Karen H. Pittman
Liar, liar, pants on fire: Why Scott Peterson deserves to Frey
By Karen H. Pittman
On one point at least, the pundits have it right: We all know Scott Peterson's breeches were burning, long before now. We all know he was hot as a firecracker for Amber Frey. We all know he's a heinous creep, a complete and total cad, a dirty double-dealing rake. But what we don't all know, the lone remaining riddle tied tight like a Gordian Knot at the heart of this whole rotten affair, is the inconceivable dark truth this mum bum ain't about to tell, known solely to him. The only mystery lingering in the wake of last week's much-publicized courtroom "Amber Alert" lurks behind the one question left hanging on everyone's lips: Is our covetous cad a killer? Is this all-too-human man really an inhuman monster capable of murdering his wife and kid?
On this point, I think the pundits have it wrong, and here's why. Never mind all the talk about how Scott burned to be with Amber. Amber wasn't the thing putting the sting in Scott's pants. What really fired Scott up was Conner, whose unlucky arrival would soon turn his chronic, babe-happy cod-burn into all-night fits of baby burping and heart-burn. Scott was getting the baby blues. And Romeo's crib of fibs was about to be rocked, all right — by reality, the kind that stinks like waste.
As regards Scott's motives, the prosecution is missing the point. Pretty-boy Peterson, being a playboy, had apparently worked himself into such a libidinous lather he could hardly stomach another single night of not being single. With each passing day, he was running an ever-increasing risk of missing out big-time on the big time. Our pathetic Scott had gotten himself into a pregnant pickle that was now growing every bit as large as Laci's stretched, marked belly. As the hour of blessed deliverance drew nigh, our unhappy pappy grew desperate — for real deliverance. Contrary to the prosecution's theory that Peterson was sniffing around Frey in order to hunker down with her, our hairy dog Scottie, who had already strayed, was now hankering to prowl. He had tasted blood again, a delicacy which had not tinged his palate for eight long months, and now he was hard on the scent.
So the only thing Scott's rabid XXX-mas fling with the Amber-dexterous blonde accomplished was to whet his blood-thirsty chops. Thus excessively fomented, thus frustrated in the extreme, he woke one fine December morning to find himself caught between a rock and a soft place, between Brooks Island and the shore. How else was a poor, tied-down, dissolute Don Juan to unctuously slip past the surly bonds of birth? If the accusations against Scott are true, he likely made the fatal calculation to kill the moment he realized life had handed him a window. But this window was rapidly closing, and once shut, it would never, ever open again. Conner was the sill. Conner was closure, his birth the death of prospects. Whether Scott began working on this complicated moral calculus one month or one week prior to the night of December 23rd is irrelevant. Exactly when and how he killed Laci are irrelevant. The point is, if guilty as charged, he made his choice, and acted on it. At some moment in time not long after hooking up with his therapeutic lady love, he must have resolved to permanently cast off his heavy burdens, one large and one small, sacrificing their two lesser lives for his greater one — which may or may not have included room for Amber Frey.
Amber, then, was something else. She of the magic massaging hands was mere foreplay. Doubtless a tangy appetizer, this fresh tart from Fresno, this juicy hors d'oeuvre from down south, was just the side dish to arouse Scott's craving for the main course. Thanks to her, Peterson's tongue, amply titillated, was now training toward the larger smorgasbord to come.
And make no mistake: Scott's real lust was for the wild life, not for Amber, and it was in this context that Conner presented a huge, seemingly insoluble problem. After all, who is more encumbered than a man endowed with both wife and child? Peterson's penchant for roses, wine, and all things fine was sharply at odds with his truth as a married man poised on fatherhood's verge. His dalliance with Amber was now careening headlong toward tragedy. He would soon be caught in a tight spot from which he could see no right way out. What had begun as an innocent enough fondness for chicks on the side had now evolved into an advanced predilection, an evil, sinister hunger, spawned by the lecherous beast raging inside him. This awful colossus of longing kept getting bigger and bigger until it could only be fed with one object, and one object alone — not with Amber Frey, but with his wife's weighty bulk. From then on, if my premise is correct, it was simply a matter of time. Laci and her precious cargo would soon be taking a steep, deep leap. She and her bundle of boy had turned into a real drag, and if Scott was going to keep his head, hers would have to go. After all, what alternative had he? It was either get this baggage off his back by dropping it like an anchor into that bracing bay, or else.
And it was the "or else" he couldn't bring himself to contemplate.
As for Amber's daughter, Ayianna, she was at worst a minor annoyance, a mosquito whose prick he could easily sidestep by walking away. Scott, like all dalliers, was free at any time to flee that young girl's sweet, resilient bondage, knowing full well he would never really be forced to snap back against his will. Bound neither by mammon nor love, tethered neither by the hard persistent tugging of purse strings nor by the softer elastic wrenching of heart strings, Scott Peterson with Amber Frey would be, for all intents and purposes, a free man. This also perfectly clarifies why he was apparently backpedaling from the idea of marrying his puff-voiced paramour, who sounds strangely as if she'd just inhaled helium.
But Scott knew what every man who sires children must know: Blood daddies don't slide by so effortlessly. They don't get off Scott free, the way paper daddies do. Deadbeat dads are regularly hell-hounded with all the fury of their countless women scorned. With Laci alive, he'd be on the hook for at least 18 years. And in the Peterson household, money, like the shadow noose closing round Laci's painfully raw, stuck-out neck, was tight, and getting tighter all the time.
The irony is, of course, his yen for freedom ultimately caged him, and his yearning for the high life may yet wind up destroying him.
If nothing else, Scott's own time line should do him in. As California native Charlotte Baker, who has pried this case apart with surgical steel tongs, notes, "The most important fact in the entire Peterson story is the known time of his departure from the house on December 24th." She goes on to explain, "[The accused] puts himself still in the house at 9:48 AM" — the very moment when Martha Stewart fluffed her first "meringue" on TV. Cell phone records suggest Scott was still "either in the house or very close to it at 10:08." At that time, says Peterson, Laci, who was then dressed in "black pants and a white shirt," was "mopping the kitchen floor." But, as Baker points out, by 10:18, "The dog was already back at the house, muddy and dragging its leash!"
According to Baker: "This means it is utterly impossible that Laci finished mopping the floor, changed into the clothing in which her body was ultimately found, leashed up the dog, [then] went out walking toward the park with no jacket (in 50-degree weather), no keys, no purse . . . and was captured and dragged off by unknown assailants — [all within a span of] ten minutes!"
She also offers a theory as to how and when Scott killed his wife. Insisting Peterson waited to commit his "deadly deed" until after Laci started undressing for bed on the evening of the 23rd, she draws a harrowing picture of premeditated cowardice, noting Laci's torso was recovered without her shirt but with her bra and the tattered remains of the beige pants her half-sister remembers seeing her dressed in earlier that evening. Yet the blouse she was sporting that night was discovered the next day by investigators on her bedroom floor. Baker cogently argues that the physical "evidence" the experts deny exists is buried within this "otherwise negligible detail" — that Laci was not wearing her shirt when searchers fished her out of the bay. Why is this tidbit so damning? Because it suggests an approximate time and method. Because it suggests that Scott slithered up behind his wife and strangled her while she was pulling her top up over her head. Because it suggests that Laci did what anyone would do: Swallowing mouthfuls of fabric, she fought for her very life — and it was during this pitched battle that our wild mother cat clawed those pesky little nicks and abrasions into Scott's hands. Death by asphyxiation also explains why little or no blood was left on the scene.
Her advice for the prosecution? Destazio and team would do well to remember her mantra, "It all rests on those ten minutes!" Add to that the "coincidence" of Laci's and Conner's bodies both washing up separately "one mile from Brooks Island, where [Scott] told everybody in the world he was fishing," and we have a case that really does look like "the slam dunk" the DA said it was.
Baker also seconds my notions about Conner. "You have it exactly right [when you say] Conner was what had to be gotten rid of — and [Scott] certainly couldn't wait until the boy was born." Instead, for Baker's part, he chose "to kill both birds with one stone, [since] Laci had [already] become the proverbial albatross anyway, with or without Conner." But, as she somberly reminds us, "Conner was the triggering element."
The mundane, moronic talking points of TV panelists notwithstanding, Scott Peterson's lies are probative. They do go to the question of guilt. They show us something besides the obvious. If nothing else, they paint an unflattering portrait of an incredibly self-obsessed, unbelievably unbelievable man. In Peterson we see not only a pathological liar, but also a consummate confidence artist who is beyond all reasonable doubt a rank sociopath, too. And yes, this blameworthy cad is precisely the kind of man-ster who is capable of killing his wife and kid.
So no, a liar does not a murderer make. But a philandering liar who incriminates himself with his own trumped-up time line is no less a murderer for either his deceitfulness or his folly. If Charlotte Baker's hypothesis is accurate, as this commentator believes it is, then Scott's crotch deserves to frey, courtesy of the California Department of Corrections. Burn, baby-killer, burn. As far as I'm concerned, Scott Peterson is one lying mother-chucker.
© Karen H. Pittman
On one point at least, the pundits have it right: We all know Scott Peterson's breeches were burning, long before now. We all know he was hot as a firecracker for Amber Frey. We all know he's a heinous creep, a complete and total cad, a dirty double-dealing rake. But what we don't all know, the lone remaining riddle tied tight like a Gordian Knot at the heart of this whole rotten affair, is the inconceivable dark truth this mum bum ain't about to tell, known solely to him. The only mystery lingering in the wake of last week's much-publicized courtroom "Amber Alert" lurks behind the one question left hanging on everyone's lips: Is our covetous cad a killer? Is this all-too-human man really an inhuman monster capable of murdering his wife and kid?
On this point, I think the pundits have it wrong, and here's why. Never mind all the talk about how Scott burned to be with Amber. Amber wasn't the thing putting the sting in Scott's pants. What really fired Scott up was Conner, whose unlucky arrival would soon turn his chronic, babe-happy cod-burn into all-night fits of baby burping and heart-burn. Scott was getting the baby blues. And Romeo's crib of fibs was about to be rocked, all right — by reality, the kind that stinks like waste.
As regards Scott's motives, the prosecution is missing the point. Pretty-boy Peterson, being a playboy, had apparently worked himself into such a libidinous lather he could hardly stomach another single night of not being single. With each passing day, he was running an ever-increasing risk of missing out big-time on the big time. Our pathetic Scott had gotten himself into a pregnant pickle that was now growing every bit as large as Laci's stretched, marked belly. As the hour of blessed deliverance drew nigh, our unhappy pappy grew desperate — for real deliverance. Contrary to the prosecution's theory that Peterson was sniffing around Frey in order to hunker down with her, our hairy dog Scottie, who had already strayed, was now hankering to prowl. He had tasted blood again, a delicacy which had not tinged his palate for eight long months, and now he was hard on the scent.
So the only thing Scott's rabid XXX-mas fling with the Amber-dexterous blonde accomplished was to whet his blood-thirsty chops. Thus excessively fomented, thus frustrated in the extreme, he woke one fine December morning to find himself caught between a rock and a soft place, between Brooks Island and the shore. How else was a poor, tied-down, dissolute Don Juan to unctuously slip past the surly bonds of birth? If the accusations against Scott are true, he likely made the fatal calculation to kill the moment he realized life had handed him a window. But this window was rapidly closing, and once shut, it would never, ever open again. Conner was the sill. Conner was closure, his birth the death of prospects. Whether Scott began working on this complicated moral calculus one month or one week prior to the night of December 23rd is irrelevant. Exactly when and how he killed Laci are irrelevant. The point is, if guilty as charged, he made his choice, and acted on it. At some moment in time not long after hooking up with his therapeutic lady love, he must have resolved to permanently cast off his heavy burdens, one large and one small, sacrificing their two lesser lives for his greater one — which may or may not have included room for Amber Frey.
Amber, then, was something else. She of the magic massaging hands was mere foreplay. Doubtless a tangy appetizer, this fresh tart from Fresno, this juicy hors d'oeuvre from down south, was just the side dish to arouse Scott's craving for the main course. Thanks to her, Peterson's tongue, amply titillated, was now training toward the larger smorgasbord to come.
And make no mistake: Scott's real lust was for the wild life, not for Amber, and it was in this context that Conner presented a huge, seemingly insoluble problem. After all, who is more encumbered than a man endowed with both wife and child? Peterson's penchant for roses, wine, and all things fine was sharply at odds with his truth as a married man poised on fatherhood's verge. His dalliance with Amber was now careening headlong toward tragedy. He would soon be caught in a tight spot from which he could see no right way out. What had begun as an innocent enough fondness for chicks on the side had now evolved into an advanced predilection, an evil, sinister hunger, spawned by the lecherous beast raging inside him. This awful colossus of longing kept getting bigger and bigger until it could only be fed with one object, and one object alone — not with Amber Frey, but with his wife's weighty bulk. From then on, if my premise is correct, it was simply a matter of time. Laci and her precious cargo would soon be taking a steep, deep leap. She and her bundle of boy had turned into a real drag, and if Scott was going to keep his head, hers would have to go. After all, what alternative had he? It was either get this baggage off his back by dropping it like an anchor into that bracing bay, or else.
And it was the "or else" he couldn't bring himself to contemplate.
As for Amber's daughter, Ayianna, she was at worst a minor annoyance, a mosquito whose prick he could easily sidestep by walking away. Scott, like all dalliers, was free at any time to flee that young girl's sweet, resilient bondage, knowing full well he would never really be forced to snap back against his will. Bound neither by mammon nor love, tethered neither by the hard persistent tugging of purse strings nor by the softer elastic wrenching of heart strings, Scott Peterson with Amber Frey would be, for all intents and purposes, a free man. This also perfectly clarifies why he was apparently backpedaling from the idea of marrying his puff-voiced paramour, who sounds strangely as if she'd just inhaled helium.
But Scott knew what every man who sires children must know: Blood daddies don't slide by so effortlessly. They don't get off Scott free, the way paper daddies do. Deadbeat dads are regularly hell-hounded with all the fury of their countless women scorned. With Laci alive, he'd be on the hook for at least 18 years. And in the Peterson household, money, like the shadow noose closing round Laci's painfully raw, stuck-out neck, was tight, and getting tighter all the time.
The irony is, of course, his yen for freedom ultimately caged him, and his yearning for the high life may yet wind up destroying him.
If nothing else, Scott's own time line should do him in. As California native Charlotte Baker, who has pried this case apart with surgical steel tongs, notes, "The most important fact in the entire Peterson story is the known time of his departure from the house on December 24th." She goes on to explain, "[The accused] puts himself still in the house at 9:48 AM" — the very moment when Martha Stewart fluffed her first "meringue" on TV. Cell phone records suggest Scott was still "either in the house or very close to it at 10:08." At that time, says Peterson, Laci, who was then dressed in "black pants and a white shirt," was "mopping the kitchen floor." But, as Baker points out, by 10:18, "The dog was already back at the house, muddy and dragging its leash!"
According to Baker: "This means it is utterly impossible that Laci finished mopping the floor, changed into the clothing in which her body was ultimately found, leashed up the dog, [then] went out walking toward the park with no jacket (in 50-degree weather), no keys, no purse . . . and was captured and dragged off by unknown assailants — [all within a span of] ten minutes!"
She also offers a theory as to how and when Scott killed his wife. Insisting Peterson waited to commit his "deadly deed" until after Laci started undressing for bed on the evening of the 23rd, she draws a harrowing picture of premeditated cowardice, noting Laci's torso was recovered without her shirt but with her bra and the tattered remains of the beige pants her half-sister remembers seeing her dressed in earlier that evening. Yet the blouse she was sporting that night was discovered the next day by investigators on her bedroom floor. Baker cogently argues that the physical "evidence" the experts deny exists is buried within this "otherwise negligible detail" — that Laci was not wearing her shirt when searchers fished her out of the bay. Why is this tidbit so damning? Because it suggests an approximate time and method. Because it suggests that Scott slithered up behind his wife and strangled her while she was pulling her top up over her head. Because it suggests that Laci did what anyone would do: Swallowing mouthfuls of fabric, she fought for her very life — and it was during this pitched battle that our wild mother cat clawed those pesky little nicks and abrasions into Scott's hands. Death by asphyxiation also explains why little or no blood was left on the scene.
Her advice for the prosecution? Destazio and team would do well to remember her mantra, "It all rests on those ten minutes!" Add to that the "coincidence" of Laci's and Conner's bodies both washing up separately "one mile from Brooks Island, where [Scott] told everybody in the world he was fishing," and we have a case that really does look like "the slam dunk" the DA said it was.
Baker also seconds my notions about Conner. "You have it exactly right [when you say] Conner was what had to be gotten rid of — and [Scott] certainly couldn't wait until the boy was born." Instead, for Baker's part, he chose "to kill both birds with one stone, [since] Laci had [already] become the proverbial albatross anyway, with or without Conner." But, as she somberly reminds us, "Conner was the triggering element."
The mundane, moronic talking points of TV panelists notwithstanding, Scott Peterson's lies are probative. They do go to the question of guilt. They show us something besides the obvious. If nothing else, they paint an unflattering portrait of an incredibly self-obsessed, unbelievably unbelievable man. In Peterson we see not only a pathological liar, but also a consummate confidence artist who is beyond all reasonable doubt a rank sociopath, too. And yes, this blameworthy cad is precisely the kind of man-ster who is capable of killing his wife and kid.
So no, a liar does not a murderer make. But a philandering liar who incriminates himself with his own trumped-up time line is no less a murderer for either his deceitfulness or his folly. If Charlotte Baker's hypothesis is accurate, as this commentator believes it is, then Scott's crotch deserves to frey, courtesy of the California Department of Corrections. Burn, baby-killer, burn. As far as I'm concerned, Scott Peterson is one lying mother-chucker.
© Karen H. Pittman
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
