Keith Ablow is a forensic psychiatrist who consults on Court TV. He has also written several psychiatric thrillers (which I’ve never read and must check out immediately) and other nonfiction books. In this book, Ablow examines why Scott Peterson, a man with no history of violence or mental illness, would murder his wife and unborn son. To do this, Ablow takes an in-depth look at Peterson’s life story and family history. He interviewed several members of both Scott’s and Laci’s families, as well as an ex-girlfriend of Scott’s and Amber Frey’s attorney, Gloria Allred. Many other sources were also utilized, such as law enforcement professionals, attorneys, and many people who had known Scott Peterson in the past.
Ablow’s theory about the creation of the psychological “perfect storm” in Scott which led him to kill begins decades before Scott was even born. On December 20th, 1945, Scott’s maternal grandfather, John Latham, was murdered by employee whom he had recently fired. The murderer was eventually caught and convicted, and he died in San Quentin, where Scott is now on death row. There’s definitely an irony there.
Jackie, Scott’s mother, was only two when this happened. Her mother, for whatever reason, decided she could not raise Jackie and her three brothers by herself. It is unclear if this decision was due to poor physical health, mental health problems relating to the loss of her husband, or perhaps some of each. In any case, Jackie and her brothers were placed in an orphanage called Nazareth House. Jackie saw her mother once a week. She rarely saw her brothers, since boys and girls were kept apart in the orphanage. The orphanage was impoverished; the children often had to eat outdated food. Jackie developed asthma, just one more thing in a very difficult life. Physical and sexual abuse were common at the orphanage, though it is not clear whether Jackie suffered such abuse or merely witnessed it (which would be bad enough).
Jackie lived at the orphanage for ten years. When she did leave, it was to take care of her mother, whose health was failing. It’s unclear how she felt about this, whether she was resentful of having to care for a woman who had put her in an orphanage, or just happy to be “home.” The book also doesn’t mention whether her brothers stayed in the orphanage or what. The kids did have an aunt, their mother’s sister, but it’s unclear whether living with her was ever considered as an option for any of them. Her mother died soon after Jackie graduated high school.
Jackie dealt with her pain by becoming involved with many different men. She gave birth to her first child, Don, on April 2, 1963. Her lover abandoned her, and she gave the child up for adoption. The exact same thing happened two years later with a different man. Jackie’s second child (Anne Bird, who wrote a book saying why she believed Scott was guilty of killing Laci and Conner) was born on July 8, 1965. Again abandoned, Jackie gave up her second child for adoption.
Most people who have given up a child for adoption will probably tell you that it’s hard enough to give up one. Ablow interprets this behavior (giving up two babies in two years) as being indicative of Jackie’s unusual ability to bury her emotions and sever attachments to others.
In 1966 Jackie had a third child, a son named John, by a third lover who had also left her. She wanted to give him up for adoption as well, but was dissuaded from doing so by her pediatrician, who basically (according to Bird) told her she couldn’t keep giving away her kids. Too bad he didn’t consider the possible ramifications of sending John home with such a person.
Jackie raised John as a single parent until she met Scott’s father, Lee Peterson. Ablow doesn’t get into Lee’s background as much as he did Jackie’s, but he did say that Lee had grown up in grinding poverty. Lee was divorced when he met Jackie, and he had three children by a previous marriage. A first-degree relative (unnamed) indicated that the divorce occurred in part because he didn’t like having the kids around, and that he was uncomfortable with emotions, whether they were his own or someone else’s.
A year after his parents married, Scott was born. Shortly after he was born, he contracted pneumonia and had to be hospitalized and placed in a plastic oxygen chamber. Ablow mentions the emotional toll this takes on newborn infants, the separation from caregivers, the unpleasantness of the hospital stay, and all that. While many babies go through this and don’t grow up to be killers, it is one more thing that contributed to Scott’s emotional makeup. Interestingly, during the trial neither parent mentioned being fearful at that time that they would lose their new baby. His father described him as a happy, “shiny” baby.
Ablow believes that Scott’s parents were physically present but emotionally absent, and that Scott learned early on that anything less than perfection from him would not be tolerated. After all, babies symbolized abandonement to his mother, and she’d given away two of her children and wanted to give away a third. His father had divorced his first wife in part because he didn’t like children. In fact, they sent Scott’s older brother John to live with relatives when he misbehaved as a teenager.
Ablow theorizes that Scott’s parents were not only emotionally absent, but that they stifled any expression of individuality or personhood from Scott, to the point where he began to die a spiritual death, and that he learned how to give others what they wanted in terms of opinions, emotional responses, and behaviors. His parents convinced Scott that he was their “golden boy” but to stay that way he had to do whatever they wanted. He buried his rage at having to give up himself, and stopped being able to empathize with others or to experience real emotions himself. In essence, he became a sociopath.
When Scott met Laci, his ex-girlfriend Lauren had just broken up with him. Interestingly, she broke up with him because she thought he was rather bland, and that he expressed little emotion. He lacked spontaneity, and he tended to plan dates according to what he thought a woman’s idea of the perfect romantic date would be. It started to get boring to Lauren after awhile. Scott begged Lauren to reconsider the break-up, but she held firm. He even used Laci to try to make Lauren jealous, when he and Laci first started going out. I am not sure why Laci was willing to continue dating him after he did something like that. However, she didn’t notice lots of things about him, and that suggests she had some problems of her own.
Laci’s parents were divorced before she was a year old. She had a strained relationship with her biological father, who showed up drunk to her wedding. As a child, she was seriously ill; she had to have surgery to remove an eight-pound tumor (how does a tumor get to be that size before someone notices it? I don’t get that). Before dating Scott, Laci lived with a physically abusive boyfriend, her high school sweetheart. He eventually tried to murder another girlfriend and is currently in prison for that. After that, Scott, with his formal, perfect way of courting must have looked pretty good to her, with her idealized vision of romance. She liked to ignore anything unpleasant, such as Scott’s womanizing tendencies. Laci’s sister, Amy, noted that she had never even heard Laci and Scott argue, and that Laci had never said anything negative about Scott to her. She further noted that Scott tried to give Laci anything she wanted. It was too good to be true, obviously. Laci and Scott really didn’t know anything about each other.
While they were married, Scott dated several other women on the side. Ablow theorizes that Scott became a sex addict because the only time he truly felt alive was during sex.
Scott and Laci tried to conceive a child for two years before Laci got pregnant, though Scott may have assumed that Laci wouldn’t be able to get pregnant, since one of her fallopian tubes was removed when the tumor was removed. Scott did tell his sister-in-law that he had sort of hoped that Laci was infertile.
Fatherhood, of course, is anxiety-provoking even in men well-equipped psychologically for it. Impending fatherhood was even more of a psychological strain on Scott than most. Amber Frey helped him escape reality during this critical time, but Ablow also believes that Amber was able to reach out to the real Scott, more than anyone else. That’s why he felt so desperate to hang on to her. He knew that Amber wouldn’t stay with him if she knew he was married with a child on the way.
So, we all know how he decided to deal with that.
When detectives began questioning him, Scott was unable to play the part of the concerned and then grieving husband convincingly. Scott had gotten used to mirroring other people’s emotions, people who were predisposed to believe him. The cops didn’t give him the cues he was used to receiving.
This book was just fascinating to read. His theories about what turned Scott into a killer really make a lot of sense. He wasn’t trying to excuse what he did, of course, but merely to understand him. Although very in-depth, it was also very readable. If only someone had known to make such an effort before a tragedy occurred; I can’t help thinking that. Although there were early signs that Scott was losing his ability to empathize with others, I did get the feeling that there were a number of opportunities to disrupt the perfect psychological storm developing in Scott, opportunities that unfortunately were missed.
