The Prosecutor's Case .. continued

Going back to the defendant's fishing story. You know, we talked about the, the umbrellas being in the back of his truck at the end of the day. Remember he took those umbrellas to the shop, according to him, so he could keep them in the shop there and get them out of the rain. Of course, they're under a patio cover, so I don't know why you would do that to begin with.

But besides that fact, let's say he did that. Why didn't he leave them in the shop? Well, I forgot. That's what he told Detective Brocchini on the tape: I forgot. Okay, so let me get this straight here. You've got a whole stack of umbrellas in the back of your pickup truck. You have to back your pickup truck up to hook the boat up. How are you not going see those, number one. You then drive all the way out to the Berkeley Marina with them in the back of your truck. You have to back the truck down to put the boat in the water. Of course, you don't see them then, I guess. You then drive all the way home and you have to put your boat away. They're still there in the truck. If your reason for taking them there that morning is to put them in the shop, then put them in the shop. But, of course, he doesn't do that, because that was never his reason for putting those umbrellas in the truck.

Distaso never forgets anything it seems – except to come up with some actual evidence of guilt. However ordinary people forget things all the time.

Once they served their purpose of covering Laci's body, he didn't care about those umbrellas anymore. He only cared been Detective Brocchini started asking him about it. Because it is, it's suspicious: What do you got those in your truck for, you know; but he's a good liar. He comes up with a story quick.

Much quicker than me. You can tell if I'm lying. It's all over my face. Not this guy. He can look Diane Sawyer straight in the eye and tell her a bald-faced lie.

He says he leaves at 9:30. The evidence strongly supports he left much later than that. You know, remember the Martha Stewart thing and the meringue. You know what? I'm going to tell you straight up, that was an embarrassment to me personally because I told, because I stood up here in opening statement and told you something that wasn't correct. I told you there was no mention of meringue in that Martha Stewart tape. And you know what? We were wrong.

You know what, though, the truth is a good thing. The truth about that Martha Stewart reference to meringue is one of the best facts for the prosecution in this case. The defendant says: I saw a segment of Martha Stewart where she was making some cookies of some sort, something to do with meringue. That segment did air on December 24th. Do you know when that segment aired? What was the testimony? 9:48 in the morning. If this guy saw it, and it appears he did from the description he gave, he was in his house at 9:48. Now, nobody at ten minutes to 10:00 or twelve minutes to 10:00 says they're leaving at 9:30, so he's lying about that.

No, Distaso is lying about this. Apparently he has never heard anyone say, “Good heavens, look at the time. I didn’t realise how late it was”.

Let's talk about that cell phone call. Pull up the, that cell phone chart, John, if you could. Let's talk about the cell phone call. Remember the cell phone call that he made at 10:08? We had a lot of testimony about the cell towers, and got really back and forth. Voice mail, incoming voice mails when someone calls you, outgoing voice mails when you're checking your voice mails.

Remember that?

Well, it all boils down to this: The main cell tower for 523 Covena is 1250 Brighton. If you leave, and it's overlapped coverage with 10th and D. If you leave Covena and you're driving towards where the shop is, you fall into the 10th and D coverage area. Remember what the expert said? How do we know that the cell tower information for this particular day and this particular call at 10:08 is accurate?

We don’t. These are billing records, not standard time transmissions from the NIST.

Well, here's, this is 203 G. This is a cell phone, I mean, yeah, a cell site chart that Investigator Jacobson did. It's in Eastern Standard Time.

Remember what you heard? The cell site stuff comes in Eastern Standard Time.

Invoice calls comes whatever time you're in. Here Pacific Standard Time.

That 10:08 call voice mail retrieval, it's right here in the records. I'm not making any of this up. This is 203 A 1. You guys can go back there and check this all yourself.

Voice mail retrieval, that call starts at 1250 Brighton, it ends at 10th and D.

At 2:12 there's another voice mail retrieval, and remember Investigator Jacobson wrote VMRT, voice mail retrieval whenever it is, puts him in Berkeley. Well, we know for a fact, by his own statement and by the receipt he was in Berkeley at that time. So that's accurate.

The rest of these are in the invoices. These are calls tracking his movements.

He's in Berkeley. Berkeley. He's in Oakland. He's driving home. At 2:34 he's in Oakland. At 2:40 when he calls his father, Lee Peterson, he's in Castro line Valley. Driving back to Modesto. At 2:45 when he calls his father again, he's in Grassland Avenue in Castro Valley, driving home.

There's an incoming voice mail. 3:44. That one is not in the invoice records.

You can't track people through cell sites for incoming voice mails. Remember what the lady said? You got to use the records together.

Here he's in Livermore, makes a call to his home. And then at 5:44, when all this is reported, we know he's in front of his house, 1250 Brighton. Those calls that became an issue that were a problem, remember we had all that discussion about, those are all incoming voice mails. They're not in these invoice records.

The next call that is in the invoice records, another voice mail retrieval where he's calling, checking his voice mail. Guess what? Puts him right at 1250 Brighton at 6:29 when he know he's standing in front of his house. This cell site information for that 10:08 call is completely accurate, and it's backed up by the records themselves.

Now, Karen Servas, put that clock back up, John. Karen Servas finds the dog no later than 10:18.

Karen Servas is perhaps one of the most unreliable witnesses ever. She changed her testimony three times, and based it on her ‘expert’ reconstruction of her shopping trip times on the day before Christmas, and based that on the receipts from the store – a store whose registers were shown to be as much as a day off. However Vivian Mitchell is a much more reliable witness. She saw Laci walking the dog between 10:00am and 10:30am and this does support Servas’ testimony. Of course it also eliminates Scott as the abductor of Laci.

How do we know that that's true? Let's talk about Karen Servas for a minute. Karen Servas has no stake in this case at all. She's just a neighbor. She's not an agent of the prosecution. In fact, if anything, before this all started, she was a friend of the defendant's; remember? She had been over to his house a couple of times, or numerous times, really. Her kid had even swam in his pool. He would help her with stuff if she needed it. They had no ill will between them whatsoever.

She originally tells the police, because they call and ask her, who found the dog. She tells the police: I found it exactly at 10:30. That's a fact. That's what she originally told them. She didn't deny anything here, like: No, I never said that, or, you know, I tried to back out, or anything else. She said: Yeah, that's what I told him. I originally told him it was right around 10:30.

But then you remember what she said? A day or two later she found that Austin's receipt. Austin's Christmas Store, 12/24, 2002, 10:34 a.m. She said: I found that receipt and I realized, you know, my time, I might be off on my time a little bit.

Then clearly she is wrong and has impeached herself.

And she said: I wanted to make sure for him, not for the prosecution, not for the Modesto police, not for any other reason but for this guy, for Scott Peterson, I wanted to make sure that my time when I found that dog is exactly accurate, because maybe that's going to have something to do with what happened to Laci.

Now, the fact that it turned out really badly for Scott Peterson doesn't mean anything as to why she did it. She did it because she was trying to help him out. So she went and back-tracked everything she did. Remember what she said she did initially? Here's the chart. She finds the dog in front of her house, looking down the street. She, she walked back over where she did to the gate, she walked back around, she then went back to her house, remember she made the motion of putting the dog away, put him in the gate, left the a leash on him.

She went back to her house, pretended to wash her hands, got in her car, drove downtown, drove twice around the bank parking lot. That's what she said she did. She didn't go into the bank at that time. Drove twice around the bank parking lot. She couldn't find a place to park. She went down to Austin's, went in, pretended to buy an ornament, came out, and from that point on that's when she stopped her time.

And then she just back-tracked how long that took from 10:34 and back-tracked, and she said she found that dog no later than 10:18. How do we know that 10:54 receipt is accurate? Because remember what she told you? She said: After I left Austin's, I made a phone call. Her cell phone records says she made that phone call at 10:37 in the morning, exactly as, as she said. Buy an ornament at 10:34, make a phone call when I go outside on my cell phone. It's right here in the records, 10:37.

These are billing records, not standard time transmissions from the NIST. The cash register record is not accurate either.

She then said she went to Starbucks, got some coffee, or whatever she said she did there; I don't remember. Then she said she went back to the bank and made her transaction.

If you remember at the end of the trial the defense asked Investigator Bertalotto about that additional record that she just got, which was at 10:53, completely supporting exactly everything that she said. Karen Servas is not lying here. Karen Servas is not doing anything here except being completely accurate to you all. And that's what we want. That dog was found no later than 10:18. And if that's the case, then this is what had to have happened in ten minutes, in a ten minute time. Laci would have had to get up, put on all her jewelry, because the defendant tells the police and some other folks, the dog tracking people and stuff, that they had on diamond earrings, the diamond changes, but the general description was diamond earrings, a diamond ring, a diamond watch.

So she puts on all of her jewelry to then, I guess, go mop the floor. Because he says, when he says he leaves, she's mopping the floor, she's got on a white shirt and black pants, and she's barefoot. So she has to have put her jewelry on, finish mopping the floor, put on her shoes and socks, changed her clothes, because remember, when she's found, Laci Peterson is not bearing black pants.

Because she changed them AFTER she got back from walking the dog. That’s why the black pants were found in the house with grass clippings on them – from Laci’s walk to the park with the dog.

Laci Peterson is wearing a pair of pants just like these. No one confuses these pants with black. Except for maybe him. Because that man confused Modesto with Paris, Brussels, Normandy, France, and everywhere else.

Cheap sarcasm. The mark of a great litigator? His OWN witness says they were NOT the pants she wore to the salon. There is no reason for Scott to say she was wearing black pants – except that it is the truth.

But nobody would do that. So she changes out of these nice pair of capri pants, I mean she changes out of her black pants she was wearing when she was mopping, into these nice pair of capri pants so she can go walk the dog.

No evidence of this was ever offered.

She has to then get abducted by these mysterious, homeless, 290 registrants, you know, we're going to go through all these crazy theories that have been proposed to you. But she gets abducted by somebody. This is all in ten minutes.

Nonsense. She could have been abducted up to, say, 5 minutes before Scott returned home.

The dog then has to, of course, nobody sees or hears, even though that dog barks like crazy. The dog then has to be able to come home in the ten minutes time, because she's now done all these things, been abducted, the dog comes home and has to be found by Karen Servas, all in ten minutes, all in a ten minute window, because at 10:08 the defendant is just now driving away from his house.

This whole time theory is based on utterly false assumptions.

One thing I forgot to tell you about that 10:08 call. Another reason why you know it's accurate, Investigator Jacobson tested it. He got a cell phone in the exact same network, he did it three times. He made a phone call, he drove for a minute and twenty-one seconds, the length of time for that call, and every single time, 1250 Brighton it started, 10th and D it ended.

He even went to the shop, because remember that's where Scott Peterson is supposed to be, he's supposed to be at the shop. He even went to the shop and he made phone calls. Every time 929 Woodland. Never 1250 Brighton, never 10th and D. Actually, I want to make sure I'm completely accurate. I know that that, that those cell phone calls from the shop started at 929 Woodland. I can't remember off the top of my head exactly where they ended, because those coverage areas are very clear. So I don't want to tell you anything that's not accurate.

Too late. That ship has left the dock – and exploded in flames!

So regarding those Jacobson calls at the shop, use your own memory for those because I can't remember up here off the top of my head exactly where were those.

Before I leave Karen Servas and the timing, I want to talk about the only defense attack that they made on, on the timing was this: A couple receipts that were introduced by, by Bill Austin, kind of, and you really need to go back, if you're at all wondering about these, go back and get his entire testimony read back. It's very enlightening about these, this particular exhibit. But two receipts from two different days in January of 2004.

From purchases made ten minutes apart. This is a deliberate lie and a fraud on the court.

From testimony: However, the next Christmas season, Mark Geragos sent a private investigator to Austin's Christmas store to test the accuracy of the cash register. In front of Bill Austin, the owner, Jensen had two no-sales receipts rung up ten minutes apart. The receipts, however, showed a discrepancy of 49 minutes (Austin) and recorded two different dates (Austin). The two no-sales receipts are Defense H. In his testimony, Austin said he could not remember the details of when the two receipts were made.

Somehow we're supposed to believe that this document makes Karen Servas's time line inaccurate.

No other conclusion is reasonable. Cash registers are not precision chronometers, and those who set them are not always careful.

... To be continued.