The Double Life of Scott Peterson: Two Christmas Eves — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

At 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 2002, four Modesto police officers pull up outside a single-story ranch house at 523 Covina Avenue. The front windows face the street, but heavy drapes cover them, blocking the view in or out. A 27-year-old woman has been missing from this house since that morning. She is eight months pregnant. Her husband says he went fishing, 90 miles away, and that he came home in the afternoon to find her gone. Officer Matt Spurlock leads the way up the brick walkway. Behind him, Sergeant Byron Duerfelt is on the phone to the supervisor, who runs a detective unit called Crimes Against Persons. I'm requesting the assistance of a CAP detective, sir, Duerfelt says. Spurlock tries the front door. It opens. Most of the lights and sirens are off. The lights on the outside are on. There's a Christmas tree in the corner of the dining area. The officers inventory the presents underneath it. In the nursery, new baby clothes are stacked in a white crib. Miniature sailboats hang from the ceiling. One of the officers stops in front of a life preserver on the wall. It reads, Welcome Aboard. In the living room, a tan and white throw rug is bunched up on the floor against the patio door. Officer John Evers says, Steps around it and leaves it where it lies. They work through the rest of the house, room by room. Closet doors open. A shower curtain slides back. On the kitchen wall, there's a chalkboard where Lacey has written, Merry Christmas, in a youthful script. On the counter, leftover pizza sits in an open box with a container of ranch dressing next to it. And beside that, a telephone book. Open. The police see a full-page ad. With a photograph of a young man being handcuffed by a uniformed officer. And underneath it, the words, Criminal Defense. Former Deputy District Attorney. The lawyer lists his specialties. One of them is murder. Scott Peterson will later give an explanation for that. Sitting in an interview room at the Modesto Police Department, he says he had the phone book out to call hospitals. There are two accounts of that day. The day Lacey Peterson disappeared. First, the way Scott Peterson tells it that night to a detective with a notebook. Then the same day again, the way investigators will say, it really happened. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. Your name, your address, even your signature. It's all sitting in a database that anyone can access. A cyber scammer can pull your records, use AI to forge a transfer document, file it with your county, and on paper, they're the new legal owner of your property. 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And out at the curb, Sergeant Duerfeld calls his supervisor back with a list of six things that do not sit right. It has been less than an hour since police were called, and the supervisor wants a murder investigator at that house. Immediately. The detective who catches the case is Al Brocchini, 17 years on the job. He'd planned a quiet Christmas with his family, up in the Sierra Nevada foothills. After getting the call, he drives back down Route 108 toward Modesto and the house on Covina Avenue with the police scanner going on his dashboard. Brocchini opens an investigation that night. He'll be with Scott Peterson on and off until 1.30 in the morning. Their taped interview begins. At midnight. Let's just go over what we already talked about, so I can make some notes. Just tell me about the morning. Here's how Scott describes that morning. Lacey is up first, and she has cereal. If she doesn't eat as soon as she's out of bed, she gets sick because of the pregnancy. Scott stays in bed a while longer, gets up around 8 and showers. They watch television in the converted garage. Her favorite show is on, Martha Stewart. Scott doesn't watch the whole thing. He remembers cookies of some sort. He remembers they talked about what to do with meringue. She tells him her plan for the day. Finish cleaning the house, mop the kitchen floor, take the dog for a walk. Then the store for Christmas morning breakfast supplies and for the gingerbread cookies she's making for the Christmas Eve dinner at her parents' place that night. He was going to go play golf at the club, but it seems pretty cold outside, so he decides to go fishing instead. That was a morning decision. I was going to go play golf at the club or go fishing. It seemed too cold to go play golf at the club, so I decided to, you know, 9.30 or whatever. Before he leaves, Lacey asks him for help with the mop bucket. He had me put the bucket by the front door for her. She's, you know, once pregnant, I'm kind of. I didn't pick it up or anything, so I filled it up for her. He tells Burkini what she's wearing when he leaves. Black pants, a white long-sleeved top, plain, nothing written on it. No shoes. Her white tennis shoes, the ones she wears to walk the dog, are not in their usual place by the wet bar. He says he looked. Scott leaves around 9.30 in his pickup and drives to the warehouse he rents on Emerald Avenue. Mortiser. It's a woodworking tool to make tables. Oh, you maybe saw it on the trailer there. Yeah, big. Yeah. I just got that, so I assembled it. Check my email. Send one email. Then hook the boat up and. The email goes to his boss. Then he hooks up the 14-foot aluminum bucket he bought two weeks earlier, which is stored at the warehouse, and tows it 90 miles to the Berkeley Marina. He feeds $5 into the automated parking machine and takes the timed receipt. It reads 12.54 in the afternoon. Scott's in the water by about 1 o'clock. He goes north a couple of miles to a small island with a no-landing sign on it. It's called Brooks Island. He fishes for about 90 minutes, catches nothing. Tells Brocchini that a lot of the reason he went was just to get the boat in the water and see how it ran. Back in the truck, he calls Lacey as he's leaving the marina and leaves a message on her voicemail. Okay, beautiful. I just left a message at home. Uh, 215, I live in Berkeley. I'll see you in a bit, sweetie. Love you. Bye. He stops for gas in Livermore on the freeway back toward Modesto. He hits traffic and calls the house again to say he will not be home by 4. He stops at the warehouse to drop off the boat and gets home at 4.45. Scott comes around back. Their dog, Mackenzie, is in the yard and Scott is surprised to see he still has his leash on. Scott takes it off of him and puts the leash on the picnic table then goes in through the French doors. The dog and their gray and white Siamese cat follow him inside. The cat goes over to the mop bucket still sitting there full and looks like it's going to drink from it. So Scott carries the bucket out the side door, dumps it, and leaves it outside. He puts his clothes in the washing machine, his jeans, his blue T-shirt, a green polo. To make room, he pulls out a stack of stained white towels their housekeeper had left in there and piles them on top of the machine. He eats one piece of the cold pizza, then showers, dresses, and checks the answering machine. There are three messages. Two of them are his own, from the road. The third, is from Lacey's stepfather, Ron Gransky, asking them to bring over whipped cream. This is supposed to be a celebratory evening. They're due at Lacey's mom's house for dinner at 6 o'clock. At 5.15 by his own account, Scott Peterson looks at his watch. Sharon Rocha is looking at a clock too. She is Lacey's mother. She has a ham in the oven and she has just put a casserole dish of scalloped potatoes on the top rack. She's told everyone to come at 6. The clock by her stove reads 5.15. She finishes up in the kitchen and goes into the bedroom to change. change two minutes later her phone rings hi mom scott says is lacy there no she says she wonders why he's asking in sharon's account of it scott pauses he says then he says the sentence that will change her life when i got home lacy's car was in the driveway and mckenzie was in the backyard with his leash on and lacy's missing 22 years later sharon rocha described that call to netflix producers scott called me to find out if lacy was at my house and i said no and he said well then she's missing missing what do you mean missing i mean people don't use that term lightly so i told him to call her friends and find out if anybody has seen her you it's the word that stops her missing sharon says later that it was a strange choice of words lacy's not the kind of person who goes missing she's practical and organized and nearly eight months pregnant and they're coming for dinner in 45 minutes sharon asks scott what time he got home 4 45 he says it's now 5 17 scott's been home for more than 30 minutes before calling his mother-in-law to ask if she has heard anything from him and he says no he says no he says no he says no he says no heard from his wife. Within the hour, Lacey's stepdad, Ron Gransky, is on the phone with the Modesto Police Department. Two weeks later, Sharon Rocha opens that oven. The casserole dish of scalloped potatoes is still sitting on the top rack. She looks at them for a long time. Something else happens that evening before any detective arrives. At 5.30, Scott Peterson knocks on the door of a neighbor across the street, Amy Krigbaum, to ask whether she has seen Lacey. Krigbaum asks him where he's been all day. Scott tells her he was golfing. Down at East La Loma Park, at the end of their street, Ron Gransky is helping search for Lacey. Officer Spurlock finds him standing at the footbridge and asks whether he knows where Scott has been. I believe he went golfing this morning, Gransky says. Are you sure? Yes, he answers. Later that night, on Scott's front lawn, with two officers standing there, Gransky asks his son-in-law directly, were you able to get in a game of golf this morning? He hesitates. Then he says he did not play golf. It was too cold that he went fishing instead. Gransky is a fisherman himself. 9.30 or 10 o'clock in the morning is way too late for fishing, he says. You should have gone earlier. What were you fishing for? Scott doesn't reply. Burkini asks Scott why the truck is backed in. Scott answers immediately. He always does that, because the toolbox in the bed has been broken into. A couple of times. That morning, he had loaded a set of patio umbrellas wrapped in a blue tarp into the back of the truck to store at the warehouse. He forgot and drove to Berkeley and back with them still in there. Burkini asks whether Scott owns any handguns. Scott says yes. A Llama 22 in the glove box of his truck, where it's been since a pheasant hunt about a month ago. Burkini pops open the glove box, the gun is there, and he takes it. Burkini asks whether there was anything unusual in the house. Two things, Scott says, the leash and the back door unlocked. Near the end of the interview, Burkini asks to test Scott Peterson's hands for gunshot residue. Scott hesitates. Then he asks, will boat motor exhaust register positive? Burkini doesn't answer that question, but asks one of his own. Would you be willing to take a polygraph? Sure, Scott says. The detective asks a second time. Scott says he's certainly willing. And then Burkini tells Scott what's bothering him an hour into the tape. Burkini asks him where he wants to go. Physically, Scott says, back to my home. The polygraph is scheduled for the next afternoon, Christmas Day, with an agent from the California Department of Justice coming by to assist. At one o'clock, as detectives are waiting for him, they get a phone call. Scott has changed his mind. He says his father, Lee, told him taking a polygraph was not a good idea. Scott Peterson will never take a police polygraph. Did you know many U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water? 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Now, the same day again. Not the day Scott Peterson describes. This time, the way police and prosecutors come to believe it really happened. Let's start with what was on TV. Martha Stewart is on that morning, Lacey's favorite show, and Scott remembers Martha talking about what to do with meringue. Detectives will pull that broadcast later. The segment about meringue aired at 9.48 that morning. Scott tells Burkini he left the house around 9.30. But the meringue is Scott's own detail. Nobody put it to him. He offers it. And it airs 18 minutes after the time he says he was already gone, which puts him still in that house until at least 9.50. Next door, neighbor Karen Service backs out of her driveway and finds their dog Mackenzie loose in the street. Dragging a leash so dirty, Karen goes back inside her house to wash her hands after she's handled it. I left the leash on the dog and abruptly just left and shut the gate and went on with my day. And I really didn't think much more. The next day, when police take Karen Service's statement, they ask her to pin down a time when she found the dog. Using a receipt from an errand she ran just afterward, she works it back to no later than 10.18. That leaves 28 minutes from the time Scott would have heard meringue before leaving the house and the time Mackenzie was found outside barking and alone with no Lacey. 28 minutes for Lacey to finish mopping, load the dishwasher, make the bed, curl her hair, lace up her sneakers, clip a leash on Mackenzie, and head to the park and become a victim. Police come to believe that Lacey Peterson never left her house alive. They cannot say exactly when she is killed. They cannot say exactly how. Neither can the prosecutor who takes the case to trial. Here is Rick DeStasso two years later in his closing argument. Quote, the defendant strangled Lacey Peterson on the night of December, 23rd or the morning of December 24th. I don't know. I don't have to prove that to you. Strangling and smothering is not going to leave a lot of evidence. Unquote. There is almost no physical evidence in that house. Investigators have a phrase for a killing like that. I believe that this was what I call a soft kill. That he either suffocated her or he strangled her. And there would be two reasons that he would. One is that it's very quiet. Secondly, it doesn't make a mess. Investigators focus on the bedroom. The night Bricchini walked through the house, he saw a white comforter in Lacey and Scott's bedroom pulled up over the pillows as though someone had tidied the bed in a hurry. At the foot of the bed, there was an indentation running across as though a body had been laid out there. Bricchini does not write it down, but he clocks it. Two days later, on December 26th, detectives come back with a warrant. A crime scene officer photographs the bed. Then they strip the bed and take it away. the comforter cover with them. Beside the indentation on that cover are two small spots. The spots are blood. Forensics will later confirm the blood is Scott Peterson's. Detectives come to believe Lacey Peterson was killed on that bed. One theory they take seriously is that she reached up and scratched him as he was strangling her to death. Then Scott has to move her. Investigators believe he wrapped her in a tarp inside the house and dragged her out through the back door, wadding up the throw rug as he went. Police also suspect Scott mopped the floor and deliberately let Mackenzie loose with his leash still attached, setting up the possibility that someone took Lacey. Here is the prosecutor, DeStasso, again. Quote, he wrapped her in a blue tarp and backed his truck up to the gate. He carries Lacey out, puts her in the car, and then he puts her in the car. back of the truck. Who's going to suspect him? Everyone thinks he's the perfect husband. Unquote. And that is what the umbrellas are for. Detective Craig Grogan, the lead investigator, will testify that the patio umbrellas Scott loaded that morning were approximately the same height as Lacey Peterson. And that wrapped in a tarp in the bed of a truck, they would not only hide Lacey's body, but would explain what anyone saw him loading. Scott dropped Lacey in the car, and then he dropped her in the car. Scott drives to the warehouse on Emerald Avenue. In his version, he spends one hour assembling a woodworking tool and sending one email. In the police version, this is the hour Lacey Peterson's body goes from the truck into the boat that no one knows Scott had. Brocchini is inside the warehouse the same night, working by flashlight and the high beams of his own car. On the floor of the boat is a chunk of concrete with a steel loop set into one end. Scott tells him it's a homemade anchor and that the loop is there to tie the rope to. But there is no rope attached to it. There is also concrete dust inside the boat, not on the rim, but down on the ridges that run up the sides and across the bottom of the boat. The detective can think of no reason for that to be there. Two days later, on December 26th, detectives come back with a search warrant covering Scott's house, his warehouse, his vehicles, and his boat. Scott tells him that the boat is a homemade anchor, and that the loop is there to tie the rope to. Brocchini looks at the flatbed trailer more closely. On the trailer is a plastic water pitcher, the kind you might keep in a refrigerator. It's about a third full of murky water with gray residue wringing the inside. Brocchini stands close and studies it. There's a mallet lying next to the pitcher. And in the dried concrete on the trailer are four circular impressions, each one the size of the bottom of that water pitcher. Brocchini works out what he's looking at. Ready mix concrete and water, pour it into the pitcher, let it set, knock it out with the mallet, stand it on the trailer to cure. Four rings, at least four anchors. They have found one on the floor of the boat. That leaves at least three unaccounted for. In the bed of Scott's pickup, Brocchini finds a small tool coated in dry cement. He assumes this was used to mix the concrete. Detective Grogan asks Scott how many anchors he made. Did you make just one? Yeah. Scott says he made it days earlier, mixed in a small white painter's bucket, not in the pitcher. Detectives see the pitcher but never locate the bucket. The police theory is that concrete weights took Lacey Peterson's body down and that the cement on those ridges inside the boat crumbled off of the weights as she went over the side. Beneath the boat's bench seat, detectives find a pair of yellow needle-nosed pliers. There is a single strand of black human hair clamped in the pliers. Lacey Peterson has black hair. A Modesto detective bags the hair, seals it, and marks it to be sent for DNA testing. There is no root attached to the hair so the analysis does not give a conclusive match. However, it says the DNA is consistent with a hair from Lacey's hairbrush. The hair does not belong to Scott Peterson. At 10.06 that morning, the morning Lacey disappeared, Scott Peterson makes a phone call. It is the last call he makes for about four hours. No calls on the drive, not at the marina, not on the water. Police note this as a change from his normal behavior. He tows the boat from his warehouse about 90 miles to the Berkeley marina. Detectives believe Lacey Peterson is in that boat. At 12.54 in the afternoon, he arrives at the marina, feeds five dollars into the automated parking machine, and takes the timed receipt and keeps it. That night, standing in his own driveway, he hands it to a police officer who has not asked him for it. At the marina, Scott puts the boat in the water and goes a couple of miles north toward Brooks Island. That is where police believe Lacey Peterson is. Scott Peterson's body is discarded into San Francisco Bay. He went out to Brooks Island and he dumped her weighted body into the water, hoping that it would never, ever come up. Four months later, on April 13th and then the 14th, the decomposing bodies of a full-term baby boy and a woman wash ashore directly east of that island. The rest of the day is the day you already know. Scott calls Lacey twice from the road and leaves excited. He goes to the marina, and he takes off. He drops the boat at the warehouse, and he is home at 4.45. The dog is in the yard with the leash on, and he takes it off. He dumps the mop bucket out the side door. He puts his clothes in the washing machine, eats a piece of cold pizza, showers, dresses, and plays back the messages on the answering machine. Then he waits. At 5.15, he looks at his watch and picks up the phone. Scott says, is Lacey there? In the first version, that is a husband finding out his wife is missing. In the police version, he knows very well what has happened to her. In the weeks following Christmas, police keep a close eye on Scott Peterson. They impound his truck and get a court order to put a tracking device on Lacey's Land Rover. When he rents another pickup, they take him to the Berkeley Marina three times after December 24th, and he does not take the boat with him. Surveillance units watch him sit in his vehicle near the boat ramp, just looking out at the water. When he learns police are bringing in dogs, Scott brings the boat's cover home from the warehouse and puts it in a shed behind the house. Then he sets a gasoline-powered leaf blower down on top of the cover. The leaf blower leaks. Police note that Scott Peterson is not otherwise careless with his equipment. Burkini interviews neighbor Karen Service again. Afterward, he writes up a list and he gives it a heading, Scott Peterson False Statements. One, that police took his handgun from inside his house. Two, that he volunteered for a polygraph and officers told him not to take it. He told his mom, Sharon, that he's deliberately avoiding the press so the coverage stays on Lacey, and that if he senses interest starting to fade, he'll give an interview himself just to bring it back. He calls a realtor about their house on Covina Avenue and talks about selling it or renting it out. There's no way if Lacey comes back that we're going to stay there, he says. On January 11th, 2003, Sharon leaves Scott a voicemail meant to bring him home. He says, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm relief. A sonar scan of San Francisco Bay has turned up something on the bottom. It's been identified and it's a boat anchor. It is not her daughter. The wiretap on Scott's phone is running while he listens to the message. As his mother-in-law's message plays, Scott Peterson lets out a low, quick whistle. Hi Scott, this is mom. It's about quarter to one. Just wanted to know, I just got a call from Ron Cloward. He's at Marina and it was a boat anchor. Of course, we knew it wasn't Lacey, but I just wanted to know. I'm going to call your house in case you don't get this message first. Bye. Scott Peterson has a cut on his knuckle. The cut is not the problem. The problem is Scott's explanations for it keep changing. When Detective Grogan asks him what cut him, Scott says he doesn't know. Probably the door, he offers, or something. Grogan asks whether it was just a scuff on the knuckle and Scott says, yeah, left hand, index finger. Five weeks later, Scott's on television holding up his hand for a Sacramento reporter named Gloria Gomez. She has just asked him whether it would surprise him if police found blood in his vehicles. Take a look at my hand. You can see, you know, cuts here on my knuckles, numerous scars. I work on farms. I work with machinery. I know I cut my knuckle that day reaching in the toolbox of my truck and then into the pocket on the door. I cut open my knuckle and there's a blood stain on the door. What happened to he doesn't know? Sometime after Christmas, Scott complains to Lacey's mom, Sharon, about Brocchini, including that the detective had checked his hands for cuts a few times. Then he makes a point of showing Sharon his hands. Sharon glances at them quickly and writes down later what she saw. Not one finger, but a line running across the knuckles of all four fingers, a cut or a slice that has almost healed. She says nothing. One Christmas Eve, two different versions. In Scott Peterson's accounting, a man goes fishing, comes home to a quiet and empty house, tosses in a load of laundry, cleans up, eats a slice of leftover pizza, then calls his mother-in-law. To the police, that may have been a mistake. But he's not alone. He's not alone. He's not alone. He's not alone. A man has killed his wife and unborn child, dumped their bodies in the cold sea, and is trying to cover up his crime. The Modesto Police Department will spend the next two years trying to prove it. But there's a problem. There are witnesses whose accounts do not fit the police timeline. A van that doesn't belong on that street, three men in a yard, and people who say they saw a pregnant woman walking a golden retriever that morning, after the point's got Peterson, had left. After the time police had concluded, Lacey Peterson was already dead. I'm Megyn Kelly. That's next time on MK Confidential.