Scott Peterson Finally Breaks His Silence on the Murder of His Wife & Unborn Child

It was one of the most watched murder trials at the turn of the century. Scott Peterson is now finally speaking decades after his wife was killed and he was convicted of her murder. He maintains that he didn’t do it and his defense has resurfaced thanks to the LA Innocence Project.

Laci’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.

Related: Inside Scott Peterson’s burglary theory

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.

Who else could’ve killed Laci?

The LA Innocence Project is looking into a potential burglary that happened across the street from the Peterson’s home in December in Stanislaus County. This is known as the Medina Burglary Theory and suggests Laci encountered burglars and they killed her for fear of being identified.

“The burglary could have occurred about the same time Laci went for a walk,” investigative journalist Mike Gudgell explained in Peacock’s Face to Face with Scott Peterson. “It’s possible that Laci confronted the burglars, or saw the burglars, or the burglars saw her and were worried about whether she would call the police. So either one of those scenarios could have triggered a panic that led to her abduction.” 

In Face to Face, Scott offered up his own theory of what happened to his wife. “There were a lot of people in that burglary,” Scott said in Face to Face 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.”

A neighbor named Tom Harshman recounted seeing a young pregnant woman being forced into a car on December 24 (when he called the police on the 28th, he claimed the incident took place four days prior). “I remember all that,” Harshman recalled in the Peacock 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.”

But investigators said that the burglary in question took place sometime between December 24 and 26, and two people were even arrested, Steven Todd and Donald Pearce.