Frey Pressed Peterson to Tell Her the Entire Truth

Amber Frey, who until now had seemed almost naively dependent on Scott Peterson in their taped conversations, demanded that he tell her the truth about everything -- including his wife’s disappearance -- in tapes played Thursday for the jury in his murder trial.

After weeks of what many observers called an uninspired prosecution case, jurors Thursday heard some of the most gripping evidence yet as Frey, Peterson’s girlfriend, told him she suspected he might have murdered his pregnant wife.

“Oh, my God,” Peterson cried on the tape of a phone call on Jan. 6, 2003, less than two weeks after Laci Peterson disappeared and became the subject of a nationwide manhunt. “I hope you know me well enough [to know] that I could never do something like this.”

No, she said, she didn’t. Frey did not let up on the Modesto fertilizer salesman, who had told exotic stories of owning boats and condos and traveling the world.

Although he never confessed to anything criminal in the lengthy, often tearful conversations Frey was recording for the Modesto police, some said it was the prosecution’s best day thus far in the trial.

Saying Frey had missed her calling as a prosecutor, former Northern California prosecutor Dean Johnson said she repeatedly “bored in on Peterson” as he tried to dodge her questions.

Peterson began dating Frey, a Fresno massage therapist with a young daughter, in late November 2002, claiming he was unmarried. In fact, Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant as Christmas approached.

On Christmas Eve, she vanished. Peterson said he was fishing in San Francisco Bay and returned home that afternoon to find her gone.

With volunteers searching for Laci, Peterson tried to maintain his relationship with Frey and the fiction he was single through dozens of phone calls, which the jury has been hearing over the last three days. To explain his absence while working at the volunteer search center in Modesto, Peterson told Frey he was on a business trip in Europe.

He threw in details of European life, talking about beautiful churches and saying he had fallen and hurt himself while jogging on cobblestones in Paris.

Frey learned independently of the missing Modesto woman on Dec. 30 and contacted police, who asked her to record Peterson’s calls in case he incriminated himself. After he didn’t, and in fact talked happily about the future he and Frey would have, Frey decided to jar him by claiming a friend of hers had left a cryptic message warning her to be careful.

That provoked his confession that he was married and that his wife was missing. In that call, just after 11 p.m. on Jan. 6, Peterson said he had to tell Frey about “the worst thing in the world.... The girl I’m married to, her name is Laci.”

Prosecutors contend that Peterson killed his wife and dumped her body into the bay so he could be with Frey. He was arrested several months after Laci disappeared. But it is believed there is very little, if any, physical evidence tying him to the crime. That increases the pressure on prosectors to show that there is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant conviction.

One piece is the fact that Laci’s remains washed up months after her disappearance in the part of the bay where Peterson said he fished on Christmas Eve. Equally important, if not more, is the battering Peterson’s character has taken since Frey, the star prosecution witness, took the stand Tuesday.

When asked by Frey if it wasn’t “twisted” for him to carry on the affair with her while Laci was missing, Peterson responded, “It is.”

Frey then asked if Laci knew about her. Peterson said she did.

“Really, how did she respond to it?” Amber asked in a Jan. 7 phone call.

“Fine,” he said.

“Fine?” Frey shouted. “An eight-month [pregnant] woman, fine about another woman?”

In a rare interruption, laughter rippled through the court of Judge Alfred Delucchi.

“I know you can’t believe me. Wish you could ... I hope to gain your trust again,” Peterson said.

In another conversation, Peterson said he was not an “evil person” and had never hurt anybody, to which Frey replied: “What are you doing to me right now? Do you think I’m drowning in daisies?”

The tapes included another call in which Frey recalled that she had earlier accused him of being married, to which he had replied that he had lost his wife.

He lied because it was too painful to talk about, he said.

Peterson also had said the Christmas holidays of 2002 would be the first he would spend without his wife.

“Scott, this has to be the biggest coincidence I have ever heard of,” Frey said. “I mean, are you psychic? I mean, you predicted your wife would be missing?”

As the tapes played, jurors frequently glanced at the defendant, seated next to his attorney, Mark Geragos.

At one point, where Frey discussed on tape how hard it had been to be a single mother and how much she had been counting on Peterson to help her raise her daughter, Frey, seated in the audience, began to cry. Her attorney, Gloria Allred, put her arm around her.

“I have one word for her,” Allred said outside court. “Awesome.” She added: “This was a very important day.”

The trial resumes Monday, with more tape recordings. By midweek, it is expected, Geragos will get his chance to cross-examine Frey.