Key points from Scott Peterson’s trial

Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 | 8:47 a.m.

Key points from the Scott Peterson trial:

-Testimony that Peterson told his mother-in-law Laci was "missing" within an hour of returning home from his supposed fishing trip.

-Peterson asking a detective if they had begun using cadaver dogs in the search for his wife just a day after he reported her missing. "I told him we hadn't even considered Laci dead yet," Detective Allen Brocchini testified. "That kind of sets the stage for this entire case," prosecutor Rick Distaso told jurors.

-Peterson's continued romancing of mistress Amber Frey while authorities and volunteers searched for his wife.

"I just need to tell you how much I care about you ... And I desire so much to be, you know, for the rest of our lives, your best friend, your biggest comfort," Peterson tells Frey on one wiretap.

-Peterson's repeated lies about his whereabouts heard by jurors on wiretapped phone calls. At times, he was at the Berkeley Marina as police scoured San Francisco Bay for the bodies, but told friends and family he was elsewhere.

-The conversion of his baby's nursery into a storage room before the bodies had been discovered.

-Peterson's selling of Laci's car and inquiring about selling the couple's home, fully furnished, within weeks of her disappearance.

-Peterson purchased a two-day ocean fishing license days before that Christmas Eve, yet Peterson claimed the fishing trip was a last-minute substitution for golfing when he awoke to a cold, blustery day.

-Peterson's comments to at least two people that he had been golfing all morning, before telling police he had actually been fishing on the bay. Authorities claimed the waffling suggested he had not yet settled on an alibi.

-Peterson telling Frey several weeks before Laci vanished that he had "lost" his wife and the coming holidays would be the first he would spend alone, a foreshadowing of the murder, police contended.

-Peterson's purchase of a boat two weeks before Laci vanished, and his apparent computer research on bay currents a day after he was confronted about lying to hide his marital status.

-Peterson's altered appearance on the day of his April 2003 arrest in San Diego. He had bleached blond hair and a goatee and was carrying 15,000 in cash, as well as clothes and camping gear.

-The discovery by police that someone had used a computer in the Petersons' home on the morning Laci vanished - after authorities contend she was already dead - to search Web sites for a scarf and a sunflower-motif umbrella stand. Defense lawyers suggested the user was Laci, who had a sunflower tattoo on her ankle.

-The omission of a key witness statement from a detective's police report from a woman who claimed to have seen Laci before she died at the warehouse where her husband stored the boat prosecutors claim he kept a secret from her.

-Laci Peterson stood to inherit nearly $1 million, a detail defense lawyers noted meant her husband stood to gain more if she remained alive.