Student who ‘douche’ Scott Peterson owed money to before Laci’s murder says he ‘shouldn’t be believed’ in freedom bid

A STUDENT who Scott Peterson owed money before being arrested for the murder of his heavily pregnant wife says the convicted killer’s renewed claims of innocence should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Almost two decades after Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife Laci and their unborn child, two new documentaries have thrust the infamous case back into the spotlight.

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The latest installment, Face to Face with Scott Peterson, premiered on Peacock on Tuesday and features Peterson’s first on-camera interview since 2003.

Now 51, Peterson has maintained his innocence ever since Laci’s disemboweled and decapitated remains washed up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay in April 2003 – almost four months after she was last seen alive.

The horrifying discovery was made just one day after a full-term male fetus was found a short distance away in a marshy area of the Bay that DNA tests later verified was Peterson’s unborn son.

Laci had been eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time of her murder.

Peterson was arrested five days later in San Diego near a golf course 30 miles from the Mexico border.

He told officers he was heading to play golf with his father and brother, but a series of suspicious items were found in his car: survival gear, multiple cell phones, a fake driver’s license, and $15,000 in cash. Peterson had also dyed his dark hair blond.

Police believe Peterson was attempting to disguise himself and had plans to flee to Mexico.

There was no DNA evidence tying Peterson to the crime. Still, prosecutors speculated he’d possibly killed Laci for her $250,000 life insurance policy or because he wanted to escape fatherhood and married life.

Shortly after Laci vanished, it was revealed Peterson was having an affair with another woman, Amber Frey, who would later testify against him at trial.

Peterson was found guilty of the first-degree murder of his wife, as well as the second-degree murder of his unborn son in November 2004.

He was initially sentenced to death but is now serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The long-settled case took an unexpected twist in the summer of 2023 when Peterson contacted the Los Angeles Innocence Project (LAIP) – a nonprofit that helps overturn wrongful convictions – and requested its attorneys re-examine his case.

The group granted the request, and LAIP’s director, Paula Mitchell, told the LA Times earlier this year that Peterson had a “claim of actual innocence that’s supported by newly discovered evidence.”

LAIP cited a mattress found in a burning van near the Peterson home shortly after Laci’s disappearance and duct tape found on her leg as grounds for a new forensic examination, in addition to 13 other items of evidence that could exonerate him.

Netflix aired a new documentary about the Peterson case only last week, American Murder: Laci Peterson.

But in Peacock’s newest offering, Face to Face with Scott Peterson, the man in question renews his claims of innocence first-hand from Mule Creek State Prison, telling filmmakers, “I didn’t kill my family.”

“If I have a chance to get the reality out there, if I have the chance to show people what the truth is and if they’re willing to accept it, maybe that takes a little bit of hurt off my family,” said Peterson.

“And that would be the biggest thing that I can accomplish right now.”

Peacock’s decision to present Peterson with a megaphone has drawn some controversy – much like when the NBC-owned streaming platform filmed a similar project with acquitted accused child killer Casey Anthony in 2022.

Trevor Boelter, who shared a run-in with Peterson when he was a student at Cal Poly Tech University in the late 1990s, told The U.S. Sun he feels conflicted on the matter.

“I mean sensational news is now big business. Every podcast at the top of the charts is true crime, every new Netflix doc,” said Boelter.

“I do find it compelling that if the Innocence Project is taking his case then his side of the story should be told – not to be necessarily believed.

“But when a team like IP takes your case it gives far more credibility to shedding light where it wasn’t before.

He added, “Just because you’re a douche doesn’t mean you’re a murderer – but again that’s for the courts to figure out.”

SCOTT PETERSON: ‘A TOTAL DOUCHE’

During his time at Cal Poly Tech, Trevor, now 48, was a classmate of murdered teen Kristin Smart and was among the very last people to see her alive in May 1996.

Peterson also attended Cal Poly and was speculatively linked to the case during the trial of Smart’s killer, Paul Flores, in 2022.

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In 1997, roughly a year after the disappearance of Smart (whose remains have never been found), Trevor was working for Cal Poly’s student newspaper, The Mustang Daily, where he sold advertising space to local businesses.

One day, he said he received a call from a woman who told him that she and her husband had just opened a new restaurant in the town called The Shack and they were wondering if he could stop by their home to discuss advertisement rates.

Trevor obliged the request and was greeted at the door by the woman, Laci Peterson, who he remembered as “gorgeous and incredibly nice.”

Laci invited Trevor inside and introduced him to her husband, Scott.

Unlike the warm and welcoming Laci, Trevor said Scott was hostile, condescending, and “totally douchey.”

He said: “I go inside and her husband is in there cooking hamburgers, and he’s just the complete opposite of her.

“I remember meeting Laci and thinking, ‘Wow, she’s so pretty, so nice and so friendly.’

“But he wasn’t like that at all, he was totally douchey. He kept saying to me ‘Are you going to make us millionaires bud by putting little ads in your paper?’

“He was just really dismissive and kind of rude. But I thought, ‘Whatever, a sale is a sale.'”

Trevor agreed on a rate with the Petersons and started advertising The Shack regularly in the paper.

Several weeks would pass before Trevor received a call from his manager informing him that the Petersons hadn’t been paying their invoices.

He called Laci, who said she wasn’t sure what happened because Scott handled their finances. She then gave him Scott’s cell phone number and told him to call immediately.

FRIGHTENING THREAT

When Trevor got ahold of Scott, he was driving in his car.

He calmly assured Trevor the “check’s in the post, buddy,” – but no such payment ever arrived.

Consequently, advertisements of The Shack were pulled from The Mustang Daily without warning.

A short while later, Trevor had just come out of a class when his manager called him again.

“Hey, do you remember that couple whose ads we stopped running because they weren’t paying? Well, the husband just came here looking for you and he looked pretty mad,” Trevor recounted the manager telling him.

The manager told Scott that he “had to pay his bills and the issue wasn’t Trevor’s fault,” but it did little to calm Scott Peterson’s anger.

“My boss told me I should watch myself,” recounted Trevor.

“He said, ‘I just don’t want him to come up here and hit you because he was complaining his business had dropped off.’

“But eventually I forgot about it, I didn’t care about it anymore and I graduated and moved to LA.

“Then all of a sudden I kept seeing this guy’s face all over the TV but I couldn’t place who he was.”

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Eventually, the penny dropped: It was Scott Peterson, who in April 2003 was arrested for murdering his wife Laci and their unborn baby boy.

Laci’s dismembered remains and the body of their unborn son were found washed up along San Fransisco Bay. She was reported missing months earlier, having vanished on Christmas Eve 2002.

Peterson, despite protesting his innocence, was found guilty of murder by a jury in 2004 and sentenced to death by lethal injection the following year.

His death sentence was later overturned on automatic appeal in the Supreme Court in 2020, but his conviction was upheld.

Trevor said he couldn’t believe it when he realized it was Peterson who had threatened to harm him over the pulled newspaper ads.

He shared the story on TikTok last year, and the video received more than four million views and 600,000 likes.

PETERSON’S BLANKET DENIALS

Peterson, too, is seeking to share his story and is likely hopeful of making a viral splash.

In conversations with documentarian Shareen Anderson for Face to Face, Peterson opened up about the fallout of the murders and doubled down on his claims of innocence.

He accused Modesto police of being too laser-focused on him as a suspect and ignoring or failing to adequately investigate leads that could’ve exonerated him.

“There are so many instances where there was evidence that didn’t fit the detectives’ theory that they ignored,” Peterson claims in the doc.

“People want the answer they believed in to be the answer.”

During his trial, and periodically in the years since he and his attorneys have raised a theory that a burglary near the Petersons’ home around the time Laci was last seen may have been connected to her murder.

Police contest the break-in occurred days after Laci vanished, but witnesses in the docuseries claim to have seen a suspicious van circling the neighborhood in the days preceding.

One witness sensationally claimed to have seen a pregnant woman being forced into the back of the van, but that claim has not been substantiated.

Peterson still clings to the burglary theory, telling Anderson, “Here was a burglary across the street from our home and I believe that Laci went over there to see what was going on, and that’s when she was taken.”

Of the police’s theory that he killed Laci to escape the commitment of fatherhood, Peterson added: “I just don’t get that argument. That’s just not true.”

In the documentary, Peterson also addresses his affair with Frey.

Of his reasons for withholding the affair’s existence from investigators, Peterson claims he did so because he wanted the search for Laci to continue without distraction.

He also downplayed the nature of his and Frey’s entanglement, saying, “I guess I understand why she tried to turn it into a relationship after the fact and made claims that it was something more. But it simply wasn’t.

“That’s a massive misconception, I think. And I was absolutely wrong. But I embrace the truth on that. It’s a horrible truth.”

PETERSON’S REGRETS

Additionally, Peterson shared with Anderson his reasoning for being caught a stone’s throw away from the Mexico border in the days after the remains of Laci and their son were found.

Explaining the fake ID (which belonged to his brother) and a large amount of cash on his person ($15,000), Petersen said he’d been spending time with his family in San Fransisco, and he had borrowed the ID to get a discount on the golf range.

He also denied attempting to make evasive maneuvers to escape the police, claiming to have mistaken them for paparazzi before his arrest.

Peterson said one of his biggest regrets was allowing attorneys to waive time on his trial instead of presenting more evidence.

“I would not waive time on my trial, and I look back on that now and I wonder if that was the right decision,” he shared.

“They had the evidence of my innocence [… but] It was a nightmare being stuck in county jail.

“Now I look back on some of the things we learned, some of the things we were still learning during the trial, and wondered, gosh, if I had been more prudent or patient or whatever, maybe things would have been different.”

Peterson chose not to testify at his trial.

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BURGLAR THEORY PURSUED

In Face to Face, Peterson’s burglary theory is more rigorously explored in light of new leads uncovered by LAIP.

The burglars convicted in the case in question, Steven Todd and Donald Pearce, have denied any involvement in Laci’s murder and police determined they had watertight alibis for Christmas Eve, when Laci vanished.

Peterson, his attorneys, and Peterson’s sister-in-law, Janey, all point to an alleged criminal network based out of Modesto’s high-crime Airport district that may have been involved in Laci’s disappearance. 

The claims are bolstered in the series by a tip from Modesto resident Tom Harshman, who claims to have called police twice in 2002 to report seeing a pregnant woman being “forced into the back of a van.”

The tip, however, was reportedly not followed up on.

Ex-Modesto detective John Buehler said the department received a lot of “phantom sightings” at the time but didn’t remember hearing about Harshman’s tip.

Buehler said it wasn’t “unexpected” to see Peterson’s case taken up by LAIP, but Al Broccini, a fellow former detective, was less diplomatic, calling the decision “bulls**t.”

“It’s bulls**t,” he said. “There is absolutely no reasonable doubt he did it. [The] jury got it right.”

In May, a judge denied the majority of LAIP’s requests to retest items of evidence for DNA in the case.

Only a strip of duct tape found on Laci’s body was granted permission to be tested.

Should someone else’s DNA be recovered from the strip, it could be enough to grant Peterson a new trial.

In the series, Peterson is asked about his memories of his life with Laci before she vanished and when he was a free man.

“Every moment is so real … and still there,” he said.

“I drove away expecting to come back that afternoon and have our wonderful Christmas together after we both had fun mornings [but] no, they were gone.

“I say goodbye to Laci and then my family was gone.”