The Reel Review
Just a week after the debut of Netflix’s American Murder: Laci Peterson, a three-part docuseries recapping Scott Peterson’s 2002 double murders of his eight months pregnant wife Laci and their unborn child Connor, Peacock has released its docuseries about Peterson and his family’s efforts to overturn that conviction based on what they say is possible evidence from a burglary that had occurred across the street from the Peterson home that detectives omitted in the trial – something detectives vehemently deny as false.
Investigative journalist/co-director Shareen Anderson, who worked on A&E’s 2017 docuseries The Murder of Laci Peterson, interviews Scott Peterson from Mule Creek Station Prison, where he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. While a now much older Peterson expresses his regret at not testifying at his trial, something his attorneys advised him not to do after a disastrous private mock interview, he really says nothing new. His appearance in the docuseries is little more than a hook to draw in viewers.
Instead, the majority of the focus is on Scott’s sister-in-law Janey Peterson, who since his conviction has become a lawyer and taken on the mission to clear Scott’s name and free him from prison. Whereas some details about the alternative burglary theory are intriguing, they still pale in light of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence – Peterson’s buying a boat just a couple of weeks before Laci’s disappearance, his internet search history of tidal patterns in San Francisco Bay, and GPS tracking that confirmed that Scott was at the Berkeley marina (more than an hour and a half drive from their home) on the afternoon of Laci’s disappearance and near the section of the bay where, months later, Laci and Connor’s badly decomposed bodies would wash ashore. The docuseries’ absence of interviews with Amber Frey, with whom Scott had started an affair (initially he lied saying he was single, and later, telling her before Laci’s actual disappearance that his wife was “lost”), makes this docuseries look very flimsy and one-sided.
REEL FACTS
• After losing in its attempt to get court-mandated DNA testing on 17 pieces of possible evidence in May 2024, The LA Innocence Project, a non-profit legal advocacy group which has been working to prove Scott Peterson did not kill his wife and unborn child, is awaiting another ruling from the judge on whether a piece of duct tape found on Laci’s body can be DNA tested.
• Scott Peterson theorizes that criminals burglarizing a house across the street kidnapped and killed Laci and her unborn child, but the convicted burglars said the break-in occurred on December 26th, two days after Laci went missing.
• Authorities fearing Scott Peterson was fleeing to Mexico arrested him on April 18, 2003 in San Diego. Peterson had dyed his hair blond and grown a goatee and had thousands of dollars in cash and his brother’s drivers license in his possession when he was arrested.
Video & Photo
