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Date of Birth
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May 4, 1975
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Date of Death
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December 24, 2002
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Location
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Modesto, California
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Cause of Death
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Homicide
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Who She Was
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Her Story
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=””]Her disappearance and later murder gained nation-wide media coverage, and changed laws in regards to murder of an unborn.
Born in Modesto, California, she graduated from California Polytechnic State University, where in 1994, she met Scott Peterson through a friend. They were married two years later, and ran a successful restaurant in San Luis Obispo, California. The couple moved to Modesto in 2000, where she became a substitute teacher.
She disappeared from her Modesto home on Christmas Eve morning 2002, when her husband, Scott Peterson, reported she had taken their dog for a walk while he went fishing in San Francisco Bay. Upon her husband’s return that afternoon, the dog was found in the backyard, where a neighbor had put him earlier that day and she was not at home. At that point, her husband called police about 6:00 pm to report her disappearance. A wide-scale search failed to find her, and the story soon had national media attention, including an episode on “America’s Most Wanted.”
At the time of her disappearance, she was almost eight months pregnant with their unborn son, Conner Peterson, who was due to be born on February 10, 2003. There were numerous unsuccessful searches for her. Police soon learned that her husband had a new romantic interest, Amber Frey, who thought Scott Peterson was unmarried, until learning through news reports of her disappearance. At that point, Frey contacted the police and provided critical information on Scott. Her husband’s unbeknownst participation with Frey in a wiretapped telephone conversation led to further incriminating information from him that she could be dead.
On April 14, 2003, two badly decomposed bodies of a woman and a male fetus washed ashore on the beach of Point Isabel Regional Park at San Francisco Bay, which DNA soon identified as hers and her unborn son’s remains. Four days later, when it was clear the police were focusing on Scott, her husband made an apparent run for the Mexican border, dying his brown hair blonde, growing a goatee, carrying $15,000 in cash, camping equipment and his brother’s borrowed passport. He was arrested in La Jolla, near San Diego and close to the Mexican border, and charged with first-degree murder.
On November 12, 2004, despite a vigorous defense from her husband’s high-profile defense attorney, Mark Geragos, a conviction on both charges was reached and a month later, her husband was sentenced to death. In December of 2005, her mother, Sharon Rocha, was awarded $250,000, the proceeds of her life insurance policy and wrote a book, “For Laci”, describing the circumstances of her death and Scott’s subsequent trial.
The murder of her unborn son, Connor, led the US Congress to pass the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act,” in their honor. In 2020, the California Supreme Court upheld her husband’s conviction but overturned the death sentence due to improper dismissal of some jurors over their disagreement with the death penalty. Her husband is serving a life sentence without parole.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text css=”” el_class=”profile-links-header”]
Memorials
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Articles
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