Josh also fit the evolutionary model of control of the female in his life. He was clearly focused on dominating Susan, even though she was the more capable parent and provider in their home. He worried about what she thought of him, and, after her disappearance, clearly harbored a simmering fury about a wife he described as flirtatious and “highly sexual,” and feared was restless. Susan, like other victims of familicide cases examined by Websdale, worried about the violence her husband was capable of, yet had a strategy to change the situation—and leave Josh if she was unsuccessful.
But while Powell’s murders and suicide are consistent with many aspects of most cases of familicides, his crime was also extremely unusual because it occurred in stages. First Susan vanished, then Powell killed his sons and committed suicide. The individual characteristics of Powell’s crime is a testament to the complex challenges of understanding family annihilations and other types of fatal domestic violence because they often combine several key factors from biological forces to societal pressures, to mental illness, even while they exhibit startlingly similar patterns.
Powell’s killing of his two young sons is more typical among dads who murder their children to punish an unfaithful wife or a mate who is leaving or about to leave. Such a “reprisal murder” was suspected in the Michigan case of John Skelton, whose three young sons, Andrew, Alexander, and Tanner, disappeared while he had custody of them over Thanksgiving in 2010 after his wife had divorced him. He was sentenced to up to 15 years in prison after pleading no contest to an unlawful imprisonment charges. The prosecution case was hurt because the boys’ bodies were never found. Skelton claimed he had given his sons to some unidentified organization to protect them from his ex-wife.
But Susan Cox Powell was already dead when Braden and Charlie were killed, so there was no errant wife to “punish.” Josh Powell was enraged with several other people, however, whom he wanted to “show”—his in-laws, his own estranged family members, civil authorities who were barring Powell from his children. Powell also faced intrusive court-ordered tests to determine if he was capable of incest or sexually attracted to children. Powell may have been so humiliated by the prospect that he would have to submit to the tests—or, perhaps, that he would be exposed as a pedophile or incestuous father—that he opted for murder-suicide. He was likely also infuriated by the thought that he would be denied access to his own kids. The fact that he not only killed himself and his kids, but also used a gas-fueled explosion to do so added a special emphasis to his deadly “message,” the kind of “overkill” that police were struck by at Chris Foster’s estate.
Bill Parente was far more typical among his “genre” of family annihilators, and he shared several aspects of familicidal “civil reputable hearts” studied by Websdale. Interestingly, there are more mothers who commit this type of family annihilation than in the livid coercive cases (though they don’t kill their spouses). Websdale argues that in either situation, a parent appears to be “overwhelmed by their gender calling”—in the case of a male, a sense of failure at being a good provider, while women may be ashamed—or angry—because a husband is leaving her.
“The vast majority of familicidal hearts experienced acute shame at failing to live up to the imperatives of their gendered callings as providers, lovers, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers or partners,” the author writes.
Parente was regarded as a good provider, a solid citizen, a devoted dad and husband, and a religious man. If anything, he was too “enmeshed” with his family and seemed to have little life beyond his work and wife and daughters. He also suffered a devastating turnaround in his fortunes and was about to face major ignominy and community revulsion with what had to be imminent arrest to be followed by the hurt, shock, and humiliation of his family. He may have truly wanted to spare them the shame of his actions, or perhaps he couldn’t bear to imagine them angry and disgusted by him after his suicide. Or, as Gelles has noted, he simply regarded the family as a single entity, and that his suicide inevitably in his mind involved a “family suicide.”
Parente, as other similar killers, was clearly not as stable as he might have appeared to be to many. “Civil reputable” killers are affected, as are the livid coercive murderers, by a sense of alienation, anomie, and alienation, Websdale has concluded. These “perpetrators appear conformist, proper, respectable, almost emotionally constipated or tightly constrained,” noted Websdale.15 “By virtue of their social locations, upbringings, physiologies and temperaments, civil reputable hearts subdue extreme emotions such as rage, or perhaps experience them much less than the livid coercive heart.” Yet evidence suggests that many “lived lives full of tension and apprehension about the future, often quietly worrying about their days,” he adds. Unlike livid coercive killers, the Parente genre of family annihilators tend to live in “well-to-do or at least upwardly mobile or economically aspiring families,” and are “well thought of in their communities, sometimes pillars of them,” notes Websdale. “They have much farther to fall than their livid coercive peers. Indeed, the prospect of losing face, of falling from grace, looms large” in their lives.16
Their murder-suicides are particularly shocking to the community and friends and acquaintances, whose very concepts of relationships and human behavior are profoundly shaken by the attacks, says Websdale. “When men and women of honor and respectability commit familicide it raises the possibility that other like-situated persons have the same potential, and it makes us doubt the genuineness of manifestations of honor, civility, caring and nurturing,” he points out in his book.17
One of the most famous cases of a family annihilation was New Jersey accountant John List’s murder of his wife, his mother, and his two sons and a daughter in 1971. He fled, assumed a new name, and wasn’t apprehended for 18 years. By then he had a new family. Like Parente, he was the only son of a devoted mom. He was a loner whose social life hinged on his family. When he lost his job, he didn’t tell his wife, pretended to go to work each day, and sank deeper and deeper into debt. “My professional career had reached a dead end, but I was too proud—or ashamed—to admit it, even to myself,” he said in an interview after he was busted.18 When he shot his family, he arranged their bodies under blankets, and left classical music playing for them on the radio. Like William Parente, he planned his attack, and, as Websdale notes, “killed with care.”
It’s not only modern society that may have some link to family annihilations, but, Websdale fears, something in particular about relationships forged in America, the birthplace of familicides, that fuels the murderous intent. He suspects the problem may be more pronounced in this country, though no international evidence has yet been gathered to support that view. The “don’t tread on me” and “rugged individualist” aspects of US culture may be particularly demanding for families under stress. A culture formed in the “white heat of individual responsibility” sees “less willingness to recognize the importance of community and caring for others,” argues Websdale.19 “Rather, we see enormous expenditures on the criminal justice juggernaut and incarcerations, and an abject failure to connect individual malevolence and pathology to social, economic and political arrangements.”
THAT’S WHEN I REALIZED. SCOTT SAID THAT SHE WAS “MISSING.” AND I JUST, I JUST KNEW, I KNEW SHE WAS MISSING.
—Sharon Rocha, mother of Laci Peterson, in testimony at the 2004 murder trial of her son-in-law Scott Peterson
He was a strikingly handsome salesman from Modesto with a wrestler’s build and smoldering dark eyes, a pretty, loquacious wife, a swimming pool in a comfortable California neighborhood, and a baby boy on the way.1 But Scott Peterson, who was close to turning 30, wasn’t happy. He was once a restaurateur in Southern California, glad-handing the customers and flirting with the women. The restaurant wasn’t a roaring financial success, and his determined wife, Laci, wanted to be closer to her mom in her hometown of Modesto, especially once she planned to have a baby. So there was Scott: a charismatic head-turner with the women,
but, essentially, now a pedestrian family man selling fertilizer, and not very effectively, in a dusty middle-class cow town in the landlocked Central Valley of California—“just a normal, every-day town, not anything unusual or different than any other city,” is how his mother-in-law would describe it later in court. That’s the kind of mediocrity Scott was struggling with as he floated in his pool on a hot, dry summer afternoon in 2002, his heels cooling in the water that collected in the bottom of his air mattress. He was talking, quietly, to his brother-in-law, Brent Rocha, who had become good friends with Scott since he married Laci five years earlier. Laci, along with Brent’s wife, Rose, and the Rochas’ toddler son were in one section of the pool, and “me and Scott were on the other end, and we were just kind of talking about life,” Brent would later testify in court. “We were just talking about, you know, not only about him being a parent, but in general how he wasn’t doing good at his job, and kind of had a lot going on: He’s turning 30, and he was going to be a father. He was down, kind of quiet. He was talking about how he was trying to interview new associates at his business, and hoping they would be better sales people than he would be.” Scott wasn’t thrilled about having a baby, Brent’s wife would later recall, pointing to a chat with Scott about starting a family. “We were talking about pregnancy or having a family, and I believe I said something to the effect of, to Scott, ‘Are you ready for this?’ and he looked at me and said, ‘I was kind of hoping for infertility,’” she would testify. “He wasn’t laughing, he wasn’t smiling, so when I heard that I was kind of surprised, I was kind of shocked by what he said, and I didn’t know how to read him.”
On Christmas Eve that year, Laci Peterson, eight months pregnant with the couple’s first child, vanished. Later in spring, a couple walking their dog would find her fetus entangled in seaweed on the shore of San Francisco Bay. A day later, Laci’s torso was found nearby.
Scott Peterson was the man who launched me on this book. I covered his 2004 trial for the capital crime murder of his wife and unborn son for the New York Daily News. When I walked into the courtroom, I was already suspicious he was guilty. For one thing, statistics were on my side. Any time a family member is missing or murdered, the most likely suspect is the spouse, or, in the case of a child, a parent, so Scott was doubly suspect. And Scott’s early concern for his missing wife looked canned. He cried too easily, talked too articulately when TV cameras were on him, casually skipped at least one community vigil for Laci, and started to store furniture in the nursery he and Laci had prepared for the boy. He knew his baby wouldn’t be returning to use it. In the cynicism of the newsrooms of places like the New York Daily News or New York Post, reporters and editors alike watching dads and moms like Scott cry so easily at pleas for lost children, quickly scoff “guilty” when they’re clustered around TV monitors or looking up from their desks at televised press conferences, before turning back to news of the next dead body. The innocent who have lost loved ones are often paralyzed by sorrow; they have a difficult time even communicating, so wracked by fear and worry are they. The anguish of Laci’s mom, Sharon Rocha, was palpably painful to witness.
Figure 13.1. Laci flashes a smile and rests her hands on her pregnant belly. Though Laci grew increasingly uncomfortable as the months progressed, she was thrilled to be pregnant. Presented in evidence at Scott Peterson’s murder trial.
A relaxed Scott smiled lazily, and often, at the defense table in the Redwood City courtroom where he was tried, but I could see death row in the faces of the jury, and he’d have no glad-handing as a restaurateur, not even a life in Modesto, nor a baby boy on the way—a son he and Laci had already named Conner. The son-about-to-be had a nursery waiting for him in the couple’s Covena Avenue home in Modesto, decorated in a nautical theme with a plaid life preserver over his crib that said “Welcome Aboard” when Laci’s body was found.
I didn’t get it. Every day, squeezing past knees to my courtroom seat, I wondered, again, what could drive a man to kill the only offspring he’d ever have? There’d be no chance for Scott to father a child in San Quentin. It seemed to be against every human instinct to kill a pregnant wife. Did Scott have some profound biological defect in his brain wiring that created a lethal personality? Was he turned into a killer by an abusive childhood? Or was something in him so twisted by social forces that it overrode a primeval human drive to procreate? Were we creating a culture that somehow helped unleash a twisted machismo that destroyed its own spawn? Mothers killing their children are as profoundly upsetting. But, as a woman, I could more easily understand many cases in which a mother was clearly mentally unstable (killing a child to exorcise “demons,” for example) or in the throes of a vicious postpartum depression. An apparently cold, calculated decision to eliminate a pregnant wife and son so close to birth, simply—as it appeared to be in Scott’s case—to exchange one woman and one life for another without the bother of divorce court, the expense of alimony and child support, and the tarnish of a failed relationship, I found completely incomprehensible.
Absolutely nothing in Scott Peterson’s background indicated he would become a killer of his wife and unborn son—he had no known history of violence, no arrest record. “Scott does not have the genetics of a cold-blooded, premeditated killer,” his attorney Mark Geragos told People magazine just as the trial was about to begin.2 Laci never complained of abuse; in fact, she seemed to have a near-perfect marriage. There wasn’t a whisper of trouble to her friends, nor did she ever confide that anything was wrong to her mom, Sharon Rocha, who was described by Sharon’s longtime companion as Laci’s “best friend.”
Scott was the much-loved last child of Lee and Jackie Peterson, who merged their earlier families in a kind of Brady Bunch before Scott’s birth. Jackie had given up two babies for adoption before she met Lee—and nearly a third one until her doctor talked her out of it—because she feared she couldn’t adequately care for them as a single mom. It was clear at the trial from Jackie’s fiercely defensive behavior with the press and Laci’s family that she had desperately tried to make up with her son for the children she had left behind. When Jackie was asked on the witness stand if she was Scott’s mother, she responded: “Proudly so, yes.” At the penalty phase of the trial, she pleaded with the jury “not to take my son away.” He’s an “exceptional young man and he’s my son,” she said. “I know he’s not perfect. But he is genuinely a loving, caring, nurturing, kind, gentle person.”
Figure 13.2. Laci and Scott pose happily for a snapshot long before there was another woman in Scott’s life. Presented in evidence at Scott Peterson’s murder trial.
Scott was a popular student, a sought-after date, a star golfer in high school. He met Laci while the two were students at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo. Laci majored in decorative horticulture, and Scott in agricultural business. As he attended school, he worked at a packaging company owned by his parents, who had given him an investment stake in it, but he later cashed it out to combine funds with money from Laci to launch a burger restaurant called The Shack. Laci gushed to her mom about Scott, who was tender and attentive, and wooed her with thoughtful, romantic flourishes. The first time Sharon Rocha traveled to San Luis Obispo to meet Scott at Laci’s insistence in 1994, he had a special table waiting for them at a restaurant where he worked at the time. There were a dozen red roses on the table for Laci, and a dozen white roses for Sharon. Scott and Laci married three years later, shortly after Laci graduated. She found a job as a wine distributor in the Monterey area, so she lived in Prunedale while Scott finished up his degree the following year and continued working at The Shack. They bought their Modesto home with financial help from the Petersons. Laci eventually settled into regular work as a substitute teacher. Scott found a job selling fertilizer for agricultural supplier Tradecorp, and joined the nearby expensive Del Rio Country Club to pursue his passion for golf. He barbecued, the couple put in a swimming pool in the backyard, he called his mother-in-law “Mom.” “You thought the
world of him” before the day Laci vanished, “is that a fair statement?” Scott’s attorney Mark Geragos asked Sharon Rocha on the witness stand.
Rocha: Yes, it is.
Geragos: He called you Mom?
Rocha: Yes.
Geragos: He would talk to you, and you had no qualms about the way he treated your daughter whatsoever; isn’t that correct?
Rocha: Yes.
Geragos: You never saw him ever get violent with her, did you?
Rocha: No.
Geragos: You never saw him even get angry in the sense where he would yell at her or raise his voice at her, did you?
Rocha: No, not that I ever recall.
There were even times, Geragos pressed Rocha, “when he probably should have been mad at Laci, and did not get mad at her, would just say, ‘Oh, honey, that’s okay.’ Is that an accurate characterization of the relationship?” To which Laci’s mom conceded: “Possibly.”
Sharon Rocha’s common-law husband, Ron Grantski, the man who helped raise Laci from the time she was two, sometimes found Scott unnaturally patient with the occasionally pushy Laci, whom Grantski had nicknamed “JJ” for “Jabberjaws.” Laci “got basically anything she wanted because Scott tried to give it to her, isn’t that correct?” Geragos asked Grantski when he was on the witness stand, and Grantski agreed.
But despite every appearance, the relationship was crumbling, and Sharon and Laci didn’t have a clue. Scott had an intense, secret life he kept well hidden from his friends, his wife, and his mother-in-law, which he launched just months before his son was about to be born. Scott was wooing another woman just as Laci was struggling with the increasing discomforts of her advancing pregnancy. “She was complaining about her feet swelling, having a hard time standing up for any length of time or walking, her back was aching and she seemed to be tired all the time,” her mom testified. Scott’s brand-new secret mistress was everything Laci was not at that moment—petite, blonde, fragile, and painfully shy.
Killer Dads Page 18