Scott Peterson Claims Burglars Were Actually Behind the Murder of His Wife Laci

Scott Peterson, who was convicted of murdering his wife Laci and their unborn child in 2004, maintained his innocence and put forth alternate theories regarding the death of his wife in the new docuseries Face to Face With Scott Peterson.

Directed by Sharon Anderson, the three-part series focuses on these alternate theories and features Scott’s first interview in over 20 years. The biggest question mark he, and others, raise surrounds a burglary that took place across the street from the Peterson home the morning Laci disappeared.

“There were a lot of people in that burglary,” Scott said in a video call from Mule Creek State Prison in California, where he’s serving life without parole. “And I believe that Laci went over there to see what was going on. And that’s when she was taken.”

Laci went missing on Dec. 24, 2002: Scott had left that morning after breakfast to go fishing, and later that day, a neighbor found their dog wandering alone in front of the couple’s house in Modesto, California. The burglary took place sometime between Dec. 24 and 26, and two people were even arrested, Steven Todd and Donald Pearce.

But authorities nixed any possible link to Laci’s disappearance, and the judge who oversaw Soctt’s case didn’t allow any evidence related to the burglary to be included. Prosecutors had successfully argued that the burglary took place after Laci’s disappearance.

But in Face to Face, one of the Petersons’ neighbors, Diane Jackson, said she remembered driving home on Dec. 24 and seeing three people in front of the burgled home with a van. Though she dismissed it at the time, she later reached out to the police to tell them about it after Laci disappeared. 

Similarly, a man named Tom Harshman said he saw a young pregnant woman being forced into a car on Dec. 24 (he called the police with his story on the 28th and claimed the incident took place four days prior). “I remember all that,” Harshman recalled in the series. “We’d saw a girl, and she was pregnant, and she was in a van, and we were worried about her. She had to pee, so they took her over to a fence and forced her back in the van, and they were kind of manhandling her, and she was kind of frightened.”

Another point of contention regards blood found on a mattress in a burnt-out orange van that police believed might’ve been tied to Laci’s disappearance and death. At the time, however, authorities discounted any DNA testing of the blood splatter, and even recently, a California court denied a request to retest the mattress for DNA results. (The request was made by the Los Angeles Innocence Project, a nonprofit that started reviewing Scott’s case earlier this year.)

“It basically comes down to: There was a crime. There’s DNA. They should probably find out whose DNA it is. Very simple,” Bryan Spitulski, a former arson investigator of the Modesto Fire Department, said in Face to Face. 

Throughout Face to Face, Scott argued that Modesto police essentially zeroed in on him as the prime suspect and were not interested in other possibilities. “It was the evidence they decided to ignore and to go with the theory,” he said, adding near the end of the episode: “I wasn’t the last one to see Laci that day. There’s so many credible witnesses who saw her walking.”