Craig Peyer’s Fate in Hands of Jurors for the Second Time

Former CHP Officer Craig Peyer strangled Cara Knott 18 months ago out of fear that the college student would reveal his “appetite” for stopping young women motorists on a dark freeway off-ramp and that the discovery would ruin his career, a prosecutor said Tuesday during closing statements in Peyer’s murder trial.

Peyer’s realization that Knott was likely to “yell to the high heavens” about his unorthodox conduct during a traffic stop drove the officer to a chilling conclusion--that “he had to kill Cara Knott that night to save his own butt,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst argued.

‘Choice to Make’

“He had a choice to make,” Pfingst said. “ ‘It’s either me or her. It’s either all I’ve built up or her life.’ And, after he made that decision, he went to the trunk of his car . . . he got out a rope and he strangled Cara Knott.”

Defense attorney Robert Grimes countered in his two-hour closing statement that the prosecution’s evidence “falls far short” of that necessary for jurors to find Peyer guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt.

In his characteristic rapid-fire delivery, Grimes sought to sow doubts in jurors’ minds about each piece of the multilayered case against his client and argued that prosecutors had failed to prove that Peyer ever had contact with Knott the night she died.

Also Tuesday, Grimes filed a motion for a mistrial, arguing that Pfingst’s remarks to jurors about a lack of an explanation for scratches on Peyer’s face the night Knott died amounted to a prejudicial comment on the fact that Peyer did not testify at the trial. Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman denied the motion.

After the closing statements, Huffman instructed the jury on the law they must apply in evaluating the case. In a new development, Huffman included instructions about a voluntary manslaughter verdict along with those for first- and second-degree murder.

At 3:39 p.m., the jurors were escorted by the court bailiff to a secluded room, where they deliberated 40 minutes before recessing for the day.

Peyer, 38, is charged with murdering Knott on Dec. 27, 1986--the night the 20-year-old San Diego State University student was en route to her parents’ El Cajon home from Escondido. Prosecutors say Peyer pulled Knott over at the Mercy Road exit on Interstate 15, strangled her after a struggle and threw her body from the Old U.S. 395 bridge near the off-ramp.

Knott’s body was found by police the next morning in a creek bed 65 feet below the bridge. Her Volkswagen beetle was parked nearby in running condition, with the keys in the ignition and the driver’s window partly rolled down.

Peyer, a Poway resident, was arrested about two weeks after Knott’s death. He was a 13-year veteran of the CHP until he was fired last year. He has been free on bail since March 4, 1987. In February, jurors in Peyer’s first trial deadlocked, 7 to 5, in favor of conviction.

The Peyer case is perhaps the most sensational and widely publicized of its kind in San Diego County history. Peyer’s arrest marks only the second time a California Highway Patrol officer has been charged with committing a murder while on duty.

Tuesday’s proceeding unfolded before a courtroom packed with spectators who began lining up for a seat as early as 6 a.m. As they have during each day of both trials, relatives of Knott and Peyer were present for the climactic session.

Although both attorneys donned dark gray suits Tuesday, the styles employed by each as he sought to make a final impression on jurors were markedly different.

Pfingst, in a voice that rose and fell, gave a tightly woven summation that lasted 90 minutes and capsulized the physical evidence and testimony presented during the monthlong trial.

Throughout his statement, the prosecutor scanned the faces of jurors, at times standing before them almost defiantly with his arms folded or his hands on his hips. Occasionally, he became red in the face with emotion; at other times, he displayed visible scorn as he disparaged the testimony of a defense witness.

Grimes, on the other hand, generally maintained his calm, soft-spoken manner throughout his closing remarks. His firmest argument to the jurors came as he repeatedly reminded them that, to deliver a guilty verdict, they must conclude that the prosecution’s case left not a shred of doubt in their minds.

Pfingst opened his closing statement the same way he launched the trial--by immediately focusing attention on Peyer’s habit of stopping women at Mercy Road at night and conversing with them about personal issues for long periods. Two dozen women--many of whom drove Volkswagens--testified that they were stopped by Peyer at the foot of the unlighted off-ramp in 1986.

That practice, Pfingst argued, amounted to “a time bomb” that was waiting to go off.

“This pattern of behavior was part of an appetite that developed and continued over a period of months and was never satisfied,” Pfingst said, “until Dec. 27.”

On that night, he argued, Peyer had reached the northern end of his beat at Via Rancho Parkway and was making a turn to get back on southbound I-15 when he spotted Knott, who was leaving a gas station and also getting on the freeway. The time, according to a credit card receipt, was about 8:35.

Because Knott “fit the profile,” Peyer had her pull her car down the Mercy Road exit roughly 10 minutes later, a stop that Pfingst said was the one observed by Traci and Scott Koenig, two new prosecution witnesses. Then the safety-conscious Knott, noticing the darkness, either drove to the frontage road where her car was found in a futile effort to get back on the highway, or was led there by Peyer.

“There is only one way that Cara Knott was going to get off the highway and down to a dark, deserted location,” Pfingst said, “and that is that she responded to a police officer.”

But, once he had stopped Knott, Pfingst argued, Peyer realized that she was unlike other women motorists. She was angered by the unorthodox stop and likely to object to it. That realization, the prosecutor argued, caused Peyer to panic.

“His little secret, his little game, his little pattern of behavior had caused it to go too far, and now everything he had was at risk,” Pfingst said. So Peyer weighed the consequences that would befall him if Knott told his superiors, Pfingst said, and made a “clear, conscious decision” that he had to kill her to save his career.

That decision was premeditated and the crime Peyer committed was first-degree murder, Pfingst argued.

But Knott left a clue, he said, striking at the face of her attacker and leaving “claw marks.” Peyer, Pfingst noted, had scratches that were seen later by two gas station attendants, his CHP colleagues and his wife, Karen.

In the first trial, defense witnesses testified that Peyer told them he scratched his face when he fell against a chain-link fence at CHP headquarters. But Huffman barred that testimony in the retrial, ruling it hearsay, and on Tuesday, Pfingst repeatedly raised the scratches and the lack of any defense explanation for them.

Pfingst said Peyer’s behavior after the killing provided further evidence of his guilt. He changed the time of a ticket and falsified his daily activity log in an attempt to create an alibi for the time he was killing Knott, the prosecutor said. The officer told friends he wanted to “get out of the area.” And he told a San Diego police officer that he thought Knott’s killing was “a situation that got out of control.”

Still more proof that Peyer was the killer comes from fibers and blood evidence, Pfingst said. A distinctive gold fiber found on Knott’s blood-soaked sweat shirt matches fibers from Peyer’s CHP jacket patch, prosecution witnesses said; five other fibers link the victim and the suspect as well.

A drop of blood on Knott’s left boot matches Peyer’s in type and numerous genetic markings, and the donor of that blood is among .6% of the San Diego County population--or 12,800 people, Pfingst noted.

Grimes began his closing remarks by solemnly lecturing the jurors on the principles on which the nation’s legal system was founded, specifically, that a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. He argued that prosecutors highlighted evidence that tended to suggest Peyer was the killer and ignored that which might have exonerated the former officer.

Criticizing the motive the prosecution set forth, Grimes said most of the women stopped by Peyer called after news of his arrest was broadcast and that many expressed no reservations about their encounters with him. The defense attorney said it was not unusual for a male officer to talk to women motorists longer than male motorists.

Grimes also challenged the sequence of times the prosecution said places Peyer and Knott at the Mercy Road off-ramp at sometime around 8:45 p.m. He suggested that, had Peyer pulled her over at that time, a couple in a limousine broken down at the foot of the exit would have seen them.

Responding to prosecutors’ charge that Peyer used a rope discovered in his trunk in early January to kill Knott, Grimes asked the jury why Peyer would have kept the alleged murder weapon in his trunk if he were guilty.

“Why not just throw it away?” Grimes said. “This person who prosecutors say went through this elaborate cover-up, why did he have this rope?”

Grimes also cited testimony from pathologists who said the rope might have had blood or skin on it had it been used to strangle Knott. Similarly, he said Knott should have had an abundance of skin and blood under her fingernails--rather than the tiny flecks discovered--if she indeed scratched Peyer.

Harshest Attack

The harshest attack lodged by the defense attorney was against the pathologists in the homicide investigation, who he said “botched” Knott’s autopsy. Grimes said Knott’s time of death could have been determined if pathologists had taken the temperature of her liver at the crime scene. That time, he said, might have exonerated Peyer.

He had little to say about the prosecution’s blood evidence, but Grimes reminded jurors that fiber experts could not definitively say whether fibers they compared “had come from the same fabric--let alone the same factory.”

Another weakness in the prosecution’s case, Grimes said, is the failure of authorities to match fingerprints taken from Knott’s car with any of 19 people whose prints were taken. Peyer’s prints were not found on the car, and the unidentified prints could belong to Knott’s killer, Grimes said.

Jurors in the case will continue their deliberations this morning. The jury in Peyer’s first trial spent seven days reviewing the evidence before announcing that it could not reach a verdict.