Scott Peterson says he’s an ‘a-hole’ for cheating on slain wife but maintains innocence

In his first on-camera remarks in two decades, the convicted double murderer Scott Peterson called himself “a total a-hole” for cheating on his pregnant wife, Laci, before her slaying – but he insisted he did not murder her or their unborn son, Conner.

“It’s horrible. I was a total a-hole to be having sex outside our marriage,” the 51-year-old Peterson said in an interview shown as part of a three-part documentary series premiering on the NBC streaming platform Peacock on 20 August, according to People.com . But, during the interview conducted over a video call from California’s Mule Creek state prison, he added: “I didn’t kill my family.”

The docuseries titled Face to Face with Scott Peterson arrives seven months after the Los Angeles Innocence Project (LAIP) announced it had taken up the former California fertilizer salesperson’s claims that his 2004 conviction had been wrongful.

On the docuseries, which partially focuses on the non-profit LAIP’s efforts to overturn that conviction, Peterson also dismisses the police work that preceded the guilty verdict returned against him as a “so-called investigation”.

“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 I can accomplish right now,” said Peterson, who also expressed regret for not having testified at his murder trial.

Laci Peterson’s killing almost instantly drew intense national media coverage in the US, where researchers have found women who are pregnant or recently gave birth are more likely to be murdered – often at the hands of an intimate partner – than die from obstetric causes. She was eight months pregnant when she went missing from her home in Modesto, California, on Christmas Eve 2002.

Investigators then recovered her remains and that of her unborn child in April 2003 in the San Francisco Bay, near a spot where Scott Peterson had said he had been fishing on the day Laci, 27, had disappeared.

Police were deeply suspicious of Peterson. He had engaged in multiple extramarital affairs, including with one woman who has publicly described how he claimed to be a widower before Laci Peterson’s disappearance.

That woman was a key witness when prosecutors tried him for murder. They argued that Peterson smothered his wife in order to pursue a future with his mistress, massage therapist Amber Frey , and then brought her body out to the bay in a newly purchased fishing boat from which he dumped her into the water.

Peterson’s defense team countered that his wife was alive when he left to go fishing on the day she went missing. Taking note of the little forensic science evidence gathered by prosecutors, the defense alleged that Laci was kidnapped, and Peterson was framed for her killing.

Jurors sided with prosecutors, who presented a wealth of circumstantial evidence, and convicted Peterson. They also sentenced Peterson to the death penalty after 12 hours of deliberations.

Related: Los Angeles Innocence Project takes Scott Peterson case up 21 years after wife’s murder

The California state supreme court took the death penalty off the table for Peterson after finding potential jurors were improperly dismissed from the case for indicating that they objected to capital punishment. Yet the court upheld the conviction and re-sentenced Peterson to life without the possibility of parole.

Court filings in January from Peterson’s LAIP attorneys said there had been new evidence which supported his “claim of actual innocence” and introduced “many questions into who abducted and killed Laci and Conner Peterson”. The filings stopped short of saying what the new evidence is.

A separate documentary about the case, American Murder: Laci Peterson, debuts Wednesday on Netflix. In a preview of that film, Laci Peterson’s mother, Sharon Rocha, recalled hoping that her former son-in-law was not simply “filling her [daughter] with crap” when she became enchanted with him after meeting him while he worked at a cafe that she frequented.

And since then, Rocha said: “I have learned to go with a gut feeling.”