Episode 23: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson, I hope everyone had a very happy New Year! Today we are going to start a little series on ‘Men Who Kill Their Wives’. We talked a lot previously about domestic violence and how prevalent it is everywhere. There are a lot of statistics showing that about 40% of female murder victims actually die at the hands of a spouse or lover.

Today I want to look back at a murder that occurred in 2002. Laci Peterson, a sweet young woman, with a beautiful smile, captivated the hearts of the nation when she was reported missing on Christmas Eve by her husband, Scott Peterson. Laci was eight months pregnant and her and Scott had already named their son Conner before his birth. On March 2003, Laci’s and Conner’s remains were discovered just one day apart, over three months after her disappearance.

Listen in to hear the story of Scott, Laci and Connor Peterson…

SHOWNOTES:

• Many times the behavior of these men is not compromising at all. It’s his way or the highway. He also may believe that love justifies sacrificing his wife or his girlfriend. The only way that he can ensure obedience and express authority and power is to kill her. And so that’s why this happens a lot. It reminds me of the Scott Peterson case back from 2002. And of course it’s a little bit different because Laci, his wife, was not having an affair, although she was pregnant and it was his child. Laci and Scott dated for two years and then eventually moved in together. And in November of 02, Laci was seven months pregnant and Peterson met a massage therapist named Amber Fry. He told Amber that he was single. So she had no knowledge that he was married. And so she began to date him not knowing that he had a wife, especially not knowing that he had a child on the way. (05:19)

• Although the autopsy results, they were sealed by the judge, an anonymous press release reported that there was nylon tape around the baby’s neck and a cut on the baby’s body. One day later, Laci’s torso was found and it was about a mile away from where the baby had been located. Now she was severely decomposed. They said to the point that it was even hard to tell by looking at her that it was a human body. So you can only imagine. I mean, we talked about decomposition before. There’s a foul odor and there’s maceration. Sometimes it’s very difficult to tell that it’s even a body. In a lot of cases, we would have insect activity and animal activity that would desecrate that body even more and make someone really hard to be identified. Of course, in these cases, they did DNA to identify Laci and the baby, which they had agreed they were going to name him Connor. But Laci’s head, arms, legs, and internal organs were missing. Like I said, she was severely decomposed, although her cervix was intact. In April of 03, Peterson was arrested. (09:52)

• And then in 05, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. And what I found interesting is, and I didn’t even know until I started doing research, that there’s some pretty recent activity on the case. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 05. Then in August of 2020, so that wasn’t that long ago, because this happened back in 02, they overturned his death penalty and then re-senenced him to life in prison without parole. This was December 8th of 2021. Then he was moved from San Quentin to Mill Creek State Prison in California in October of 2022. These are all fairly new things that have come up on the case October of 2022 when he was moved and then just there in 2021, re-sentenced to life in prison. (15:01)

• So maybe even one of the reasons I decided to go into it because I just, I was appalled at that time that a husband would kill his wife. But then now that I’m in the business, I see how often it does happen. It’s rather scary. And we see it all the time in this line of work. Not all the cases are high profile and not all of them end up on the news. But I can promise you that in your area, even if you live in a small town, it happens often and you may not hear about it. Men killing not only their wives, but also their families. The Chris Watts case is another that really, really interested me. And it was a little more recent than the Lacey Peterson case. But nonetheless, it happens a lot more than you realize. (16:24)

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