There is a van parked outside 516 Kovina Avenue that does not look like it be...
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 on to Kovina Avenue, and as she passes 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. 1140 AM. 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, and she changes her mind as she tells
“Annie. I drove by at, I think it was some time after her mother-in-law in the morning”
and saw this man and she worked three people out there. And I noticed it only because they noticed me. I also did not yet work. I mean, you had workers. You'll turn it out there and look at you when you're doing your yard work. The van is parked outside 516 Kovina directly across the street at 523 is Scott and Lacey Petersen's home. At this time 1140 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 have 16 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 and
“older van parked on the street, doors that opened at the rear. She first thought it was”
white. She says, "Now she thinks it might have 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.
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That's promo code [email protected]. 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 5/16 Kavina 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,
and unusually long white utility van, no windows along the rear sides, parked in front of the same house, 5/16. She tells police one other thing, between about 9/20 and 9/40am, 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 Kavina 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 ...
Garagos rents Dalton in office above the J Street Cafe, a block from the jail.
No phone, no facts, 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 Meldenado and his wife Helen stopped for gas at a minimart on Miller Avenue,
“near the corner of Kavina, between about 9.50 and 10 o'clock a.m. on Christmas Eve.”
Pulling out they drive west away from the Peterson's neighborhood and toward town. A few houses past Kavina, 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 from pause on her, as if it were jumping on her.
I hope she doesn't fall, Helen says. Later, Meldenado 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 Medesto 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. Meldenado 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 LaSamba 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 once her account preserved under oath before trial.
It never happens. Vivian dies before the trial begins.
Diana Kempos is a janitor at the county hospital. On the morning of December 24, 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 fucking 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 the Orah 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, "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 Kovina Avenue.
On December 24, 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 Lacy 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, setting up wooden barricades for crowd control. When a woman runs out of the house across the street at 5.16, 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 Kvina, he writes, "I did not contact neighbors in regards to this incident. On January 2nd, police arrest Stephen 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 Peterson's. An officer sits Stephen down to talk about the burglary, before he can even start, Stephen says he had nothing to do with "the woman." The officer asks him what woman he's talking about. The missing woman with the baby says Stephen.
The officer's report shows what happens next. He asks Stephen 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,
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took place becomes a point of contention. Diane Jackson saw three men in a van outside of that house at 1140 AM 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 looked at me sort of made me think
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 AM 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-burglary Donald's account puts Steven there on December 26th saying Steven came to him for help moving the safe. And when I interviewed Detective John Mueller in 2021, he gave me still another version of the department's timeline.
So we broke into the house of the 25th.
And he took a bit of property on the 25th. But there was a save 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 down he there's a safe over there. We need to go back over and get that. So they return 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 hoop line. 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 Kavina 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've 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's absolutely no way a burglary took place on December 26th during those burglary 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 Kavina Avenue on Christmas Eve.
Two weeks or so after Lacey Peterson disappears, a lieutenant with the California Department of Corrections named Xavier Apante hears about an inmate at his prison who has allegedly been talking about Lacey. The inmate is Sean Tenbrook, his brother Adam Tenbrook knows burglary Stephen Todd. Lieutenant Apante calls the Medesto police tip line twice.
He says it takes at least a week before a detective calls him back. Apante tells a detective that he listened to a recorded call between the Tenbrook brothers. On it, the lieutenant claims, Adam Tenbrook 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 Medesto detective interviews Sean Tenbrook who denies everything. Lieutenant Apante says Sean Tenbrook 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 Apante 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 Apante walked back his story entirely, saying he doesn't really know what he heard. Medesto 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 Apante.
In May of 2003, more than a year before the Scott Peterson trial, the video taped 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 on tour in that neighborhood, she would have let them have it.
For any of that to matter, she has to have walked up on the burglary while it...
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 Modena 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 Bueler to me in 2021. Well, it's pretty rare that a guy doing a property crime is going to turn into an inductor of a pregnant girl with it's walking a dog. If everybody, if Diane Jackson sees a van in the living 40 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 pulls into question. You know, viability is a witness.
Bueler 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. Bueler 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 amid size 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 and 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 and they'd never been to her house.
So it's easy to misplace or misidentify somebody, especially with the coverage going on. Bueler 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, which she saw the stable at 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 McKenzie the dog not barking.
Diane Jackson gives her statement within days and then a second one on January 16th.
Explain it 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 hypnotized her. Police hypnosis is meant to draw out details of 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 versus 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 frustration, accusing the prosecution of inten...
happening in the morning, Lacey disappeared.
Jackson says the experience ruined her life. Her friends in Medesto 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 Annie.
“I do member being hypnotized, but I don't remember, not fake conscious of it.”
So I don't know, therefore, as I really am. Even if the Medinos 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 Medesto.
Lacey Peterson's face is on posters and shop windows and on the dashboards of cars. And then Scott Peterson changes. He grows a go-t 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, an April 18th at 1135 in the morning, police arrest Scott Peterson, near the Tory Pines golf course in La Jolla. Detective Albroquini arrives as Scott is being handcuffed. He later describes the moment to Netflix. "He had an orange hair, he had an orange go-t. I walk up and he's out. Tell me it wasn't my wife and baby." 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.
“Tory 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 interviewed the manager of the Tory 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 for some. 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?
