Although he was convicted for the murder of his wife, Laci, Scott Peterson is now spouting his own theory for what happened on Christmas Eve 2002.
Thanks to Face to Face, Peacock’s new true crime docuseries, audiences are dipping their toes back into the case of Scott and Laci Peterson.
The three-part interview-style series has emerged as Peterson gears up to fight for a retrial to overturn his sentence of life in prison without parole for the murder of Laci.
One of the biggest focal points of both the doc and Peterson’s strategy is his theory that his wife was abducted and killed by strangers who were burglarizing a neighboring home.
On the morning Laci disappeared, the house across the street from the Petersons in their neighborhood of Modesto, California, was broken into. Peterson claims the cops didn’t look into this incident when investigating Laci’s whereabouts.
“There were a lot of people in that burglary,” Scott said, “And I believe that Laci went over there to see what was going on. And that’s when she was taken.
“It was the evidence they decided to ignore and to go with the theory. I wasn’t the last one to see Laci that day. There’s so many credible witnesses who saw her walking.”
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One of these witnesses is a man named Tom Harshman, who is featured in Face to Face as someone who saw Laci get into the burglars’ van.
“I remember all that,” Harshman recalled to interviewer Shareen Anderson. “We’d saw 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.”
Despite this theory getting more traction thanks to these testimonies, California police dismissed the burglary angle back in the early 2000s during the peak of the investigation.
Detective Doug Ridenour told The Modesto Bee that two men were arrested in connection to the burglary, and Modesto P.D. believed they had nothing to do with Laci Peterson’s disappearance.
“We’re confident in our minds that we have resolved one crime,” Ridenour stated. “And now we can get back to focusing on Laci’s disappearance.”
You can learn more about Peterson’s differing versions of what happened to Laci as Face to Face with Scott Peterson is now streaming on Peacock. To read more on the case, here are five disturbing details you should know and you can check out the top serial killer documentaries to watch right now.