Legal consultant Chris Pixley “stress tested” new evidence uncovered by Scott Peterson’s attorneys and insists it “deserves examination”
The decades have taken a toll on Scott Peterson.
The 53-year-old former fertilizer salesman, who was convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, in 2002, steadfastly maintains his innocence yet has now spent half his life behind bars.
His perpetual faint smile has given way to a tired, drained expression typical of a man used to looking over his shoulder — he was savagely attacked by another inmate at California’s Mule Creek State Prison last year — and trying desperately to convince a judge that he doesn’t belong in prison.
“I have always hoped, believed and expected that at some point justice will be done,” says Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos, who represented Peterson in his murder trial, “because I don’t think what happened to Scott is justice.”
Plenty of people would disagree.
In April, San Mateo County Superior Court judge Elizabeth Hill denied Peterson’s latest petition, filed on his behalf by the Los Angeles Innocence Project (LAIP), to overturn his conviction. It introduced 14 new evidentiary claims, including sworn statements, eyewitness accounts, scientific research and alternative theories about what happened in the murders of Laci and the couple’s unborn son on Christmas Eve in 2002.
It was a case that riveted the nation after it was discovered that Scott was having an affair with a woman whom he had told he was a widower celebrating his first holiday season on his own.
The judge described Peterson’s claims as “neither new, admissible nor material,” writing: “The court remains unpersuaded that petitioner has a claim for relief based on actual innocence.”
Now, as his lawyers draft an appeal to a higher California court, a new documentary, Scott Peterson: The New Evidence, premiering July 16 and 17 on A&E, disputes the judge’s finding.
“This documentary is built around the idea of stress-testing the Los Angeles Innocence Project’s findings,” says host Chris Pixley, an Atlanta-based defense attorney and ABC News legal analyst.
The nearly three-hour project, which was produced independently of the LAIP, features interviews with witnesses and experts and pursues unexplored tips that Pixley claims police and prosecutors ignored in their rush to convict Peterson.
These new evidentiary claims run the gamut from testimony from Modesto locals who maintain that they saw Laci walking her dog after police believe she was already dead to a theory that she was abducted and killed by a group of men burglarizing a neighbor’s home.
“This is new science and new evidence, and every time you drill down, you find more. It deserves an examination,” says Pixley.
By all accounts, police arriving at the Peterson home after Scott reported Laci missing on the evening of Dec. 24, 2002, quickly grew suspicious due to her husband’s calm, detached demeanor.
Scott told police he had last seen Laci watching Martha Stewart Living at about 9:30 a.m. before leaving to go fishing at the Berkeley Marina, 90 miles away on San Francisco Bay.
Over the next two years, millions followed the twists and turns of the investigation and Scott’s ensuing trial.
He was convicted on two counts of murder in 2004 after prosecutors convinced jurors that he killed pregnant Laci as well as their unborn son, whose bodies washed ashore about a mile apart.
Scott’s attorneys filed numerous appeals, culminating in the LAIP’s current petition.
“Judge Hill recognized the most recent attempt to undo the jury’s verdict for what it was,” said Stanislaus County District Attorney Jeff Laugero after Hill’s 2026 ruling.
Ninette Toosbuy, a retired LAPD detective who appears in the new documentary, acknowledges that many people believe Scott is guilty: “In many ways Scott is his own worst enemy based on some of the things he did, like having an affair.” But that doesn’t make him a killer, she insists.
Pixley is convinced by the new evidence seen in the documentary that Scott deserves a new trial.
“He will not go free unless the narrative related to the case changes, and this deep dive that the LAIP has done and that we have now stress-tested is part of that,” he says.
But for Laci’s mother, Sharon Rocha, nothing will shake her belief in Scott’s guilt.
“We constantly hear that they have new evidence, but there is no new evidence,” Rocha — who declined to comment on the new documentary — told PEOPLE in 2024. “Twelve people found him guilty of murder, but he doesn’t admit to that.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
