Frey testimony brings drama, but what about the evidence?
By Harriet Ryan
Court TV
REDWOOD CITY, California (Court TV) -- She's been described as a mistress, a massage therapist and lithesome blonde, but this week Amber Frey gets a new designation: Witness No. 102.
The 29-year-old is expected to take the stand at the capital murder trial of former paramour Scott Peterson Tuesday morning. Her testimony, estimated to last eight days, is the most hotly anticipated of the 11-week-old proceeding.
Court officials held a special lottery to accommodate press demand for extra seats in the courtroom, and county employees installed new speakers in an overflow media listening area to ensure Frey's girlish voice will carry to the ends of the crowd.
For those lucky enough to snag a seat, the drama begins the moment Frey clicks a heel across the courtroom linoleum. On the way to the witness stand, does she look toward Peterson, the man who once wooed her with Russian poetry and said he wanted to be a father to her daughter? Does he return her gaze? Is she dressed in a conservative suit or a tight dress? How does Laci Peterson's mother react, and what of the defendant's own parents?
But if Frey's delivery of soap opera spectacle is assured, her significance at the trial is not. How she will help jurors determine whether Peterson killed his pregnant wife remains an open question.
Frey will describe the six-week whirlwind romance she conducted with the fertilizer salesman before his wife went missing and recount how she began cooperating with police against him. Through her testimony, jurors will hear hours of telephone conversations she surreptitiously recorded and see concrete evidence of their affair, perhaps including a receipt for a tuxedo he wore to escort her to a party and a strip of unopened condoms she told police bore his fingerprints.
Much her story is not in dispute. Peterson has admitted the affair and acknowledged that he lied to Frey about being married. He has confirmed the amorous phone chats with her after his wife vanished.
Prosecutors have theorized that Peterson plotted his wife's murder for weeks, killed her in their home December 23 and disposed of her body in the San Francisco Bay with a boat he had secretly purchased.
They have struggled to produce firm evidence of a murder plot or a killing inside the home, however, and Frey does not seem likely to help them because she didn't learn of Laci Peterson's existence until after the mother-to-be's disappearance. Then, the lovers spoke extensively over the phone, but, according to the defense, Peterson never admitted any involvement and, in fact, repeatedly expressed hope for his wife's safe return.
Prosecutors are likely to seize on one particularly suspicious statement Peterson made to Frey. Two weeks before Laci Peterson went missing, he tearfully told Frey he had "lost" his wife and would be spending his first holiday alone.
When Frey later discovered that he had a wife who was missing, she confronted him during a recorded call.
"How did you lose her then, before she was lost? Explain that," she asked him.
"There's different kinds of loss, Amber," Peterson replied. She pressed him further, but he said he could not elaborate.
Tall tales
What Frey seems chiefly to offer the prosecution is a portrait of Peterson as a liar of near pathological proportions. On their first date, an alcohol-soaked evening that included a Japanese dinner, slow dancing and sex in his hotel room, Peterson told Frey he had never been in a real relationship. In fact, he and his wife had celebrated their fourth anniversary the previous summer.
He explained his long absences by telling her he was duck hunting with his father in Alaska or jetting off to Brussels on business. He bolstered his tall tales with talk of time differences and phony bad connections.
When he told her about his "lost" wife, he sobbed. But, when she quickly forgave him, he resumed his normal demeanor, she told police. The suggestion that Peterson can cry on command may be especially resonant later when jurors screen television interviews in which he weeps when discussing his wife.
The impact of Frey's testimony will depend on how she withstands what is expected to be a withering cross-examination by Peterson's lawyer, Mark Geragos. The defense may even suggest she had something to do with Laci Peterson's disappearance.
In his opening statement, Geragos told jurors that one prosecution investigator was certain the killing was the work of more than one person and suspected Frey. Other police officers cleared her of any involvement after she gave them a detailed alibi, but that account relies in part on Frey's toddler daughter for corroboration.
Geragos has implied that Frey was more interested in a relationship than Peterson. She initiated many calls, he said.
"In fact, everything in those tapes is consistent with someone who was just trying to keep her at emotional bay," he said during his opening statement.
He is likely to grill Frey about her rocky romantic past. Her best friend, Shawn Sibley, who introduced her to Peterson, acknowledged on the stand that Frey had a series of bad relationships, including at least one with another married man.
