It was one of the most watched murder trials at the turn of the century. Scott Peterson now is finally speaking decades after his wife was murdered and he was convicted of murdering her.
Laci Peterson’s body with her eight-month-old unborn baby was found in the San Francisco Bay in April 2003. A search party was sent looking for her after she went missing on Christmas day in 2003. Scott was found with $15,000 in cash and bleached hair, and prosecutors believed he was fleeing to Mexico. Peterson claimed that he was out fishing on the day she was declared missing.
Related: The Gruesome Details of How Laci Peterson’s Body Was Found 4 Months After Her Disappearance
In 2004, a jury found Scott Peterson guilty of the murder of his wife and their unborn baby. He was convicted Scott of two counts of murder: first-degree murder with special circumstances for killing Laci, and second-degree murder for killing the fetus she carried. Judge Alfred Delucchi sentenced Scott to death by lethal injection and ordered him to pay $10,000 toward the cost of Laci’s funeral.
Where is Scott Peterson now and is he still alive?
While he initially faced the death penalty, Scott Peterson’s sentence resulted in him currently serving a life sentence at Mule Creek State Prison in Amador County. Two weeks after the Netflix documentary American Murder: Laci Peterson, Scott released his documentary Face to Face with Scott Peterson on Peacock where he tells his side of the story.
Did he really kill his family?
While it’s tempting to go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, as far as the law is concerned, Scott Peterson did kill Laci and Conner. The discovery included 42,000 pages of documents, and the evidence against Peterson included forensic evidence including mitochondrial DNA, weeks of apparent planning, and months of suspicious behavior both before and after the fact.
Peterson admitted to having an affair with Amber Frey, a massage therapist months before the murder of his wife—his wanting to escape his marriage is the perfect motive.
“He looked at me and said, ‘I was kinda hoping for infertility,’” testified Rosemarie Rocha, per a CNN report at the time. When his defense asked if he could have been joking, she replied, “He wasn’t laughing and he wasn’t smiling.”
“It’s horrible,” he told People about how he’s feeling currently about the case. “I was a total a–hole to be having sex outside our marriage.” He continued, “I regret not testifying [at my trial], but if I have a chance to show people what the truth is, and if they are willing to accept it, it would be the biggest thing that I can accomplish right now—because I didn’t kill my family,” he explained.
In 2020, the California Supreme Court overturned his death penalty sentence, citing jury selection errors by the trial judge. He was sentenced to life in prison a year after it was overturned.
In 2024, the Los Angeles Innocence Project took up his case and requested that more than a dozen pieces of evidence from the original investigation undergo new DNA testing. “New evidence now supports Mr. Peterson’s longstanding claim of innocence and raises many questions into who abducted and killed Laci and Conner Peterson,” a statement read. Despite the new documentaries coming out, Scott remains “optimistic and confident” that he will walk free after the new evidence is presented.
