Rancho Santa Fe Review - Rw Peterson Investigative

28
November 30, 2006
Rancho Santa Fe Review
From corporate clients to murder mysteries, private investigator
has sleuthed some of America’s most notorious crimes
By Ian S. Port
Staff Writer
News Corp. recently canceled
publication of O.J. Simpson’s
already-infamous If I Did It, a
book billed as the Juice’s confession to the murders of Nicole
Brown and Ron Goldman. But
San Diego-based private investigator R.W. Peterson doesn’t need
to read the man’s recollections to
find out what probably happened.
He has his own sources.
“We found a witness that saw
O.J. one day stalking Ron Goldman at California Pizza Company
in Brentwood, sitting out in his car
in 98-degree heat, watching,”
Peterson remembers. “The prosecution never used it.”
Thinking back about the time
he spent investigating the
Brown/Goldman murders while
on a retainer from a group helping
the prosecution, most of what
Peterson remembers seems to be
frustrating.
“There were a lot of things
[the prosecution] didn’t use in that
case. People in the DA’s office and
the investigators, they didn’t want
any help. ‘Don’t confuse us with
more information.’You get a lot of
that, especially when you’re working with law enforcement.”
As a professional P.I. for
some 28 years, Peterson has
focused his magnifying glass at a
lot of frustrating cases — the O.J.
Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey
matters foremost among them. But
a long tenure in the sleuthing
occupation has turned Peterson
into a kind of living movie character: a man who can follow cars in
traffic without being detected;
who can carry and use a concealed
weapon (and dodge bullets); a
man who, when the job calls for it,
will conduct surveillance on a target while flying a helicopter.
As Seen on Television
Appropriately, that Hollywood image of a powerful, clever,
somewhat flashy private eye —
which Peterson, with his hardly
inconspicuous red Shelby Cobra
and decidedly stern mustache, has
honed well — was what drew him
into the business in the first place.
After working as a cop in a
Chicago suburb, Peterson was living in Denver when an image on
late-night television tipped him
off.
“I always liked being selfemployed,” Peterson remembers.
“So one night I’m watching
Banacek, an old PI series. I
thought ‘Jeez, that looks like fun, I
wonder if you could make any
money doing that.’ I found out —
in Denver, Colorado then at that
point — you didn’t. It took me
four or five years — I just
starved.”
But it turned out Peterson had
a knack for tracking hidden assets,
and he soon had a few high-paying
corporate clients. During the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s,
he was hired by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation to
find hidden accounts of fraudulent
investors with methods your average CPA didn’t learn in school.
“If [funds are] offshore it can
be difficult. Sometimes you just
get them in deposition,” Peterson
chuckles, reticent at recounting his
techniques.
“They think they’ve been
tracked on satellite —‘What about
that trip to Switzerland? Where
you went skiing in Austria and
went across the street to Switzerland?’ — they don’t want to lie in
deposition, so sometimes you can
leverage them.”
His successes working for the
FDIC earned his firm a national
reputation, and earned Petersen
profiles in numerous national
media, including Barron’s and
of it, I think. You kind of identify
with it. And seeing those parents
get beat up over and over, and
whoever did it get away with it.
Just frustrating.”
Peterson says he’d love to go
back to work on the Ramsey case
if he ever got the chance. The few
people whom he still “likes” are
scattered around the country now,
but he knows that they — unlike
Karr — were at least in Boulder at
the time of the murder. He groans
with personal frustration at the
open-endedness of the case, but
accepts that not everything about
being a P.I. is as easy or glamorous
as it seems on TV.
A Private Eye In Full
Private investigator R.W. Peterson with his dog Boe.
CNN. But that exposure was nothing compared to the interest he
received after being hired by a
group called Friends of Nicole to
investigate the Brown/Goldman
murders.
Sleuthing The Juice
Helping investigate the “Trial
of the Century” put Peterson right
where he’d dreamed of being —
on the right side of a “fun,” highprofile case that seemed headed
toward a just conclusion. Or so he
thought.
“It was frustrating because for
the first three, four, five months
you’d be talking to people socially
and, ‘Oh no, the Juice didn’t do
that, are you kidding? The drug
cartel did it,’ or whatever Johnny
Cochran was spinning. You’d
think these people are morons.
They were buying whatever little
blip they saw in the media that day,
something Shapiro or Cochran spit
out in the media. But then it kind
of turned, after eight months or so,
people started seeing the light if
they had any kind of mind at all.”
Peterson and his team tracked
O.J. buddies Kato Kaelin and Al
(AC) Cowling around L.A. leading up to the trial, hoping to find
something or someone that would
put the Juice away. He bristles with
frustration at seeing their side lose,
but can’t forget the fun of the actual work.
“You can always tell when
somebody else is following somebody,” Peterson explains. “We’re
following AC from Malibu all the
way to downtown L.A. and there’s
this other guy following him, too.
And we figure it out. And eventually he pulls over and we pull up
and ‘Hey who you working for?’
And it turned out he was working
for Fox news.”
Peterson and his team were
following Cowling under the theory that he probably helped O.J. the
night of the murders and, hoping
the white Bronco driver might lead
them to more information, they
had staked out his usual haunts.
According to Peterson, Cowling
ran a steroid business from the
parking lot of Gold’s Gym in Los
Angeles. It was there that Cowling
discovered he was being tracked.
“They had guys walking
around before they came out to do
their stuff to look for cops sitting
around. There we are sitting out on
the street in ties and stuff. So he
figured it out and he came walking
up to the car. He takes a camera out
of his car and comes up to our car,
and my guy’s sitting next to me
with a big old telephoto lens, he’s
going ‘Hey you guys’ and takes a
picture through the window.”
But Peterson, the sleuth, managed to get the last laugh by setting up surveillance atop a nextdoor building, two stories above
the lot where Cowling’s deals
went down. The former defensive
tackle never saw his investigators
again.
Despite all the hard work
invested in the O.J. case and the
fact that the likely murderer is
basically sticking out his tongue at
a furious public, Peterson says it’s
definitely not the most frustrating
case he’s worked on. Only one
unsolved case still raises his blood
pressure and keeps him awake at
night — a world-famous mystery
that hits a bit too close to home:
the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.
Unpopular
Unsolved Crime
Theory,
A few months after the media
explosion surrounding the murder
of JonBenet Ramsey, Peterson got
a call from a psychologist in Boulder who wanted him to look into
an incident that had happened at
his home. While away on business, the man’s daughter had suffered an attempted assault at the
hands of an unknown intruder.
Her mother scared the perpetrator out of a second-story window without getting a good look,
but the parallels were chilling: this
family lived in a house less than
half a mile from the Ramsey
house. Their daughter went to the
same dance studio as JonBenet.
While, at 12, she was twice as old
as JonBenet, she was petite, which
to Peterson suggested that she
could appeal to the same
pedophile’s taste.
Since there were no scuffle
marks on the door or anywhere in
the house — indicating the villain
was likely already in the house
when the daughter and mother
returned from their evening movie
— Peterson thought his case was a
good fit for the “intruder” theory
in the Ramsey case, and he began
looking into the earlier crime with
the help of veteran Boulder homicide detective Lou Smit.
From the beginning, Peterson
says, he didn’t believe that JonBenet’s parents killed their daughter.
“Here’s a 6 year-old kid, the
parents are seemingly normal,
she’s taken in the basement, she’s
garotted with cord, with these
elaborate knots. This is somebody
that’s into bondage, into weird
stuff. She’s probably hit with a
stun gun, whacked over the head
and penetrated vaginally, pretty
much tortured,” Peterson reasons,
instantly calling up details. “It’s
just preposterous: you kill your kid
in that fashion and you’re not certifiably insane, then you’re going
to sit down and write a two-and-ahalf page ransom note with all this
technobabble? It’s just impossible.”
Peterson remembers a number of other details about the crime
that seem to point to the intruder
theory: unidentified DNA on JonBenet’s panties, leaves from outside inside the closet where her
body was found and, of course, the
mysterious ransom note.
But, like Smit, who also
believed that an intruder killed
JonBenet, not Patsy or John Ramsey, Peterson’s views were unpopular in Colorado in the months surrounding the crime.
“I got a lot of heat because
there was a lot of fervor over that
in Denver. Really, nationally, but
even more so there. So I was on a
couple talk shows, and these guys,
they’d get angry at you. I was on
Geraldo one time and Geraldo was
just convinced they [the parents]
were lying,” Peterson says.
“It was just after O.J. so
everybody’s saying, ‘Oh they have
a lot of money, they get lawyered
up, so they must be guilty. Well …
[the parents] cooperated for
months and months, and the cops
wouldn’t look at anything else.
They kept badgering them.”
Peterson says he “likes” about
three other people in that case,
meaning he thinks they would
make good suspects. One of them
is not John Mark Karr. In fact,
Peterson said he was incredulous,
after Boulder’s unsuccessful investigation and prosecution of the
Ramsey parents, that its DA made
another so costly, easily avoided
mistake earlier this year by dragging Karr back to the U.S. before
checking to see if his DNA
matched any of that left on JonBenet’s panties. Despite confessing to the crime, Karr was dropped
as a suspect in the case after his
DNA did not match.
The Karr incident gave Peterson a false but long-awaited satisfaction — even though he wasn’t
the one working on solving it —
which made the news that it wasn’t
him even more painful.
“The Ramsey case is a big
frustration in my life,” he says. “It
gets my blood pressure up just
talking about it. I hate to get into it.
It’s just frustrating, having a
daughter the same age. That’s part
Listening
to
Peterson,
though, it seems much of his job is
every bit as satisfying as it’s made
out to be. For every boring background check or baffling crime-ofthe-century he’s labored on, Peterson has a story about something
cool that happened, like the time
he and his team boarded a boat in
Marina Del Ray to tell some
would-be kidnappers what would
happen if they didn’t give up their
pastime.
There are the few cases from
clients who’ve been generous
enough to support helicopter surveillance, which, for obvious reasons, Peterson lists first on the
back of his business card under
methods of investigation available.
There are also hazards: the
druggy who shot at Peterson while
he was trying to find a runaway.
The numerous lawsuits from people who had something they didn’t
want to be found (especially if it
was themselves), and made up a
story to keep it hidden. (Peterson
says gray areas are one thing, but
breaking the law is never the way
a good P.I. stays in business.)
Also hazardous are targets
who suddenly become aware that
they’re being followed. For this,
Peterson says, it’s essential to have
a good line in response. One man
who confronted him had just been
informed of his tail by the woman
who hired Peterson. He wasn’t too
happy when he approached Peterson and a female team member.
“I think I said something like,
‘You OK? We’re trying to get to
the airport.’And all of a sudden he
just had this weird kind of blank
look,” Peterson recalls, chucking.
“That’s happened to me a couple
of times, I’ve used that line – ‘You
OK?’ And then the guy starts
scratching their head thinking
‘Hmmm, maybe this isn’t the
guy.’”
Despite the glamour, most of
his work isn’t as easy as it seems
on TV. And since P.I.s aren’t
known for being eager to talk
about their methods, the only real
way to learn the business is by
doing it — and it takes a lot of
learning.
Take following a car, as an
example, of a basic job requirement. Peterson admits that it looks
easy. But like investigating, it
involves a lot of grunt work when
the right people aren’t looking.
“It can be like the Indy 500.
You’re doing 90 mph on the freeway just to catch up because you
got snagged on the onramp,”
Peterson muses. “And you’ll irritate about five or six people during
the course of the day, they’ll be
giving you the finger because they
think you’re a nut-job the way you
drive, weaving. You just have to
ignore them.”
Fore more information, visit
rwpeterson.com or call 760-4430575.