The team behind Netflix’s American Murder: Laci Peterson docuseries offered Scott Peterson a chance to participate — but he chose not to.
“We did reach out to Scott and we had a couple of conversations with him in prison,” director Skye Borgman exclusively told Us Weekly. “He ultimately decided not to participate in our documentary.”
Borgman didn’t have any issue with Scott, 51, not being involved, adding, “It is fine. Especially because I feel like we did get the perspective from his family and that we did want it to be very, very Laci forward.”
While working on the three-part doc, Borgman always kept Laci’s perspective in mind.
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“It was always the intention from the beginning to get as many different sides to this story as possible. We cast a wide net when we were looking for people to talk to,” Borgman continued. “There were even people who don’t appear in the documentary who we talked to and who provided some pretty important insight into the story. It was important to me to talk to Scott’s sisters and to get their perspective. And it was important to talk to law enforcement and Laci’s family.”
American Murder: Laci Peterson, which premiered on Wednesday, August 14, offers Laci’s family and friends the opportunity to share their side of the story. Laci originally went missing in 2002 while she was eight months pregnant. Her husband, Scott, was arrested and charged with two counts of murder in 2003 after Laci was found dead at age 27.
Scott was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Laci and the second-degree murder of their infant son. He maintained his innocence while being sentenced to death, which was overturned in 2020. One year later, Scott was re-sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Netflix’s coverage of the high-profile case comes days before Peacock is set to release their upcoming true crime special Face to Face With Scott Peterson. Their version will feature Scott speaking out for the first time in 20 years with footage of him from prison.
Despite the dual releases, Borgman supports multiple perspectives on the situation.
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“I always like hearing from all different sides. Honestly, I think it’s part of our responsibility as documentary makers to get all sides of the story,” she shared with Us. “It makes for a much more layered, complicated and truthful documentary to be able to hear from Scott’s side and to be able to hear from Laci’s side. So that’s important to me.”
The filmmaker continued: “It’s also important to me to be as balanced as possible, to listen to people, to take their stories in and to put their perspectives together. To put the evidence together, put everything together and deliver a story in as truthful a way as possible.”
Borgman knew there was another documentary being made while she worked on American Murder: Laci Peterson — but she didn’t let it influence her work.
“I didn’t know what their perspective was. I still don’t know. I’ve watched the trailer as well. It seems like you said that it skews more towards Scott’s innocence. But the fact that that project was going on didn’t really impact the making or the decisions of our project at all,” she noted. “We were committed to our story. And when you get involved in a story like this, it’s almost like it’s all you can think about. You’re not thinking about all this stuff that’s happening outside of it. We were very focused on this. We knew it was happening, but we had no idea what it’s about or what kind of access they had.”
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Ahead of the doc’s release, Borgman reflected on how her initial vision for the project compared to the final version.
“With every documentary series, I go into them with a very clear outline of the story points that I know and how I see the three different episodes going together. Then you go into the field and you talk to people and you’re sitting down with them for two to eight hours sometimes. You learn little details that they’ve forgotten about or that they mentioned. Then you dig a little deeper,” she explained. “So you learn a lot in the production [phase] and then it changes it a little bit.”
Making a docuseries means learning to evolve with the work.
“You come back and you restructure that outline that you put together. Then you start putting it into the edit sequence. Then you find other things that it’s like, ‘Oh, this doesn’t quite work and this doesn’t work. And do we need to know this?’” Borgman concluded. “It’s very, very similar to how I first saw it, but even better than I initially conceived of how this story would be put together.”
American Murder: Laci Peterson is currently streaming on Netflix.
