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| Area witnesses recall day Laci vanished
By Brian Anderson CONTRA COSTA TIMES JUNE 11, 2004 For now, it's all about time Lawyers spent part of two days this week working with witnesses to chisel out an accurate time frame they believed could show what happened Dec. 24, 2002, when Laci Peterson left her Modesto house and never returned. On Thursday, two witnesses continued that process. A mailman and a Peterson neighbor whose house was burglarized tried filling in more of the gaps. Susan Medina said she and her husband left their Covena Avenue house for Los Angeles about 10:32 a.m. the day before Christmas. Records of a mobile phone call helped trace back the time, she said. The neighborhood was quiet that morning, she said; there was nothing out of the ordinary. Between 10:35 to 10:50, mailman Russell Graybill was making his way down Covena Avenue, he said. The U.S. Postal Service uses a bar-code tracking system along the route to determine where their letter carriers are situated and at what time, he said. Graybill said he, too, noticed nothing odd, adding that dogs were barking at him as usual. Every dog, he said, except for the Petersons' golden retriever, McKenzie. As Graybill was making his rounds, Amie Krigbaum was getting up, she said Wednesday. She awoke to barking dogs about 10:35 or so, she said. Krigbaum let her own dog out, noticing nothing unusual as she waited on the front porch across from the Petersons' house. Minutes earlier at 10:18 a.m., neighbor Karen Servas found McKenzie standing in the street, she said Wednesday. He was attached to a muddy leash, she said, and his owners were nowhere to be found. Servas put the dog in the Petersons' back yard, washed her hands inside her house and left on her errands, she said. Using a store receipt from that morning, she later backtracked to better determine when she saw McKenzie, she said. At the heart of those matters is time Scott Peterson, now standing trial on charges accusing him of killing his wife, Laci, and unborn son, told police he left home about 9:30 the morning of Dec. 24. He picked up a fishing boat at his warehouse before driving to the Berkeley Marina, from where he left on an hours-long fishing trip on San Francisco Bay, Peterson said. When he returned home later that day, his wife was gone. But investigators said that was only part of the story. Yes, Peterson left home that morning, but the time was closer to 10:08, police said, citing the man's cell phone records. And yes, he went to the Berkeley Marina, but it was with his wife's dead body, which he ultimately dumped overboard, prosecutors have said. Using the Servas timeline with Peterson's phone records, someone would have had only minutes to snatch Laci off the street. Creating questions, defense attorneys say, was the burglary at Medina's house. Two men, police later learned, had broken into the Medina place, stealing tools, guns, a safe and jewelry, among other things. The burglars kicked in a door, leaving a muddy footprint behind, Sgt. Craig Wend testified Thursday. Based on a tip, police arrested Steven Todd and Donald Pearce. The men were unusually cooperative, police said, confessing to the break-in they said occurred about 4 a.m. Dec. 26. Particularly troubling for Peterson's defense is the scene around the neighborhood at the time police said the burglary occurred. The very day after Laci turned up missing, police flooded the neighborhood, as did television cameras and news reporters -- not an ideal setting for a burglary, defense attorneys contend. But police said the men had nothing to do with Laci's disappearance. Prosecutors plan to call Todd as a witness, court records revealed, to help prove as much. HOME INDEX LACI TRIAL NEWS ALIBI-WITNESS LIST SCOTT |
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