Ex-CHP Officer Peyer Guilty of Murdering SDSU Student

A San Diego Superior Court jury Wednesday convicted former California Highway Patrol Officer Craig Peyer of first-degree murder in the December, 1986, strangulation of 20-year-old San Diego State University student Cara Knott.

Peyer, 38, the first highway patrol officer ever found guilty of murder, tightened his jaw and glanced downward briefly as the clerk read the verdict to a packed courtroom shortly after noon, following five days of deliberation by the jury. Judge Richard Huffman then ordered Peyer held without bail until sentencing July 20. Peyer could be sent to prison for a term of 25 years to life.

Peyer was whisked from the courtroom by two armed marshals as his wife, Karen, stared blankly and his parents lowered their heads.

Members of the Knott family, who had been in the courtroom throughout the monthlong trial, sobbed quietly when the verdict was announced and embraced and clutched each others’ hands when Peyer was taken into custody. Knott’s father, Samuel, shook hands with the prosecutors before reading a statement thanking the public and those who showed “outstanding diligence” in working to solve his daughter’s murder.

Long, Painful Process

“We put our trust in the criminal justice system and feel justice has finally been served,” Knott said. “This has been a long and painful process. No verdict does true justice or eases the loss of our precious Cara.”

Speaking in a hoarse voice, Knott, flanked by his family, also read a poem about his daughter that he wrote April 18, the day jury selection for the trial began.

Cara’s mother, Joyce Knott, said the conviction was “a great relief” but does not make the loss of her daughter easier to bear. Cheryl Knott, one of Cara’s two sisters, said, “Justice has finally been done.”

Defense attorney Robert Grimes said his client would appeal the verdict.

In an interview with reporters outside her Poway home, Karen Peyer, who had been in court through both trials of her husband, reiterated her belief in his innocence.

“This is a real hard time for us, but we’ll all take it one step at a time,” Mrs. Peyer said tearfully. “We are united as a family. We trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Our faith is in Him. I love my husband. I stand by him and will always be married to him.”

At a press conference later in the day, Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller heaped praise on the two prosecutors who handled the case, saying Deputy Dist. Attys. Paul Pfingst and Joan Stein “did not leave a stone unturned” as they worked for a conviction. He noted that the circumstantial case was particularly tough because Peyer was an officer at the time of the crime.

“I think what we demonstrated is the system works,” Miller said. “I think justice is being served and, while it was a controversial case within our community, I think we’ve all done our job and I think we’ve demonstrated that nobody’s above the law.”

Only 1 Vote Taken

Jurors left the courthouse through a rear exit and at first declined to talk with reporters. One juror interviewed later, retired marine biologist Edda D. Bradstreet, 58, said the panel took just one vote on Peyer’s fate--the vote late Wednesday morning that unanimously found him guilty. Until that point, she said, none was sure how the others felt about Peyer’s innocence or guilt.

“I didn’t know how it was going to be,” Bradstreet said. The decision was “difficult,” but, “from our instructions, it was clear to all of us that it was murder 1,” she added.

Peyer was accused of stopping Knott, while she was en route from Escondido to her El Cajon home, at the Mercy Road exit from southbound Interstate 15, strangling her and throwing her body from an abandoned highway bridge near the off-ramp. Knott’s body was found Dec. 28, 1986, in a dry creek bed 65 feet below the old U.S. 395 bridge. Her Volkswagen beetle--in running condition--was parked nearby on a deserted frontage road with the keys in the ignition and the driver’s window partly rolled down.

Peyer, a 13-year veteran of the force, was fired by the CHP on May 28, 1987 because of Knott’s slaying. He has been free on bail more than a year.

Wednesday’s verdict was the finale to a case that probably attracted more media and public attention than any similar criminal case in San Diego County history.

The verdict came almost four months after Peyer’s first trial ended with jurors deadlocked 7 to 5 for conviction on the murder charge. On Wednesday, Victor Dingman, a juror in the first trial who voted to acquit Peyer, said he was “shocked” by the verdict.

“First degree implies premeditation, that he intended to kill someone,” Dingman said. “I don’t believe that. If he were guilty, manslaughter or second-degree murder would be a more feasible (conviction), in my opinion. . . . Premeditation doesn’t fit in with what was brought into evidence at the first trial.”

Dingman also said he still has doubts about Peyer’s guilt.

“If he’s guilty, tell me, how did he transport the body three-tenths of a mile and not get any blood on his car? Why was there no blood or skin transfers on the murder weapon?” he asked.

Patrick Coady, one of seven jurors who voted for conviction at the first trial, said he was not surprised by the conviction.

Another Murder Case

“If you look at that night carefully, there were several steps involved in the stop,” Coady said. “I don’t think that he intended to kill her when he pulled her over. But, as it escalated, he made the decision to kill her. She tried to escape, and he said, ‘This is it. I’m going to kill her.’ ”

When Peyer was taken into custody Jan. 15, 1987, it marked the second time a CHP officer had been accused of committing murder while on duty. In 1984, former officer George Michael Gwaltney was convicted in federal court of civil-rights violations stemming from the slaying of an actress in Barstow. That conviction followed two Superior Court murder trials that ended with hung juries.

In the weeks after Peyer’s arrest, there was apprehension among many women motorists in San Diego County. They became wary of the uniformed officers sworn to protect them, and CHP officials pleaded with the public to have faith in law enforcement agencies. One woman was tried and convicted on charges of refusing to pull over promptly when a sheriff’s deputy attempted to stop her on a remote road. Her conviction was overturned by an appellate panel earlier this week.

Cmdr. Kent Milton, chief spokesman at Highway Patrol headquarters in Sacramento, said he does not believe the guilty verdict adversely affects the image of his agency.

“We never thought of it in those terms,” he said. “Craig Peyer was terminated long ago. The murder was the problem, and we dealt with that. So whatever the verdict was didn’t really seem to impinge on the organization any longer.

“I’m sure, that a lot of our personnel will wish this case never happened. But it did. We will have to live with the fact that somebody on duty committed this kind of crime,” Milton added.

Lacking eyewitnesses who could prove Peyer had contact with Knott, the prosecution built its case on a wide array of physical evidence and on testimony from two dozen women stopped at night by the patrolman in 1986.

Sophisticated Tests

Sophisticated tests found that a spot of blood on Knott’s boot matched Peyer’s in type and numerous genetic markings--and could have come from just 0.6% of the county population, or 12,800 people. Six tiny fabric fibers also were said to link Peyer and Knott. One unusually dyed gold fiber found on Knott’s bloodstained sweat shirt matched gold threads from the CHP patch on Peyer’s jacket, experts testified.

A 4-foot rope found in the trunk of Peyer’s patrol car was consistent with marks on Knott’s neck and was the murder weapon, prosecutors contended, noting that the rope was not standard CHP equipment.

More than 20 women, many of them young, attractive Volkswagen owners, testified that Peyer forced them to the bottom of the unlighted Mercy Road off-ramp and engaged them in lengthy conversations about their personal lives. Many were never given tickets; none said Peyer made sexual advances or detained them against their will. Most were stopped for minor equipment violations; Knott’s car had a broken license plate light when it was recovered.

In an argument that at least one juror said she found convincing, prosecutors said that pattern of unorthodox stops demonstrated that Peyer was a man with a “predatory nature” whose “appetite” for young women wasn’t sated until he met Knott. They theorized that Peyer killed Knott after she threatened to complain about the encounter to his superiors.

Although the evidence remained the same in the retrial, prosecutor Pfingst used hindsight and experience with jurors in the first trial to weave what many observers described as a more solid and organized case than his predecessor. He dropped some weak witnesses from the lineup and obtained improved performances from others. He attempted to leave no question unanswered, no issue unaddressed.

Perhaps most significantly, Pfingst made several new motions that were granted by Huffman and hindered the defense effort to plant doubt in the jurors’ minds. Chief among these was a ruling barring witnesses from testifying about Peyer’s explanation for scratches seen on his face the night Knott died--scratches that prosecutors argued were inflicted by Knott.

In the first trial, these witnesses said the patrolman told them his face was injured when he fell against a chain-link fence. But Huffman later ruled that evidence was hearsay, and said Peyer would have to take the stand if he wished to offer the explanation to jurors.

Peyer did not testify in either trial, so jurors had to accept the prosecution’s theory or speculate on another cause for the wounds. Grimes said Wednesday that deciding whether or not to place Peyer on the stand was one of the toughest choices he has faced as an attorney.

Defense Raised Issue

Another ruling by Huffman excluded testimony from four defense witnesses who said in the first trial that they saw an unidentified hitchhiker lunging at cars near the freeway on-ramp Knott used the night she disappeared. That ruling deprived the defense of an alternative suspect.

The defense maintained that the prosecution failed to prove Peyer ever had contact with Knott. Grimes attacked the blood and fiber evidence as inconclusive and suggested that two new prosecution witnesses, a couple who said they saw a CHP car stop a Volkswagen at Mercy Road the night Knott died, fabricated their story.

Grimes also argued that coroners botched Knott’s autopsy by failing to take the temperature of her liver at the crime scene. That procedure and others could have established an approximate time of death and would have exonerated Peyer, Grimes argued.

On Wednesday, Grimes said the retrial “was a different case with different evidence” than that presented in the first trial. He hinted that Huffman’s rulings had significantly reshaped his case and said his client is “crushed” by the verdict and anxious to appeal.

Pfingst credited his success to insights provided by jurors in the first trial. “I think we certainly had the benefit this time of the input from the first jury as to the areas where they may have been a little bit confused or may have wanted more information.”

Specifically, Pfingst said, he attempted to clear up confusion about the sequence of events the night Knott died. During closing arguments, he displayed a timetable of Peyer’s activities the night of the murder, leaving a dramatic gap between 8 p.m. and about 9:45 p.m.--a gap, prosecutors said, when Peyer’s activities could not be verified. It was during that period that Peyer was killing Knott, prosecutors argued.

After the verdict, the Knott family visited the cemetery where Cara was buried, leaving flowers, poems and notes at the grave site.

Civil Lawsuit Pending

The Knotts have a civil lawsuit pending against the State of California, the CHP and Peyer.

On Wednesday the family’s attorney, Patrick Frega, said the guilty verdict gives a substantial boost to the Superior Court suit, which alleges that the agency knew Peyer improperly stopped women motorists and had a drinking problem.

“Civilly, it’s already decided,” Frega said, because the degree of proof needed in a criminal case is greater than that needed in a civil suit. Frega said Peyer will be formally served with the lawsuit soon. He said he delayed serving him with the complaint earlier because of fears that the action would provoke more publicity and cause a mistrial in the criminal case.

The complaint seeks unspecified damages for emotional loss, funeral expenses and the deprivation of Knott’s earning potential. Whether Peyer has any money or assets that can be tapped at a civil trial is unclear, Frega said, adding that it may be a year or more before the lawsuit comes to trial.

Times staff writers Jane Fritsch, Tom Gorman, H.G. Reza and Richard A. Serrano contributed to this report.