The new Netflix docuseries American Murder: Laci Peterson takes a closer look into the murder of Laci Peterson. It included new commentary from several people, including Laci’s mom, Sharon Rocha, who opened up about her concerns regarding Scott Peterson after Laci told her mom she was expecting her first child.
“[Laci] would ask me questions about what it was like to be pregnant, and she was curious, you know, about all of those things,” Sharon, 72, told the cameras during episode 1 of American Murder: Laci Peterson. “I remember after her housewarming, she called me. She was crying at that time because she wanted to get pregnant and [Scott] didn’t. He didn’t want to have a child.”
To Sharon’s surprise, Laci called “about six months later” and said that she and Scott, 49, had started trying to conceive. Sharon explained that she asked Laci about the situation because Laci had told her mother that Scott “didn’t want to” have children.
“[Laci] said, ‘He’s changed his mind. He said he wants to, now,’” Sharon continued.
By July 2002, Laci was pregnant and despite her concerns, Sharon said she was excited for her daughter and son-in-law.
“I was happy for her,” the California native explained in the docuseries. “But for some reason, I just had in the back of my mind that something didn’t feel quite right because he didn’t want to have kids at all, and then, all of a sudden, he did. That concerned me.”
Laci went missing on December 24, 2002, and she was eight months pregnant with her and Scott’s unborn son. Her disappearance resulted in a months-long search, something Scott was cooperative in assisting with at first. It was soon discovered that Scott was having an affair with a woman named Amber Frey, and his affair quickly moved him into the spotlight as the prime suspect.
Four months after she disappeared, Laci’s body was discovered in the San Francisco Bay by a couple who was taking their dog for a walk. The body of her unborn child was found one mile away. Laci’s cause of death was unable to be determined because her body had decomposed too much. However, it was confirmed that Laci’s body had been brutally mutilated. She was decapitated, and her forearms, her right foot and her left leg from the knee down were missing when her body was found.
Scott maintained that he was innocent in Laci’s murder and claimed that he had been fishing the day Laci went missing, but he was arrested four days after the bodies were found. After a high-profile trial that began in 2004, Scott was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder in 2005. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection, but in August 2020, a judge overturned his death penalty sentence after it was determined that the original trial had “a series of clear and significant errors” during juror selection.
In May 2021, a California district attorney stated that she would not be seeking the death penalty in a new filing. Scott’s attorney Cliff Gardner exclusively told In Touch in June 2021 that he was “hopeful” that his client would eventually be released from prison.
Source Agencies
