The Megyn Kelly Show - Scott Peterson: A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special | Ep. 225

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

It's a Scott Peterson episode of The Megyn Kelly Show's True Crime Christmas Week. Megyn Kelly is joined by Jon Buehler, lead detective in the Laci Peterson case, to break down all the evidence surrounding the murder, including Laci’s life with her husband Scott, the day she disappeared, Scott’s unassuming persona, his possible narcissistic personality disorder, his refusal to take a polygraph test, evidence from his mistress Amber Frey, the discovery of the bodies, Scott’s attempts to evade arrest, the details of the trial, what may happen next with Scott Peterson, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and our true crime Christmas week here on the program. My guest today is John Buehler, a retired detective for the Modesto, California Police Department. Almost 20 years ago on Christmas Day, he got a call to help on the case of a mother-to-be who went missing on Christmas Eve 2002. Her name was Lacey Peterson. John worked with others in the Modesto PD to find Lacey and the person responsible, her husband, Scott Peterson. John, so great to have you here. Thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for the invite. I appreciate it. Okay, so let's just start for our listeners who aren't familiar with the case with the story of Scott and Lacey Peterson. They were living in Modesto, California. How long had they been married at the time she disappeared? Well, right about five years. We've been married about that long. And they'd come up from down in Southern California and moved up to Modesto to be closer to Lacey's mother and her sister and brother.

Okay. And were there any reports of marital problems or bad behavior by Scott or any of the stuff you look for once somebody's been convicted of double murder? You say like, oh, he tortured the neighbor's cat. He did, you know, when he was grown up, things like that. Anything like that with him? Gosh, Megan, nothing at all. I mean, this guy was, he was the guy you want to marry your sister or your daughter. I mean, there was, you just couldn't find any flaws in this guy at all from outward appearances, you know, immediately when we met him. You know, it took a while before things started to fall into place. And we saw that there was another side to him. But from all appearances, you know, he didn't have a criminal

record. I mean, everybody liked him. You know, you'd have a barbecue. You want to make sure you invite Scott there because he's going to be part of the fun. So he wasn't that guy who people are like, there's something creepy about him. No, and you know, that's kind of the thing that's a little bit unusual about that is nobody really could come up with that. Although a lot of Lacey's friends, then once Amber came forward, and I know you want to cover that, but once she came forward, then people, when they went away from talking to him as much as they were earlier, they started bringing up facts that were a little bit inconsistent with the all-American boy, but nothing really alarming. It's nothing that you would think of on an

individual basis. They're all anecdotal, but when you tallied them up, then they showed a little bit different side to him, a side of a guy who really didn't want to be a dad. And you, I mean, how long have you been a detective for? How long were you doing that? Well, I did it for 17 years. I was probably 12th year at that time, probably my 12th year. And so I assume you've seen your fair share of homicide cases. Yeah, when I left, I'd been involved in about 140 of them, 26 of which were mine. So, you know, you have those, you have missing people, you have suicides, you know, you deal with family members that are under stress, that are dealing with the death or the loss of a loved one. And so you kind of get used to whatants who you thought, this is a sociopath right here. Like this guy has no emotion, no feeling or empathy for others.

Was there ever a defendant like that? Yeah, I can remember a couple of them. One in particular, he did. Actually, the worst crime scene I ever went into was done with a knife and a claw. No guns involved or anything like that. And the guy who did that murder he truly was tv quality evil he was the guy that you know a script writer would you know detail out even when you looked in his eyes they were cold like it was like there was nothing behind them and you know scott doesn't have that look but obviously with this situation our belief

is and the jury's belief was that he had that capability yeah i was talking to mark garagos on the program not long ago and you, he said this about virtually everybody we talked about who he had represented. You know, he's like, I knew him and I can I get a sense for whether somebody is capable of this. And I just don't think he was. He wasn't that guy. Now, he also said the same thing about Jussie Smollett, which I don't believe either one. You know, it's sometimes we see what we want to see. But it sounds like you're not disputing that if you just met Scott Peterson on the street, you wouldn't have a creepy vibe. You wouldn't think, oh, something wrong with him. Well, no, I don't think he would. And that's the reason that, you know, he would be successful when it comes to committing a crime like this, because his suspicion level really wouldn't be there. It's a situation where you don't, he just doesn't look like a killer,

which is a thing that made him in this case so dangerous, because Lacey had no idea that this was coming. But he, over the years, you know, you meet a lot of these guys. I got to tell you, Megan, there were a lot of guys I met that committed murder. And murder aside, I kind of liked them. And it's really the same thing with Scott. He was difficult not to like, because he's so charming. He's so engaging. He's so polite. And I don't know what he was saying behind our back all the time. I know some of it wasn't too

polite, but to our face, he was always easy to deal with. But at the same time, that was a picture for us that painted something different than maybe he expected. When we deal with people that are accused of this or we're focusing on them, usually we'll see a little bit of frustration on their part as things go by. He didn't have that. The entire time we dealt with him,

he was always cooperative to a point. And then of course, he would always draw the line in his cooperation because he'd only go so far. He'd pull out that attorney card and he'd say, well, I gotta talk to my attorney about that. And so we dealt with that quite a bit. We saw that in some of his public interviews.

He gave one to a local reporter and whenever she got him on something where he tripped up a bit, you know, like, what do you mean? You told Lacey that you were cheating on her and then you continued the affair. Why would you do that? And he'd be like, well, the lawyers don't, you know,

this is the point at which I can't get into. Anything that was tough, he was like, oh, I'm not allowed to get into that, you know, and was really like, let's keep the focus on Lacey. But to me, watching that interview with the local reporter, watching the interview with Diane Sawyer, you walk away thinking he never comes close to losing his composure. This is a man who's used to wearing this mask. Yeah, I think so. And again, when dealing with him, he had an enormous amount of emotional control and that kind of fit in

with our departmental psychologist, Phil Trumpeter. He told us that, you know, this is the fit of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder. He wouldn't go so far as to call him a sociopath or a psychopath. I mean, you can label anyone on anybody, but in this case, he was just a little bit different than us.

But I don't know if you remember, there was one segment in one of the local reporters from Sacramento where she was asking him questions and his phone was ringing in the background. It was back in the kitchen. And the thing that really strikes a lot of people, we hadn't found Lacey at that time. And he tried to continue with the interview. And then he goes, hey,'t found Lacey at that time. And he tried to continue with the interview. And then he goes, Hey, you want me to turn that off? And he goes back, he finds a phone, he turns it off. Well, that could have been Brocchini or me or Grogan calling him and saying, Hey, we got Lacey down here in Bakersfield. But you know, nothing like that.

He didn't want to take the call. He just wanted to continue with the interview. So, you know, where's the concern? Where's the urgency on his part? It just was absent, at least at that moment. Yeah. And we'll get to what his half sister said about him because she spent a fair amount of time with him, I guess, during those weeks that we were looking for Lacey. And she did not walk away with a favorable view of her half brother, who she wrote a whole book about. Okay. So there they are. They're living sort of, they call him an all-American couple. You know, she's got the thousand-watt smile. He's obviously a very good-looking guy. They get pregnant with their first baby after five years of marriage.

They've got the golden retriever, Mackenzie. She's nearby her mom, who's adoring. And everything's, you know, coming up roses, or so it would seem. And then December 24th, we think, well, at least December 24th is when she was called in as missing. He says he went to fish in the local marina with a 14 foot fishing boat. He only recently bought that Lacey had never stepped foot in because that's just what he does for entertainment. He says some guys would go golfing. I like to fish. So I went fishing. And Lacey was going to get together a couple of food items to share with her family later.

He says he left the house at 930 that morning for his fishing trip. And what time does he say he returned home to find no Lacey? It's late afternoon. I'm trying to remember exactly like 330 or four or something like that. But if you recall, his original claim that he had told everybody is that he was going to be golfing that day. And he told us, of course, that he changed his plan to go golfing because it was too cold to golf. But it wasn't too cold to go out in San Francisco Bay, which is certainly not the tropics, I can tell you that. So it, you know, that a lot of little things, and this is the point for us is, you know, a premeditated murder is not going to have a witness, and it's not going to have a videotape, you know, the luxuries, the things that we all want. And of course, with Scott, you're never going to get a confession. So you have to build that case by eliminating suspects from suspicion by proving out their alibi and showing that they had no reason to do the killing. But in Scott's case, although everybody else we dealt with in this case

was pretty easy to clear, we couldn't clear him. We would always be conditional about that. So when he decides he's going to change his plans at the last minute and go fishing instead of golfing because it's too cold to golf, that's a red flag for us. Maybe not right then, but it's certainly a red flag. And then he couldn't remember what kind of bait he used. That's weird. Yeah, there was, I think he was more of a freshwater fisherman than a saltwater fisherman.

And so he wasn't sure what lures he had. And I think Al Brocchini mentioned that the tackle that he did have in his boat was all freshwater tackle that you would use up in one of the lakes in the Sierras or the foothills, not something that you would use in San Francisco Bay if you were going for like sturgeon or striper or something like that. So, you know, the fishing trip really wasn't much of a fishing trip. It was more of a trip so that, yeah, you mentioned earlier that Lacey had never set foot in that boat. Well, she had never set foot in that boat alive. She certainly was in the boat after he had killed her. Right. So he, on the way home from the marina, leaves what you guys, you and your partner, believe. Because you and the, I'm sorry,

forget the, the man you just mentioned was your partner. You were the main two detectives on the case. Well, actually, there were three of us. There were Craig Grogan and then Al Brocchini and I. Now, Al started the case on Christmas Eve when he was notified about the missing. And he knew that I always liked overtime, but he also knew I had my kids with me on Christmas Eve. So he called me on Christmas Day as I was taking them over to their mom's house. And of course, I was all too happy to jump on some Christmas Day overtime because I didn't have anything going that day anyway. But yeah, Al Brocchini, when he first started talking to him, he started gathering a lot of evidence from the beginning. And there goes your next three years completely devoted to this case. So when Scott Peterson was on the way home from the marina, he left what

appears to be to, you know, I've said to my audience i believe scott did this so i am on your side though open-minded like bring it on if you've got evidence to prove that he didn't do it let's see it um what appears to be sort of a cover your rear end voicemail to his wife lacy and here is how that sounded the soundbite one beautiful. I won't be able to get to the Villa Farms to get that basket for Papa. I was hoping you would get this message and go on out there. I'll see you in a bit, sweetie. Love you. Bye.

Not unusual for a killer to do something like that. Yeah, it's, you know, I mean for me, that was one of the first things that Brochini did when I met with him on Christmas Day is I met him at the office and he played that tape for me. And, of course, the first thing I said, how long have these guys been married? And he said five years.

And I thought, I don't know, that seems kind of flowery for somebody married for five years. It just seems sort of, you know, I mean, just like you said, to me, it was a staged call to take the focus off of him. And it didn't mean he did it. But, I mean, you know this stuff and your viewers know this stuff. How do we start a murder investigation? We started the victim and we work outward. And who's the first one you check when you've got a deceased girl? Well, you're going to look at her boyfriend or her husband. And especially when you've got a pregnant girl that goes dead or goes missing. And I think they had that 2001 study where murder was the vast majority by an overwhelming margin of the cause of death for pregnant girls. Is that right?

Oh, yeah. I thought you saw that. You probably did. You got too much going around in your head, so you forgot about it. Or I chose to ignore it because it's disturbing. It's very disturbing. But, again, you go back to Scott, and it's easier to work a case when you don't despise the guy that you think did it. You know, when he's polite to you and he's not saying anything bad about your mother or anything like that.

And so you just kind of follow the evidence and like, this is another strike against him. So when Al played that tape for me, I just thought, oh, this just doesn't sound quite right. But I've had other guys like this before that I've dealt with where it didn't seem right. I remember one in particular, he had no reaction whatsoever to his wife and daughter being missing. And I thought, gosh, this is kind of freaky. But we were able to clear him right away, not only through a polygraph, but we also verified his alibi. And he was just a cold fish guy. He just didn't have any emotion. That's something that we should keep in mind as we go through this case over the next two hours is could he just be that person, you know, that sort of oddball whose affect is different from

what we're used to. And maybe he's not a cold blooded killer. Maybe he's just got a weird affect. So I have space in my head for that possibility. But there's a lot of evidence against Scott Peterson beyond his affect. Can I ask you this? One of the things that seems so weird about the case was who kills their wife on Christmas Eve? You know, it's like if you want to kill your wife, your pregnant wife, like wouldn't you choose a quieter date? Like how cruel, how sadistic, like extra sadistic beyond killing a pregnant mother of your child? Well, you know, that's kind of an interesting, you know, question to ask. But the thing is, is whether you're killing your wife on the 4th of July, or you're killing her on Christmas Eve,

I mean, it's still pretty, pretty nasty stuff, you know, to do that. So I think in a situation like this, you can't really apply the common sense things that we operate on our day to day basis and try to put those on somebody who does something like this, because you're going to be disappointed every time because we don't do those things. And so to try and make sense of things that don't make sense, gosh, it's just, you know, you're going to be battling frustration the whole time you're batting that around in your head. So you guys get involved in the case. And one of the first things you ask Scott Peterson is, would you take a polygraph for us? Right. Is that standard procedure? And do you usually receive a yes in response to that? Well, yeah, the polygraph, I love the polygraph, because it does a variety of different things. Okay, now, of course, it's not admissible in court. Well, I don't care about that,

because I'm not using it to go into court with it. But the first thing you do is, what's the person's cooperation level when you say the word polygraph? You know, do they run like a scalded cat away from you? Or do they say, Oh, absolutely, I'll take it. You know, and somebody who, who wants the focus to be on Lacey and wants us to be trying to turn over every rock and log and look under every car and blanket that might be in a park or something like that to try and find her, take the poly, take the focus off of you and let us move on. So we're not spending time trying to clear yet. But when he originally he said yes to the Polly on Christmas Eve, when Brock asked him, and then on Christmas Day, when we were getting ready to do it, because when when Al called me,

Al Brocchini called me, and we went down there, we started to the office and started talking. And then we went over to Scott's house. And that's when I first met him. Pleasant, nonchalant, you know, he greeted us, you know, and it's like, he just when I first met him. Pleasant, nonchalant, you know, he greeted us, you know, and it's like, he just didn't have any concern. I mean, he walked away, he had something else that he had to attend to. And I just kind of thought, well, gosh, how come you're not asking me 90 questions? Why aren't you, you know, asking me, what are we going to do next? Are you going to get helicopters up? You know, are you going to get a boat patrol? I mean, whatever he wants to come up with. He didn't have anywhere near the same emotional urgency that Sharon had or any of Lacey's friends or family. And so when we got done meeting with him and chatting with him, then the first thing

that I did after that is my neighbor two doors over was the senior polygraph examiner for California Department of Justice, Doug Mansfield. And so I called him, and he usually gets calls from me because I like doing the polygraph. It was a pretty good tool. And I, you know, of course, I hate to call him on Christmas Day, but he's always good for things like this. And so he said, yeah, I'll come down. So he came down, and with the intention of, you know, putting Scott on the box. And then between the time that Val had asked him the night before, if he'd take the polygraph, and then that afternoon when Doug came down to get him hooked up, he apparently had talked to

his father and Lee had told him, no, don't take it. Now, I'm not sure what Lee's reasons for that is, but Lee's a successful businessman from San Diego. Great. But that's maybe not the best advice to give your son, not to take the poly when the detectives are trying to clear him so we can start going towards better suspects than your son your son but it is what it is he did what he did and i i get it i get it too what this is december at this point 25th uh 2002 uh it was too cold for him to golf so he went out on the cold water was the swimming pool at the Peterson house still open? Oh, gosh, no, you wouldn't be swimming this time of year.

So do you remember when it closed up? Well, I mean, there was water in the pool, but it's way too cold in Northern California to go swim at that time of year. So yeah, he wouldn't have been swimming in there. And obviously, we checked the pool, no lacy in there, you know, we, you know, checked all over the house. Well, the reason I ask is because his, his half sister, I guess he had a half sister was given up for adoption and then she came back to the family and she got to know Scott and their mother, Jackie well, and, uh, another sibling, I think. And she would write in the book that she would ultimately publish something like 33 reasons why he's guilty. So her conclusions right there.

She had a feeling that he was obsessed with his swimming pool at his house and that the way he would go back and take care of it and clean it and so on. Her own theory was he drowned her in that swimming pool. Gosh, I never heard that. I didn't read her book. It's an interesting take. I, I kind of don't agree with that because he would have had the, I mean, they both would have been soaking wet and it would have been a, gosh, that would have been a violent fight to try and, you know, drown her in the pool. There would have been splashing and noise and the houses were close together there. The house to the South where his neighbor Karen lived. I mean, that's right there. And I

think that would have potentially attracted too much attention, much easier to carry out suffocation or strangulation inside the residence itself underneath a pillow or a blanket or whatever you would choose to use. And hopefully that, along with the walls of the house, would blank out the noise if there was any. Well, what about, I asked Mark Garagos this, and I said, what, you know, why couldn't, because he's like, there were no forensics at all tying him to the murder, which I think is pretty true. And I said, well, why couldn't he have just suffocated her or strangled her?

And he said there would have been secretions, which would have provided, you know, some evidence that a murder had taken place there or something bad had happened to Lacey wherever he did that. Well, I don't totally agree with that. I mean, Mark's got his take, and I know what side he's on, and I respect him. He's walked the courtroom many, many times, so I get that. But I see it a little bit differently. There was a whole ton of evidence there.

Now, if you take a look at this case and you think in terms of what if Scott didn't know Lacey and we went and processed the house as a crime scene, we would have found a multitude of evidence that would have linked him to the victim. We would have found hair. We would have found fibers from clothes. We would have found maybe lipstick on a glass, all sorts of things, fingerprints all over the house. And one of the things that we did, just so that everybody wouldn't think that we were one-sided on this, is when we did process the house for evidence of a stranger abduction or intrusion, and there was no forced entry, of course, we had the FBI come down from Sacramento with their evidence response team, had them, independent of the SNP, they processed the house. And when they did that, of course, I think there was a saying that you attorneys use evidence of absence as absence of evidence.

And there was no evidence that anybody else had come in that house. So when you look at this situation, well, of course there's evidence there, but it's not the type of evidence that you would think of on a movie or something like that because they lived together. They were married. So of course, you're going to have her stuff there. There was one spot of blood that was on the comforter that probably wouldn't have been there if Lacey was alive because Lacey was known as a fastidious housekeeper. That blood spot was linked to Scott, of course. Scott had a cut on his finger. I don't remember which one it was, but one of them, which could be consistent with her scratching him or something like that as he's trying to suffocate her or strangle her in

bed. Now, whether or not she would defecate, whether or not she would urinate, I mean, I don't know. It just, it all depends on the, I don't think you could rule that out. I don't think you could rule it in. And I certainly wouldn't say that the absence of that, those two things would suggest that he couldn't have done it in there. Do you remember, John, whether the bed, for example, had, you know, fresh linens on it,

you know, did it look like he had cleaned up at all? Well, the only thing I remember from the bed is there was an indentation on the comforter at the foot of the bed, it would be consistent with a human body lacy size, being on the foot of the bed and then moved from there. And, you know, I mean, it could have been a variety of different things. Maybe Scott sat there or laid back or something like that. I mean, it doesn't mean that she was there, but it is consistent. And once again, you know, Megan, these cases are built on, you know, circumstantial evidence and you find a couple of things and, well, that's kind of interesting. And, and then it kind of becomes suspicious when you find a few more. And then when you've got, you know, two dozen, now it's kind of compelling. And that's really how we work

these cases. You just follow what you have, you document it and you look at it, you know, with a eye of experience and you say, gosh, this is not looking too good for this guy. Well, I get that. And there's plenty of, plenty of stuff that pointed the finger at him, but I'm kind of stuck on the forensics. As an amateur, have you ever been to a scene where somebody was strangled or suffocated and would there necessarily be urination or something by the person being killed? Do you have any idea whether that's true? Not at all.

You can't say that there's an absolute on it, that there would be anything like that. And that's the thing with this case. It's not all the murders that happen to be able to say that everybody who was strangled, everybody who was smothered is going to either defecate or urinate or something like that. It doesn't really mean it.

Of course, you'll remember that there was some laundry that was done by Scott after he got back from his fishing trip. Clothes, his clothes. Yeah, and anything that he discovered that might have been there, or maybe if she had left anything on a blanket or a towel, there's no reason he couldn't have taken that with him and disposed of that with her body up there in San Francisco Bay. So, you know, there's there's a lot of things. I remember that he had been mopping. Somebody said he'd been mopping the

floor area. And he had said something earlier that Lacey was mopping when he left. Well, the cleaning lady had mopped the house the day before. She had noticed that Lacey was very tired at the time. So she even doubted that Lacey went for a walk. But for Scott to be doing any mopping or cleaning up seemed kind of suspicious. And even one of Lacey's friends, Stacey Boyer, the next night, I think it was the 26th, she had said something about Scott was doing some vacuuming around the house to take his mind off of what was going on. I mean, if I'm stressing about something, the first thing I'm not going to grab is my Hoover, you know, I'm going to do something else. But, you know, that seems kind of funky. And then you probably also remember there was a bunched up rug and a straight path from the bedroom to the side door that goes out to the carport where his truck was backed in. Unusual. Neighbors had never seen him back the truck in before. Bunched up rug. Scott gave the explanation the dog did it or something like that.

Okay, maybe the dog did do it. But also maybe he did it when he was dragging Lacey from the bedroom out to the carport to put her in the truck and then put the patio umbrellas on top of her that were in a blue tarp so nobody would see her underneath there. And people saw him drag out the patio umbrellas. Yeah. And even one of the neighbors, she was walking, I think it was a chocolate lab, a gal named Kristen. And she was eight months pregnant. She was walking by at the time.

She greeted Scott that morning. She said, good morning, Ari, or something like that. And, you know, he just, he reacted just like Scott normally does. You know, nothing suspicious there, but there really would be no reason for anybody to be suspicious of him. Because again, we weren't looking at somebody that looked like Charles Manson. We're looking at somebody that's more resembling, you know, maybe Ted Bundy or something. Yes. I've thought about him many times. He has a lot of the same qualities. I mean,

he was a charmer. There's a reason he was very good looking. And there's a reason so many women fell for his fake charm. And he truly was a sociopath. Okay, there's so much more to go over in terms of the investigation, the huge, huge bombshell of Amber Fry, who John interviewed and worked with to get all those tapes, some of which we've heard. So we're gonna get into that next. She changed the entire course of the investigation. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. Johnson, we'll get back to the forensics in one second, including Scott Peterson on tape showing his injured knuckles and hand. But as you guys were investigating this, the biggest bombshell, I think we would both agree, is the emergence of Amber Fry, 27-year-old single mom, massage therapist, who had started dating him only on November 20th. Now, again, she goes missing, Lacey does, December 24th, November 20th. So it's not a long-term affair. But she comes in, and can you just walk us through, what was that like when you first talked to her? And you're thinking about Scott Peterson as a suspect, but you don't have him yet.

So when you met with her for the first time, what was that like? Well, it was it was really groundbreaking for us because until she called, we didn't have anything that we could find in Scott's background and suggested that he was anything less than perfect. I mean, he just, you know, there was just no stain on this guy whatsoever. And we almost kind of lost Amber originally because her original call came in and she had volunteered to give the call takers, Scott Peterson's date of birth of the one that she was dating to see if it matched up with the one we were investigating. And the call taker, just couldn't connect the dots on that one and said, well, I can't give you his date of birth. And then Amber was frustrated. She said, well, I'm not looking for his. I got the date of birth of the guy I'm dating. If it matches up with the guy you're looking at, then I probably got information for your detectives. And so anyway,

she finally hung up in frustration. But the next day, she calls in. Yeah, you're lucky she was persistent. She calls in and Al Brochini, he's standing at the clerk's desk that is right next to my desk as the clerk is taking Amber's call. And she's typing it into the data bank thing that she had on her desk there. And Al's reading this as she's typing. And then Al says, is she on the phone right now? And Bev said, yeah, she is. And so, of course, Al grabs the phone and he starts talking to her and he gets some details and he goes up this is pretty cool so uh he says we'll be right down so

he hangs up and he grabs me we go into the sergeant's office and we said hey you know this is what we've got and he just says go don't tell anybody just go so Fresno's you know 100 miles south so we drive down there record time no lights and siren and we get there and Amber's there with the friend that originally introduced her to Scott and so we interviewed both of them separately and we got enormous detail from the friend about Scott's behavior at these conventions I guess there was a convention in Anaheim that they had gone to and he of course was representing himself as being single. And then this Sean decided that, you know, I've got this friend, Amber.

She's pretty nice. So she, you know, played Cupid. And then, of course, they met. Well, when it came time to interview Amber, and I think this is kind of true of most girls, you guys have a memory that's spectacular. And she had dates. For certain things. Yeah, yeah. You know, especially everything men do wrong, which of course, but different show different subject. Anyway, so she ends up giving us incredible detail on their dates and what they did. And she,

you know, she luckily she held on to souvenirs. So she had wine corks, and she had tickets and all sorts of things that, you know, would back up what she was doing. And it was almost like she I think she, you know, she didn't know us. It was almost like she had a concern that we wouldn't believe what she was saying. So she backed all these things up with, you know, real physical evidence of this stuff. She showed us a gift that he had bought for her daughter, this little star globe and, and some other stuff. And, and it really interesting because now this emerged, you know, this different kind of guy that we really didn't know was there.

Certainly we were suspicious, but we had nothing to hang our head on. So when we left her house, you know, we were hungry. It was mid-afternoon. And so we said, well, you know, we're going to go get a bite to eat. If you guys want to come with, you can come with us. And so she said, well, hey, would you want to stop by CVS or Walgreens or something like that? I don't remember which one it was because I've got some pictures. And we're thinking pictures. Yeah, we'd probably be interested in those. So we go to the photo counter there at CVS or Walgreens and she gives a claim ticket to the gal, and the gal brings

out the envelope, and they're twin pics. There's two pics of each, and we're looking through these, and it's a famous picture of Scott and Amber at the holiday story. I think she's in the red dress. He's in the tux and everything like that, and we're looking at this, and it's like, yeah, this gal's probably telling the truth here, and, you know, they were just from a couple of weeks earlier, and, I mean, it was pretty impressive, and I'm sure that, you know, they were just from a couple of weeks earlier. And, I mean, it was pretty impressive. And I'm sure, you know, the gal behind the counter had no idea what she had just handed us. And so, anyway, then we went over to Radio Shack to buy a little device to hook up to a recorder. Because we always kept a couple of recorders in the trunk of our cars. Because we used these many times on cases.

We'd give them to a victim or a witness and see if they could get the guy to talk to them. And so we retrieved a recorder out of my trunk along with like 10 tapes and some batteries. And then we went to Radio Shack, which was nearby. And Brock bought the connecting unit that would go to her phone. And the recorder itself showed her how to use it. And as he's showing her how to use it, the phone rings. And Brock, he goes, gosh, that's Scott's number right there. So she's looking at us like, take the call.

And so she took the call. And that was like the first recorded conversation. And it was just very interesting. And this is the one thing that I don't understand why this case was so popular with everybody. Because we had many other murders that were actually more, to me, more interesting than this one. Although this one had TV quality victim and, you know, responsible in it, you know, I mean, definitely the made for TV, you know, cast on this one of the detectives, of course, but when it came to this,

it was just, gosh, we're here working this thing. Everybody's looking at this and it's just another Modesto murder, you know? I mean, it's important to us. It's important to the family, but it's, it was kind of, it was just difficult to believe how it was getting so much attention. partner who has been duped but in the beginning days you're wondering was she duped we don't know were they in on it did they both get rid of lacy scott you know this gorgeous guy who lacy seems to have you know won the jackpot with right like it just he's like yeah he's got a good job he's got a seemingly nice family he's a good looking he treats her well it's like every woman's worst nightmare that this man you meet and fall in love

with and marry and get pregnant by turns out to be a sociopath who would murder you in your bed with your it's like the worst thing you can imagine. So it's it taps into, I think, a lot of things for a lot of people, but especially women. So so can I ask you, because Amber Fry, we've got that famous and I'll play it, uh, part of it, the happy new year call on, on New Year's Eve that he calls Amber while he's at the vigil for Lacey. Um, but did she start taping him before that? Yeah. Um, she started taping him. Gosh, I think that was, well, it was right around that same time because it was within a week of the 24th. So it was the recorded call for New Year's Eve. Yeah, that was right after we had met her. Okay. So it's unbelievable. on this, you know, detectives that were clearing out sex registrants and parolees that had violent criminal pasts that could be good for this and verifying their alibi and stuff like that. And

of course, as you guys, as you paid more attention to this case and it became bigger, anybody that we looked at, you know, they wanted to be away from this thing big time. They did not want to be involved in this. They did not want to be linked to this as being in any way possibly related to Lacey's murder. So the cooperation level that we got from a lot of people that ordinarily probably wouldn't have cooperated with us, probably wouldn't like us because we were cops, was a little bit different this time. And that was one of the good things that the media brought to us that made things easier in some ways, but in other ways, not so much. Well, it's the reason Amber Frye knew to call you. She saw all the media coverage of this guy who was missing his wife. And she was like, holy, that's my a Fresno cop. And I think his name was Richard. I

can't remember his last name, but he had, he, he caught the coverage and he thought, gosh, that's sounds kind of like that girl that, that, or that guy that Amber stayed. And so he called Amber. He remembered, I mean, Scott hadn't even been in Amber's life that long. He remembered the description of him or that he would fit it. Well, she was, you know, I mean, you're a young girl, you're blonde, and you're dating Scott Peterson, you're going to flash him around like a nickel-plated 38. And so she's telling all of her friends, you know, hey, look what I've got. And I don't blame her, you know, I can see her doing that. So this, you know, this friend of

hers, you know, platonic, he was just a friend. And he caught the, you know, the intense media coverage. And so he called her. He says, you might want to check with those guys up there in Modesto and see if this is the same guy. Because I can't remember for sure, Megan, if he had told her that he actually lived in Modesto or Sacramento. I know he told somebody at one time that he lived in Sacramento. But anyway, she hadn't seen any of this coverage. And, of course, as you remember, there was great frustration with people in the media because they couldn't get Scott on camera hardly at all. He was always in the background at the center where they were

coordinating the search outside of law enforcement. He talked to several, you know, people from the media and he just said, hey, I don't want to be a part of this. This is all about Lacey. This is to find Lacey. I don't want to be the distraction. And of course, you know, you can interpret that both ways. Maybe he's sincere about that, or you can look at it that he didn't want his face out there because he didn't want Amber to see it or anybody else. So, you know, if you think about how he appeared on the, you know, I'll just finish this up real quick with you. Yeah. Had there been other affairs besides Amber? Yeah, there'd been at least two that we knew of that were called in. Girls had called us

and told us about things. And, you know, I hate to say that, but I mean, they are what they are. They're in the record and, you know, it is what it is. But he lied about that, too, when he gave his interview to I don't know if it was Diane or if it was Gloria Gomez and the Sacramento affiliate. But he told one or both of them that Amber's the only one he ever had an affair with. Yeah, he's he's stretched the truth on a lot of things, a lot of things that he didn't have to stretch the truth on. So it was really difficult, you know, dealing with him to know where the, you know, the truth ended and the lies started because he he would lie sometimes for no reason on things that were inconsequential. And that was kind of difficult for us to kind of pick through. But it you know, it was he just he was just he was just interesting to work you know yeah okay so amber fry uh she does

put on the wire and she does start recording her calls with him and the the one that i remember just from covering it at the time i was you know a very young reporter um was the one he's at the vigil for lacy and and Connor with the candles. This is before they found the bodies or know that they're dead. You know, Sharon Rocha, the whole family's there, like praying to God that they'll be a sighting, a return, a ransom demand, something. And what's Scott doing? He's all smiles and he's on the phone with Amber.

And here's a snippet of that conversation. Yeah. And he goes on to say the crowds are amazing. The crowds. He's looking at the crowd for his wife's vigil. I mean, it's like, that's, that's something wrong. There's obviously he is a sociopath. That's like no normal person can do that, John. Well, and that kind of, you know, falls into why we don't really have any doubts that he did this. Now, yeah, again, it's a premeditated murder. There's no videotape. There's no eyewitness.

He's never going to confess. At least I don't expect that he would. He could probably water board him. You're not going to get it out of him but it's one of those things where when when on one hand he's telling us how worried he is and how he you know he wanted to keep his face away from the media coverage because he was afraid that you know it would be a distraction or if he was afraid that if amber came forward then you know we would no longer search for her which gosh we were going to search for her regardless it doesn't make any difference if Amber's part of the equation or not. And so, you know, when he's doing that, you notice the vigil, he's got the baseball hat pulled down low. He's got the collar up on the jacket, everything like that. And, you know, from a distance, you might not even connect him as

your boyfriend if you're Amber, you know, cooking spaghetti and you just glance over your shoulder at the TV, which of course she didn't do because she didn't watch a lot of TV. Wow. Well, notwithstanding that, Gloria Allred got her hooks into Amber and we've seen that show many times now. And that this was the moment that stunned the world. I remember watching this thinking, OMG, here it is, Amber Frye at the press conference coming forward and telling the truth. Sot 5. First of all, I met Scott Peterson, November 20th, 2002. Scott told me he was not married. We did have a romantic relationship. I am very sorry for Lacey's family and the pain that this has caused them. And I pray for her safe return as well. Now, why did she come out at that point,

John? Because she had been working with you guys and she had gotten something like 27 or 29 hours of tape as far as I read. So what led her to go public? Yeah, there was a total of 29 hours of recorded phone calls between the two of them. But what happened with that is we were going to keep her on ice as long as we could. We didn't want to bring her forward. We didn't necessarily expect that he was going to tell her that he killed his wife and he wanted to run off to belgium with her or anything like that but we were hopeful that we might be able to get something else out of that so we were going to keep working this for a while but unfortunately somehow the inquirer found out about her and we got a tip

that they were going to be running uh that photo of amber in the red dress and sc Scott in the tux on the whatever edition it was that came out. I don't know if it came out on Thursday or Friday or whatever that was. Well, of course, you know, out of consideration for both families, you know, Scott's family down in San Diego and Sharon and the family in Modesto. We knew that we couldn't, you know, let that happen. And, you know, they'd be in the grocery store line and then they see the inquirer there with this picture and, you know, then they drop their groceries and freak out. So we knew we were going to have to tell both families about this. So Craig Grogan and Phil Owen went down to San Diego to tell Lee and Jackie about this. And then, of course, Al and I, we called Sharon into the office to tell her about it.

And, you know, she came down there with Ron Gransky. And, you know, and that was one of the heartbreaking things of the whole case. You know, you can work a lot of murders, you know, but you're touched by these victims. You know, they stay with you. I mean, there's some of them that stay with me even to this day that I still talk to. But she came down and they knew that there was something up because we didn't generally call them to come down to our office. But they came down, it was late afternoon.

And they had a, they had a scheduled interview with Greta. That was going to go on after our meeting. And so she sat down and you could see, you know, they were, you know, anxiety. So we said, well, Hey, you know, we called you down here. We got something's going on. We want to get you in front of it. So like you're not surprised by it. And then I had this folder in front of me, it was on the table. And I just opened the folder and split it across. And, you know, Sharon looks at it and she just, you know,

put her head in her hands and said, why did he have to kill her? I remember that like it was yesterday that she said that. And I think, you know, the family wasn't, you know, none of these families are stupid. And I think they all knew this. They knew it was coming, but they were hoping for that one little chance out of a billion that she would come back alive. And, you know, this kind of, you know, dashed those hopes. And it's really sad to see this, you know, to see a family have to go through this.

And, you know, of course, now pick up the pieces and, you know, hope for the best in the rest of it. Can you catch the guy who did it and can we ever recover our family number to give them a you know a proper you know burial and things like that but that is that was the moment sharon realized he was behind this and that lacy would not be returning yeah i think she had a you know she's pretty. I got a feeling she had a feeling about this beforehand, but she probably wouldn't even acknowledge it except, you know, deep in her mind. But yeah, this pretty much showed her that was the deal. And then of course, because publicly, they'd been standing with Scott, they there wasn't a public rift between the families until Amber. Yeah, exactly. And and you know, you'd expect that. I mean, that's,

there was nothing, they didn't have it in concrete. I mean, we look at the thing a little bit different. You know, we're not going to, we don't tell people everything that we know when we're working one of these cases. You can't, you know, because maybe you're wrong too. And it might, you know, you're not going to disrupt the family and the relationships with your suspicions. You know, you, you work your suspicions and you gather your evidence to, to prove your case, you know, and to present it to a jury. And you don't want them to slip up. I mean, even a well-meaning family member could slip up and say something to Scott before you're ready for him to know you're working with Amber.

And, yeah, I understand. That makes perfect sense to me. There's so much more to go. The trial gets started and Scott's defenders to this day point to the lack of forensics. But is that fair? We're going to get into a bit more what the prosecution actually had and now what the defense is saying we should take a new look at.

Don't go away. There's much, much more to discuss with retired detective John Buehler. Don't forget, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. And the full video show and clips when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. If you prefer an

audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. If you leave a comment in the Apple comments, which you can do by subscribing there, I will read it. I have read all 21,000 of them. I find them actually very helpful. People write the most thoughtful things. And I'd love to know what you think about this story and this case. And by the way, when you're there, you can find our full archives with all of our true crime Christmas shows.

Don't go away. John, there was an incredible moment where Peterson sat down with Diane Sawyer of GMA and actually claimed that he told Lacey about Amber, his affair partner. Here was that moment. Did your wife find out about it? I told my wife. When? Early December. Did it cause a rupture in the marriage?

It was not a positive, obviously. It's inappropriate. But it was not something that we weren't dealing with. A lot of arguing? No, no. No, you know, I can't say that even, you know, she was okay with the idea. But it wasn't anything that would break us apart. There wasn't a lot of anger?

No. Bull. I mean, that's such an obvious pack of lies there. But my question is, why? Why did he feel the need to say he disclosed the affair to Lacey? You know, that remains a mystery to me, but it also plays kind of against his claim about fishing. I'm sure, you know, OK, two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, she's baking gingerbread cookies and she's going to say it's OK for him to go fishing, thinking maybe he's going

fishing or maybe he's going down to Fresno again. I mean, I just don't see that. You know, we get a lot of insight into Lacey and what she was about by, you know, her friend Lori and Renee and Stacey and Kim, you know, they tell us a lot of things along with Amy and Brent and Sharon and Ron. But when you know, when we talk to them about things like this, there's no way on this planet that she would be okay with this, you know, she would have tossed him out of the house like a bag of garbage, you know, she wouldn't have put up with that. And she would have told someone.

That's what all of her friends said. And any woman knows you've always got at least the one friend who you tell everything to. You know, you don't go blab your private marital problems around. But something like that, you tell somebody. And it's I just I never understood why he felt that lie was necessary, how he felt it was better that she knew. Like, did he think we thought the motive of killing her was she was going to say he was a cheater? No, that's not what we thought. I'm going to pause right there, squeeze in one more quick break.

Got to pay the bills and then come back and we'll take a deep dive into forensics. Don't go anywhere. John Buehler stays with us. I hope you will, too. John, so what was the final catalyst for the arrest of Scott Peterson? Well, of course, you remember the bodies were discovered in a two-day period in April. And when the first body was discovered, I was just kind of, eh, that might not have anything to do with our case. I really wasn't hopeful that that would, you know, be anything to do with what we were dealing with. But then when the second body came up, so you've got a female that doesn't have all the limbs

attached and everything that shows it's been in salt water for three to six months. And then you have a almost full-term baby that doesn't have the same marine activity on it and looks, you know, essentially normal. You know, that kind of tells you a story of what you got there, especially when they're found so close in proximity to each other and to where Scott was fishing. So when you have that, that pretty much, oh, okay, well, we can figure this one out. And we put together an arrest warrant for scott based on that information and other information that we had gathered to that point and it was almost interesting the way this case went for that you know four month period because it seemed like

anytime we ran out of something or we're getting close to finishing up all the different things we were doing besides scott then all of a sudden something would pop up and it would like fill the tank with gas and we'd have more to go on. And so this was a point before those bodies, you know, showed up, we were just about ready to charge him. But unfortunately, the DA in Stanislaus County, he said, Hey, if you don't have a body, I'm not going to give you a filing. Now we've been working this case as a no body homicide from the start. And we were using a protocol that was developed by a prosecutor from Merced County, south of Stanislaus County, where we lived. And this case fit everything on the, all the things that he had on the protocol with, you have a victim that doesn't have any prior history of leaving, they've got ties to

the community, they don't have any family problems, they didn't clean up a bank account, they don't, all these different things that are going on there. And so she's like the, you know, the victim that you want when it comes to putting one of those cases together. So, of course, when the body showed up, that got everything jumped up into high gear. So arrest warrant was put together. We had a surveillance going on for Scott down in San Diego by agents from Department of Justice, Ernie Lamone and his crew down there, because we didn't have enough cops to help out on this. So we used, you know, help from a lot of different agencies throughout the state. So we drove down to San Diego and we hooked up with those guys. And then we were going to make the arrest the next day when the DNA results were going to be released. Bill Lockyer was the attorney general in California

at the time, and he was going to be in charge of releasing those results to the media and to the public. And the instructions that we got from Judge Beauchesne, who gave us the arrest warrant, was, I know what you have here, but don't execute this arrest warrant until you get those DNA results, if you can. He didn't tell us we couldn't, but he wanted us to wait until we got those results and so when we started following scott that next morning he was a i don't know if he was nascar quality but he was a pretty darn good driver i mean high speed and he could cut lanes and take an off ramp and of course we we did drive like that we'd roll our car or something and so we'd have to miss them you know we'd drive down another off-ramp. But it was just a big, you know, it was kind of like a comedian of cars driving around.

It was ridiculous. So they had a helicopter up. So luckily we were able to stay on him. But even the helicopter lost him at one point. But was he fleeing? Because we all remember, our audience, I think, he had dyed his hair blonde. He had grown a goatee. He had $15,000 of cash on him. He had, I think, did he dyed his hair blonde. He had grown a goatee. He had $15,000 of cash on him.

He had, I think, did he have a fake driver's license? His brother's ID. Yeah, okay. He had camping gear. It certainly seemed like he was about to flee, perhaps across the southern border. Well, we couldn't rule that out. I mean, he knew San Diego well. He grew up down there, and that's not very far from Mexico. We didn't know if he thought the cops were after him or if he thought that you guys were after him, you know, trying to, you know, get an interview or, you know. You know, dye their hair for us, John. Well, you know, it's funny because on that hair dye thing, he had two versions of that.

He told somebody that he dyed his hair because he wanted to be more anonymous. He didn't want to be spotted in public. And then he told us that it got dyed because he was swimming in a pool with too much chlorine. So he was the thing. Every little brunette girl in America knows that's not true because we all tried to get our hair dyed that way and it doesn't work. I wish I knew about that. It's kind of old. But anyway, so he'd come up with these different versions of things, which were, you know, they're mildly amusing when you're working the case, but it's like, you don't have to

lie about this stuff, you know, just tell it straight. It's in his nature. All right. So, so listen, so I want to move it along. So, so you affect the arrest, the trial takes place and what forensic evidence did you have? What was, I it was circumstantial as I'm looking and getting ready for this interview. OK, scent sniffing dogs picked up Lacey's scent in the Berkeley Marina four days after she disappeared. Scott's team and Garagos was saying this just the other day. Say you cannot rely on that. Dogs fail two out of three of these tests under similar circumstances. That was a bunch of BS evidence the dogs sent.

Your thoughts on the dogs? Well, I know a few dogs in the neighborhood. You know, I feed them some little milk bone treats, but I don't know dogs like canine handlers do. My understanding is dogs have an incredible sense of smell that is multiple times better than humans. You know, I can't disagree with what DeAragos is saying, because I don't know enough about that subject to make the call on that. But once again, it was just one of those strands of physical evidence. And if you remember Vincent Bugliosi's book, Helter Skelter, he described the circumstantial case as a series of strands or cables, or strands of wires on a cable that become increasingly big and strong. And okay, you can attack the dog, well, get rid of that little strand, but you still have

all the rest of these. And so when you add up all the circumstantial evidence, that paints a very compelling picture. It almost be like if you had a jigsaw puzzle on your table, and you were missing three pieces in the middle, but you'd be pretty sure what the picture says. And that's what we had here with all the circumstantial evidence. So when it comes to physical evidence, well, we've got Scott's behavior and we can do a whole show on that, but you've got the absence of intrusion from another person coming in there. You've got the condition of the bodies and where they're found. You've got Scott's behavior when it comes to how he's dealing with everything involving this case, whether it's returning to the scene where the body's exposed,

I think five or six times. And this is consistent with what killers generally do if they have little doubts about whether or not they hit the body enough. So you've got all of those kinds of things. You've got Amber coming in. You've got the absence of anybody else involved in it. We've got the burglary across the street that we were able to clear those burglars from involvement in this. Ah, let's stop there. That's that's a big item being pushed by Scott's sister in law right now saying there was a burglary in the neighborhood. She thinks that she says that there is proof that it happened on the morning, Lacey went missing, which she says was definitively 1224 and not 1223, which was something the police had suggested could have been the case. She said, we believe Lacey was killed after she stumbled upon that burglary live. She said a neighbor, Diane Jackson, said she saw three men in a van in front of a home there on December 24th. But then I understand that

the two robbers apprehended denied any involvement in the case and they were cleared by the cops. Moreover, there was apparently a second person in the neighborhood, maybe, I don't know, maybe it was a woman you mentioned earlier, who was pregnant and walking a dog that day. But you tell me why we shouldn't be putting much stock in the burglary theory that they they nabbed Lacey because she saw them. Well, it's you know, it's pretty rare that a guy doing a property crime is going to turn into a, you know, an abductor of a pregnant girl with it's walking a dog. I mean, it's if everybody, you know, if Diane Jackson sees a van at 1140 in the morning with three guys in it, but she can't even tell us if it's white, tan or black, it kind of calls into question her, you know, viability as a witness.

In addition to that, one of the burglars, a guy named Steven, he rode that route daily as he was sourcing a narcotic habit. But he was that would be his route when he went to his girlfriend's house. So on the 24th, he noticed that the house across the street looked like maybe people had left for the holidays. As he went over there on the 25th, he was pretty sure they did. So he broke into the house on the 25th and he took a bit of property on the 25th. But there was a safe and some tools and other things that he couldn't take on his bike. So he returns home and he's living in a shed behind his friend, Don, who's living with his mother. And he tells Don, hey, there's a safe over there. We need to go back over and get that. So they returned on the 26th. And the reason we

know that they were there on the 26th is they said they saw the media down the street when they were in the house and it was a big hoopla and they couldn't figure out what it was because they didn't know. But it was interesting to them that the media would be out in the street. Well, they're going in and out through the back of the house. So, you know, I mean, whether it's Geraldo or Greta or you or anybody else out there, they're not going to see these guys carting a safe out the back of the house. When they came under suspicion for this burglary, this is one of the things that we've run into, is cooperation level from people that are doing property crimes.

It's very rare that they're cooperators. But these two guys, not only did we arrest one of them on an active warrant, they both rolled on their involvement in the Berkeley because by that time they knew what was going on down the street. They wanted to be as far away from this case as humanly possible. If they could have gotten a flight to Burma, they would have gone. But that wasn't their option. So they begged to take a poly because they knew, and they wanted to share the results of the polygraph, because they knew if they went to jail, which they were going, that they wanted to be able to share that with the other inmates, because the other inmates ain't going to take too kindly to two guys that they think might have killed this woman and her

unborn child. So not only did we recover property from that burglary, we recovered nothing of Lacey's, no jewelry, nothing at all. And we even recovered property from another burglary that wasn't even related. Everybody that these guys had sold or given property to in exchange for drugs turned stuff in. We even had one guy came in the police lobby and dumped off a bag of property from the burglary and run out before anybody could grab it. Of course, they didn't know what was in the bag until they opened it up. So as far as these guys being involved in this, one of the things that I'm sure you remember is there was a $500,000 reward at the time leading to Lacey's, you know, recovery and, you know, locating her and everything

like that. Well, in Modesto, when you've got guys that are using meth and, you know, two guys involved in an abduction to try and convince me, I mean, I worked in a different world than maybe some of your viewers, but to try and convince me that one wouldn't roll on the other for $500,000. I mean, my gosh, that's, that's, you know, pure Santa Claus. I mean, there's just no way. What about, well, what about this other thing? Let me, cause there's a few things. Um, I kinda, I kinda jumped ahead there, jumped ahead there. But Janie, the sister-in-law of Scott Peterson, says there was evidence Lacey was alive on Christmas Eve morning past the point there are a couple of witnesses who saw the pregnant woman walking her golden retriever around the neighborhood. And what's your response to that? Well, there were two pregnant girls that were pregnant about the same stage as Lacey that

walked dogs in the neighborhood. There was one named Michelle who was walking a golden retriever and another one named Kristen that was walking a chocolate lab. And then there was a third girl, another attractive gal, all three attractive, that easily could have been mistaken for Lacey by somebody in the neighborhood who did not know Lacey. Now, and this is the interesting part, is none of these people that came forward and claimed they saw Lacey there actually knew her. They didn't, they never had a barbecue with her. They'd never been to her house. So it's easy to misplace or misidentify somebody, especially with the coverage going on and when, with the thought of being helpful, or maybe the thought that I want to be involved in this, but we couldn't find any evidence that

anybody who actually knew Lacey had seen her in the neighborhood at that time. And as far as anybody identifying her as walking around there, it could have been an easy mistaken identity with any of these other three girls. I interviewed two of them. And, you know, if you're looking out the blinds and you don't know who you're looking at, I mean, think about yourself, you know, you're at your home, you see somebody walk by in the morning and then two days later, maybe something comes up and that might have been the same person. But if you don't know them. Yeah, I don't have that kind of memory. I could never I would not be able to do that.

But let me throw another one at you. There is an allegedly a prisoner confession overheard by an officer named Lieutenant Aponte at Narco Prison in California. The lieutenant phoned in a tip in 2003 claiming he overheard an inmate's conversation about Lacey. Later, this Lieutenant Aponte changed his story saying, I don't really know what I heard. He was not called as a witness at trial, but this could become a thing, I suppose,

that if he heard a prisoner confession of some sort. Do you know about this? Yeah, I know about what you said right there, because it apparently wasn't a big enough deal on our radar to have him called as a witness. And again, when you look at Garagos, I mean, he, not only is he a skilled attorney, his staff, I mean, I don't know if you ever talked to any attorneys on his staff, but he had a bunch of great attorneys that were digging up every single thing they could. I don't think they missed anything. And if Aponte would have been something of value, I highly doubt that Mark would not have called him to the stand.

Now, there might have been some tactical legal reasons for that. I don't know. Or maybe some information came up later. And if that's an appeal issue, put him on the stand. Let's hear what he's got to say. You know, I mean, if Scott didn't do this, I don't want him in jail, but I have no doubts that he did it. a.m. Janie Scott's sister-in-law says the mailman was there he arrived at 10 30 a.m. and said that he didn't believe the dog was there or at least he heard no barking which he would have if the dog had been outside because it barked at the mailman every day she says this proves that

Lacey was walking that dog at around 10 30 that it was in the yard at 1015. It was gone by 1030. Lacey would have been walking it at that point. And then at some point it returned back to the house, but that doesn't necessarily clear up the question of whether at 10.30 he delivered the mail and a dog that would normally have been there barking at him wasn't. Yeah, I look at that from a different aspect. Scott and Lacey had gone down to Disneyland in November, and for part of the days that they were down there, she had to be in a wheelchair because she was having so much difficulty walking. Not only her yoga instructor, but of course, also her doctor had told her at the tail end of this pregnancy, you just don't need to be out doing any walking. The day before, the housekeeper had mentioned that she was exhausted. Sharon had told us that she was exhausted. Sharon did not believe that Lacey had gone walking. And to think this girl that couldn't even move a mop bucket, according to Scott, would go down an uneven grade down to a park with a dog tugging at her when she's unstable on her feet and exhausted

from everybody's account, makes it sound to me like she didn't do that walk. Now, of course, I wasn't there. I can't make that call. But all I can do is I can compare the evidence of information that we received that seems valid and that doesn't really have a stake in this versus Janie's, you know, devotion to family and love for Scott. And I get that. I understand family members are like that. And I applaud her for her tenacity. But I don't believe that Lacey was ever walking that morning with the dog, just based on the other information that we have. So when did he kill her and what did he do in the moments after?

That's where I'm going to pick it up with John Buehler in one minute. Don't go away. So, John, what do you think actually happened inside that house and when? Well, of course, none of us are ever really going to know that other than Scott himself. But my take on it is he probably suffocated her with a pillow or strangled her and then rolled her body up in maybe a sheet or something like that. Moved her out to the truck, put her in the truck, put the umbrellas on top of her so that nobody could really see her in there, drove over to his warehouse, loaded her in the boat, used the tarp on the boat to cover the boat, and then, of course, hooked the boat up and drove her up to Berkeley Marina, launched the boat, took her out to Brooks

Island and rolled her into the water with four or five of the concrete anchors that we believe he made, judging from the residue rings of cement powder that was on a flatbed trailer that was in his warehouse, one that would be used to deliver fertilizer or something like that. That's kind of the way I think it. It could be off slightly. I mean, I'd certainly buy Scott some imported ale if he wanted to tell me what really happened, but I don't think he's going to be doing that. Why wouldn't there be any forensics in his truck? Well, why would there not be? A hair, something?

Well, don't you remember that hair that was found in the pliers that were in the boat? One hair of Lacey's and the pliers in his boat. But I mean, couldn't you make the argument, you know, my husband takes our boat out all the time. Like I'm not, I'm rarely in it, but if my hair were there, I guess he could say, you know, I get Meg's hair on me all the time. Right. Yeah. The transfer of that is, is, you know, it was easy. I can, I can see where the, you know, where the hair came from in the boat, no problem there. And then of course, it was concrete residue in the boat that was consistent with somebody rolling somebody with anchors attached over the side into the water. So, you know, you have that. But as far as any more evidence in his truck, well, she's in the bed.

You know, I can't say that there wouldn't be, but the mere fact that the scent dogs were able to trace her path, essentially in the truck as he drove from there down to the south and then turned west and went over towards his warehouse. And they followed him over there. They followed the scent from the warehouse out to 132, which is the drive that you go up to San Francisco, tracing it all the way up to Berkeley Marina. I mean, yeah, Mark Garagos can say that that's invalid. And okay, I get that. That's what he's paid to do. That's the side he's on. But it's all just additional circumstantial evidence that leads to the fingers pointing at Scott. But as far as evidence that you would expect, if he doesn't harm her to the point where she's leaking blood, and he puts her in a position where she's wrapped up with maybe saliva or any kind of

purge that comes out of her mouth after death, it's not going to get through whatever he's got her wrapped up in. You're not going to find anything in the trunk, especially since he was only in there for what I would estimate to be a short period of time from the house to the warehouse loaded in the boat and gone. No one would have seen him loading up the boat with her body at the warehouse because your theory is he did that inside the warehouse yes okay and so the only way they would have seen her getting loaded into that truck would have been from the house into the truck but as you said earlier he had backed the truck all the way

up to the house in an unusual move yeah neighbors noticed that that he you know he that was first time they'd ever seen the truck backed in and they also noticed that that he, you know, it was the first time they'd ever seen the truck backed in. And they also noticed that that was the first time that they can recall that the blinds weren't open on the front of the house in the morning. They let the morning sun in. That was something that Lacey did all the time. That particular morning, those weren't open, which is really suspicious when you think that if she was home watching Martha Stewart or something like that, that she wouldn't have opened those blinds. Quick note on the boat, though, that there was a cover that went over the aluminum boat. And when Scott found out that we were doing more digging around, he took that cover and he put it in a shed behind his house

underneath a leaking gas can that would put gasoline and leaf floor or something like that, that kind of two-stroke oil on the boat cover itself. Now, Scott was fastidious about taking care of his property, whether it was his vehicles or the surface of his kitchen table or anything like that. But the thought that he would take a relatively nice boat cover and put a leaky leaf blower gas can on top of it for any other reason other than to maybe destroy Lacey's scent seems kind of strange to me. So again, just one more piece of circumstantial evidence. And themselves anecdotal, they don't mean anything before you have those things up. They become very, very convincing. And this is one of the things that I think a lot of people that don't think he did it are missing is they're not making themselves available to all the individual

circumstantial evidence because you have to ignore just a giant heap of this stuff to believe he didn't do it. I applaud Peterson's family for their love for Scott and what they're trying to do, but you're going to have to do something else. We understand their motive. Okay, let's talk about the boat because Garagos was lamenting that his experiment, trying to show a man Scott's size, throwing a body, a pregnant, an eight and a half month pregnant woman's body overboard with a bunch of cement anchors, um, that he did that experiment and it showed the boat sinking.

We've actually got that, the videotape that he tried to get into the judge kept out. Um, let me ask you about it. Cause as I watched it, I was like, you know, he does raise an interesting question. Could a, could a man as big as Scott Peterson get a pregnant woman that pregnant overboard with four anchors attached to her without the boat capsizing or sinking? Here's Garagos' clip from his would-be evidence that was denied. And for our listening audience, it shows an exact replica of Scott's 14 foot fishing boat and a man in scuba gear. You know, they're not purporting that it's actually Scott. It's a reenactment. What they say is and a dummy that is a pregnant woman

and he can't the boat is sinking. He's basically can't get overboard without sinking about the back of the boat is going down, down, down and under the water. So I get that the prosecution wasn't there when he filmed his experiment. And that's why the judge said no, because that didn't give them the chance to object to the currents weren't the same on the day you did this as they were on December 24th. Or who knows how heavy was that dummy that Mark used? Who knows, right? Like, we don't know because they weren't there. But does he raise some good questions about whether it's possible, you know, given the laws of physics? Well, yeah, of course, he raises good questions on that.

And, you know, my whole thought on that is, gosh, if you're going to do that experiment, send us an invite. Let us come there and let us, you know, do it with you. I've seen that same tape. It's been a while since I've seen it. Of course, I can't see it on this, you know, device here, the way we're doing this. But I saw it and I thought, gosh, the guy could have tried a little harder to not let the boat go over. I'm of the belief that it could have been done. I don't think that there's anything unusual about that. But if it's a situation where they only want to show one version of it,

that's why it was objected to. Let's do a scientific study. I mean, it doesn't mean you have to get a physicist there, but let's try it a couple of times. Maybe get somebody in there that wants to keep the boat from going over, somebody that isn't really on that same side. Well, you have to think if he believed that he could do it without the boat sinking, and they tried it five times and every time it sunk, he would have said, you know what? Let's go back and do it. We'll do it tomorrow. Prosecution can come with me, right yeah he didn't yeah he didn't round back and say oh that's your objection and you're sustaining it your honor okay no problem we can

we can do it uh right now um the the uh the anchors you believe he made four cement weights because i also read that they found planter pots at the bottom of the water and that they were found by divers in the marina. Many believe that they were used to weigh down Lacey's body because they matched broken pots in his storage unit. Is that not the right anchor? It was those concrete blocks that he made? I never heard about them finding planter pots up there. That's a new one for me. You know, of course, this case had, gosh, I think I got the note here on it, over 43,000, over 43,000 pages of reports. So there were a lot of people. That could be nonsense. A lot of us. Yeah. But at the same time, I remember the one anchor and one concrete anchor

that was in Scottsboro. It didn't even have a rope attached to it. Now, most people I know, if they're going to toss an anchor out to pull their boat, they usually have a rope attached there. Yeah, it works better. Yeah, generally. But it was one of those things where the cement ring suggests that he made four or five of them, and I believe it was five. And the fact that one was found, okay, cool. But if you remember, when Lacey was found, minus the head, minus the four extremity limbs, that suggests five anchors on her when she goes in. And one of the things that was

noted on her condition when she was recovered, again, the forensic pathologist said it appeared that she'd been in the salt water for three to six months, that the limbs had been separated by either surgical precision, or they had been weighted, and then the weights separated. And then that she also had three broken ribs. Well, she talked to her mom the night before, you know, on the 23rd, and she didn't say anything about broken ribs. And Lacey probably would have told somebody if she had broken ribs. And so that also fits with Scott kneeling on top of her, you know, suffocating her or strangling her. And of course, the way the limbs were separated supports that there were weighted devices, anchors, concrete anchors on each one of the four extremities and maybe around the neck. So He was not counting on her torso coming back up.

And that torso had their baby in it for most of its time underwater. The forensic pathologist said the umbilical cord was still attached. And I mean, it's so sad, but that Lisey died still pregnant with her unborn son. And they were put to a watery grave and they but they came back up they came back up to tell the tale and it was first connor's body and then lacy's the remains of it that were found and while it wasn't exactly uh evidence of scott's involvement you know it didn't show whatever a gun shot, like a bullet that was linked to him. It really was the final piece that you needed to bring him to justice. Well, it seemed like it to us. I mean, again, it's all circumstantial. But, you know, there's a lot

of murder cases are circumstantial. You know, it's, that's kind of the way we put them together if you don't have an eyewitness or a videotape. And it's, it was compelling to us. And apparently it was compelling to the jury the first time around. You know, I, I wouldn't have any doubts that we would get another good verdict on a second trial. You wouldn't, you would not. I'm confident in the prosecutors that we have, Birgit and Dave. And then of course they bring somebody else in because Rick is now a judge. But you can bring things up all these years later. I believe we have a good case. If you get a good jury, I think you get a good

verdict. And if somebody gets on the jury, the jury's always a crapshoot, as you know. You've done this for a while. And you just never know what you're going to get with them. would like it to have been the burglars or some random sicko on the street, and that it's not possible for what appears to be a loving husband to strangle the mother of his unborn son a month before that son is going to be born, completely viable baby, and then anchor her, shove her in the back of a truck under a tarp and tie five concrete blocks to her neck and each limb, hoping she will stay in that watery grave. But he was so efficient that the torso broke free and that body floated in four months later. It's like, I would rather believe some

random creepy boogeyman did it. There's something about it. That, I think, might be one of the biggest challenges at the trial, the need to believe that. Well, we all share in that. You look at him and he just doesn't look evil, but evil does exist. And one of the reasons that evil is successful a lot of times is it comes disguised as a beautiful man or a beautiful woman. And so you never know what you're going to get with that. But the thing is, is, you know, people, you want to look at Scott, and you want to think he couldn't have done this. But gosh, he wanted to sell, you know, the house within two weeks of Lacey going missing, he will be sold Lacey's car a month or so after she went missing, he turned the nursery into a storage area. I mean, this is the guy that is

wanting his wife to come home. This is the guy who's looking forward to the birth of his son. You know, you're going to have to give me some better evidence of that because I just I I can get past his looks, which are so disarming. And I can see what actually he did because his actions are speaking evil, even though he's coming out of an attractive package. All right, I'm going to squeeze in a break, because up next, we're going to talk about what the sister said he was doing in that same timeframe John just referenced, and another piece of his Diane Sawyer interview that was very, very telling. More with John Buehler right after this stay tuned the sister her name is Amy Bird and she wrote John that she because she spent a lot of time

apparently with Scott in the weeks after the disappearance and before his arrest and she wrote in her book that he appeared smitten with her and Bird's 22 year old babysitter this is while they're looking for Lacey and Connor before the bodies came up smitten with her and bird's 22 year old babysitter this is while they're looking for lacy and connor before the bodies came out smitten with her 22 year old babysitter on more than one occasion he told his sister and bird how attractive the sitter was i mean this is like the man's in his world his version his wife is missing and so is their baby. How attractive the sitter was. With Lacey still missing, he plied the sitter with drinks that he called, quote, flirtinis,

based on peach schnapps. And she said, he looked like a charming young man without a care in the world. She went on to write, he seemed totally uninterested in any new leads or new information.

He never once shed a single tear for lacy or connor the situation uh and that two weeks after lacy's disappearance he ordered two porn channels on his home tv and she was a witness to that uh i i mean like that alone would make me convict him. Well, yeah. I mean, and that's just consistent with his behavior. And this is one of the reasons that we couldn't discount him because he just didn't show the interest in this case the way he would say on TV.

He's waiting for the little guy to come home. He won't even refer to him as Connor. And he wants Lacey to come home. But when the cameras turned off, then he's just not interested in any of this. And especially when you compare his reaction and the way he dealt with all of this with Sharon and all the other side of, you know, Lacey's family and friends, they were all just urgent, going crazy, wanting some solutions and suggestions. So they were, they were always interested in this and he just wasn't. And this is consistent with what I've seen on other guys that have done similar types

of killings. They just, they don't, you know, they don't have that interest in it. I remember Scott's dad said one time, you know, Lee, he mentioned that, you know, brief doesn't have a playbook and, you know, maybe it probably doesn't for people that haven't dealt with a lot of families that have suffered a loss. But when you deal with families and friends that have suffered a loss over a period of time, you kind of get a, you know, a data bank of what reactions are from subdued silence to hysterical, you know, punching on the back of the one who gives him the death notification. How I remember that. And everything in between.

But when Scott doesn't even move the needle on this, and he isn't asking the questions that you expect and that you get from sincere people, it just fits with what he did. And by itself, it doesn't mean he did it. It just is one more strand that, to me, shows that he did it. It just is one more strand that to me shows that he did. What kind of a man is flirting with a 22 year old babysitter, offering her flirtinis and then downloading porn while his wife and unborn baby are at best for Scott Peterson at that point, missing. I mean, it's just it's so clear that he was involved. Then he goes on with Diane Sawyer. And we talked with Garagos about what a mistake it is for these high profile defendants to give interviews to the press. You guys must love it.

You're in the opposite seat than Garagos, who's like, no, you guys are like, go for it. Diane Sawyer is amazing. She's a great choice. And here is one of the things. Listen to this for the audience at home listen to him refer to lacy before the bodies long before the bodies were found in the past tense listen here tell me about the state of your marriage what what kind of marriage was it god i mean the first word that comes to mind is you know glorious i mean we took care of each other very well um she was amazing he is amazing that's telling well you know it's interesting because he even referred

to lacy in the past tense twice during brockini's interview with him on the evening of christmas eve so even from the start he was doing that and you know it was you know you can't hide that stuff i mean he's pretty slick for the most part but you know those things slip out when you're doing it and no matter how slick you are you you can't be that good and then there was the interview uh Gloria Gomez of Sacramento. And in that, you referenced it earlier in the show, he slips in the fact that he had a cut on his hand. It reminded me of OJ. It reminded me very much of OJ, but we know OJ's murder was with a knife. Listen, I'll just let the audience hear it, but I don't think this was by accident. He knew somebody was going to notice it, and he was laying the foundation for what happened. Here it is. It wouldn't surprise you if they found blood

in your vehicles. Explain why. Well, take a look at my hands. 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. On what day? On Christmas Eve. Doing what? 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. On the driver's side door.

What did you guys make of that well a pretty good way to explain that away and and you know i can't rule out the fact that it's possible he could have cut it that way but it's also possible that lacy may have scratched him as he was killing her and so you know those again without a witness in a videotape or a confession, you're never really going to know on that. But that was not accidental that he raised that. Well, you know, and that's all for the jury. You know, the jury listens to that and they draw their own conclusions on that. But just the fact that he's volunteering and talking about it, it's almost like it's a guilty conscience coming out.

And he wants to make sure he gets in front of that with this story. So I can't rule out. what of the toolbox because one of the things that one of the evidence rulings was that garagos's boat video couldn't come in but as i understand it there was a ruling that the prosecution introduced showing that he could have fit a body the size of a pregnant woman in the toolbox of his flatbed truck. Is this familiar to you? No, because it was a pickup. The flatbed was the trailer. But I know we did an experiment and it was submitted to the court where we had a eight

month pregnant clerk in the investigation division at Stanislaus County District Attorney's Office. And we took an overhead photo of her inside the boat between the seats. Now, the seats go across the width of the boat, and she easily fit in between those two seats. And she was consistent in size with Lacey. So that was one of the things that we did to show that that was possible, that she could have easily been hidden in the boat.

But I don't even remember if we were able to get that in at trial or not, because it's been too long ago. But, you know, I like that Judge DeLugia, I thought he was pretty, pretty right down the middle, he gave some good favorable decisions to the defense, and then maybe some that they didn't like. But that's true in every trial, as you know, you know, you get them, you get ones that you like, and you get ones that you don't, you're just hoping that the judge is doing it right. Well, and I mean, their big basis for appeal is not necessarily you know judicial misconduct it's the it's juror misconduct juror number seven who called herself strawberry shortcake um did not

disclose on her juror questionnaire that she had apparently been the victim of domestic violence while pregnant which i agreed the defense had a right to know whether it was enough error to allow, whether that was prejudicial enough to throw out a verdict in a case like this is a different story for the listeners and the viewers who don't remember her. We used to call her pinky at the time. Here she is, along with another juror celebrating their guilty verdict. You know, you don't always see the jurors talk in California. In this case, you did. It's a quick snippet of her. Watch.

San Quentin's your new home. And it's illegal to kill your wife and child in California. So that's the gal. And I wonder what you think about now this push, because he's had his sentence reduced because of a different juror misconduct issue not related to this gal and now in february we will have a hearing to see whether scott peterson gets a new trial on the guilt or innocence phase of the whole thing because she that juror did not disclose this fact on her questionnaire yeah well that brings up two points uh number one i had heard that her her lack of, well, that brings up two points. Number one, I had heard that her

lack of coming forward with that information on the juror questionnaire was that she was the victim of a threat from a boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, and she didn't see that as domestic violence. Now, there may be more to it than that, but that's what I had originally heard. Yeah, that's better for the prosecution than what I just said, for sure. Yeah. And then, of course, when it comes to the death penalty thing, I'm not a huge death penalty guy because I think it's been 17 years since California has carried one out. So to even try somebody on a death penalty seems to be kind of a placebo. They're not going to get the needle. They're probably going to die in custody. I would rather have more flexibility in jury selection without a death penalty case. So maybe you get a good juror that

just doesn't want to do a death penalty thing, but they can be fair about it. To me, that's a better way to go because I just, my personal feeling is the death penalty in California is kind of a joke. They're not serious about it. What kind of life does he have now? Describe his prison life. Well, San Quentin Prison is a very interesting place. It's got an enormously interesting culture and heritage. It's not a very pleasant place. It's frightening, even to us, when you go there when you're a cop and you go into one of the prisons to for an interview or whatever you have to do up there it's it's it's a scary atmosphere it's interesting you talk to the correctional officers and we ask them you know how the hell can you do this be locked up with these guys all day and they go well how the hell can you do what you do

at least we know who the players are and i can see it from both sides but it's uh death row i think is a if i had to be in San Quentin, I'd want to be on death row because I'm not really exposed to that many of the other inmates and general population in San Quentin can get you hurt pretty quick, especially if they don't like you for killing your wife and your child. So, you know, if, if, if he, if they do stay with the verdict of guilt and he does get, you know, life without parole, we call it L-LOP, and he stays in there, they're going to have to assure his safety by keeping him isolated because he would be a target for other inmates. There's a National Geographic special that was on a couple of years ago that profiled San Quentin and even one of the inmates that they interviewed talked

specifically about Scott, that he would be attacked if he was in general population. They'd even do it with a pencil. Pretty interesting show to watch if you get a chance to catch that one. Of course, it's not as good as your show, but it's good. Naturally. But the prison code of justice is so weird. It's like you don't get to San Quentin for being a Boy Scout, but like there's certain lines they won't cross. I guess you're not allowed. What? I'm killing your wife. I don't know if that's a problem, but killing your unborn baby, is that the thing that's going to get him the pencil in the neck? Yeah, it's a very interesting, it's a violent, but a very interesting culture up there. Any of the state prisons in California are, you know, not everybody gets to go in unless you do something really bad, but it's a very interesting culture up there. I don't think Scott's days are very good. Now, Scott has an enormously impressive emotional control.

And so he can, I'm sure he adapts better than I would. And, but it's, it's not, you know, he's not ordering Flirtini's up there. You know, he's stuck and he ain't going anywhere and they don't smell good. They're noisy. And you're not there with the faculty at Stanford. So, you know, it's not a very pleasant place to be. oppose the death penalty, say, I oppose it because I think it's too kind, it's too swift, that I'd rather see somebody, especially a young man like Scott Peterson. I mean, Sharon Rocha at the hearing just most recently was just saying Lacey would be, I think she said 47 now, and Connor would be 18. And it really does give you a flavor for the

passage of time and how much they've lost. And Scott Peterson, too, is not getting any younger. But what a tortuous existence. And I wonder what you think about what would be worse, a death sentence or a life in prison without parole? Well, you know, that's kind of a flip of the coin. I mean, that's, you know, do you have the fish or do you have the steak? I mean, they both are, you know, kind of equal in some ways. I think the anxiety of knowing that the Grim Reaper is coming when you've got that death sentence, if they're going to carry it out, would be very difficult to deal with. But, again, most people that end up in there don't think the way we do.

So their thought process is probably slightly different. There was some good things recently. There was a guy put to death recently in one of his closing statements before they gave him the needle was he solved another case for him. He did the last minute. He said something about another murder that had been committed and that they cleared him on that or cleared the case based on what he said. I guess he committed it. So, I mean, for me, if they're not going to carry it out, don't bother with it. Don't cause additional problems. Don't make the trial longer by having a penalty phase.

Just get by with, you know, your life without parole and leave it at that. And then you sit there and you think about it for the rest of your life. The concern also, of course, you know, you put an innocent man to death. I wouldn't want to ever see that. And in this case, you know, you don't have a confession, you don't have an eyewitness, and you don't have a videotape. So, you know, there's always that. And in this case, you know, you don't have a confession, you don't have an eyewitness, and you don't have a videotape. So, you know, there's always that. Well, we have the fear that, you know, he's good looking, that we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and he is, for better or for worse, sort of a celebrity. That the jurors of 2021, or this would be 22, have been completely trained to expect CSI-like investigations where the proof

is always there and the absence of tight forensics mean you don't have a case, right? That all these things are challenges if this case has to be retried. We didn't even talk about this woman, Evelyn Hernandez, who she was up in San Francisco and she went missing in May of 2002. Her body washed up in San Francisco Bay in July of 2002. That case considered, I think, unsolved as of a couple years ago. Right. So there's so much that the defense could make hay with. You know, was there a serial killer?

Were they wrong about the burglars? Was there something happening on December 24th? And I just wonder whether we're so obsessed with like armchair detective work in 2021, it would be a more of an uphill battle for the prosecution. I'll give you the last word. Well, it probably would be. But again, I have confidence in the prosecutors from Stanislaus County District Attorney's Office. They've got some incredibly bright trial attorneys there. And so I don't know who they would assign to it the second time around. With it going to trial again, hopefully not. The big thing for me is the torture for the family, for Sharon and the rest of the family,

for them to have to go through this again. And even for this to come up for resentencing here in December, what a great time of the year to do that, to just open that wound again. Now, granted, every Christmas is going to be different from before Lacey went missing to now. And I get that. But then they have to add, you know, salt to the wound by having this thing happen now. Why couldn't they have done this in February and put it off a little bit longer? But, you know, that is what it is. And this is what we're dealing with. As far as I'm concerned, I'm close to the case along with Craig and Al. We were in it from the start. And, you know, it is what it is.

It was a team effort. I appreciate you referring to me as the one who solved it. I didn't solve it. We worked it together from those of us that were on the core unit investigating it from the beginning to the other detectives that came and helped with us, the other agencies, sheriff's departments, detectives from other agencies, the FBI that helped us out on our crime analysis, did a wonderful job putting things together. And the evidence clerks, the evidence technicians, and everybody that joined in on it. It was a big team effort. I just hope that if we go to trial again on it, that we get a good jury, they can see right through this stuff. And they see every strand of this circumstantial evidence makes an unbreakable cable and they come back with the

right verdict. I hope the same. John, thank you so much for your investigatory efforts and for being here to tell us the story. Wow, what a case. Joining us later this week. You've got to join us later this week. We've got a heartbreaking and infuriating story about the opioid crisis featuring the author of Dope Sick, the book, and then the creator of the incredible TV series. If you haven't seen it, you need to. In the meantime, make sure you see the show

by downloading The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. You can watch it if you prefer at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. Thank you so much for listening, not just today, but all days. We appreciate it. More later.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.