Peterson a Jekyll-Hyde fascination
At one time, not long ago, Scott Peterson was an ordinary man. He lived on a leafy suburban street in a ranch home with a kidney-shaped pool and a built-in barbecue. He belonged to the Rotary Club. He had a golden retriever.
Now he sits in a Redwood City courtroom, accused of murdering his wife, Laci, and their unborn son and dumping her body off the Berkeley marina. With his pale gray suit and calm attentiveness, Peterson looks like a juror who mistakenly took a seat at the defendant’s table. He sits with his chin jutting forward, his brows furrowed, as if listening to a business presentation instead of testimony from neighbors and acquaintances that could send him to his death.
When a photo of Peterson’s Modesto house was projected onto a screen during testimony this week, he stared at it, looked away, then stared at it again, as if trying to reconcile his two lives — the man who lived in the green house on Covena Avenue and the man on trial for murdering his eight-months-pregnant wife.
That duality is at the heart of our intense fascination with Peterson’s trial. It is not the specifics of the crime that pack the courtroom every day with newshounds and spectators, who show up by 8 a.m. in hopes of landing one of the 30 public seats. One man from Vermont has rented a cottage in Palo Alto, Calif., so he can watch the trial.
The sensational public interest is born of Peterson’s ordinariness. He is not so different from us. We don’t know yet whether Peterson committed the crime, but the possibility that he killed his pregnant wife taps into our own fear of and fascination with the idea of doubleness — the suspicion that beneath life’s familiar veneer lurks something uncontrolled and primordial.
Horror writers have long known that the scariest monster is the one you don’t recognize as monstrous. A pet Saint Bernard turns into a killer beast. A flock of birds goes on a deadly rampage. A quiet doctor named Jekyll becomes a psychotic murderer named Hyde.
“Dr. Jekyll is this perfectly ordinary man, a respectable, older man, a treasure to the community,’ said Barry Qualls, a 19th century literature professor at Rutgers. “But inside is a murderous impulse.’
I thought about this as I watched Scott Peterson jot notes on a yellow legal pad and chat with a bailiff during the morning recess. If he committed this crime, I keep thinking, there ought to be an outward sign, some mark that labels this middle-class fertilizer salesman as cold-blooded. There’s nothing.
“Many of us have had dangerous thoughts and have worried about those dangerous thoughts leading to action,’ said Dacher Keltner, a social psychologist at UC Berkeley.
Keltner tells his students about a study in which ordinary people followed orders to inflict what they were told were painful shocks on test subjects. (The test subjects feigned screams.) Nearly 70 percent were willing to push the shock to what they were told could be fatal levels.
“When I teach that study, students really grapple with it,’ Keltner said. “They want to believe there are evil people and that the rest of us are free of that kind of strange fate. They want to believe that there is a select sample of people who are dangerous, a very select group of contaminated people.’
I look at the jurors who will decide which Scott Peterson is the real one, the ordinary man who lived in the green ranch house or the man who police say murdered his pregnant wife.
Peterson listens to his former neighbor, a single mother, testify that he helped her with chores she couldn’t do alone, such as straightening her Christmas tree two days before Laci disappeared.
“Just your normal neighbor stuff,’ the prosecutor summarizes.
Later in the day, I drive past the front doors of my own neighborhood and wonder what dark surprises might be behind them.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is joanryan@sfchronicle.com.