Testimony Contradicts Scott Peterson Account

Laci Peterson’s sister testified Friday that Scott Peterson said he had golf plans on Christmas Eve, throwing into question his story about going fishing the day his wife vanished.

Amy Rocha said she cut Scott Peterson’s hair Dec. 23 and that he had offered to pick up a gift basket for her grandfather near the country club where he was a member.

“He said he was going to be out that way golfing,” she said in about 30 minutes of testimony. “I assumed all day.”

Peterson told police he last saw his wife about 9:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve as he left to go fishing at the Berkeley Marina. He told them he returned to Modesto late that afternoon, shortly before family members reported Laci Peterson missing about 6 p.m.

On the third day of a preliminary hearing to determine whether Peterson, 31, will stand trial in the death of his wife and unborn son, Stanislaus County prosecutors began laying the foundation for their case on Laci Peterson’s disappearance with testimony from the last people to see her alive.

Among them, Laci Peterson’s mother, Sharon Rocha, told a jammed courtroom that she thought “the world” of Scott Peterson before last Dec. 24.

She recalled getting a call from Peterson at 5:17 p.m. on Christmas Eve in which he said her daughter was “missing.”

“I was getting really scared by then when he said ‘missing.’ He didn’t say she wasn’t home or he couldn’t find her. He said ‘missing.’ ”

Rocha, in 30 minutes of calm testimony, also described a frantic search with a flashlight of the park where Laci Peterson liked to walk.

She remembered calling out Scott Peterson’s name while he was 40 feet away, and said he didn’t respond.

Rocha and others described a happy but weary-looking Laci Peterson who was “ecstatic” and looking forward to having her first child.

Peterson, a former fertilizer salesman, is charged with murdering his pregnant wife and the baby boy she was carrying.

The remains of his 27-year-old wife and the fetus were discovered in April on the shores of San Francisco Bay near where he said he was fishing.