Producer (27 page)

On April 30, 2002, Mark appeared on our show again.

KING:
Where do we stand with you and the Petersons?

GERAGOS:
I’ve met with them. I’ve talked to Scott, and I’m going to make a decision… very shortly. I’ve met with the parents on a couple
of occasions. They’ve called me up, and I’ve talked to them, and we’ve had some in-depth discussions. And I can tell you that
Scott’s mother especially is a very compelling advocate for her son. I’ve met with Scott, and I’ve talked with the public
defenders. I was up in Modesto yesterday. And I’m going to sleep on it and make a decision.

KING:
What can you give us? Just a couple things, Mark. Can you give us what are the balancing points, what’s for, what’s against?

GERAGOS:
I think he’s already universally been convicted in the court of public opinion. I don’t think there’s anybody that you can
talk to that doesn’t just assume his guilt, and… that’s a part of what presents a challenge… Part of why people go into criminal
defense is to defend the underdog and to try to make it a truly adversarial system. And that is definitely intriguing in this
case.

KING:
So what’s on the downside?

GERAGOS:
The downside is that it’s a monumental undertaking, in terms of time, number one, and effort, and, as well, the other clients
and the impact to the other lawyers in my practice. There are other people that I have to think about, and I suppose that’s
weighed by the fact that—here’s somebody who is truly up against it, in terms of public opinion, if you will. And there’s
a whole lot of factors, others that I won’t even get into, at least on the air.

KING:
Knowing you, Mark, would you say you’re leaning toward helping him?

GERAGOS:
Yes, I would definitely say I’m leaning toward helping him.

On May 1, 2003, Nancy Grace, our guest host that night, took an enraged phone call from Lee Peterson, Scott’s father.

PETERSON:
You are speculating on these facts as much as I am.

GRACE:
(Peterson continues, but Grace talks over his comments) And you are believing what your son is telling you.”

PETERSON:
Please don’t interrupt me. You’ve had your say here for months and you’ve crucified my son on national media. And he’s a wonderful
man. You have no idea of his background and what a wonderful son and wonderful man he
is. You have no knowledge of that and you sit there as a judge and jury, I guess, you’re convicting him on national media.
And you should absolutely be ashamed of that.

GRACE:
I think who should be ashamed of themselves is whoever is responsible for the death of Laci Peterson. And lashing out at me,
I completely understand where you are coming from. I’m simply stating what has been leaked or what has been put in formal
documents. If you find them disturbing, I suggest you ask your son about some of them, sir.

PETERSON:
There you go, Nancy, look at this look on Nancy’s face. You absolutely hate my son. I don’t know what it is. (Grace begins
speaking again) Does he remind you of someone?

GRACE:
No, no I don’t hate your son. But I hate what happened to Laci.

Mark called me at home during that time to discuss whether he should represent Scott. Since our show was focused so intently
on the case, Mark wanted my opinion as to whether he should take this high-profile case with a suspect who looked like your
favorite neighbor on the block. “What do you think, Wendy?” he asked me.

“I don’t think you should do it,” I said. I just couldn’t see this working in Mark’s favor. My son, Walker, who was four at
the time, agreed. He grabbed the phone and in his baby voice, he chimed in with, “Don’t do it, Mark. Don’t do it.”

This article came out in
People
magazine on May 19, 2003:

Curiously, this is the same Mark Geragos who, days before, while analyzing Peterson’s prospects on a TV talk show, had concluded
that the accused didn’t have much of a chance. In the interview he declared that the circumstantial
evidence—including the fact that Peterson had been having an affair, that the bodies washed up near where he said he had gone
fishing and that he had tide charts of the area—was almost “overwhelming.” “You combine all that together,” said Geragos,
45, “there’s a lot of guys sitting in state prison on a lot less evidence.”

Now the lawyer says that a visit with Peterson’s mother, Jackie, changed his mind. “I heard things that I had never heard
before that had not been out in the press,” says Geragos. Among his colleagues, Geragos is considered especially adept at
deflecting negative p.r., which should come in handy with Peterson, given that polls show a large majority of those surveyed
believe he is guilty. One of the first things that Geragos did was mount a vigorous effort to make sure that the arrest and
search warrants remained sealed, thus preventing any more prejudicial information from leaking out. Says Steven Cron, a criminal-defense
lawyer in L.A.: “Peterson needs someone like Mark, who knows how to deal with the media.”

On April 21, 2003, Scott Peterson was charged in Stanislaus County Superior Court before Judge Nancy Ashley with two felony
counts of murder with premeditation and special circumstances. He pleaded not guilty, and Mark took the case on May 2, 2003,
but he also took a lot of heat for agreeing to defend Scott.

“People say I took it for the publicity,” Mark says. “That, I find to be ironic, because we were instantly put under a gag
order so I couldn’t say anything. I could have literally had any one of three different networks write me a very large check
to be an exclusive commentator the day before. So it wasn’t like I needed the aggravation of a death penalty trial in that
firestorm
to get publicity and be on TV. In fact, it was the opposite. It took me off TV.”

Mark accepted the case, he obeyed the gag order and stopped appearing on our show. Once they did opening arguments on June
1, 2004, I traveled to San Mateo a number of times and sat in on this extraordinary trial. I must have been there about twenty-five
days in all and I was riveted. I took a great liking to Jackie Peterson, just like Mark had, and I invited her and her daughter-in-law
to my home for lunch since they lived close by. When a grieving Jackie Peterson left my house, oxygen tank in tow, my heart
went out to this woman who had lost everything—her son, her daughter-in-law, and her grandson to be. At the same time, she
truly loved her son, worried about his health, and considered him incapable of murder. This was when I understood how Scott’s
actions had not only destroyed his wife and son. They had destroyed his entire family and would continue to do so.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the trial was seeing Scott himself sitting there quietly, day after day, looking like
a sweet man, while the truth about him was making itself known. In the courtroom, he was not allowed to talk to his parents,
but I saw him give his mother a nod and a smile when she walked in each day. He was such a good-looking guy and he was nice
to his mother.
What the hell was going on?
was all I could think. I remembered Jackie had told me she was worried that Scott was not getting the proper nutrition. “He
isn’t getting any fruit in jail,” she told me, clearly distressed.

She was right. Throughout the course of the trial, I watched Scott’s coloring change from a normal skin tone to a gray pallor,
caused by lack of good food, fresh air, and sunshine. And still, he never looked like someone capable of ruining the lives
of everyone around him by murdering his pregnant wife.

Time, however, was the great equalizer, as the truth began to emerge in this grisly ordeal that no one wanted to believe had
happened. After all, the evidence the district attorney was presenting against Scott was circumstantial. In the OJ case, there
had been solid, physical evidence, like a glove, blood, and DNA. With Scott, on the other hand, no matter how much we believed
he had done this terrible thing, there was no DNA, he had pasted a photo of Laci on the wall of his jail cell, and no physical
evidence ever emerged. To this day, while Scott maintains his innocence, I have no idea
how
he did it. And neither does anyone else. For this reason alone, I thought at the time that Geragos might win his case.

On November 13, 2004, the principals were called to the courthouse in San Mateo to hear the verdict. But Mark Geragos was
in Los Angeles. “The jury had been out for several days,” explains Mark. “I lived in LA and the case was up north, in Redwood
City in San Mateo, a good three to four hundred miles from home. I got accustomed to shuttling back and forth, but most of
the time, I just stayed in San Mateo. On this particular Wednesday, a couple of jurors had gotten into a fight and the judge
had replaced a juror. That meant that the new juror would need to get briefed on what had come before, which meant they would
virtually be starting deliberations all over again.

“I figured there was no way there could be a verdict until the following week since the next day, Thursday, was a court holiday,”
recalls Mark. “All they had was Friday, and it would take that long to get the new juror up to speed. I approached the judge.
‘With your permission, your honor,’ I said, ‘I’d like to go to Los Angeles and do a hearing on Friday, if that’s okay with
you.’ ”

“I just put in a new juror,” the judge said, “and they can’t
possibly come to a verdict on Friday. Just be back here on Monday.”

“I left my associate Pat Harris up there,” says Mark, “just in case and I headed south to Los Angeles. Pat had been there
with me for three months, now, and he had been present every day at court, so he was completely up-to-date and I felt secure.”

No one was more surprised than Mark when the jury came to their verdict on that very Friday. When Mark heard about it in Los
Angeles, there was no way he could scramble around and get on a plane in time. The fact that close to five thousand people
had turned up in the street in San Mateo when they heard that the verdict was in only made it more impossible for Mark to
get to the courthouse, which was completely surrounded.

“I watched the guilty verdict on television,” Mark said, “and I couldn’t believe the way bystanders were screaming for blood
and hurling things at Scott’s mom, Jackie. It reminded me of a Jim Crow trial.”

When I heard that a verdict had been reached, I called Mark immediately. He was terribly upset. He truly had believed the
jury would hang, because all the evidence had been circumstantial. “There were two jurors I call ‘stealth jurors,’ ” he said,
“because they had an agenda against Scott and lied to get on the jury. We would never turn them around, and it was pretty
apparent by the fifth day of deliberations that the jury was hung. But the judge refused to call a mistrial. Instead, he removed
the foreperson, which was a disaster for the defense. On top of that, two other jurors were removed for fighting. In my experience,
when you have a struggling jury with a presumption of guilt, you basically engineer a guilty verdict by removing jurors. I
thought it was unfair and just awful.”

Mark made his peace by realizing he had represented the
underdog as best he could, which was part of the reason he was an attorney in the first place. When a panel discussed the
outcome of the trial on
Larry King Live
, I asked criminal attorney Michael Cardoza, “How did this happen? How could this cute-looking guy have killed his own wife?”

Michael’s answer chilled me to the bone. “With a sociopath like Scott,” he said, “killing Laci was like killing a moth. It
held no more significance for him. Sociopaths feel that nothing is their fault, they are able to justify everything, and they
have no remorse and basically no feelings whatsoever.”

So that was why Scott looked so cool and collected. Maybe he really believed he was innocent. But I wondered why Laci had
chosen a husband who was incapable of real feelings. Spouses lie to each other from time to time, but what woman would ever
think that the very man who impregnated her would kill her and his own unborn child?

A month following the verdict, the jury sentenced Scott to death by lethal injection. He now lives on death row in San Quentin
Prison, where after a requisite number of appeals, they will eventually end his life.

Larry did a show at San Quentin after Scott had been placed on death row there. Our show was about a group of men who had
made a significant enough mistake in their lives to be sentenced to prison for life without the possibility of parole. We
were interested in their stories and it made a very provocative show. But when he inquired about Scott, Larry was not allowed
to visit him since no one can visit the death row building. The other prisoners told us that death row inmates were treated
like animals, as they were chained and shackled before they could go anywhere in the building. What a life for a guy like
Scott who looks like anybody’s older brother, next-door neighbor, or kind uncle.

While I have absolutely no doubt about Scott’s guilt, I still feel uncomfortable about his being sentenced to death because
there was no real evidence and so many questions remain unanswered. No one saw him making the weights that held Laci underwater,
no one knows where he killed her, and no one knows how he got her body into the truck and, subsequently, into the bay. But
he was found guilty, despite his looks, the things he said, and his constant claims of innocence. It took some time, but his
character revealed itself like a roadmap, and now we all know who he is.

Perhaps the final irony is that Scott’s San Quentin jail cell overlooks San Francisco Bay where he dumped his wife’s pregnant
body. Now, he has all the time in the world up to the day that he dies to decide whether or not it was worth it.