PETERSON TRIAL In tapes, a forceful Frey dogs suspect

Amber Frey taped more than 350 calls with Scott Peterson for police.
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REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Weeks of swooning sweet talk by Amber Frey turned to bitter, relentless confrontations with Scott Peterson in phone calls accusing him repeatedly of being involved in the disappearance of his pregnant wife, according to recorded calls played in court Thursday.
Peterson denied it every time, sometimes through tears, telling his former mistress "My God, Amber, I had nothing to do with her disappearance."
In a series of phone calls recorded Jan. 6, 2003, Frey asked him again and again to explain how he told her he had "lost" his wife, Laci, weeks before she actually went missing. She also demanded to know why Peterson said he would be spending the first holidays without his wife. Laci Peterson disappeared Christmas Eve 2002.
"This has to be the biggest coincidence I have ever heard of. I mean are you psychic? I mean you predicted your wife would be missing?" Frey said.
"No," Peterson said.
"How can you not expect me or to even think or even to, to let this pass that you possibly had planned this?" she asked.
"I did nothing like that," he said.
"Oh, well, then again, this is the biggest coincidence ever," she said.
"No."
"Elaborate to me."
"No."
He cries
During Frey's constant demand for the whole story about his wife's disappearance and his lies about being single and being in Europe while he was actually in Modesto, Calif., with a missing wife, Peterson starts to cry.
"I wish I could tell you everything," he said.
"Save your tears," she said flatly.
Most legal experts following the case considered Thursday's full day of taped phone calls a devastating day for Peterson, who is accused of murdering his wife and unborn child. Prosecutors are trying to convince the jury in Redwood City that Peterson killed his eight-months-pregnant wife so he could continue his relationship with Frey.
"Scott is finally confronted and he has failed to give an explanation and sounds like he's trying to hide something," said Stan Goldman, a Loyola Law professor who listened to the tapes played in court Thursday. "It's probably the darkest moment for the defense. The defense may have been ahead before, but they're behind the eight ball now."
During parts of the recorded calls, some jurors put down their transcripts and stared at Peterson, who was looking down. At the end of the day, several jurors shook their heads and raised their eyebrows at each other.
At one point, Frey, a 29-year-old single mother and massage therapist from Fresno, Calif., began crying and wiping her tears while she listened to the recorded call from the spectator seats in the courtroom. Her lawyer, Gloria Allred, put her arm around her.
Strung him along
Frey, who had been in the midst of a monthlong, intense, passionate relationship with Peterson, began taping calls for police the day she found out from a friend that Peterson was married -- and to the missing Modesto woman shown on the news. Frey strung Peterson along for a week of phone calls, played for jurors earlier in the week.
In them, she often came across as naive and uneducated, calling the famous writer Boris Pasternak "Forrest," for instance, and referring to author Jack Kerouac as Jack Cadillac.
But on Thursday, when the tapes were played of Frey confronting Peterson, she came across as sharp, focused and forceful.
"I never thought Amber Frey would do nearly so well," Goldman said.
"Today was the cross examination of Scott Peterson jurors will never see -- and it was a pretty good one," said Jim Hammer, the former San Francisco prosecutor who has been following the case. "Trials are largely decided on a gut level -- and it's hard to say that with every passing hour that the jury isn't hating him more."
Throughout the calls, Frey attacks Peterson on numerous fronts, from suggesting he was staying away from TV cameras so she wouldn't see him on TV, asking how he could seem so "joyous" on his earlier phone calls while his wife was missing, to asking if she should be afraid of him, and even asking whether the baby Laci Peterson was carrying was his.
The confrontation
But of the more than 350 phone conversations Frey taped for police, none was more anticipated than the Jan. 6 call in which she first confronted Peterson -- and he finally confessed that he'd been lying.
At one point, Frey asked: "Tell me why I should not be afraid of you."
Peterson: "I am not an evil person. I have never hurt anyone."