The vague link — or not — between Kristin Smart and Modesto’s Scott Peterson
Wait, you say, wasn’t there a tie between Kristin Smart and the case of Scott and Laci Peterson?
If you recall that brief bit of speculation from 19 years ago, you’ve got a pretty good memory. Allow me to refresh it.
Kristin Denise Smart, from Stockton, was 19 when she disappeared in May 1996 as a freshman at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She was presumed dead and despite much investigative work, authorities weren’t able to pin her murder on anyone — until Tuesday, prompting the news reports that jogged your memory and made you wonder about a vague connection to Scott Peterson.
At the time Smart vanished, Peterson — from a city near San Diego, and 24 at the time — also attended Cal Poly. So did Modesto’s Laci Denise Rocha, who had been dating Scott since 1994 and married him in 1997.
The Petersons later moved to Modesto, where he sold soil products for an agricultural business and she was a substitute teacher. When she disappeared eight months into her first pregnancy on Christmas Eve 2002, Scott — who told police he’d gone fishing that day — quickly became their No. 1 suspect.
He was arrested when the bodies of mother and fetus washed ashore nearly four months later in San Francisco Bay near the spot he’d said he launched his newly acquired boat.
Three months before his arrest, authorities wondered whether they might have a serial killer on their hands because two women in some proximity to Scott had gone missing 6 1/2 years apart.
Hours after news leaked that San Luis Obispo sheriff’s detectives were exploring a possible link, they acknowledged that they couldn’t find one. The Modesto Bee reported that in January 2003, less than a month after Laci vanished and nearly three months before Scott was arrested.
I covered the case for The Bee, Laci’s hometown newspaper, producing reports each day of his blockbuster trial from Redwood City in 2004. A jury found Scott guilty of double murder and he arrived on death row in San Quentin in March 2005.
Laci’s mother, Sharon Rocha, graciously has shared with me in extended interviews her thoughts on her daughter and grandson, their lives and deaths, and enduring memories.
I wrote reviews on most of the dozen-plus books about the case, including true-crime author Marilee Strong’s “Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives,” published in 2008 and dominated by the Peterson case. Strong speculated that Scott took cues from Smart’s disappearance to erase the woman he had promised to cherish, and the author cited subsequent murderers who since have commented on Peterson’s methods.
Scott Peterson’s case goes on
Scott’s family flatly rejects any theory of his guilt and has labored since to win his freedom. In 2018, I met in Modesto with his sister-in-law, Janey, who agreed to record lengthy video footage with me in their family-owned crate-building business in Poway, near San Diego.
The California Supreme Court in August overturned Scott’s death sentence, which Stanislaus County prosecutors soon will try to reinstate. In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court said the lower court in Redwood City must decide whether Scott should get a new trial altogether because of alleged misconduct by a juror in Scott’s original trial.
That stems from revelations that Richelle Nice had been assaulted while pregnant and failed to mention it when seated on the jury. Nice also sat down with me and a videographer, in 2017, to explain why Scott’s stealth-juror contention is nonsense. “I did not lie to get on this trial to fry Scott. I did not,” she told me.
On Tuesday, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office arrested Paul Flores, who also was a freshmen when Kristin Smart went missing nearly 25 years ago and was the last person seen with her. They also took into custody his father, Ruben, and declared the case solved.
Scott Peterson’s ultimate fate is yet to be seen, but no, he was never implicated in Smart’s murder, and now someone else finally is.
This story was originally published April 14, 2021 at 11:34 AM.
