| LACI & CONNER MAY THE TRUTH BE TOLD |
| PARTIAL TESTIMONY OF AMBER FREY AT THE TRIAL OF SCOTT PETERSON April 11, 2004 |
| Taped phone calls of love between Scott Peterson and his mistress Amber Frey were played for jurors. Scott first took her to an intimate dinner at a fancy sushi bar, where he paid extra for a private room, she said. He then asked her to come back to his room at the Radisson Hotel so he could change. He wasn't wearing a wedding ring, Frey said. Once in the room, he suddenly produced a bottle of champagne and box of strawberries from his leather bag. "He put one strawberry in each of our glasses," Frey said. "I remember eating one. They were a little bit sour." Amber Frey admitted she was so enthralled by the charming Peterson that they wound up having steamy sex back in his hotel room just hours later. "He reassured me that it was appropriate [to have sex] in light of the evening's events," Prosecutors continued where she left off Tuesday, playing tapes of Scott's calls. In one, Scott called at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2003 -- New Year's Day, a week after his pregnant wife Laci went missing. Scott had told Frey he was in Paris. At one point during a conversation about New Year's resolutions, he comes up short on specifics. "Oh, I'm sure there's all kinds of things that I want to do better about myself," he was recorded saying. But ... I've got nothing. I can't think of nothing right now off the top of my head." The conversation later turned to their relationship as Peterson -- who Frey said initially told her he was not married, and later said he had lost his wife -- talks of writing a letter to Frey from Paris. He was unsure about what to include, he said, and wondered about their future together. "So what do you want to be together with me?" Frey asked. "Well, I mean obviously my, you know, my thoughts are that I think that we, you know, would be wonderful together," Scott said, as Frey stoked the conversation. "I could care for you in any and every way. For the rest of our lives I think we care for each other and (Frey's daughter) Ayianna and, you know, we could fulfill each other." Those words and similar statements were not those of a man mourning his missing pregnant wife, prosecutors believe. The calls added to police suspicions that Scott had something to do with his wife Laci's disappearance only a week before the phone call. While hundreds of Modesto, Calif., police officers and volunteers searched for Laci in the two weeks after she disappeared, Scott spent hours on the phone with his secret girlfriend, telling her he was kissing her picture, lusting over her skin-tight leopard print pants ("Oooh!") and promising "we could fulfill each other, you know, forever." Scott even told Amber Frey his favorite movie, according to a taped phone call played for jurors Wednesday in Peterson's double murder trial: "The Shining," a horror movie about a deranged man attempting to kill his wife and son. Prosecutors played hours of phone calls Frey had taped for police leading up to Jan. 6. All the while, Scott told Frey he was in Paris and Brussels ("tripping on cobblestones,") and on the way to Madrid (I'll be saying `hola' a lot more instead of `bonjour.'") In fact, he was in Modesto, where frantic searches for his wife were under way across the Central Valley and into the San Francisco Bay. That's where Scott had told police he was fishing the day Laci disappeared on Christmas Eve, and where the bodies of Laci and her unborn son would wash up more than four months later. They talked about love at first sight and the meaning of agape, "meaning a deeper love, OK?" Scott said. He asked her to rent the movie "Love Affair," because it was so romantic, and "my hero," Warren Beatty, starred in it. The playful tone of the conversations struck many who have been following the case. "Are these the actions of a guy that is distraught, upset and desperately seeking his pregnant wife?" Jim Hammer, a former San Francisco prosecutor who is following the case asked. "To my ear, he sounds like the happiest man on earth." Scott apparently had time to read poetry, and told Frey on Jan. 4 that he had read a poem that day - a Boris Pasternak poem - and it reminded him of his relationship with Frey. It went something like this, he said: "We huddle under a large tree round with ivy with the storm raging around us. The only thing keeping me grounded are my hands on your waist." "So you've been thinking a lot about me?" Frey asked him. "Yeah, that's all I did today," he said. "And I'm sorry, I, I just, I just started rambling and there's a tear in my eye and it's trickling." He talked about reading a book by Jack Kerouac - a name Frey heard as "Jack Cadillac." Peterson forgot the name of Kerouac's "On the Road," but he found it interesting because "I never had a prolonged period of freedom like that from responsibility." They talked about Frey's singing karaoke at a party - she sang a bar from Julio Iglesias' "You could take my breath away." She told him she was wearing black "leopardy" pants, and red boots. "So the pants aren't skin tight?" he asked. "Yes they are," she said. Peterson told her he found something else "incredibly appealing and sexy" about Frey. "Do you think I'm intelligent?" she asked him. "Hum, yeah, but that wasn't the quality I was thinking of," he said. "Tell me," she said. "Self-esteem," he answered. "You have good self-esteem and that's difficult to find in people." He told her he struggled with finding the right words to describe Frey, because "special" wasn't enough. "Can I tell you how wonderful you are?" he asked Frey in a Jan. 4 call. "I need a better vocabulary or a book or a thesaurus or something to find the right words to describe you." LINK TO WIRETAP TRANSCRIPT HOME INDEX LACI SCOTT AMBER TRIAL ALIBI-WITNESS LIST WIRETAPS |
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| Amber is questioned by prosecutor Harris as Scott looks on as Judge Delucchi looks at a 2002 Christmas party photo of Peterson and Frey, |
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