The Double Life of Scott Peterson: The Alternate Theories — Ep. 3 | MK Confidential

There is a van parked outside 516 Covina Avenue that does not look like it belongs there. Late in the morning of December 24th, 2002, a woman named Diane Jackson is driving home from her hand therapist appointment. Her husband is coming home at noon for lunch and she is thinking about whether she has enough time to make his food. She turns onto Covina Avenue and as she passes the house at 516, she sees three men standing in the front yard. Two of them are at the back of a van parked at the curb. The third is up near the house. All three of them stop what they are doing and turn and look at her as she goes by. She pulls into her own driveway and looks at her watch. 11.40 a.m., 20 minutes to make his food. She can do this. Her first thought about the three men she tells police later is that they are landscapers. Then she changes her mind as she tells Annie. I drove by at, I think it was some time after 11 in the morning and saw this man and two or three people out there and I noticed it only because they noticed me. And I thought, oh, they're not yard workers. I mean, yard workers don't turn up their head and look at you when you're doing your yard work. The van is parked outside 516 Covina, directly across the street at 523 is Scott and Lacey Peterson's home. At this time, 11.40 in the morning on Christmas Eve, no one has reported anyone missing. Diane Jackson does not know she is a witness to anything. She goes inside and makes her husband's lunch. On the Friday after Christmas, Diane hears that the neighbors at 516 were burglarized while they were away. She telephones the Modesto Police Department and tells them what she saw. A detective takes her statement that evening. Three men, an older van parked on the street, doors that opened at the rear. She first thought it was white, she says, and now she thinks it might've been darker, maybe tan or brown. Three weeks later on January 17th, 2003, the Modesto Police Department asks Diane Jackson to come down to the station and there they hypnotize her. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Everyone's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. But what if you're looking to lose weight but are not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those intense side effects? This is why doctors created a weight loss supplement called Lean and the results could be remarkable. Lean says the studied ingredients in their product have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it into energy and to curb your appetite and cravings so that you are not as hungry. But listen, Lean is not for the casual dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created Lean for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose. You could get started with 20% off and free rush shipping, adding Lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit TakeLean.com and enter Kelly for your discount. That's promo code Kelly at TakeLean.com. Diane Jackson is not the only person on that street who reports a vehicle that does not belong there. Around 9.20 on Christmas Eve morning, a city building inspector leaving 516 Covina has to drive around a van to get out. He remembers a white Ford, two doors at the back, paint chipping down to gray primer and a crude wooden roof rack. Minutes later, a woman who often walks that street sees it too, though she's never seen this van before. An unusually long white utility van, no windows along the rear sides, parked in front of the same house, 516. She tells police one other thing. Between about 9.20 and 9.40 a.m., she saw Scott Peterson standing in the bed of his pickup truck in his own driveway. At least five people reported a strange van in that neighborhood around the time Lacey disappeared. Several of the sightings are on Covina at the same hour Scott is loading his truck, but Scott never mentions seeing a van. Five reports with similar descriptions, but nothing definitive. Matt Dalton spent 13 years as a prosecutor, most of it with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. In January 2003, he quits and goes to work for defense attorney Mark Garagos. When Garagos takes Scott Peterson's case, Dalton moves to Modesto and begins investigating Lacey's disappearance for the defense. Garagos rents Dalton an office above the J Street Cafe, a block from the jail. No phone, no fax, no copier, no bed. Dalton sleeps on the floor until something runs across his chest in the dark. After that, he sleeps in a tent indoors. He reads more than 30,000 pages of police reports. It appears there was a van that did not belong, possibly connected to a robbery, in Lacey's neighborhood when she went missing. But can this be linked to Lacey's disappearance? Dalton goes and finds the witnesses, knocking on door after door, making call after call. Six people have told the Modesto Police Department that they saw a very pregnant woman walking a golden retriever on the morning of December 24th. Dalton interviews all six. None of the six witnesses ever testifies. Garagos tells the jury in his opening statement that he will call them, but he doesn't. Dalton says he still does not know why. What the jury hears about these witnesses comes mostly through police officers being questioned by the defense. And even then, the judge tells jurors they can consider those reports only to understand what police did with them, not as proof that the sightings themselves actually happened. Homer Maldonado and his wife, Helen, stopped for gas at a mini-mart on Miller Avenue, near the corner of Covina, Pulling out, they drive west, away from the Petersons' neighborhood and toward town. A few houses past Covina, they pass a young woman. She is, in his words, very pregnant. She is walking a golden retriever and having trouble controlling it. The dog is up on its back legs, front paws on her, as if it were jumping on her. I hope she doesn't fall, Helen says. Later, Maldonado sees Lacey Peterson's photograph, and he is certain it was her. He doesn't know the family, but he finds her brother Brent's number and calls him. On January 1st, he also telephones the Modesto Police Department. No one calls him back, so he drives down to the command post and reports it in person, and is told that a detective will speak with him. Maldonado says no one ever does. He is the only one of the six with a receipt supporting where he says he was and when. Vivian Mitchell is at her kitchen window on La Sombra Avenue at about 10.30 a.m. Christmas Eve morning when she sees a pregnant woman walking a golden retriever. She's in her late 70s, and she has seen the woman and the dog in the neighborhood before. She watches them for about four minutes, she thinks, and she says to her husband, Bill, there's that lady with the pretty dog. Dalton wants her account preserved under oath before trial. It never happens. Vivian dies before the trial begins. Diana Campos is a janitor at the county hospital. On the morning of December 24th, she is outside on a cigarette break at a spot above Moose Park. She sees a pregnant woman walking a golden retriever with two men following behind her, and the dog will not stop barking. Then one of the men in a beanie shouts, shut the ******* dog up. Diana finishes her cigarette and goes back to work. Two days later, she sees a flyer of Lacey. Diana looks at it and thinks, hey, I know that girl. She reports it to security at the hospital where she works, and a Modesto detective comes and takes her statement. She tells him she is real good with faces. A few minutes later, she softens it. She's pretty sure. At about the same time, down at the parking lot at Moose Park, a driving instructor named Leora Garcia is out with a student driver. She hasn't seen anyone walking a dog, but she tells police about a vehicle pulled to the side of the road with a long woman's coat hanging out, caught in the door, and then the vehicle speeds off. Leora got part of the license plate number, Texas plates, in a rainbow frame. She does not say it was a van, or if she did, it does not make it into the report. Years later, when Dalton calls Leora Garcia at home, she remembers it, well, a white van now, she says, with a wooden rack on top. She tells Dalton that she had a terrible feeling watching it drive away. He writes, quote, something about the van frightened her. Russell Graybill has been a mailman for 10 years. For about the last year, his regular route has included Covina Avenue. On December 24th, he delivers the Peterson's mail between 10.35 a.m. and 10.50 a.m., and he can fix that time window because the post office requires him to scan his time as he goes. He tells the police two things, that the side gate is wide open, and that Mackenzie, the dog, does not bark at him. That dog, he says, barks at him every single day from wherever the dog is in the house. But this day, nothing. Graybill does not see Mackenzie anywhere. It strikes him as strange. If Lacey is walking Mackenzie off property past 10.35 a.m., then she is alive after Scott leaves the house for the marina. But Karen's service says the mailman is wrong. She says she personally put the dog back in the Peterson's yard at 10.18, closing the gate behind her. The jury never hears about the allegedly open gate or the dog that did not bark. What the mailman Graybill tells police is written down by hand, and then it gets lost in the mass of paperwork. Thousands of pages are being scanned into the case file. The scanner skips about 10 of them, and those 10 go to the defense in a separate stack that never makes it onto the index of evidence. Peterson's appeal lawyers find them years later going through boxes one page at a time. On the afternoon of December 26th, officers are outside of 523 Covina setting up wooden barricades for crowd control when a woman runs out of the house across the street at 516 screaming that she has been robbed. Susan Medina and her husband have just driven back from Los Angeles. They find their French doors have been kicked in. The safe from their master bedroom is gone, and the dolly from their tool shop out back is sitting on the front porch. The police officer assigned to the Medina burglary writes a supplemental report explaining why he did not go door to door investigating the burglary. Due to the priority given to 523 Covina, he writes, I did not contact neighbors in regards to this incident. On January 2nd, police arrest Steven Todd and Donald Pierce for the Medina burglary. The men live at the same address in Modesto's airport district, the low-income neighborhood that borders the Petersons. An officer sits Steven down to talk about the burglary. Before he can even start, Steven says he had nothing to do with, quote, the woman. The officer asks him what woman he's talking about. The missing woman with the baby, says Steven. The officer's report shows what happens next. He asks Steven again to tell him about the burglary. There is no record of him asking about the missing woman again. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. 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Strangely, exactly when the Medina burglary took place becomes a point of contention. Diane Jackson saw three men in a van outside of that house at 11.40 a.m. on the morning of December 24th. Here's what she told ABC back in 2021. I was coming down Covina towards the park, going past Lacey on one side and Medina's on the other. And I just looked over and there were three guys on Medina's property and a van out front. And the only reason it caught my eye is that they turned around and looked at me, sort of made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. The Medina's came home on the evening of December 26th, and by that point, found it had been broken into. But the accounts do not line up neatly. The burglar, Steven, tells police he went over the fence at 3 a.m. the morning of December 27th. That's clearly incorrect since the Medina's came home and found they'd been burglarized on December 26th. Co-burglar Donald's account put Steven there on December 26th, saying Steven came to him for help moving the safe. And when I interviewed Detective John Buehler in 2021, he gave me still another version of the department's timeline. So he broke into the house on the 25th and he took a bit of property on the 25th, but there was a safe and some tools and other things that he couldn't take on his bike. So he returns home and he's living in a shed behind his friend Don, who's living with his mother. And he tells Don, hey, there's a safe over there. We need to go back over and get that. So they returned on the 26th. And the reason we know that they were there on the 26th is they said they saw the media down the street when they were in the house and it was a big hoopla and they couldn't figure out what it was because they didn't know. The Modesto Police Department settles on December 26th as the date of the burglary and announces it has nothing to do with Lacey Peterson's disappearance. Ted Rollins covered the disappearance for KTVU in San Francisco, reporting live from Covina Avenue. Ted tells A&E the police timeline does not fit what he saw. The problem with that is I was standing outside that house at five in the morning on December 26th. And I would have gone and interviewed the burglars if they were out there because there was nobody outside the front of that house. My head was on a swivel that morning and there is absolutely no way a burglary took place on December 26th during those early morning hours. Stephen had three prior convictions for residential burglary. Dalton, Garagosa's investigator and a former prosecutor, argues this guy should have faced 25 years to life. He got eight years. Donald got 180 days. Both men pleaded guilty to breaking into the Medina house at night on December 27th, a day after the homeowners had discovered the crime. That is three days after Lacey Peterson disappeared. And it is a version of events that puts them nowhere near Covina Avenue on Christmas Eve. Two weeks or so after Lacey Peterson disappears, a lieutenant with the California Department of Corrections named Xavier Aponte hears about an inmate at his prison who has allegedly been talking about Lacey. The inmate is Sean Tenbrick. His brother Adam Tenbrick knows burglar Stephen Todd. Lieutenant Aponte calls the Modesto police tip line twice. He says it takes at least a week before a detective calls him back. Aponte tells a detective that he listened to a recorded call between the Tenbrick brothers. On it, the lieutenant claims, Adam Tenbrick said he had heard that Lacey walked up while Stephen Todd was burglarizing the house and that Stephen threatened Lacey. This is the only alleged account that places Lacey with the burglars across the street. A Modesto detective interviews Sean Tenbrick who denies everything. Lieutenant Aponte says Sean Tenbrick then telephoned his mother asking her to tell Adam to keep his mouth shut because quote, you don't know who you're dealing with. Lieutenant Aponte says he taped that call but he was never called as a witness. And when investigators went looking for that tape years later, it did not materialize. ABC reported this summer that Lieutenant Aponte walked back his story entirely saying he doesn't really know what he heard. Modesto police and the prosecution dispute all of this account. They say there are no reports showing anyone from the department was ever in contact with Lieutenant Aponte. In May of 2003, more than a year before the Scott Peterson trial, the videotaped police interviews with burglars Stephen and Donald are marked for destruction. Prosecutors say the burglary was solved. Both men had confessed and the evidence was destroyed as part of routine procedure. Scott Peterson's defense says that in a capital case evidence potentially connected to an alternate theory should have been preserved. Lacey Peterson was a member of the neighborhood watch group. People who knew her said that if there was somebody untoward in that neighborhood she would have let them have it. But for any of that to matter, she has to have walked up on the burglary while it was in progress and no eyewitness can put her there. On Christmas day, the morning after Lacey Peterson vanishes, a van is found burning in an alleyway a mile and a half from her front door. A Modesto fire investigator works the scene, rules it arson and hands the case to the Modesto police department. In the back is a mattress. A Modesto police evidence technician tests material from that mattress and finds faint evidence of possible blood. His report carries a heading, missing person investigation. Under that he writes Lacey Peterson's case file number. The potential blood sample goes to the state department of justice lab which finds no blood on the mattress. The fire investigation is closed as a separate case entirely. Scott Peterson's defense says it did not learn the van existed until after the trial. No court has found that this van had anything to do with Lacey Peterson and no one has established that it was the same van multiple witnesses reported seeing near the Peterson house. As for the Medina burglary, police reject the idea that it had anything to do with Lacey's disappearance warning, don't put too much stock in vague witness accounts like the one from the lady rushing home to make her husband a sandwich. Here's detective John Buehler to me in 2021. Well, it's pretty rare that a guy doing a property crime is gonna turn into an abductor of a pregnant girl with it's walking a dog. I mean, if Diane Jackson sees a van at 1140 in the morning with three guys in it, but she can't even tell us if it's white, tan or black, it kind of calls into question her viability as a witness. Buehler says both burglars asked to take a polygraph examination because they knew they were going to jail and didn't want other inmates thinking they had killed a pregnant woman and her baby. Buehler also points to other pregnant women in Lacey's neighborhood. Three of them in fact, he interviewed two himself and one of them looked a lot like Lacey Peterson. She was due in January and she walked a mid-sized dog. She too was reportedly placed under hypnosis by the police department in an effort to help her remember her exact activities on the days in question. None of these people that came forward and claimed they saw Lacey there actually knew her. They didn't, they never had a barbecue with her, they'd never been to her house. So it's easy to misplace or misidentify somebody, especially with the coverage going on. Buehler doesn't believe Lacey Peterson was out walking that morning at all. On a trip to Disneyland in November, she had spent part of the day in a wheelchair. Her yoga instructor and her doctor had both told her not to walk at the end of the pregnancy. Her own mother did not believe she had gone walking. And to think this girl that couldn't even move a mop bucket, according to Scott, would go down an uneven grade down to a park with a dog tugging at her when she's unstable on her feet and exhausted from everybody's account, makes it sound to me like she didn't do that walk. As for that mailman, police interviewed Russell Graybill three days after Lacey disappeared. He cannot remember anything unusual about that morning when he sits with the police, even as he specifically remembers the Peterson's gate being open and Mackenzie the dog not barking. Diane Jackson gives her statement within days and then a second one on January 16th, explaining exactly why she was so sure of the time she saw that van, 1140, the morning of Christmas Eve. She can't remember the color. The next day, January 17th, they hypnotize her. Police hypnosis is meant to draw out details a witness cannot otherwise recall. With Diane, investigators want more detail about the men and the van. The defense will later want the same. Diane could make a great defense witness. There's just one problem. In California, hypnosis doesn't just probe a witness's memory. It can effectively end her usefulness as a witness. The rule goes back to a 1982 California Supreme Court ruling, People v. Shirley. Once a witness is hypnotized, it can become too difficult to assess the reliability of her memories. In addition, police here used an unqualified hypnotist. So Diane's statement about the men and the van and the time can be admitted, but she will not be taking the stand as a witness. No other details. A reality Garagos later raises in frustration, accusing the prosecution of intentionally disqualifying her from telling all of her story about the burglary across the street happening in the morning Lacey disappeared. Jackson says the experience ruined her life. Her friends in Modesto treated her as though she had been trying to get Scott Peterson off, she says, when she was only trying to tell the truth. More than 20 years later, she still cannot say what was done to her. Here's what she tells legal analyst Chris Pixley for A&E. I do remember being hypnotized, but I don't remember not being conscious of it. So I don't know, therefore, was I really hypnotized or conscious of the whole thing. I don't know. Even if the Medinas were burglarized on the morning Lacey Peterson went missing, there is not a single witness on the record who can testify the burglars had any interaction with Lacey. By spring, the Scott Peterson case is everywhere in Modesto. Lacey Peterson's face is on posters and shop windows and on the dashboards of cars. And then Scott Peterson changes. He grows a goatee and a mustache and lightens his hair. On April 12th, he answers a classified ad for a 1984 Mercedes Benz and pays $3,600 in cash. He has the DMV paperwork with him. The seller looks at it and sees the name Jacqueline Peterson. That's Scott's mother as the buyer. The seller asks about it. Scott insists the paperwork is right and that Jacqueline is his own name. It was kind of a boy named Sue type name, he says. That's what my parents stuck me with. He adds that he goes by Jack. On April 18th at 1135 in the morning, police arrest Scott Peterson near the Torrey Pines Golf Course in La Jolla. Detective Al Brocchini arrives as Scott is being handcuffed. He later describes the moment to Netflix. He had orange hair, he had an orange goatee. I walk up and he's, Al, tell me it wasn't my wife and baby. You know, I'm like, that's ridiculous. I mean, you know, come on, Scott, you know better than that. Police search his newly purchased Mercedes. They find just under $15,000 in cash, Mexican currency as well. His brother's driver's license, which the arresting detective notes now looks like Scott with his hair lightened. There's camping and survival gear, weapons, four cell phones. Torrey Pines is close to the Peterson family home in San Diego, where Scott said he was visiting. It's also about 30 miles from the Mexican border. Police interview the manager of the Torrey Pines Golf Club where Scott says he was headed. The manager checks the book. Scott Peterson did not have a tea time. His father Lee did. Lee was down for eight o'clock that morning for a foursome. The state says Scott was running for the border. His family says he was going to play golf with his dad. But Scott Peterson's golf days are now over. I'm Megan Kelly. Next time on MK Confidential, the trial of Scott Peterson and my conversation with attorney Mark Garagos. Does he still think his client is stone cold innocent?