. You have that little tail.

at the very bottom of both Bs.

You don't see that in his writing here.

There's not a lot of similar features, and the ones that are are very general

in nature.

The conclusion that was rendered by the expert in this particular case was that

it is probable that Scott Pearson did not write the question material seen on

these post-it notes, and I would agree with his conclusions.

When I look at all of these entries in his daily journal, they're all very

neatly within the lines, written in small block print, very legibly. Does

that say anything about Scott Peterson's personality?

A lot of people think that we can determine personality from handwriting,

but there's no science behind that.

Now, the next thing that you did is...

compare the questioned document to the samples of Lacey Peterson's handwriting.

So when we look at the known samples for Lacey Peterson, we have a couple of

lists with hand-printing material.

We also have a calendar with a lot of handwritten material as well.

So her writing style is a print style using upper and lower case.

Some of the features I noticed was that The I is smaller than the C in the

question document.

When we look at Lacey's writing, you see that I is consistently smaller

than the C.

The other is that the C and the H in the question document are connected.

And when you look at Lacey's handwriting, that CH combination is

oftentimes connected.

So that would be another similarity.

What do you see in this evidence?

Based on the evidence submitted, I would have arrived at the same conclusion,

that Lacey Peterson probably wrote the question material on the Post-its.

The comparison that Jennifer was able to make was extraordinary.

It really adds to the credibility of the Los Angeles Innocence Project's argument

that her handwriting proves she had knowledge of Scott Peterson's boat.

And it suits a big hole in the prosecution's theory of the case.

The prosecution has a theory that Lacey Peterson was calling marine supply

stores to buy real marine supplies as part of the nautical theme that she had

for Connor's nursery room.

These are not notes where she wanted to buy some small rubber duckies. These are

notes where she's pricing out a live anchor.

And that's not something that you're going to hang over the baby's crib.

The Los Angeles Innocence Project makes the argument that this is evidence of

the fact that she knew about Scott's boat.

Therefore, Scott's boat is unlikely to be part of a premeditated murder plot.

If Lacey knows about the boat, that is...

Critical evidence that concerns the Innocence Project of undercutting the

prosecution's theory and that violated Scott's right to due process on a fair

trial. It becomes virtually impossible for Scott Peterson to get due process

because the defense wasn't aware of these post-it notes until 2024.

It was clear to me that she did know about the boat. The PD deep-sixed

everything they could that wasn't consistent with Scott being the culprit.

They were not going to be deterred.

Nearly four months after Lacey disappeared, a woman's body washes

ashore at Richmond's Point Isabel, a day after a fetus was found not far away.

The bodies were that of 27-year-old Lacey Peterson and her unborn son.

The state presented testimony at Scott Peterson's trial through a Dr. Chang,

who was a title expert.

Dr. Chang.

testified at trial that for the bodies to have washed up on the Richmond

shoreline, the most likely launch point would have been exactly where Scott

Peterson was fishing.

Now, that was a powerful narrative, but new science is challenging the viability

of that narrative.

Scott Peterson says he launched his boat here to go fishing the day he says Lacey

disappeared. Police found title charts of the San Francisco Bay on Scott's

computer.

The Los Angeles Innocence Project makes the argument that the new tidal science

changes this case and undermines the reliability of the vertiteer.

Dr. Fagan, the Los Angeles Innocence Project expert, has done something

called computational hydrodynamic modeling.

Using the Dell 3D modeling system, he ran various simulations, trajectory

simulations, wind simulations.

And the conclusion of the tidal expert is... that a new tidal science places

the bodies being inserted in the bay from a shallow water location, likely

the Albany Ball.

To my right is Point Isabel, where Lacey Peterson's body was found.

Just north of that is the Richmond shoreline, where Connor's body was

discovered.

A few miles in this direction is Brooks Island.

That is where Scott Peterson places himself fishing on the day of her

disappearance.

And the Berkeley Marina where Scott launched from is to my left. And, of

course, the Los Angeles Innocence Project believes that all of the new

scientific evidence points here to the Albany Bulb as a possible place where

Lacey's body would have been placed in the water in order to wind up where she

was found at Point Isabel.

In 2002, when Lacey Peterson went missing, I was a faculty member at Cal

Poly at San Luis Obispo. I worked with San Francisco State University in San

Francisco Bay.

So you know this body of water because so much of this case centers on the

question of where Lacey Peterson's body was placed in the bay.

Now, there was a storm event.

Between April 11th and April 12th, 2003, that both the defense and the

prosecution think that, believe, may have been the triggering event that

brought the bodies up.

The body was anchored, and when it washed up was in a condition that

indicated that it had been there for weeks or months.

That story is the most plausible.

The bodies were logged on the seafloor for some time and likely released during

that storm event.

I want to start with Dr. Chang's testimony at trial that Scott Peterson

anchored Lacey Peterson's body in the bay somewhere near this location where

he was fishing.

Dr. Chang is a hydrologist. Is that a fit for doing the general analysis,

backtracking from where these bodies were located to where they might have

been placed? Absolutely. He has the background to do this.

For Dr.

Chang's model, what you do is you grid the entire bay at 500-meter resolution.

So each grid space is a 500-meter block.

And basically looking at the adjacent block, whether it has a flow of water

into it or not, and then translating that flow to the next block.

So it's like pixels, if you will, in a picture.

So as water moves from one pixel to another, it actually creates that flow

field or the tidal flows in the bay. But one of the odd things about the trial

testimony was that Dr. Chang only used wind as a factor to

backtracking the bodies.

He only used wind. Yeah, there's problems with that.

He cited his tidal paper in the testimony, but then again never used it.

So the conclusions that he arrived at, which he testified to, were based

entirely on wind and not tidal action. Right. Why he didn't use tides is sort

of a mystery because that's his background, and that's the reason he's

an expert to testify.

In the bay itself, it's a very tidally driven system.

And tell me, if you will, your confidence level on Dr. Cheng's

conclusion that the body was placed here.

Zero.

And what's your confidence level with the current day model, Dr.

Sagan's theory that Lacey Peterson's body was placed in the bay somewhere off

of the Albany Ball?

And, of course, Dr. Fagan has the benefit of using the DELF 3D model.

Yeah, DELF 3D is the model. It's astronomically different.

It's able to take in high-resolution data to help you drive the model. It

integrates freshwater input. It integrates the wind. It integrates the

tidal force thing. All of those things gave me much more confidence in

believing the model output.

Also, Fagan has looked.

at the conclusion that Dr. Chang arrived at.

And he's done some modeling of where that body should have ended up if, in

fact, she had been anchored or where Dr. Chang testified that she was anchored.

Starting in the position of that location, you see the body would have

gone behind Brooks Island and then it would have been shot through this

channel and then oscillated here in the tides, possibly to the Golden Gate

Bridge and out.

But the bodies couldn't have ended up where they were found based on where Dr.

Chang put the position in the trial.

I think it's important to remember Dr. Chang did not have the tools that are

available today. You know, I think at the time he was the person to call if

they were going to deal with tides. But it's bizarre that tides weren't used in

his testimony.

Now, the big question, based on what you've seen, where do you think Lacey

was likely?

placed in the water?

Oh, that's a tough question.

It's possible that it is here, as Dr. Fagan shows.

But I think there's some nuance that have some bearing on the actual

location. If the position of the body was here, this is a very protected area,

sort of shielded, if you will, from the storm event.

So it could be a little further south along the coast here. Right along the

coast here in Albany and Richmond. Yeah.

And not anywhere in the water near or off Brooks Island where he was fishing

that day. Right. Highly unlikely that the bodies were anchored in this

location.

We went down the trails. The trails are ostensibly wide enough to take a car

down. He didn't need a boat to dump the body in the Albany vault.

He wouldn't have launched the boat at the Berkeley Marina if he intended to

deposit her body at the Albany vault. He wouldn't have needed to.

What if he wasn't fishing off of Brooks Island? What if he just took the body

over to the area of the shallow water and dumped it there?

If you are a first-time criminal, where does it seem better to dump a body?

Way out in the bay, in the deepest waters, or in shallow waters 10 feet

from the shore?

What's interesting about this area is there was a search that was done of the

bay.

The water here is very shallow, so shallow that this area at the Albany

Bulb wasn't searched.

Since the shallow waters weren't searched, it's possible that Lacey's

body could have been there for months.

The state refutes these claims, saying that the area of the Albany Bulb was in

fact searched with side-scan sonar and that the LAIP cannot demonstrate that

there was a lack of search effort.

The states argue that the Los Angeles Innocence Project is arguing something

that was known to science as early as 2003.

Los Angeles Innocence Project, of course, points out the fact that they're

using new Delft 3D technology.

We are light years more advanced today than we were in 2003.

I thought I would be more skeptical when I came out because it would take about a

10-minute walk to bring a body here in this location.

But in walking out here, These are wide paths.

You could get a vehicle down them. And it's not impossible to conceive at all

of someone easily bringing a body and placing it in the water.

It seems much easier to have accomplished that here than out of the

Berkeley Marina via a boat where there are so many people.

There's no suggestion that Scott Peterson was at the Albany Bulb.

There's no suggestion that he drove his car out in that direction.

If you're going to entertain an alternate theory, and of course the Los

Angeles Innocence Project is asking us to entertain an alternate theory, that

someone else is responsible for Lacey Peterson's death. And that's where

everyone starts to roll their eyes. But being here physically, coupled with the

title maps and the modeling that I've seen, says to me that the Los Angeles

Innocence Project's theories make a lot of sense.

It not only works for the scientists,

But visually, it works for a layman like me.

We had a week full of various witnesses taking the stand.

Karen's service found Lacey and Scott's dog, McKenzie, dragging its leash the

day before Christmas.

One of the big puzzles in this case is the timeline. When exactly was Lacey

Peterson killed?

One thing about this case is that it's a timeline case.

And the state established their entire timeline on the basis of the testimony

of one person, Karen Service, Peterson's neighbor.

But was Karen Service's testimony as critical as prosecutors made it out to

be?

There were only five murders in Modesto in 2002.

The Modesto Police Department does not have extensive experience investigating

murder cases.

They had almost no experience dealing with high-profile investigations.

The disappearance of a woman that turns into a criminal investigation, all in

the media, created this rush to be able to put a name to a suspect as quickly

as possible.

When I got there, the first person that I talked to after meeting Scott was his

next-door neighbor, Karen Service.

Karen encountered the Petersons' dog, McKenzie, with its leash attached to it,

unattended in the front yard on the morning of December 24th.

So you took the dog, put her in the backyard, closed the gate, and went on

your merry way. Mm-hmm.

After placing Scott and Lacey's dog, McKenzie, in the backyard of the

Peterson's home, Karen's service had errands to do. One of those errands was

to go to a Christmas store by the name of Austin's.

And we were able later, because of a receipt that she had kept, to trace down

the approximate times that she actually found McKenzie.

And she was able to narrow that time down to 10-18.

At trial, the state presented Karen's service's testimony.

for the premise that Lacey Peterson had already been murdered by the morning of

December 24th and therefore didn't take Mackenzie out for her normal morning

walk. The state never addressed how Mackenzie got a leash on in the first

place, why she was out in the front yard, or any alternative timeline that

would have involved Lacey preparing to go for a walk and being called back into

the house.

Karen Service was completely credible.

I have found nothing to suggest that she was lying.

I was working at the time for the Modesto B. I was a reporter, and I was

assigned to cover the case.

So you're the only person that's ever interviewed Karen Service.

What was it about Karen Service's testimony that was so credible?

Karen Service was an important witness for the prosecution because she

established the timeline.

I knew Karen's service prior to the trial, and she was entirely credible.

The possibility exists that because she didn't go knock on the door and give the

dog back to Lacey, that Lacey was alive and well and inside the house. The

scenario doesn't require Karen's service to have lied.

It simply says that putting the dog behind the gate is not an indication of

whether Lacey's alive or dead at all.

One possible scenario is that Lacey prepared to take the dog on a walk, that

she had gone back into the house for some reason, and Karen Servas came and

found the dog unattended and put it away.

Karen Servas' testimony tells us nothing about whether Lacey Peterson walked her

dog that morning.

It only tells us that the dog was prepped to go for a walk and was in the

front yard, and Lacey wasn't there at the moment.

Also, Karen was not the only eyewitness that morning.

Central to the Los Angeles Innocence Project case is the fact that there were

15 eyewitnesses who said they saw Lacey Peterson walking her dog on the morning

of December 24, 2002, after Scott Peterson had already left for the San

Francisco Bay.

If they are to be believed, it paints a much clearer picture of what happened

that day.

And the people that stepped forward, they came forward immediately.

But according to the LAIP, most of their statements were never followed up on by

the investigators for the Modesto Police.

This is the first time I've seen a video interview with any of them.

And it's the first time they've been shown outside a courtroom.

Gary Ramoyan is a local private investigator in Modesto, California,

hired by the defense team to interview the many eyewitnesses that the police

did not speak to in the run-up to the trial. Some of those interviews were

recorded on tape.

I said, God, did you see that woman? She's pregnant. She's struggling with

the dog.

And she had dark clothing on, and her hair was real shiny, shoulder-length

black. I had seen the posters, and I knew that was the woman that I had saw

that day.

It was definitely Lacey Peterson.

These are just people who are giving contemporary statements, honestly

telling the investigator what they remember.

They kept asking for anyone who had sight, and so eventually I decided that

I probably should report it. There were a lot of witnesses who came forward, but

the investigators didn't follow up with the vast majority of them.

We were going down to the Loma, we seen this lady walking her dog.

She looked too pregnant to be out in the cold.

When I saw the news on Christmas night that they showed the Peterson dog, And

that's when I turned to my wife and said, I saw that dog in the park. And in

my mind's eye, I see a round person with black leggings and a white smock.

Fifteen witnesses came forward with eyewitness sightings of Lacey.

The sheer number of eyewitnesses, that's compelling.

The time was about...

Sometime after 9.45.

Somewhere between 10 and 10.30.

Around 9.30, it could have been 9.45.

It was between 9 and 11 a.m. It could be 9.45. It could have been 10.15.

The witnesses placed Lacey Peterson walking her dog in her neighborhood

after the time that Scott Peterson would have left for his warehouse and for the

Berkeley Marina.

The majority of the witnesses contradict Scott's and the state's timeline of

events. Because Scott claims Lacey was home watching Martha Stewart at 10 a.m.

That's not something that you can dismiss, but it was actively being

dismissed by the investigators.

The Modesto police disregarded most of the eyewitness testimony. That is an

indictment of the type of investigation that was done here. I mean, it

challenges whether this was a thorough investigation.

I don't remember anybody seeing Lacey walk the dog because I don't think that

ever occurred. I don't think she walked anything because she was dead by then.

A sergeant that was in charge of the Lacey thing, I gave him a statement.

We were interviewed by a motorcycle policeman.

Nothing happened.

And then nobody talked to me after that.

Yeah, I was surprised that the motorcycle police didn't come talk to

me. Their eyes were on Scott Peterson himself.

There were a number of people in the neighborhood who I talked to soon after

she disappeared who told me about their supposed sightings of a pregnant woman

and a dog on Christmas Eve. There were hundreds and thousands of tips coming in

to police. Most of them were well-meaning and some were earnest.

Without asking you about names of specific witnesses that you talked to,

I'm interested in knowing whether any of those witnesses are cited in the LAIP's

filing. I did interview some of the people who were cited in the appeal. I

ended up questioning their credibility.

They would use words to the effect of, well, in my mind's eye, I can see a blur

over here, and I think it could have been a person with a dog, and that

person might have been pregnant.

I just can't really say.

I never thought that there would be anything interesting to say about a case

that has been poured over like no other case I've ever seen for decades.

And the more I read, the more fascinated I became.

I've been studying memory for a long time and bringing that understanding of

the basic science of memory, how memories are formed in the brain, to the

real world, especially of eyewitness memory. What time frame are we talking

about when you reference the reliability of memory early on? I usually say days

and weeks after the event, maybe months, but once you're talking about a year and

certainly two years, those memories, they might be true, they might be false,

you just can't tell.

That's the methodology that I applied to the evidence in the Scott Peterson case.

And I focused on the earliest reports from these witnesses that I could find.

Days, maybe weeks, that's it. What they were saying at that time.

What's most interesting to me from these very early reports are common features

jump out across independent witnesses at a time when memory is most reliable.

A pregnant lady, a dog, time frame after she was supposedly murdered by Scott

Peterson.

So we took the drive around Modesto and followed the location of these

eyewitness statements.

We're passing the gas station where Homer Maldonado and his wife stopped to

get gas.

As they came down this road, he said he was driving slowly.

And I noticed a young pregnant woman struggling with a gold retriever.

The dog was holding her.

And that's relevant because that keeps coming up.

What was the next witness that stood out to you?

My name is Vivian Regine Mitchell.

This home, to my left, has a kitchen window that looks out on the

sombra. Hey, I was standing right here, watching the dishes.

We pulled this curtain back.

There was this beautiful lady and her beautiful dog walking up the street.

Vivian said that she saw a lady between 10 and 10.30 a.m. and that she was

almost positive it was Lacey. Same time frame as the witnesses were saying. It's

early reports of memory when memories are most reliable.

So I'd pay attention to this myself.

She was wearing a white top with long sleeves and black.

I understand that Vivian Mitchell was elderly, and you might jump to the

conclusion that therefore we shouldn't listen to anything she has to say, but

that would be the wrong way to think about it.

Science-based evidence of the effects of aging on the reliability of confidently

reported memories does not show that it has no information value.

It's still useful information, just not as useful as from a younger person.

That morning, we didn't know there was anything wrong.

She was relatively confident early report.

In the case of Karen Service, her timeline played an outsized role in that

case. Well, I mean, I congratulate the prosecution for focusing on the early

reports of an eyewitness, in this case, Service.

But I can't think of a reason to focus on her selectively. There's so many

witnesses who claim to have seen Lacey.

And I just want to keep emphasizing that doesn't mean Scott Peterson is innocent.

I don't know.

But, you know, the prosecution's particular theory is running into some

serious headwinds, I would say, really serious headwinds.

She was last seen walking her golden retriever Tuesday morning. At least

three new witnesses saw Lacey walking her dog the morning of Christmas Eve.

have received witnesses stating they saw her in La Loma Park walking that dog

early in the morning.

Lacey's typical dog walking route took her past Vivian Mitchell's home and into

La Loma Park where Lacey was seen by a number of witnesses.

According to the LAIP, these witnesses were also ignored by investigators.

I want to find out why these eyewitnesses weren't taken seriously.

Of all the Lacey sightings, which, if any of those, stood out to you?

There is really no one witness who stood out far above all the others, but I'll

say that, you know, one witness who seems pretty compelling to me is Campos.

Diana Campos is someone who saw Lacey walking her dog out on the Dry Creek

Trail, which is part of the East Maloma Park.

She also, the time, she has it at 1045.

And when you look back at the early reports, that's what she's saying. And

she's saying it because she had to be at work at 11. That's how she knew it was

1045. And this is somebody who is a custodian at Stanislaus County Hospital

who had to clock in at 11 o'clock and is able to show, I clocked in that day at

11. That lends credibility to the time. This one's more anchored to a

documentable event. If you're trying to get at the truth of the matter, you

should weigh that more than you weigh.

Other accounts, perhaps.

The state's theory is centered around this Karen service receipt, which allows

them to backtrack to the time that she placed the Peterson's dog in their

backyard, and they base their entire theory on the idea that Lacey Peterson

was dead by the time Karen's service discovered the dog.

But Diana Campos had a card showing what time she stamped in for work, and she

saw Lacey walking the dog when she was on a smoking break before her shift

started.

Why isn't Diana Campos' timeline and her receipt as important as Karen's

services?

So I thought we'd take a walk in Paloma Park and just get a feeling for what

it's like around the same time of the morning. Right.

We do have a number of witnesses that saw her here.

including Diane Campos.

You have other witnesses, like John Brazil.

This is somebody who's a park service worker, and he saw Mackenzie pulling on

Lacey. Now, that's a commonality among a number of these 15 eyewitnesses who saw

Lacey and the dog that morning.

Mike Givetta said that he saw Lacey Peterson walking her dog.

I mean, from an investigative standpoint, I would bring a witness here

to the park, say, okay, this is the park.

Where were you?

When you were there, where was Lacey? And that would give us a sense of the

distance.

If we don't know that, then it's very difficult to really provide a reliable

assessment on how reliable their sighting was.

I'm interested to know if proximity to the event that you sight matters in

terms of witness memory.

It does.

It reduces the likelihood of getting a confident report. Yeah, that happens.

They become more likely to be wrong, and they let you know by saying, I'm not

sure. And when the distance is long and witness is nevertheless saying, I

confidently saw that face, it doesn't reduce its reliability.

So Campos was far away, I guess.

It's less likely that she would have been confident, but she was confident.

And when they are, it tends to be reliable.

So you still want to put weight on that, and you just have to factor it in with.

I don't know, 20 other witnesses or something. What they also remember from

that early morning and see if you can make a sensible picture.

All of these sightings are around the same time on December 24, 2002.

All of them are given by these 15 eyewitnesses to the police within days

of her disappearance.

The times of some of the eyewitness sightings of Lacey walking her dog

overlap in places that would not have been possible.

But there are enough eyewitnesses.

that police had a reason to pursue an alternate timeline.

Considering the potential of these witnesses and the fact that they were

not taken seriously leads me to really only one conclusion, and that is that if

you think that you already know who did it.

then spending time interviewing and bringing out maps and having a witness

explain where they were and provide you with their entire narrative is a

colossal waste of time.

That's the only logical explanation I can come up with, that at that time, the

investigators must have felt really sure that they had their man.

I'm Gary Ramoyan, private investigator, and I'm here with Tony Freitas.

Of the 15 eyewitnesses that saw Lacey Peterson walking her dog on December 24,

2002, around 10 a.m. in the morning, Tony Freitas is probably number one or

number two for me in terms of the witnesses that I would like to meet with

and talk to.

I understand that you attempted to report this to the police, is that

correct? Yes, that is correct.

And so I called and said that I had seen her walking her dog and that the reason

I was calling was because I knew that it was after 9.30 and that was the last

time she was seen.

There's so many factors here that help with this testimony. He drives the same

route every single day. He knows that it would have been at least 9.45.

I mean, Tony's just there. He's wearing a tank top.

He's just, you know, all right, you want me to tell you what I know?

i'm here to tell you had you ever seen the same woman before never

of

the few eyewitnesses that the police say they spoke to tony frages is one of the

only ones that's still alive

In 1999, I had an opportunity to work for Oral Wheat Breads.

It was always just as a delivery person.

Did you have a standard route that you were on? Yeah.

When you run a regular route like that, you're always on the same schedule

pretty much unless something drastic comes up where there's an accident or

something like that. And I knew it was after 9.30, you know, and it was before

10 o'clock that I had seen her walking.

Did your company keep logs, or did you have timesheets that showed when you

dropped off at each of your locations? Yes. In our trucks, we had a printer,

and we'd print out the time, the stop.

And I didn't even really know nothing until I started seeing the posters about

a week later. One of my friends had brought it up to me, and he had this

woman had been missing, and he showed me a poster.

And when I seen the boaster, I go, that's the same woman that I seen

walking a dog. Same build, same height, same haircut, everything.

So it's your friend that was the spark that caused you to report it.

Originally, he reported it.

He told me, I'm going to call and tell them that, you know, I have a friend

that had seen it and stuff.

So your friend made contact with the police and made a report about what you

saw. Yes. And he left your information with them and your contact.

Yes, as far as I know, yes.

And did you ever go to any of the volunteer centers or to the police to

make an in-person report?

No.

So what was the first time then that you did talk to anyone from the police?

At some point, somebody contacted you.

Not that I ever remember that, anybody from the police department or nothing.

So you had visits from reporters and you had visits from the defense

investigator, Gary Ramoyan. Yes.

To your recollection, you didn't have anyone that identified themselves as a

police officer or investigator who visited you? No.

No.

There's a report that Bill Grogan filed suggesting that just prior to the trial

of Scott Peterson, he came and spoke to you.

Your statement is right here.

So he spelled my name wrong.

And then it says Tony could not see a blouse or the type of shoes.

How could I not see a top that she was wearing? I mean, that doesn't make

sense. She was wearing a light-colored sweater.

And it wasn't light-colored pants. It was dark pants that I had seen her

walking in.

So I don't know why that says that. So basically there are aspects of that

report that purport to be a conversation with you that are not accurate. Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you now recall that conversation at all?

No. This could have been a possibility, but I don't remember that at all.

The only thing I remember was basically just getting the subpoena. Do you recall

who subpoenaed you to testify? Garagos. Okay. The defense did? Yes.

You were called in to testify, but they didn't ultimately examine you before the

jury. Did you ever get an explanation from anyone as to why they didn't put

you on to testify?

Never.

The witnesses that saw Lacey on the 24th, I think, were telling the truth.

But at the time, I thought that we had debunked their case.

And you think you didn't call them because you felt like you had already

debunked? Not only did we debunk, people get sidetracked by the fact that there

was no evidence in this case.

The defense team made a decision not to bring forward those eyewitnesses known

to the defense.

Garagos' team isn't putting any of these people on the stand.

You have to wonder if the trial would have had a different outcome had the

defense called even some of these 15 witnesses.

How did you feel when the verdict came out? I just shook my head, like...

Anybody I ever kind of talked to, you know, I've seen her and stuff. Oh, no,

you're wrong. There's no way that this guy did it. He did it. He did it. Well,

if he said that Scott was already gone and I seen her after that.

It means he didn't do it. It means that he didn't do it.

You said your confidence level that.

that it was Lacey Peterson that you saw that morning was 99% at the time. I

still feel the same, that that's who it was.

Would you be willing to testify that you were never contacted in any way, to your

knowledge, by anyone that identified themselves as being from the Modesto

Police? Yeah, I would still stand by that.

Tony's statement to us and Tony's statement to Gary Ramoyan back in 2003

are not without some problems.

And so I called.

and said that I had seen her.

One of the problems is that when Gary Armoyan came around to meet with him

back in 2003, Tony told him that he called in to the tip line originally.

Tony's now saying that it was his friend who made the call to the tip line.

What matters is, is he believable? I found Tony to be very believable.

There's just so many new aspects of this case that were previously unheard of,

undiscussed, that got very short shrift, if any attention at all, in the trial,

either by the prosecution or the defense.

The reality is that you had 15 eyewitnesses, and none of these

witnesses testified at trial, and we have no clear answer on why they were

not called. You have the investigators destroying investigative notes.

Questions like the one that has now arisen with Tony Freitas publishing

reports about witnesses that you met with, where the witness says, I never

met with any investigators.

That's another level.

This is entirely what the L.A. Innocence Project was called upon to do, to test

the constitutional reliability of this verdict.

But I still have questions. I'm eager to keep digging into these claims and

looking into the new evidence.

Mark Argos points to newly discovered evidence he says was never turned over

by prosecutors.

They had a theory, and they were going to get rid of everything that didn't

support it.

A fetal expert testified that baby Connor died on or around December 23,

2002. How many other experts consulted in order to find one that gives them the

answer that they like?

There are multiple witnesses talking about an unusual van. What the hell?

This changes everything.

I never, ever had a doubt that he didn't do this.

To not consider that there might be a correlation is investigatively

negligent. He did not do this. Something was going on across the street.

We just want to get to the truth. It's what was missed in this case that

maybe is moving me the most now.

This is crazy.