| Tuesday, July 6, 2004 Scott Peterson turned away as prosecutors displayed graphic photos of his slain wife and unborn child at his capital trial Tuesday. The double-murder defendant angled his chair to the side and stared toward away across the courtroom as the gory images of the severely decomposed bodies were flashed onto a giant projection screen. Several jurors appeared disturbed by the pictures of Laci Peterson and the baby the couple planned to name Conner. One female panelist put her hand to her temple when she first glimpsed a photo of the baby's body. Another woman looked away entirely. The pictures accompanied testimony about the separate discoveries of the mother-to-be and child on April 13 and April 14, 2003. A dog walker found the boy's remains in grassy marshland on the shores of San Francisco Bay. The next day, about a mile away, another dog owner came across Laci Peterson's body wedged in some rocks on the bayshore. Elena Gonzalez, told the jurors she sighted Laci's body while chasing one of her dogs at a park in Point Isabel. "We found something that looked peculiar sort of. It was Laci's body," Gonzalez said. Gonzalez testified she found the body -- mostly just a torso -- half-submerged in the water along a rocky embankment. The location of the bodies is one of the prosecution's strongest pieces of circumstantial evidence against the 31-year-old fertilizer salesman. Scott admits he was fishing in the bay, which is about 90 miles from his home, on Dec. 24, 2002, the day he reported her missing. Laci Peterson, 27, was about eight months pregnant when she disappeared. Both sets of remains were too decomposed for pathologists to determine how the mother-to-be and child died. Gonzalez said she first mistook Laci Peterson's body, which was missing its head, for a bloated seal carcass and had to shoo away a dog who was chewing on the remains. "It was kinda munching her elbow," Gonzalez said. HOME INDEX LACI SCOTT TRIAL ALIBI-WITNESS LIST BODIES FOUND AUTOPSY |
| LACI & CONNER "I can only hope that the sound of Laci’s voice begging for her life, begging for the life of her unborn child, is heard over and over and over again in the mind of that person everyday for the rest of his life." Sharon Rocha on the day Laci was found |
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