It was a horrifying discovery. On 14 April 2003, a body was found in San Francisco Bay. The adult female was unidentifiable – she was badly decomposed, and her head and parts of her limbs were missing. But this was the second body to have washed up in two days, and the first was even more harrowing. It was a near full-term male foetus, umbilical cord still attached and with plastic tape wound around his neck. DNA tests confirmed they were 27-year-old Laci Peterson, who had gone missing from her home in Modesto, California, on Christmas Eve 2002, and the baby she had been almost nine months pregnant with. After the gruesome discoveries, there was one person police wanted to speak to: her husband Scott.
It was the start of a case that would see him vilified as an adulterer and in 2004, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. That decision was later vacated amid concerns around jury selection errors, and he was resentenced to life, but a retrial bid was quashed in 2022. But now, he has had his case taken up by the Los Angeles Innocence Project, who not only say Peterson’s rights were violated, but they believe freshly uncovered evidence will exonerate him. A court filing said, “New evidence now supports Mr Peterson’s longstanding claim of innocence, and raises questions into who abducted and killed Laci and Conner.”

When Scott Peterson was studying agricultural business at California Polytechnic, he took a job at the Pacific Café to make ends meet. There, a co-worker introduced him to her neighbour, fellow California Polytechnic student Laci Rocha. Friends said it was love at first sight, and after Laci gave Peterson her phone number, she was said to have told her mother she’d met The One.  An attractive couple, they immediately began a relationship, dating for two years before deciding to set up home together. They married in 1997 – but the newlywed Peterson was already having an extramarital affair.
Laci was blissfully unaware her husband was cheating and focused her energies on creating a happy home, while Peterson had some moderate job success, opening and then selling a restaurant. By 2000, they had moved to an affluent neighbourhood and in 2002, substitute teacher Laci was overjoyed to find out she was pregnant. However, friends say Peterson was not as happy as his wife to find out he was about to become a father. Seven months into his wife’s pregnancy, he began another affair, this time with massage therapist and single mother Amber Frey. It was a month before Christmas.
The last time anyone heard from Laci – who was by now just weeks away from giving birth – was on Christmas Eve, when she spoke to her mother in the evening. Peterson claimed that he had said goodbye to his wife that morning, before leaving for an overnight fishing trip. The next day, someone found the couple’s dog wandering loose around the neighbourhood. She took him home, but no one was in, so she secured him in the back garden. Peterson would later tell police he arrived home to an empty house, his wife’s car parked out on their driveway. When she still wasn’t back that evening, he called her parents, who immediately reported their daughter missing. When police arrived at the house, they were confronted with an eerie scene. The table had been set up for a family meal, and Laci’s car keys and handbag were where she had left them. Certain the heavily pregnant Laci hadn’t left of her own volition, a search was launched, with family, friends and neighbours rallying round. Reports say as many as 900 people joined in to help find Laci – but there was no sign of her.

Suspicion quickly turned to Peterson, who seemed unruffled at his wife’s disappearance. Modesto detectives Allen Brocchini and Jon Buehler led the investigation, and Buehler later told ABC News, “I suspected Scott when I first met him. Didn’t mean he did it, but I was a little bit thrown off by his calm, cool demeanour, and his lack of questioning. He wasn’t saying, ‘Will you call me back? Can I have one of your cards? What are you guys doing now?’” Footage of his police interview shows Peterson looking relaxed as he describes Berkeley Marina, the area he claimed to have been fishing in when his wife went missing. Brocchini told ABC, “Christmas Eve, he was cooperative, and in my mind I didn’t think he did it yet.” But when he asked Peterson if he could search his fishing boat, Peterson claimed that the power was out where it was being stored, which would make it difficult. Undeterred, Brocchini used his car headlights to examine the boat, but he later discovered the power had never been out. Peterson had lied.
Their suspicions were further compounded when Peterson was named as a person of interest – and his mistress came forward. Amber informed them that she had been dating Peterson for a month and that he had not only told her he was single, but that he was a widower. She agreed to help the police by allowing them to tap her phone and record conversations with her lover. She later told the press, “Seeing this woman, knowing she was missing [and] pregnant… Being a mother…  At that point, it wasn’t about me. It was about finding this woman.” The police listened in to Amber and Peterson’s conversations for months, capturing the moment where he confessed that he had lied to his lover about no longer having a wife. However, with no body, the police had no hard evidence to arrest Peterson. They did, however, put a tracking device on his car. They wanted to make sure they knew exactly where he was when the breakthrough came.
It was a dog-walking couple who found the baby’s body at Berkeley Marina – right where Peterson had told the police he had been fishing. A day later, the mother washed up. Laci was headless, and her limbs had been removed. At the autopsy, it was theorised that the foetus had been expelled from Laci’s body after she had died, although they couldn’t conclusively prove it, and it also could not be determined if the baby had ever been alive outside of his mother’s womb. The bodies were identified on 18 April, five days after they were taken out of the sea. The detectives immediately set out to arrest Peterson, and thanks to the tracking device, they knew he was in San Diego.
Buehler said, “San Diego was pretty darn close to the Mexican border. Scott knew the area pretty well. That’s where his parents lived. That’s where he lived. So, it wasn’t like he was going to have to get on MapQuest to try and figure out a way to get to Tijuana.” Police became embroiled in a chase, with Brocchini saying, “He was driving 80 miles an hour on a freeway, and he would slam his brakes on, pull over. It got to the point where we had a helicopter, but lost him… Either he was going to kill somebody or one of these agents that were trying to follow him was going to get killed or kill someone.” When they did manage to get Peterson to stop, they believed they had caught him on the run. His hair was dyed, and in his car, they found his brother’s ID, $15,000 in cash, camping and survival gear, and numerous burner phones. He was charged with murder – but he was to deny everything.

The trial began on 1 June 2004, and was marred by leaked autopsy information, the dismissal of a juror and outlandish claims. Peterson’s defence was built around the fact that the cause of Laci’s death could not be determined, due to the extent of the decomposition of the body. It could also not be determined whether or not the baby was ever alive. It led his defence attorneys to present an alternative theory of what happened – that Laci had been abducted, and she and the baby she had planned to call Conner were killed either in a womb snatch or as part of a satanic cult ritual. They also emphasised the fact that no evidence of foul play connected to Peterson was ever found – there was no blood or DNA in the family home or on his boat.
Although he did not take the stand at his trial, Peterson maintained his innocence – but the jury didn’t believe him. Faced with the taped conversations with his lover, and the fact he looked like he was going on the run, they found him guilty, and he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Laci, and the second-degree murder of her baby. In December 2004, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection and sent to San Quentin prison.
His team lodged numerous appeals over the years, stating that Peterson, now 51, had been denied a fair trial and that serious mistakes had been made, including one juror lying on her jury application. Finally, on 24 August 2020, the California Supreme Court overturned the death penalty, although it upheld his murder convictions, on the basis that the judge had unfairly dismissed jurors who opposed capital punishment. The court said, “We reject Peterson’s claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder. But before the trial began, the trial court made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection.” The judgement continued, “The trial court erroneously dismissed many prospective jurors because of written questionnaire responses expressing opposition to the death penalty, even though the jurors gave no indication that their views would prevent them from following the law — and, indeed, specifically attested that they would have no such difficulty. Under United States Supreme Court precedent, these errors require us to reverse the death sentence in this case.”
Peterson continued to protest his innocence, and many believed him. In the 2017 docuseries The Murder Of Laci Peterson, alternative theories were presented, including the fact that anyone who knew where Peterson was fishing could have dumped his wife’s body there to frame him.  They also say witnesses had claimed Laci confronted two burglars shortly before she disappeared. Peterson was interviewed from Death Row for the series, and he told the filmmakers about the moment he heard his guilty verdict. He said, “It was crazy, just this amazing, horrible, physical reaction I had. I couldn’t feel my feet 
on the floor. I couldn’t feel the chair I was sitting in. My vision got a little blurry.” His sister-in-law Janey has always supported him, too, saying, “There’s evidence that was completely ignored that shows Laci was alive after [Scott] left for the day… [and] there was no evidence that he had anything to do with what happened to Laci.”
Now, the Innocence Project are working to prove Scott did not commit these murders. The nonprofit organisation, which works to exonerate wrongly convicted and incarcerated individuals, is said to be planning to conduct new DNA testing on a blood-stained mattress found in a burned out van discovered near the Peterson home. If Laci’s blood is found, it could support the burglar theory. The news had been welcomed by those close to Peterson, with his defense attorney stating, “We are very excited to have the incredible attorneys at the L.A. Innocence Project lend their considerable expertise to helping prove Scott Peterson’s innocence.”