Olsen also told the police that he’d never seen Scott abuse alcohol or pick up women on those business trips. But there was one troubling incident that stuck in his mind. Near the end of the conversation, Olsen mentioned that a woman named Shawn had contacted him several weeks earlier asking about Scott’s marital status. Olsen told the woman he did not want to be involved in Scott’s personal affairs, and that she should contact Scott directly. As the detectives entered Amber Frey’s residence, Brocchini wondered if this could be the same Shawn whom Olsen had mentioned.
Amber invited the officers into her large, open living room. Al-though sparsely furnished, the one-bedroom cottage was tastefully decorated. She may not have had much money, the police judged, but Amber Frey was a neat and meticulous young woman who was trying to provide a good home for her young daughter, Ayiana.
As they sat down. Amber showed the officers several items to prove that she and Scott Peterson had been dating. One was a Star Theater 2 home planetarium, a Christmas gift she had received from him on December 26. The gift was purchased by mail order and was accompanied by a receipt and a special message from Scott written in Spanish. Then Amber pulled out three corks from bottles of wine and champagne she said the couple had shared during their dates. The corks were signed and dated and bore the couples’ names. As the officers examined the items, Amber handed them a formal invitation for a black tie Christmas party on December 14. She told police that she and Scott had attended the party together, and then presented the officers with a receipt for the tuxedo Scott had rented for the formal affair.
Amber wore an awkward smile as she next presented the detectives with a strip of unused condoms that she said would have Scott’s fingerprints on them. She also turned over a wrapped Christmas gift that she had intended to give him, with the words FOR MY I.OVE inscribed on the wrapping paper.
After the show-and-tell session, Brocchini pulled out a tape recorder, and explained that he wanted to record their conversations as part of the investigation. Both Amber and Shawn consented.
“Okay, it’s ah, Monday, December 30 of 2002,” Detective Buehler began, as the tape recorder on the table whirred. “Present is Detective Brocchini, along with myself. Detective Jon Buehler. We are here with Amber Frey and Shawn Sibley and the time we are starting is 11:02. We’re going to do two interviews here. Probably the first thing we oughta start—ah, I guess Shawn you were the first one to meet Scott?”
“Yes,” Shawn confirmed.
“And if you wanna just go into that and start telling us about how you met him, where you met him, how long ago it was, and under what circumstances,” Buehler instructed.
Adjusting herself in the chair, Shawn Sibley began her story. Shawn had met Eric Olsen and his boss, Scott Peterson, in October at a California Association of Pest Control Advisers trade show in Anaheim. One evening, they all enjoyed a Monday night baseball game in the lounge at the Disneyland Hotel bar, with another man named Dave whose last name she didn’t know.
Shawn and Scott spoke briefly about business. He was polite and engaging. Although the men would view it differently, Shawn insisted that Scott did not hit on her. She was wearing an engagement ring and made it known that she was in a committed relationship. Shawn decided to stay on for dinner with Scott, Eric, and Dave, and the four walked to Blue’s restaurant on the Disneyland strip. During the stroll, Scott removed his conference name tag and asked Shawn, “What can I write on the back of this that would attract a woman to me?”
“I took it and wrote, ‘I’m rich,’” Shawn recalled.
Scott smiled, and suggested the initials, “H. B. for Horny Bastard.”
Scott picked up the tab for dinner and all the drinks. After the meal, Eric and Dave went back to their hotel while Scott and Shawn went back to the Disneyland Hotel and drank at the bar until it closed. They then sat in the hotel’s courtyard and talked until the security guards told them to leave. Scott followed Shawn to her hotel room, where they sat in the hallway chatting until 3:30 A.M. She was sharing a room with her coworker, she said, so they couldn’t go inside.
Although Sibley maintained that Scott never came on to her, they did talk about relationships. “He asked me,” she said, “‘do you think there is only that one person who you are meant to be with forever?’ There’s probably a thousand people out there on this earth that we could be compatible with; I don’t think there’s necessarily just one.” Scott “wanted to find the one person who would make him happy,” she explained. He told her that he thought he’d found the right person, but it didn’t work out, and now he was looking for someone “intelligent.” Shawn said Peterson claimed he was “sick of bimbos,” and “he didn’t like one-night stands.” He was “looking for someone he could spend the rest of his life with,” she said. Scott asked Shawn if she had any friends who might fit the bill, but Shawn had nobody in mind.
Since Scott had been drinking, he wound up sleeping in his truck in the parking lot instead of driving back to his hotel. When Shawn ran into him the following morning, the two continued their discussion. He told Shawn that he lived in Sacramento and had a condominium in San Diego. His office was in Modesto, but he was rarely there. He also told her that he traveled extensively, in and out of the United States, and at the end of the conference the two exchanged business cards and went their separate ways.
About a month later, Shawn received a message at her office from Scott. Assuming it was business-related, she returned the call. Scott immediately started talking about “personal stuff.” After the conference, Scott told Shawn, he did not check out of his hotel; in-stead he had driven straight back to his home, and the hotel mailed him his packed bag. With that Shawn and Scott began a phone friendship, speaking two or three times a week on both her business line and cell phone.
Shawn said the charming young man always wanted to talk about personal things before they discussed business. She liked Scott, and eventually she decided to introduce him to her friend. Amber Frey, if he was “serious” about meeting a smart girl and settling down. Shawn told Scott that Amber had been hurt before, but Scott assured her that he was not a cad. “Scott insisted he would do nothing to hurt her,” Shawn told the officers. The introduction was made, and Amber and Scott began dating.
In early December, however, Shawn had learned that Scott Peterson might be married. Brocchini leaned forward and readjusted himself in the chair, paying close attention as Shawn recalled a December 6 conversation with an ex-employee named Feras Almasari, also known as Mike. Almasari told her that he had recently applied for a job with Scott Peterson at Tradecorp. Scott told Mike quite a story: Having sold his business in Europe, he said, he had re-tired and come to the United States to launch Tradecorp.
According to Almasari, Scott claimed to have so much money that his wife just “went ahead and bought” a house in Modesto.
Shawn was shocked to hear that Scott was married. She continued to question Almasari to make sure that they were talking about the same man.
“It’s Scott Peterson, the owner of Tradecorp,” Almasari told her.
“Did you confront Scott that same day?” Buehler asked, shifting in his seat.
“Immediately,” Shawn recalled, her voice rising. “I mean Amber is my best friend in the whole world. I was freaked. Here I’m thinking, Oh, my God, I set her up with a married guy. How horrible is that?”
When Shawn got Scott on the phone, he vehemently denied ever being married. But she hung up feeling unsatisfied by his explanations, and soon thereafter she called Olsen. Shawn’s account of her conversation with Eric Olsen corroborated what Olsen had told Brocchini during their interview on December 28.
Shawn called Scott again and accused him of having a wife. “He denied it,” she said. Several hours later, Scott called her back and left a message on her answering machine. “I listened to the message. It was him, and he’s all crying on it and said, you know, ’Shawn I’m sorry, I lied to you, ah, I know, when I said I have never been married.’ He s
aid, ‘It’s been very painful for me to talk about it. I lost my wife. Just give me a call, please don’t tell Amber anything, you know, I wanna tell her in person.’”
When Shawn returned Scott’s call, he said that he’d told people different stories, but still insisted he wasn’t married. He told Shawn that he “lost” his wife—the same line he had used on Katy Hansen … and that he would use on Amber.
When Shawn threatened to go to Amber, Scott implored her not to. By this time he was sobbing.
“Are you currently married?” she demanded. “I need to know. He said, ‘No, no, no. I’m not currently married.’ His wording was ‘I lost my wife,’ but I didn’t really know what that meant.”
Scott was still begging her to let him tell Amber. “I need to know that you’ve told her,” Shawn told Scott. “You need to call me immediately when you tell her because if this evening she doesn’t know, I’m calling and telling her.”
On Monday, December 9, Shawn received another call from Scott. He told her that Amber “knew everything.” Shawn did not immediately call her friend to confirm this was true. Two days later, when Amber and Scott attended a birthday party for Shawn’s fiance, Scott was introduced to Amber’s friends and treated everybody to drinks.
“What does Scott drink?” Buehler inquired.
“He drinks a mix of wine, tequila, vodka, and gin.” Shawn said everybody liked Scott after meeting him that night.
“He’s a likable guy,” Buehler stated.
“Uh-huh.” Amber chimed in.
“No doubt,” Buehler continued. “I mean, that’s what everybody has said. But, you know, we look a little past that when we’re working something like this. Don’t feel bad that you guys ended up in this kind of situation.”
“He’s a con man,” Brocchini interjected.
“He’s a salesman. He’s very convincing,” Buehler added. “He ap-pears very sincere.”
“Can you relate some of the stories Scott has told you since you met him?” Brocchini asked Shawn.
Shawn said that Scott had told her that he’d become a vegetarian for six months during college when he was dating a “vegan.” He stated that it was “worth it to stop eating meat because the sex with her was great.”
On the day he dropped his girlfriend off at the airport, Scott told her, he drove straight to a restaurant and “had a nice big, fat, juicy hamburger.”
Scott talked of his travels to Europe, particularly Spain, and about skiing and sailing and spending time in Alaska. He told Shawn that his uncle owned a cabin there, where he and his brother often went to fish.
The majority of Scott’s conversations revolved around “finding that special person.” He talked about his hopes for the future and thanked her for introducing him to Amber. Scott often told Shawn how “nice and understanding” Amber was. She was “special.” “He was not dating her for ’sport,’ ” he said. Scott had been searching for an “intelligent person” like Amber his entire life, she remembered him saying.
“Did he tell you any of his hopes, did he talk about family or kids?” Brocchini asked Shawn.
“I finally asked him, ‘If my friend [Amber] has a child, would that bother you?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, that wouldn’t bother me at all.’ That’s a whole ‘nother story that Amber can tell you,” Shawn giggled.
It was 12:41 P.M. when Brocchini switched off the tape recorder. The two detectives stood up to stretch their legs before continuing their session with Amber Frey, who asked Shawn to leave the room, saying that she was uncomfortable discussing her romantic relationship with Scott in Shawn’s presence.
“Okay, we are starting again here on December 30 of 2002 on Monday at 11:50 A.M.,” Buehler said as the taped interview began again, “just start from the first time you heard about him, first time you met him, and any detail you think of that …” Buehler instructed. What follows is the first complete published account of the initial police interview with Amber Frey.
“First time I heard about him, I can give a date. It was early November,” Amber began nervously. “Shawn told me about this guy she met, and he was absolutely wonderful. She said that we would be a good match. It was November 19 when he called me. He left me a message, and said ‘Amber, this is Scott Peterson, I’m friends with Shawn Sibley, and I’d like to meet you.’
“He left his number, and I called him back. He didn’t answer, so I called again and said, ‘Well, Shawn said you’re not very good with the phone,’ ” Amber explained. “He reached me on November 20, and I said, ‘Oh, we finally caught up.’ We talked briefly, and he said, ‘Well, I’m going to be in town, can I, I would like to take you to dinner, if that’s okay, or if you’d like to go,’ and I said sure …”
Amber continued, in a rambling fashion, to recount the details of her first conversation with Scott. At one point she asked Scott how she would identify him in the restaurant, and he jokingly described himself as six feet tall, with a big belly. He then asked Amber how he would be able to recognize her.
“I said, I’m a thin woman, small-framed, five-seven, somewhere in there … you know, blond hair. And he goes, ‘Well, Shawn didn’t describe me to you?’ I said, no, not really. He goes, ‘Well I won’t have a problem asking every attractive blonde I see. Are you Ambers”
They arranged to meet at 7:00 P.M. at the Elephant Bar on North Blackstone Avenue in Fresno. Amber arrived early and went inside. “A gentleman came in. I thought it was him. We made eye contact, and he somewhat fit the description, but I said, ‘Oh please, not him.’” Buehler chuckled.
“He passed, and I sat down, looked up, and saw a good-looking man in a suit with a big smile on his face, and he said ‘Amber? I’m Scott,’ and he gave me a little peck on the cheek and a hug.”
Scott was staying at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Fresno. He’d been in a suit all day, he said, and he wanted to check in, change, and have a shower before dinner. Cynical women might have hesitated at this, but not Amber, who was already finding Scott charming.
“So we go in, and he carried all his luggage. He had emptied it from that truck. He said ‘This is kinda embarrassing because I al-most live out of my truck.’ So we get in the hotel, he pulls out two glasses and a botde of sparkling wine, or no, cha—actually it was either sparkling wine or champagne. At this point I, I don’t recall the difference. I was like, ‘Oh.’”
After he cleaned up, Scott placed a strawberry in each glass and poured wine in each glass. After their drinks, the two set off for dinner at Edo-Ya, a local Japanese restaurant. The two were shown to a table, but Scott didn’t remain seated for long. Instead, he left to talk to the maitre d’. Few restaurants accommodate private seating these days, yet somehow Scott managed to secure a private room. There he promptly ordered another bottle of champagne. Amber listened, entranced, as Scott talked about himself and his travels to Africa, Ireland, and Spain. She had no idea that the grandiose self-portrait he was painting was pure fiction, apparently improvised on the spot.
The conversation turned to the upcoming holidays. Scott told Amber that he was going to Alaska for a weeklong trip with his brother and father for Thanksgiving.
“And then for Christmas, he said, ‘my parents always go to Maine. From there, the twenty-eighth, I’ll leave for Paris, ‘cause I have some business there.’ ”
“So when will you be back?” she asked. He told her he would re-turn at the end of January.
“We talked about my daughter briefly,” Amber recalled. “I said, today she is twenty-one months old. He goes, ‘Wow, so her birthday is in February.’ I said February 20. Mine is the tenth, I told him, and he is like, ‘Oh wow, that’s just, you know, coming up.’”
Amber told the detectives that she and Scott remained in the private room until the restaurant closed. “We were having a good time eating and enjoying each other’s company.” After dinner they went to B.B.’s, a karaoke bar next door. Amber said that she and Scott both got up and did a karaoke number.
“He asked me if I
smoked, and I said no. And he goes, ‘Oh good’ and he leaned over and gave me a kiss and said, ‘Oh no, you don’t smoke.’ It was just a simple innocent kiss.”
The two danced to Frank Sinatra tunes before heading back to Scott’s hotel. On the way, they stopped at a local convenience store where Scott purchased a bottle of Tanqueray gin and some tonic water.
“Then we went back to the hotel … and then we started kissing, and everything else. We ended up having sex that night—protected,” the twenty-seven-year-old blonde added.
The next morning, Scott drove Amber back to her car. He said he would be traveling for the next week, but would try to call. He did call her twice while he was away—both times supposedly from an airport. They got together again on December 2.
“It was his first time coming to my house,” Amber said; it was only their second date. “He got here and picked me up and hugged me and said, ‘Where’s the little one?’ And I said, ‘Oh, she’s at school. … I thought we could pick her up.’ ”
“He was really excited about getting to meet her,” Amber said. Scott brought gifts with him that day, including a house plant and a bag of groceries. She still had the plant, although its leaves were wilted.
“He brought in a bag, and he also brought dinner and wine for that night. ‘Everything else is packed; all we need to do is get the little one,’ he told her. And I said okay. And so, he just kinda hung out and then we went to the school, and he walked with me into her class and got her and we left.”
Outside, Scott and Amber struggled to get Ayiana’s car seat safely installed in his Ford pickup. “That’s terrible,” Scott exclaimed. “My car is not even baby-proofed.” Amber had no idea that Scott had his own baby on the way.
A Deadly Game Page 14