Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong Read Free Book Online Page B

him—no matter how
    painful, embarrassing, or incriminating—as if fascinated to be the
    center of so much attention.
    He watched himself with cool regard, projected larger than life on
    a giant courtroom screen, as he told blatant lies on national television,
    claiming he informed police ‘‘that very first night’’ Laci went missing
    that he was having an affair with another woman.
    He sat stoically through hours of secretly recorded audiotapes,
    listening to himself casually deceive everyone who knew and cared
    about him, including his own mother; kibitz for hours on end with
    his girlfriend about his favorite books and movies, his weight, and
    his New Year’s resolutions while the rest of the world feverishly
    looked for his wife; and spin fantastical tales in which he claimed to
    be in Paris, watching fireworks explode above the Eiffel Tower with
    his friends Pasqual and Franc¸ois, when he was really in Modesto at
    a candlelight vigil for his missing wife, ducking the media and his
    devastated in-laws.
    He looked with equanimity at gruesome photos of his wife’s rav-aged remains and listened dispassionately to the medical examiner
    describe the horrific facts of underwater decomposition—how bar-nacles were growing on Laci’s exposed bones, how the only organ
    remaining in her body after four months in a bay teeming with sea
    life was her uterus.
    During the three months of jury selection that preceded the
    trial, before his parents began attending, he laughed and joked with

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    second-chair counsel Pat Harris and the defense jury consultant even
    while potential jurors were being grilled about prejudices they may
    have formed against him. When the trial began, he took on a more
    serious mien, a sphinxlike demeanor that was impossible to read but
    that at the same time, as juror Richelle Nice noted, ‘‘spoke volumes.’’
    During the guilt phase of his trial, he shed a tear only on two
    or three occasions, such as when his mother took the stand and
    when a former buddy testified. Greg Reed met Scott through their
    membership in the Rotary Club, and their wives became friends as
    well. Greg’s wife, Kristen, was pregnant at the same time as Laci, and
    the Petersons attended Lamaze class at the Reed home. Greg was one
    of Scott’s closest friends, and as Reed described their mutual passion
    for hunting and fishing, their membership in the Del Rio Country
    Club, the party the couples had planned to attend together on New
    Year’s Eve 2002, Scott seemed genuinely moved.
    When psychopaths shed tears, they are almost always ones of
    self-pity. I suspect that at that moment, Scott was seeing not his
    friend but a mirror image of himself, Scott Uninterrupted, and the
    life he could have been enjoying if not for a cruel twist of fate. I
    believe he was mourning at that moment not the loss of a beloved
    wife and child but the chasm between the lifestyle he had when he
    was pals with Greg Reed and the one he now had behind bars.
    He cried often during the penalty phase, when family members
    and other defense witnesses attested to his sterling character and
    insisted, despite the fact that he had now been convicted and his life
    hung in the balance, that he could not possibly have killed his wife
    and child. But when a show of sadness or regret for his actions might
    easily have made the difference between getting the death penalty
    and being sentenced to life imprisonment, he made not even a feint
    in that direction.
    The total lack of normal human emotions exhibited by eraser
    killers is the hallmark characteristic of psychopaths. Although I
    believe that eraser killers have psychopathic tendencies, they do not
    appear to be typical psychopaths by all definitions of that term, nor
    do I believe that psychopathy is the only factor playing an important
    role in their psychology.
    In common parlance, the terms ‘‘psychopath’’ or ‘‘sociopath’’
    are names laypeople too often apply to