Thread: Peterson Remains Located in March!

Paper: Peterson Remains Located in March

RICHMOND, Calif. (AP) - The bodies of Laci Peterson and her unborn child were located on the bottom of San Francisco Bay weeks before they washed up on shore, but a ship may have dislodged the remains before they could be retrieved, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Oakland Tribune reported that sonar equipment located what authorities believed to be the remains of Peterson and her baby in mid-March, long before Peterson's husband, Scott Peterson, was arrested and charged with the murders.

But even after finding the underwater graves, authorities could not retrieve the remains, sources said.

``When we got back out there, she was gone,'' a source told the paper. Investigators believe that a heavily laden tanker may have dislodged the remains, which were in a shipping channel.

Doug Ridenour, a spokesman for the police in Modesto, where Peterson and her husband lived, declined to comment about the report.

Reporters were waiting on shore the day the bodies were initially found, but investigators kept the discovery a secret out of fear that Scott Peterson would flee the country, a law enforcement source told the Tribune.

The original gravesite was miles from where Scott Peterson told police he had gone fishing on Christmas Eve, the day he says that Laci Peterson vanished from the couple's Modesto home.

When she disappeared, Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant with a son she had already named Conner. The remains of mother and son were found at the edge of San Francisco Bay on April 13 and 14.

Fearing that he might flee to Mexico, police arrested Scott Peterson a few days later and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. Stanislaus County prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.

Law enforcement sources told the Tribune that the remains may have been wrapped in plastic and held down by heavy material. Sonar originally located the bodies in a dredged shipping channel about four miles off Brooks Island, a bird sanctuary just off shore from the town on Richmond on the east side of San Francisco Bay.

Scott Peterson told police that he was fishing for sturgeon close to the island, an unlikely story given the shallow water around the island, the paper reported.

``When those remains washed up, it confirmed everybody's suspicions,'' one source told the paper. ``We know where she was put, and it wasn't in that shallow area around Brooks Island.''

The shipping channel where the bodies were originally spotted is dredged to a depth of about 43 feet, but heavily loaded oil tankers headed for a nearby Chevon refinery sometimes have only two feet of water under their keels, said Blake Coney, a pilot who guides ships in and out of the mostly shallow bay.

At low tide, a ship's screws could easily churn the bottom of the bay and dislodge a body, Coney told the paper.

``This sounds like a movie plot, and it's creepy,'' he said.