The Last Christmas Eve: People v. Scott Peterson

On Christmas Eve 2002, Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant, planning a holiday dinner, and looking forward to becoming a mother. She was twenty-seven years old, warm and vivid — the kind of person who lit up the rooms she walked into. By the end of that day, she was gone, and her husband Scott had already left for the bay.

What followed was one of the most closely watched criminal cases of the early twenty-first century: a purely circumstantial murder prosecution, a sequestered jury in Redwood City, a death sentence eventually vacated by the California Supreme Court, and a legal fight that has never fully concluded. Two decades later, the Los Angeles Innocence Project is actively appealing a judge's April 2026 denial of their habeas petition, arguing that new forensic science calls into question the most fundamental premise of the case — when Conner Peterson actually died.

This episode traces the full arc: from the Christmas Eve disappearance and the community that searched for Laci across weeks, through the revelation of Scott's affair with Amber Frey, the discovery of the bodies in San Francisco Bay miles from where Scott claimed to have been fishing, the arrest in La Jolla with dyed hair and fifteen thousand dollars in cash, the five-month trial with its contested evidence and controversial juror dismissals, the split first- and second-degree verdicts, Sharon Rocha's devastating sentencing statement, the California Supreme Court's 2020 ruling, the 2021 resentencing to life without parole — and what the innocence project's appeal means for a case that still refuses to close.