JUNE 7, 2004

LACI'S MOM - SHARON ROCHA - TESTIFIES
Scott dodged answers from beginning

Even while standing behind him, Laci Peterson's mother was not getting answers from her
son-in-law that she believed could have helped figure out how and why  pregnant Laci  vanished.

Sharon Rocha's suspicions of Scott Peterson ran so high in the months after her daughter disappeared
that she agreed with a police request to record any conversations she had with Laci's husband.

Testifying at Scott's murder trial today, Rocha said Scott seemed to dodge contact with her
even as family, friends and neighbors began a desperate search for Laci on Christmas Eve 2002.

He failed to adequately answer her questions about Laci's plans that day and gave
one-word responses about his own activities, she said. Peterson avoided eye contact with
her in the gut-wrenching hours after he first called to say Laci was missing, she said.

As time went on, she said, her suspicions grew. Sharon said Scott used excuse after excuse
to get out of meetings she had scheduled to get details she said Peterson was holding back.

"I thought he was trying to avoid being alone with me," Rocha said.
"Of course, that made me feel a little suspicious."

As police cast a wary eye on Peterson, Rocha's support was steadfast early on.
She told reporters her son-in-law "had nothing to do with it" after police said
Peterson was continuing to cooperate "to some degree" with investigators.

What support there was, however, evaporated after Amber Frey came forward.
Police told Rocha and her family  in January 2002 that Peterson was having an
affair with the Fresno woman. They had photos of the two snuggling together,
one of which Peterson dismissed earlier as a kind of police effort to set him up.
(Scott told Amy the picture was "morphed")
Suddenly, things that appeared perhaps unusual before took on darker shades of suspicion.

"It was just his overall behavior," she said. "I felt that he just didn't show the
concern that I felt he should have shown" about Laci's disappearance.

So when Modesto police approached her with a request to record her conversations with Scott,
she agreed to do so. They had asked Frey a similar question and received the same response.

Police, prosecutors and --today --the jury deciding whether Peterson is guilty of killing his wife,
listened to a brief telephone conversation Sharon Rocha and Peterson had on Feb. 13, 2003.
She did not ask about the affair, but rather quizzed him about what he and Laci did on
Dec. 23, 2002 and what she had planned for Christmas Eve day when he said he was off fishing.

"I talked to her at 8:30 at night," she could be heard on the tape telling Peterson. "I need to know
everything that happened after that. I mean, we've never even had this conversation after all this time."

Sharon testified  that once she was alone with Scott  on December 28, 2002 she asked him
to tell her exactly what Laci was doing when he left the house the morning of December 24th.

"He told me she looked so cute because she was sitting on her bench
infront of the mirror styling her hair the way Amy had shown her."  (Inconsistant)

Rocha fired abrupt questions at Peterson, the tone of her voice stinging and her
words at times sounding incredulous. Peterson's conversational voice provided
a contrast to Peterson, who sounded almost at ease during that conversation.

Late in her testimony in an exchange with a defense attorney that lasted no more than a
minute, Rocha confirmed that her son-in-law was unfaithful to her daughter early in their
marriage and that Laci Peterson had kept her husband's indiscretion a secret.

That revelation is critical testimony for the defense because Peterson insists his
wife knew about his affair with a massage therapist in December 2002
when she went missing and that she had made her peace with it.

Prosecutors, who have suggested Peterson killed his wife to start a new life with
his mistress, have tried to cast doubt on his claim that his wife knew of the relationship
by pointing out that she never confided in her mother nor her half-sister, Amy Rocha.

But Sharon's testimony about the first affair contradicted that. Responding to questions by defense
lawyer Mark Geragos, Rocha said she found out after her daughter vanished that Peterson cheated when
the couple was living in San Luis Obispo, their home for the first three years of their five-year marriage.

"I was told she knew about it," said Rocha, speaking so quietly that jurors leaned forward
in their seats and spectators in the courtroom gallery could barely make out her words.

"She didn't tell me about it," she said, quickly noting that it had occurred before the
couple moved back to Modesto, where Laci Peterson was raised and Rocha lives.

The testimony appeared difficult for Rocha, who described herself as very close to her only daughter.

Under questioning by Senior Deputy District Attorney Rick Distaso, she said her opinion of her
son-in-law and her daughter's marriage had completely changed after Laci Peterson went missing.

She acknowledged that she once "thought the world of him" and let him call her "Mom,"
but she said an accumulation of curious behavior, beginning with the Christmas Eve
phone call informing her that Laci Peterson was "missing," left her suspicious.

She said that seconds after hanging up the phone with him, she began thinking about his choice of the
word "missing" to describe his wife, whom he had been searching for at that point less than an hour.

"I knew, I just knew that something was wrong," she said. She began to elaborate on her
suspicion of the particular word choice, saying, "Most people would —" when Geragos
objected to the comment and Superior Court Judge Alfred Delucchi cut her off.

Peterson, dressed in a blue suit and brown polka-dotted tie, turned his chair toward the
witness stand at the start of her testimony and seemed to pay careful attention to her account.

When her daughter's remains were identified in April 2003, Rocha gave an angry,
emotional news conference, saying, among other things, that she hoped the
perpetrator would hear her daughter's pleas for life ringing in his ears.

But on the stand Monday, Rocha was poised, only losing her composure once when
asked to describe a Dec. 20 conversation with her daughter, then eight months pregnant.

"She told me that she had a doctor's appointment on the 23rd and after the
appointment, they were going to the hospital to preregister," Rocha testified.

Her voice cracked and she wiped a tear from her face.

'Missing'
The vast majority of her testimony was spent describing strange behavior by Peterson..

Minutes after learning from him that his wife was "missing," Rocha rushed to the park where Laci
walked her dog and began frantically searching for the 27-year-old woman. She testified that,
when she spotted Peterson 20 to 30 feet away and shouted to him, he seemed to ignore her.

"I kept calling out his name and he never did turn to acknowledge that I was calling out to him," she said.

She also said that, when she tried to give him a consoling hug later that
evening, he turned away from her embrace and would not meet her gaze.

"He kept angling like away from me so we never had any eye contact," she said.

She also said he gave one word answers when she asked
questions about his movements and those of his wife.

At a Dec. 31 candlelight vigil attended by 1,200 people, Rocha said,
her family and Peterson's parents stood together on a raised platform.

"I remember all of us on the stage and the people were speaking, but I didn't see Scott," she said.

"Do you know where the defendant was?" asked Distaso.

"No, I never saw him," she said.

In his opening statement, Distaso said Peterson was on the phone with
his mistress, Amber Frey, until 10 minutes before the start of the vigil.

Rocha also testified that, at a Jan. 3 dinner, Peterson told a group of relatives and friends
that police detectives had a picture of him with another woman, but implied that it was a fake.

She quoted him as saying, "They'd done a really good job because the guy really did look like him."

The woman in the photograph was Frey. Peterson did not know
at the time that she had already begun cooperating with police.

She also recounted watching a television show about fishing with Peterson as they waited for word
about the missing mother-to-be. Peterson had told police he was fishing in San Francisco Bay for
sturgeon or striper the day his wife disappeared. When someone in the program mentioned that shrimp
was the best bait for sturgeon, she said she asked Peterson what he had been using on Dec. 24.

"He turned and looked over his shoulder and smiled at me," she said. His
sister-in-law, Janey Peterson, finally volunteered that he had used a lure, said Rocha.

She also described the frustration she felt trying to get answers from
her son-in-law. She testified that she tried to meet alone with him to find
out exactly what her daughter was doing the day leading up to her disappearance.

"There was always something that came up or he had to be somewhere else,"
she said, adding later, "I thought he was trying to avoid being alone with me."

She said she finally confronted him over the phone on Feb. 13 in a call recorded by the police.
Prosecutors played the tape for the jury. In it, Rocha asks what her daughter wore to
bed on Dec. 23, what she ate for breakfast the next morning and whether she was happy.

"These are questions that I've had and I've never had them answered," she says plaintively on the tape.

Peterson sounds tired in the recording and gives short answers.

Rocha said that two months later when she received word that the bodies of Laci  and her
unborn son washed ashore in San Francisco Bay, she immediately called her son-in-law.

"Scott, this is Sharon. You need to call me immediately,"
she recalled saying in a message on his voice mail.

"Did he ever return your call?" asked Distaso.

"No," she said.

Police arrested Peterson about two months later, just days after his wife's remains and those
of the fetus she was carrying surfaced in Richmond. He is innocent, Peterson has said.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos worked today to drive that point home, getting both Rocha and
Laci's half sister Amy Rocha to acknowledge that Peterson and Laci seemed like the perfect couple.

Never once had Peterson hurt or threatened in any way his wife of five years, they said. If someone
killed Laci or had something to do with her disappearance, they had told police, he was not that person.

Also brought up was Laci's getting ill in early November during her pregnancy while walking her
dog in the park.  Sharon said she received a call fom Laci that she got ill and dizzy while 
walking McKenzie.  Sharon told her to call the doctor.   She received another call about a
week later when the dizziness happened again.   Laci told her she called the doctor
who suggested she stop walking, or do it later in the day to avoid dehydration.

In  November, Laci was complaining to her mother that her feet were swelling, her back
ached, she was having a hard time standing for any length of time and always tired.

Sharon described the trip Laci took over Thanksgiving to her in-law's home for a baby shower
and trip to Disneyland.   She wasn't looking forward to it because of how she had been feeling.
But when she returned home, Laci told her mother they rented a wheel chair in Disneyland
to make it an easier trip for her, and that Scott pushed her around the park.

Sharon then describes the day she received the telephone call from Scott at 5:17 PM. on
December 24, 2002 asking her if Laci was there.  The numbing words, "Laci is missing".

Sharon Rocha's longtime partner Ron Grantski, who was the first to report
to police that Laci was missing, will take the witness stand Tuesday.

Also today, Frey's father appeared at the Redwood City courthouse Monday with a letter to
Stanislaus County District Attorney James Brazelton. In it, Ron Frey expressed concern about
how his daughter's reputation will fare in court, particularly under questioning by Geragos.

SHARON'S TESTIMONY AT PRELIM

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My prayers are for Laci and Conners family. In my mind
I will always hold an image of a beautiful woman
with a warm, kind smile that would light up a room.
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