Ex-Murder Suspect Arrested Again

A former postal carrier who was accused but never convicted of killing his wife in the 1990s was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of planting a series of fake bombs at a Lancaster post office, officials said.

Jeffrey Dale Peitz, 47, is suspected of leaving the hoax bombs in six incidents between December 2000 and February of this year, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. John Portillo said.

Peitz, whose three well-publicized murder trials ended in hung juries in 1995, was fired from his Postal Service job six months after the first bomb was planted, Portillo said.

On Wednesday, Peitz was being held in lieu of $5-million bail on suspicion of making terrorist threats. The district attorney’s office will decide today whether to file charges against him, Portillo said.

Authorities from the Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Sheriff’s Department searched Peitz’s Quartz Hill home Tuesday and took some items, said William Pickering, a Secret Service spokesman.

It was Portillo who prosecuted Jeffrey Peitz in the murder trials, in which he was accused of killing his wife, Teri Peitz.

In the 1990s, the couple became well-known in their east Palmdale neighborhood for their efforts to organize a Neighborhood Watch. But Teri, then 37, was shot to death on Aug. 12, 1994, while she watched television in the couple’s living room.

Jeffrey Peitz told police he was upstairs folding laundry when he heard the gunshots and that he saw a man run from the scene. The killer, Peitz asserted, was a man his wife had confronted for being an illegal squatter in a vacant house.

Eight days after the shooting, Peitz was arrested. After each trial, some jurors said a lack of physical evidence created reasonable doubt. He was freed in July 1995 after 11 months in jail.

“If we come up with new evidence, we will prosecute him again,” Portillo said after the third trial. “There is no statute of limitations on murder, so until the day he dies, this case will be hanging over his head.”