On January 7, 2003, I started a thread on a message board called "Why did Laci Peterson vanish without a trace?" It was viewed over a thousand times in a span of minutes, and then it vanished without a trace. The most popular thread on Court TV message boards at the time, it was essentially censored because somebody evidently wanted to contol the message about the disappeaance of Laci Peterson -like mob justice.

I used the thread in effort to denounce the fanatics who were essentially lynching Scott Peterson through pure and baseless speculation.

Despite Court TV, there is not a single shred of evidence which even remotely suggests that Scott Peterson had anything to do with the fact that his wife Laci vanished without a trace.

Needless to say, as long as the police failed to clear Laci's husband, the exclusive focus on Scott was essentially a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Under the circumstances, reasonable people would not have hesitated to clear Scott Peterson.

The censored, hysterical media on the other hand, dispatched a lynch mob mentality that turned a loving, doting, would-be father into a cold-blooded murderer. The most insightful aticle on the case was written, not by the mainstream media, but by the Daily Trojan, the student newspaper of Southern California, which made the following commentary;

"During the last few weeks, the news has been full of stories about Laci Peterson, the Modesto, California, woman who disappeared on Christmas Eve. At first, it was a legitimate news story. Peterson was eight months pregnant when she vanished, and her family scoured the countryside looking for her.

But during the past week, it has turned into a media circus. Newspapers revealed that Scott Peterson was cheating on his wife at the time. The extended family has issued several statements denouncing his infidelity. Finally, during the weekend, 'the other woman' came forward to talk about their affair.

Now the story seems like a repeat of the Chandra Levy scandal, in which a Modesto woman vanished in Washington, D.C. Upon investigation, it turned out that she had been having an affair with Congressman Gary Condit. Although Condit had nothing to do with her disappearance, journalists pounced on the story and turned it into a sordid soap opera."

Despite the media circus, Scott Peterson's limited knowledge with respect to the disappeaance of his wife was well documented and verified. He last saw his wife Laci about 9:30 a.m. on December 24, 2002, when he left to go fishing for the day at Berkeley Marina. She took the family dog, McKenzie, for a walk at nearby La Loma Park, it returned without Laci and there is no better confirmation than that. The man is innocent and his wife was abducted for reasons that have never been publicly disclosed.

In the alternative, we can think that Scott Peterson and the family dog plotted the abduction of Laci Peterson.

Sex can complicate everything. In '98, Ken Starr had 60 FBI detailed full time to track down and interview Monica Lewinsky's girlfriends for what she told them about President Clinton. The friends were then put before a grand jury to tell their stories, all of which became thousands of pages of lewd stories,

Fastforward to the year 2001 and "Starr Squad" skills are transferred to another abusive cabal. What if "they" had locked up Chandra Levy in a hotel room for the purpose of a vicious interrogation, the way they did when they wanted to get Monica Lewinsky to say that she had sex with President Bill Clinton?

What if Chandra Levy was a target of a covert effort to publicly expose Gary Condit's private sex life and her disappearance was merely a consequence of a Sexual McCarthyism that is so perverse and so obsessive, it even got the President of the United States impeached?

What if the disappeaance of Laci Peterson was supposed to be a smokescreen to divert attention away from the fact that the murder of Chandra Levy was an unsolved crime that craved attention --until Laci disappeared? To put it bluntly, the disappearance of Laci Peterson altered the news cycle and there is every reason to believe that the killers of both women have always been obsessed with controlling the news.

In fact, Laci Peteson's killers planted the bodies to implicate an innocent man, the media was the source of the information they required to do that and if that does not conclusively prove that Scott Peterson is innocent, what does?

There is another intriguing link between the murders of Chanda Levy and Laci Peteson. The bodies of both victims were not recovered until they were forensically useless with respect to identifying the actual culprits and in retrospect, that does not appear to be a coincidence.

Unresolved questions, to be sure, but do not blame Scott Peterson for the deviants who murdered Laci Peterson and Chandra Levy.

Next: Incompetent fanatics do not belong on the bench.