This is an original rewrite based on reporting from PEOPLE, trial-era coverage, later documentaries, and 2026 court updates. It is not a copy of any single article. Primary feature: PEOPLE, “Where Is Amber Frey Now?”.

Laci Peterson vanished from Modesto, California, on Christmas Eve 2002 while eight months pregnant. Months later, remains identified as Laci and her unborn son, Conner, were found along the San Francisco Bay. Her husband, Scott Peterson, was arrested, tried, and in 2004 convicted of first-degree murder in Laci’s death and second-degree murder in Conner’s. He was originally sentenced to death; California later reduced that to life without parole. He has always denied killing them.

Amber Frey was not part of Laci’s circle. In November 2002 she was a young single mother in the Fresno area, recently finished with mᴀssage school, and open to a serious relationship. A close friend, Shawn Sibley, introduced her to a man who came across as charming and available. They met around November 20 at a Fresno restaurant. According to Frey’s later accounts, including her 2005 book Witness: For the Prosecution of Scott Peterson, he presented himself as looking for commitment. She has said she did not know he was married.

That picture collapsed after Laci disappeared. Frey has described a December 9 call in which Peterson admitted he had not been honest about his marital history and spoke as if he had “lost” his wife and was facing the holidays without her. Frey later said she treated that as a painful personal secret rather than a crime story—until a friend showed her newspaper coverage of a missing pregnant woman whose husband was the same man. On December 30 she went to police, brought what she had (including pH๏τos from a mid-December holiday gathering), and agreed to record later calls. Investigators wanted to test whether he would keep lying about where he was and what he was doing. He did. In one widely reported sequence, he described being in Paris around a New Year’s vigil for Laci while he was actually still in California. In later recorded conversations he admitted lying to Frey, still denied harming Laci, and talked about a future with Frey and her daughter. Those tapes—hours of them—were played at trial.

Frey testified for several days in 2004 with attorney Gloria Allred at her side. Legal observers at the time said her calm manner and the contrast between Peterson’s public “grieving husband” role and his private conversations shifted the case. Allred later said Frey sounded credible and that the recordings made Peterson sound like a practiced liar. Jurors heard him apologize for deceit, insist Laci was alive, and reject the idea that he was “evil.” The tapes were not a confession. Prosecutors used them to argue motive, character, and consciousness of guilt. The defense treated the affair as ugly but not proof of murder. In November 2004 the jury convicted him.

Public reaction toward Frey was brutal. Tabloids labeled her “the mistress.” In the 2024 Netflix series American Murder: Laci Peterson, she rejected that label, saying she had been deceived too. She has described meeting Laci’s mother, Sharon Rocha, who wanted a calendar of dates—when Scott claimed to be working versus when he was with Frey. Frey has said that meeting mattered because Laci’s family did not treat her as the enemy. She also said the media crush changed what “normal” looked like for her children.

Life after the verdict.
Frey published Witness in 2005. She has continued living in the Fresno–Clovis area, working in mᴀssage and wellness-related roles, and has been publicly identified as an ambᴀssador for the fitness brand Bucked Up. She has two children, Ayiana and Justin, now adults. She married a law-enforcement officer in 2006; that marriage ended about two years later. She generally avoids the spotlight except when a documentary or news cycle pulls the case back. On NBC’s Today in 2015 she said recognition never fully went away, that she was proud of her kids, that Peterson had not contacted her from prison, and that she would make the same choice again because a pregnant woman was missing. After a 2022 ruling denying Peterson a new trial, she told Fox News Digital she was relieved she would not have to testify again—but would have done so, because “the truth doesn’t change over time.”

Why her name returned in 2024–2026.
Two rival documentaries landed in August 2024. Netflix’s American Murder: Laci Peterson featured Sharon Rocha, Laci’s friends, and Frey. Peacock’s Face to Face with Scott Peterson was built around Peterson’s first filmed prison interview in many years. In that interview he called himself an “a——” for cheating, blamed insecurity and loneliness, and called the prosecution’s “he didn’t want to be a father / didn’t want to pay support” theory offensive. He still denied murder and pointed to other theories, including a nearby burglary. Police and prosecutors have long said that burglary was investigated and was not the explanation for Laci’s death.

The legal fight did not stop. The Los Angeles Innocence Project began representing Peterson in 2024 and filed a large habeas peтιтion in 2025, arguing the conviction rested on weak circumstantial evidence, that some neighbor sightings of Laci after Scott left home were not fully credited, and that “new” scientific or investigative work justified another look. Stanislaus County prosecutors called the filing recycled arguments. On April 27, 2026, San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Hill denied the peтιтion in a lengthy order, finding the claims procedurally barred, without merit, or both, and that the material was not new, admissible, and material. Prosecutors said the verdict had been tested for two decades. LAIP said the judge misapplied habeas law and announced it would take the fight to a higher court. A&E’s July 2026 program Scott Peterson: The New Evidence tracked those claims for television. None of that litigation has made Frey a new witness of record; her public position remains that he is guilty.

Peterson is serving life without parole at Mule Creek State Prison in California. Frey, now in her early 50s, is still most often described as living privately in the Central Valley, working, parenting grown children, and stepping forward only when asked to recount the same core facts: she was lied to, she went to police, she recorded the calls, she testified, and she has not walked those statements back.