‘Truth and Lies:’ Laci Peterson’s mom recalls disturbing last visit with murdered daughter

The mother of Laci Peterson tells a touching, yet disturbing story about the last time she saw her pregnant daughter alive in a new documentary that promises to offer up untold details about the chilling case that landed Peterson’s husband Scott on death row.

In the two-hour program titled “Gone Girl. Truth and Lies: The Murder of Laci Peterson,” Sharon Rocha tells ABC News that she and her daughter, who was eight months pregnant when she disappeared from her Modesto home on Christmas Eve 2002, were sitting together on a couch when Laci told her mom that the baby was kicking.

“She and I were sitting side-by-side and Scott was sitting on the floor, and we were watching TV and she said the baby was kicking, so I put my hand on her stomach, because I’d never felt him kick,” said Rocha in an excerpt provided to People Magazine.

“I still didn’t feel him kick even when she said that,” she said. “But she leaned over to me and she said, ‘Mom, Scott doesn’t like to do this. I’ve asked him about, you know, feel my stomach when the baby kicks, and he never wants to touch my stomach.’”

“That really, really bothered me,” said Rocha. “And that was the last time I saw her.”

Scott Peterson, who graduated from University of San Diego High School, was arrested in the death of his wife and unborn son in La Jolla in 2003. He was convicted of their deaths the following year and was sentenced to die by lethal injection on March 16, 2005. He has since been housed at San Quentin State Prison, where, by some accounts, he has led a “cushy life” for the last 12 years as he continues to appeal his case.

Rocha also looked back on the wrenching weeks after Laci went missing and how her son-in-law went horrifyingly from a distraught husband to the leading suspect in her daughter’s death.

“It was very, very hard to even begin to suspect him, because in the back of my mind I kept thinking, what if he didn’t have anything to do with it?” Rocha said.

After all, Peterson was hardly a total stranger. He had been married to Laci for more than five years.

“That’s the last person you want to think had anything to do with the disappearance of your daughter — her husband,” said Rocha. “The person that was a member of your family, somebody that you loved and cared about, and thought he felt the same way about your daughter. And knowing how she felt about him.”

She said she felt guilty even suspecting her son-in-law and worried that, if she was wrong, it could have had an effect on any future relationship she might have had with her beloved daughter.

Laci Peterson’s badly decomposed body and that of her baby boy, were found just months after they washed ashore not far from where they had been dumped into the San Francisco Bay.

The documentary, which promises to detail how “it all came crashing down,” airs Thursday, Sept. 14 at 9 p.m. on ABC.

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