Scott Peterson Convicted of Murdering Wife and Baby

Friday, Nov. 12, 2004
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. � Scott Peterson was convicted Friday of murdering his pregnant wife and dumping her body into San Francisco Bay in what prosecutors in the made-for-cable-TV case portrayed as a cold-blooded attempt to escape marriage and fatherhood for the bachelor life.

Peterson, 32, could get the death penalty. He was convicted of one count of first-degree murder for killing his wife, Laci, and one count of second-degree murder in the death of the son she was carrying.

Family members intensely waited in the courtroom, and hundreds of onlookers gathered outside to hear word of the verdict.

The verdict came after a five-month trial that was an endless source of fascination to tabloids, magazines and cable networks with its story of an attractive, radiant young couple awaiting the birth of their first child, a cheating husband, and a slaying for which prosecutors had no eyewitnesses, no weapon, not even a cause of death.

The verdict followed a tumultuous seven days of deliberations in which two jurors were removed for unspecified reasons and the judge twice told the panel to start over.

The jury of six men and six women were told to return Nov. 22 to begin hearing testimony on whether Peterson should die by lethal injection or get life in prison without parole.

Mrs. Peterson, a 27-year-old substitute teacher, was eight months' pregnant when she vanished around Christmas Eve 2002. Four months later, her headless body and the remains of her fetus were discovered along the shoreline about 90 miles from the couple's Modesto home, not far from where her husband claims he was fishing alone the day of her disappearance.

Peterson was soon arrested in the San Diego area, more than 400 miles from home, carrying nearly $15,000, his hair and goatee bleached blond.

Police never were able to establish exactly when, how or where Mrs. Peterson died.

At trial, prosecutors presented 174 witnesses and hundreds of pieces of evidence, from wiretapped phone calls to videotaped police interrogations, depicting Peterson as liar and a philanderer who was sweet-talking his girlfriend, massage therapist Amber Frey, at the same time he was trying to show the world he was pining for his missing wife.

'Didn't Want to Be Tied to This Kid'

Prosecutor Rick Distaso told the jury that the former fertilizer salesman could not stand the thought of being trapped in a "dull, boring, married life with kids," and either strangled or smothered his wife and dumped her weighted-down body overboard from his fishing boat.

"He wants to live the rich, successful, freewheeling bachelor life. He can't do that when he's paying child support, alimony and everything else," Distaso said. "He didn't want to be tied to this kid the rest of his life. He didn't want to be tied to Laci for the rest of his life. So he killed her."

The jury heard how Peterson had bought a two-day ocean-fishing license days before Mrs. Peterson disappeared, yet claimed his fishing trip was a last-minute substitution for golf because of blustery weather. Prosecutors also offered evidence suggesting he used a bag of cement mix to make concrete anchors to sink his wife's body into the bay.

Peterson never took the stand. His lawyers argued that he was the victim of a frame-up. They suggested that someone else - perhaps homeless people, sex offenders or suspicious-looking characters spotted in the neighborhood - abducted her while she walked the dog, then killed her and dumped the body in the water after learning of Peterson's fishing-trip alibi.

Peterson's lawyers also offered evidence that the fetus might have died days or weeks after Mrs. Peterson's disappearance, when Peterson was being watched closely by the police and the media.

And they explained his lies and inconsistent statements about his affair and his activities around the time of her disappearance as the mutterings of a man in the midst of a breakdown over his missing wife.

Defense: He's Just a 'Jerk and a Liar'

Defense attorney Mark Geragos acknowledged the jurors probably hated Peterson, and pleaded with them not to convict him simply because the prosecution had made him look like a "jerk and a liar."

Geragos also noted the lingering questions about how Mrs. Peterson died. "Maybe the logical explanation for the fact that we have no evidence of her struggling in that house, dying in that house is because it didn't happen in that house," he said.

In addition, Geragos said police found that someone had used a computer in the Petersons' home on the morning she vanished, after authorities contend she was already dead, to search Web sites for a scarf and a sunflower-motif umbrella stand. He suggested the user was Mrs. Peterson.

The story proved irresistible to the cable networks, which almost every night brought in experts to pick apart the two sides' legal strategies and expound on some of the soap-opera aspects of the case, which included hours of secretly taped calls in which Peterson spun out elaborate tales to Frey.

Frey herself testified, saying that Peterson told her during their affair that he had "lost his wife." But she said that in all their recorded conversations, he repeatedly professed his love for his wife and never said anything to incriminate himself in her slaying.

In January, the case was moved from Modesto to Redwood City after defense attorneys argued Peterson had been demonized in his hometown to the point that he couldn't get a fair trial.

The Majority of Americans Have Spoken ... LOUD and CLEAR !

J.R.'s Take
06 Nov 2004

On November 2 of 2004 52 % of the American people sent
several messages loud and clear by re-electing
President Bush as the leader of our nation !

Message # 1: To the liberal British Press, mainly the
Guardian, stay out of our elections, we do not need
you to try to influence who becomes President. We
have minds of our own and we will decide ! Butt Out !

Message # 2: To Europe, We do not care if 70 % of you
would choose Kerry. We will decide who we choose. If
you like Kerry so much why don't you elect him to head
the EU or something like that, or maybe President of
France. Otherwise mind your own business !

Message # 3: To Osama and Al Qaeda: Your threats will
not deter us. We are not weak, but strong with
resolve to defeat you and your ilk. Your threats will
not make us run and vote for who you want to be
President. We are not Spain. Eventually we will
capture or kill you, we have patience too.

Message # 4: To the UN: Stop trying to influence our
election process. You are a bunch of spineless
jellyfish who want every leader and citizen of the
world to answer to you. We will NOT TOLERATE IT in
this country, I can assure you of that. We have
spoken and we choose to re-elect a strong, decisive,
and moral leader. President Bush is that leader. If
you think Kerry is such a great choice then appoint
him as secretary General of the UN, and then move to
the Hague. Get out of New York. We are sick of
funding you !

Message # 5: To the leftist liberal sniveling whiners,
You know who you are. The majority of America has
spoken, did you hear us? We are tired of you trying
to denigrate our country with your liberal, immoral
agenda. We will not allow you to drag our country's
moral values through the mud any longer. We do not
support abortion or partial birth abortion. We do not
support gay marriage. We believe in god and aren't
and will not be afraid to say so. We salute the flag
and are proud to recite the pledge of allegiance with
the words "Under God" in it ! We support our
President and our brave men and women in the military,
we not only support the troops, WE SUPPORT THE CAUSE !
We don't need anti American film makers and Hollywood
elites telling us what we should be and not be
supporting. Maybe Kerry can become a movie director,
or movie star. He certainly had the experience of
directing and starring in his own movie when he was in
Vietnam. Maybe he should submit it to the Cannes Film
Festival, after all, his daughter could show up
displaying her breasts through a see through dress
again, that ought to get a few votes for the film.
Hey they picked Farsenheit 9/11 didn't they?

Message # 6: To the Main Stream News Media, we are
tired of your left wing agenda. We are tired of your
distortions, half truths and outright lies. You have
proved yourselves both unreliable and despicable. You
have exposed your bias on several occasions and also
your true mission. We are tired of you attacking the
President and dishonoring our troops and our country,
by reporting only the bad news on the war on terror
and not the good things that our brave men and women
are accomplishing there. We are beginning to seek
alternative sources of news and we will continue to do
so.

Message # 7: To all of you who stated that you would
move to another country if President Bush was elected.
Many of you restating what you said in 2000. We have
two words for you, MOVE ALREADY !

Signed,
We, the majority of the People of the United States of
America !

God Bless America, our Military, and our Commander in
Chief, President George W. Bush

J.R.

Iraq chemical arms feared taken

Iraq chemical arms feared taken

Site looted, but experts unsure what was there

Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press
Oct. 31, 2004 12:00 AM

Looters unleashed last year by the U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq overran a sprawling desert complex where a
bunker sealed by U.N. monitors held old chemical
weapons, according to a U.S. arms inspectors report.

Charles Duelfer's arms teams say that all U.N.-sealed
structures at the Muthanna site were broken into. If
the site's "Bunker 2" was breached and looted, it
would be the second recent case of restricted weapons
at risk of falling into militants' hands.

Officials are unsure whether this latest episode
points to a threat of chemical attack, as it isn't
known whether usable chemical warheads were in the
bunker or what may have been taken and by whom.

"Clearly, there's a potential concern, but we're
unable to estimate the relative level of it because we
don't know the condition of the things inside the
bunker," said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N.
arms inspection agency in New York, whose specialists
have been barred from Iraq since the invasion.

Chief arms hunter Duelfer said by e-mail Friday from
Iraq that he was unaware of "anything of importance"
looted from the chemical-weapons complex. The report
his Iraq Survey Group issued on Oct. 6 said, however,
that it couldn't vouch for the fate of old munitions
at Muthanna.

One chemical-weapons expert said that even old,
weakened nerve agents, in this case sarin, could be a
threat to unprotected civilians.

The weapons involved would be pre-1991 artillery
rockets filled with sarin, or their damaged remnants,
weapons that were openly declared by Iraq and were
under U.N. control until security fell apart with the
U.S. attack. They are not concealed arms of the kind
President Bush claimed Iraq had but which were never
found.

In its Oct. 6 report, summarizing a fruitless search
for banned weapons in Iraq, Duelfer's group disclosed
that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna, 35 miles
northwest of Baghdad, after of the fall of the Iraqi
capital in April 2003.

A little-noted annex of the 985-page report said that
every U.N.-sealed location at the desert installation
had been breached in the spree, and "materials and
equipment were removed."

Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's
central chemical-weapons production site, was put
under U.N. inspectors' control in early 1991 after it
was heavily damaged by a U.S. precision bomb in the
first Gulf War. At the time, Iraq said 2,500
sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there.

The U.N. teams sealed up the bunker with brick and
reinforced concrete, rather than immediately attempt
the risky job of clearing weapons or remnants from
under a collapsed roof and neutralizing them.



The looting at Muthanna, a 35-square-mile complex in
the heart of the embattled "Sunni Triangle," is the
latest example of how sensitive Iraqi sites,
previously under U.N. oversight, were exposed to
potential plundering by militants or random looters in
Iraq's wartime chaos.

Last Monday, U.N. officials confirmed that almost 380
tons of sophisticated explosives, also under U.N.
seal, had disappeared from a military-industrial site
south of Baghdad, a location left unsecured by U.S.
troops advancing to Baghdad in April 2003.

Thousands of tons of other munitions are also
unaccounted for across Iraq. The issue has become a
flashpoint in the U.S. presidential race.