A California judge has rejected claims from convicted killer Scott Peterson’s Los Angeles Innocence Project defense team that witnesses saw his wife alive after her 2002 disappearance on Christmas Eve.
Judge Elizabeth Hill of the San Mateo Superior Court found the testimony and purported evidence that her disappearance was linked to a nearby burglary inadmissible.
Peterson was convicted after a five-month trial in 2004 of the murder of his wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn son, Conner.
While Peterson has for years suggested the suspects in a burglary at the house across the street from where he lived with his wife in 2002 could have killed her, prosecutors said that the break-in happened after she had already vanished.
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He initially received a death sentence, which was later reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2021.
He has a separate petition pending before the California Supreme Court to have his conviction overturned due to alleged juror misconduct, and his Innocence Project legal team said it would appeal the judge’s decision Tuesday.
The court had previously rejected Peterson’s requests for new DNA testing in the case on almost all of the evidence, aside from a piece of duct tape found on his wife’s pants.
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Laci Peterson was pregnant at the time she vanished. Her remains were later recovered in the San Francisco Bay. So were their son’s, at a separate location.
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Police arrested her husband in 2003 near the Mexico border after he bleached his hair blond and departed Northern California with his brother’s passport and $10,000. He had a new goatee and just purchased a used Mercedes in cash, using the name “Jacqueline,” which he told the seller was “a boy-named-Sue type thing.”
At trial, a woman he was having an affair with named Amber Frey testified that he told her his wife was dead a month before she went missing.
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In recorded calls, he told her he didn’t want to be a father and was considering a vasectomy.
And his alibi, which was that he was fishing when his wife disappeared, placed him in the same body of water where her remains were later found.
Prosecutors have written in court filings that a police K-9 picked up her scent at a boat ramp in Berkeley, California. They said her hair had been found on a pair of needle-nose pliers recovered from the vessel.
The autopsy also suggested her remains had been weighted to the sea floor before she broke apart and washed ashore — and prosecutors included evidence that Peterson made multiple homemade anchors out of concrete and rebar.
