Biscayne Bay
I’m talking about my most recent novel. It’s a crime thriller about a man wrongly accused of murdering his wife and unborn baby. What inspired me to write it? I had an inspiration on December 31st of last year, and started writing it on the first. The answer is easy. The Scott Peterson case. Scott Peterson was accused and convicted of murdering his wife and unborn child in Fresno, California and dumping her body in the San Francisco Bay on a fishing trip. It’s a sensitive subject. A lot of people find the mere suggestion that he might be innocent to be offensive. But, a lot of people are unable to look at the case objectively, basing their opinion on, well, ‘he’s a liar and a cheat, therefore he must be a murderer too.’ Um, no, that is a big leap. Ninety-nine percent of the people you might poll believe he is guilty. I fall in to the one percent. Why?
Let’s take it at face value. Let’s say I’m Scott Peterson, and I have a body in my boat. I tell everyone I am going to the San Francisco Bay on a fishing trip, and I go. Where am I going to dump that body? I can’t tell you where I would dump it, but I can certainly tell you where I wouldn’t. But it’s a moot point anyway, because that didn’t happen either way.
The big problem here is that the timeline doesn’t work. Laci Peterson went missing on December 24, 2002, and was discovered floating in the Bay in April of 2003. That’s upwards of four months. Her body was mostly intact with the fetus of the baby floating next to her. If you were to ask a forensic pathologist experienced in crime and accident victims in a marine environment, they would tell you that in the initial phase of decomposition, gasses form internally in the body causing it to float, and as decomposition progresses, the body sinks, and bottom feeders (crustaceans) go to work stripping the flesh within a few days. They generally wouldn’t expect flesh to be present after a week or two. Four months is beyond any logical extreme, even if you were to discount the effects of marine life.
Well somebody dumped her body in the Bay, they just didn’t do it on December 24th, 2002 as the prosecution claims. If it was Scott, he would have had to drive all the way from San Diego, where he was living at the time, pull her body out of a freezer or refrigerator, drive it all the way to San Francisco, and dump it in the very place where the cops already think it is. That makes no sense at all. But it makes perfect sense if the killer was someone other than Scott.
In my book, I infer that, by association, Scott’s girlfriend, Amber Frye, was the killer. Now I don’t actually think Amber Frye is the killer. That said, she did have motive and opportunity, so I think she probably should have been looked at more closely than she was. Actually, the cops didn’t look at anyone else. Scott was the one and only suspect from the day she disappeared.
It didn’t make big news, but it made the news that there was a rash of women disappearing in the Northern California Bay Area. The media stopped short of attributing them to a serial killer. And it wasn’t Scott because they continued after his arrest.
Okay so those are the main points. What is my theory of what happened? I think that Laci Peterson was the victim of a serial killer. But not a random serial killer. I think the the killer was known to Scott, and probably Laci too. It was someone that knew Scott, his situation with Amber Frye, and more importantly knew that he was going on that fishing trip. Laci was likely targeted for some time, but that fishing trip was a golden opportunity for the killer. I think he killed her in her own home, moved the body someplace where he could put it in cold storage to buy some time, and spent the next three or four months scouting out locations in the Bay where he could discretely dump the body, in a location where it would be found. Which, would be the only point of bothering to dump it in the Bay. I think the killer was savvy. He would have been someone the police would have talked to, if they bothered to talk to anyone other than Scott. He needed to maintain an alibi, so he couldn’t be driving around all day and night looking for a place to dispose of Laci’s body on the day when she went missing. He needed to wait until the investigation cooled down.
If I were Mark Geragos, Scott’s defense attorney, I would have hired not one, but two specialized forensic pathologists to testify as to the length of time the body could have been in the water, and viciously clung to that as a defense. I’ve tried reaching out to Scott’s current defense team to share my thoughts, but got no response from them.
