Verdict Took Much Thought, Only One Vote

Late Wednesday morning, the jurors in Craig Peyer’s murder trial finished their methodical analysis of the evidence and decided it was finally time to take a vote.

The six men and six women had sat through a monthlong trial and deliberated over five days, but none yet knew what the others intended to do.

Then, one by one, they raised their hands, and the answer became clear: Peyer was guilty of first-degree murder.

Few of the jurors were willing to talk about the case after the verdict was read, but Edda D. Bradstreet, 58, a retired marine biologist, provided some details of their deliberations.

‘Nobody Pushed Anybody’

Bradstreet described a quiet, almost plodding analysis of the testimony from more than 200 witnesses and of physical evidence and jurors’ own notes. The process seemed in marked contrast to the volatile balloting that resulted in a hung jury at Peyer’s first trial.

“Nobody pushed anybody,” Bradstreet said. “Nobody knew how anybody was going to vote until we voted this morning.”

In the days leading up to the vote, the jurors analyzed each piece of evidence, informally agreeing on which bits were credible and which should be disregarded, Bradstreet said.

“At no time during the deliberations did we discuss how the outcome should be,” she said. “We just discussed what we had in our notes and the evidence. . . . It all jelled toward the end.”

The jury had four choices: first- or second-degree murder, manslaughter or not guilty. Following the instructions provided by Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman, the jurors considered first-degree murder first, she said. They discussed the other options, but they never got around to voting on them.

The jurors understood from the instructions that premeditation, the key element of a first-degree murder finding, can be as short as 30 seconds, Bradstreet said.

‘It Was Clear to All of Us’

“It can be as quick as it takes you to reach in your pocket and get a rope or something like that,” she said. “It can be very quick, but you know the consequences of it when you’re doing it.”

“From our instructions, it was clear to all of us that it was murder one,” she said.

Bradstreet declined to discuss most of the evidence, but said that testimony of two dozen women who had been stopped by Peyer in 1986 at the same location where Cara Knott was killed had been significant because it demonstrated “a behavior pattern of his.”

Some jurors at Peyer’s first trial had discounted that testimony as irrelevant.

Bradstreet added that the jury also believed the testimony of Traci Koenig and her husband, Scott, who said they saw a California Highway Patrol car pull over a light-color Volkswagen at the Mercy Road off-ramp the night Knott was slain. The Koenigs came forward after the first trial ended in a hung jury. Defense attorney Robert Grimes said the Koenigs fabricated their story.

“We thought they were credible, she and her husband,” Bradstreet said.

Asked if the jury reached any conclusions about what happened between Knott and Peyer on the night of her death, Bradstreet said: “Nobody will really ever know.”