3 Migrants Saw Peyer Kill, Tipster Told D.A.

An unsigned letter claiming that three illegal aliens witnessed the strangulation of Cara Knott by California Highway Patrol Officer Craig Peyer sent prosecutors on a secret manhunt just before the start of Peyer’s retrial on murder charges, county district attorney’s office officials said Friday.

“Here we were, with jurors just ready to walk in the door, when we got this letter,” said Joan Stein, one of the prosecutors who won a guilty verdict against the veteran law-enforcement officer.

The letter claiming there were eyewitnesses to the murder was withheld from jurors during the second trial, she said.

Threat to Fair Trial

“We were afraid, if the matter became public, that it would jeopardize (Peyer’s) right to a fair trial,” Stein said. “The hardest part was not going public with the information.” If Peyer had been granted a change of venue, Stein said, “we would have gone on Spanish-language radio stations with an appeal for the witnesses to come forward.

“We’ll never know if we could have located those eyewitnesses if we had gone public with the letter when we first received it.”

Information about the anonymous letter was made public in recently released court transcripts of a closed-door, April 14 session of attorneys in the Peyer case with Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman.

Stein said the letter, printed and unsigned, was sent to one of Peyer’s best friends and to Dist. Atty. Ed Miller before the start of the second trial. Despite an investigation by the district attorney’s office, neither the letter writer nor the three Hispanic males that the letter claimed witnessed the woman’s slaying at an isolated Interstate 15 off-ramp were found.

‘They Were Scared’

“If you want three eyewitness(es) to Knott’s murder,” the letter began, “look for three Mexicans who were under the bridge and saw it happen. They came to fast food place near there and ask for ride north. They were scared and said they had to get out of this place as they saw a policeman kill a lady. They spoke fair English and worked in a packing plant” in Escondido.

Stein said the contents of the note gave no indication of the writer’s motive in sending it to both a friend of defendant and prosecutors.

District attorney investigator Augie de la Rosa interviewed Hispanic field workers in the area near the murder site in an attempt to find the purported eyewitnesses, Stein said, and others searched North County fast-food restaurants and convenience markets for the letter writer, who may have overheard the men discuss what they had seen at the Mercy Road off-ramp where Knott was strangled and where her body thrown off a bridge into a culvert.

The culvert was a popular campground for illegals. It had Spanish graffiti on pillars and beer cans strewn about, the deputy district attorney said. “It was a party place, so it is not far-fetched to believe that there may have been witnesses there that night,” Stein said.

Stein said attempts to match the handwriting in the letter or to identify fingerprints found on it proved fruitless, as did the search for the migrants.

“It was frustrating, but we knew that we could not make the letter public prior to the trial because it almost certainly would have led to a change of venue”--moving the murder trial out of San Diego, where Peyer had said he wanted to be tried.

Knott, 20, a San Diego State University student, was strangled Dec. 27, 1986, on her way home to El Cajon from her boyfriend’s house in Escondido. Peyer, 38, who was working in the area of the killing that night, was convicted of first-degree murder in the second trial. The jury in the first trial in February deadlocked 7 to 5 for conviction.

Peyer is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 3.