Scott Peterson Maintains Innocence in Peacock’s ‘Face to Face’ Docuseries on Laci Peterson’s Murder

Peacock’s true-crime docuseries Face to Face With Scott Peterson has premiered with a focus on alternate theories around who and what could have caused the shocking 2002 murder of Laci Peterson.

How to Watch 'Face to Face With Scott Peterson': The Convicted Murderer's First On-Camera Interview in 21 Years

The three-parter directed by Shareen Anderson sees Scott Peterson deniying killing his pregnant wife and their unborn child, aiming to undercut the initial Modesto police investigation and the prosecution’s case during his original 2003 trial. In 2004, Scott was convicted of the murders of Laci, who was eight months pregnant, and their unborn child, Conner. His death sentence was overturned in 2020 and reduced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In 2024, the Los Angeles Innocence Project took over Scott’s case , and the nonprofit began investigating his case around the 20th anniversary of his conviction.

The Face to Face With Scott Peterson series, now streaming all episodes , focuses on alternate theories, namely turning its focus to burglars of a house across the street from the Peterson home on the morning of Laci’s disappearance.

“You know, there was a burglary across the street from our home. There were a lot of people in that burglary. And I believe that Laci went over there to see what was going on. And that’s when she was taken,” Scott tells Anderson via a video call from Mule Creek State Prison in California during his first jailhouse interview in 20 years.

Modesto detectives conceded a next-door burglary had taken place, and two suspects had been arrested. But the original court judge disallowed evidence of the burglary incident being presented to the trial jury, as the prosecution argued the home invasion took place two days after Laci’s disappearance , and while the neighborhood was presumably swarming with searchers, police and satellite media trucks after the sensational disappearance of the young and pregnant mother became national news.

The true-crime series features conversations with former Modesto Police Department lead detective Al Brocchini, detective Jon Buehler, Scott’s sister-in-law Janey Peterson and sister Susan Caudillo, and former ABC News producer Mike Gudgell, an investigative journalist who argued the burglary was never properly investigated.

“I don’t think the police looked at the burglary enough to understand the tie-in to Laci’s disappearance,” Gudgell says in the docuseries. One neighbor of the Petersons, Diane Jackson, says she was driving home on Dec. 24 and saw three people in front of the burgled home with a van.

Jackson didn’t think much of the initial incident, she says, but did reach out to the police when she heard about Laci’s disappearance. Eventually two suspects, Steven Todd and Donald Pearce, were arrested as burglars in the next-door break-in, but they were quickly dismissed as having any link to Laci’s case.

“It was the evidence they decided to ignore and to go with the theory,” claims inmate Scott in the docuseries about solving the burglary but not tying it to the missing persons case, accusing the Modesto police of having tunnel vision in trying to prove his guilt.

The Peacock series comes seven months after the L.A. Innocence Project, which works to exonerate those it believes are innocent of crimes in which they were convicted, said it was reviewing Scott’s case with an eye to testing DNA evidence from the original murder trial and possibly getting a new trial.

That DNA testing is another point of focus in the Face to Face With Scott Peterson series — an investigation into a blood-stained mattress found in a burnt-out orange van that the Modesto police had been searching for, which could have been tied to possible killers.

Bryan Spitulski, a former arson investigator with the Modesto Fire Department, says in the docuseries that he found a trace of blood on the mattress in the van during initial testing. But the Department of Justice discounted the apparent blood splatter in subsequent testing. “It basically comes down to: There was a crime. There’s DNA. They should probably find out whose DNA it is. Very simple,” Gudgell argues.

A California court recently denied a request by the L.A. Innocence Project to retest the mattress for DNA results.

The Peacock series also offers phone testimony from Tom Harshman, a former reserve officer who called the police on Dec. 28, 2002, to report seeing a young pregnant woman being forced into a van four days earlier. “I remember all that. We’d said 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,” Harshman tells series’ investigator and executive producer Anderson via a taped phone call.

Upset by what he had seen, Harshman says he followed up two phone calls to the Modesto police department by going in person to offer his hotline tip. Asked if he recalled a visit by Harshman, Buehler, the former Modesto PD detective, dismissed his claims. “There were a lot of phantom sightings from people, and things. As far as that being a specific one, I never heard anything about that,” he says in the docuseries.

Neighborhood witnesses also say they saw the pregnant wife walking her dog on the day of her disappearance, after her husband had left to go on what Scott had claimed was a fishing trip.

The docuseries spoke to Gary Ermoian, a Modesto private investigator hired by Peterson’s family at the time to help crack Laci’s disappearance. He claimed to have canvassed the neighborhood and one local resident, Sue Maldonado, says in the docuseries that on Dec. 24, 2002, she and her husband had been driving in the neighborhood “in the morning” and saw a “very pregnant lady” struggling with her dog, a golden retriever, before driving on.

The Moldanados later called the Modesto police to report seeing Laci after her disappearance became national news, but say officers never visited their home to take follow-up evidence. Another resident on the Peacock series, Frank Aguilar, was in his car when he claimed to have also spotted Laci. “She was walking towards the park, her dog like a golden, brownish retriever,” he says. A third resident, Vivian Mitchell, tells the Face to Face series she saw Laci from her kitchen window walking across the street. “The dog was a beautiful golden retriever,” Mitchell says.

Ermoian also found a fourth local resident, Diana Campos, who claims to have seen a woman walking a golden retriever dog at around 10:45 a.m., just as she was about to start her work shift. “I don’t believe the Modesto police were following the same leads as I was. The police, I believe, were already focused on Scott,” Ermoian says.

Scott adds toward the end of the first episode: “So, I wasn’t the last one to see Laci that day. There’s so many credible witnesses who saw her walking,” before adding that the police dismissed reports of Laci sightings without fully investigating them.

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The Face to Face With Scott Peterson docuseries also touches on the marriage between Laci and Scott, which early on appeared perfect and storybook. But the Peacock series reveals that nearly a week after Laci’s disappearance, Modesto police got a phone call from Amber Frey, claiming to be Scott’s girlfriend.

The police used Frey to reel Peterson in during 29 hours of wiretapped phone calls and, ultimately, used the girlfriend as a motive to explain Laci’s murder during his trial.

Peterson said he regrets “cheating on Laci,” but insists the phone calls with Frey were an attempt to keep his mistress away from the attention of the public, the media and the police to avoid imperiling the ongoing search for Laci.

“The search for Laci is going to stop as soon as the police officers, and the public, know I was having sex with another woman,” Peterson says of the time bomb he tried to keep hidden. When his adultery was revealed, the focus dramatically shifted from questioning where Laci was to Scott’s guilt.

During the docuseries, the former Modesto police investigators speculate that Scott strangled his wife in their home to open the way for a new life with Frey, and got rid of her body in the San Fransisco Bay using a fishing boat he’d bought.

But with only circumstantial evidence, and the lack of a bloody crime scene or cleanup to point to — and Laci having yet to turn up, dead or alive — no arrest took place. That all changed on April 14, 2003, when the Modesto police found Laci’s decomposed body on a shoreline in the San Francisco Bay, and that of her unborn baby, Connor.

On April 18, Scott was arrested at a golf course entrance in San Diego as the Modesto police believed he was set to flee to Mexico. “I was never running from the police. I was always in contact with them,” he says when asked if he had been making a getaway.

Asked about the day of his arrest, where he showed a calm veneer that many took as evidence of a psychopathic personality, Scott says: “When my family was having rough times, we always did something. We’d go play golf or we go out, you know, fishing off of San Diego and that stuff. That’s how we relate. That’s how we’ve always gotten together. We never talked about the rough times, we’d just go do things together. It may seem odd to other people, but we’re not guys who talk.”

He continues, “That day, I was headed to Torrey Pines golf course to play golf with my brothers and my dad. We just wanted to get together that day, and be together. And then when I got on the road, those who I thought were reporters from — I was guessing tabloid reporters — started to follow me, I didn’t want a picture of me being taken, splashed on a tabloid, just could imagine what the headlines were. I had no concept of the police following me around.”

Ahead of his trial, Scott and his family hired entertainment litigator Mark Geragos. During the trial, Geragos took direct aim at Modesto police officer Brocchini for inconsistencies in his testimony, including the investigator’s claim no one knew about Scott’s new speedboat.

“[Laci] absolutely did. We looked at the classifieds together. She came down to the warehouse to take a look at it,” Scott says in the docuseries.

Brocchini, appearing on the Peacock series, admits he had eliminated some evidence from a police report around the speedboat. But tripping up the Modesto police wasn’t enough for Geragos to prove Scott’s innocence before the trial jury, as he was ultimately found guilty of the twin murders and sent to death row, which was ultimately reduced to life in prison without parole.

Frey appearing on the witness stand to claim Scott had planned his wife’s murder, and having wiretapped phone calls to back her evidence, proved devastating to the defense’s case. Scott now says that not testifying in his own defense, along with evidence of neighborhood Laci sightings and of the burglary across the street from the Peterson’s home not being heard by the trial jury, also undermined his case.

“Now I look back on some of the things we’ve learned, some of the things we’re still learning during the trial, kind of wondering, ‘Gosh, if I’d been more patient or whatever, everything could have been different,’” Scott says in the docuseries.

“If I have a chance to get the reality out there, I have a 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. And that would be the biggest thing that I can accomplish right now,” he adds.

Face to Face With Scott Peterson ends with Anderson asking the convicted murder what he remembers about his life two decades earlier, before the murder of Laci captivated Americans and the media covered his trial from beginning to end. “Every moment is so real, so tactile and still there; the smells and the light and the sound and when I said goodbye to Laci … and then my family was gone,” Peterson says.

“I drove away expecting to come back that afternoon and have a wonderful Christmas together after we both had fun mornings. And they were gone. And it’s still very, very present. But there are certainly times that I become a wreck. Excuse me, I’m trying not to be too emotional while I’m out here in the main room of the prison,” he adds.

Face to Face With Scott Peterson , which is now streaming on Peacock, follows on the heels of another deep dive into the sensational 2002 murder case on Netflix, American Murder: Laci Peterson .

Previously, the 2017 A&E docuseries The Murder of Laci Peterson delved into the possibility of Peterson being innocent, mentioning that police overlooked the burglary despite it coinciding with the day of Laci’s disappearance.

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