One Deputy From Murder

One Deputy This story is about a young woman named Cara Knott. In 1986, Cara is a 20 year old junior at San Diego State University. She’s a budding environmentalist, a track star and she’s studying to become a teacher. She’s the stereotypical southern California girl – blonde, bubbly, big smile. Cara also has a hot boyfriend she’s deeply in love with named Wayne Bautista. Wayne is just as enamored with Cara and the two seem to be on track to wed one day. It’s the Christmas holidays and Wayne has the flu, so Cara drove from her family home in El Cajon to Escondido, where he lives, to take care of him. While there, she calls her mom for some nursing advice on how to take care of Wayne. Then at about 8pm, she calls her parents to tell them she’s on her way back home. She had to drive a freeway to get home and it would normally take about 40 minutes to an hour to get to and from. So, when 10pm rolls around, and Cara still hasn’t come home, her dad, Sam gets a terrible feeling. He calls Wayne who tells him that she had left around 8 and that he hadn’t heard from her since. He assumed she had gotten home. Cara’s family immediately jump into action. Her mom and dad search the freeways and off ramps all night long, looking for any sign of the white VW beetle she drove. They call the hospitals and police but no one has seen any sign of Cara. Still hunting for any sign of Cara into daybreak, they drive down an exit ramp off of I15 down Mercy Road. This off ramp is really weird – it dead-ends underneath a dark overpass and it’s heavily overgrown with vegetation. It’s such a creepy area that police commonly refer to it as the tomb. People familiar with the area say that the Mercy Road exit off I-15 has bad energy. Some claim it is haunted, and that they hear cries and screaming and some say they’ve seen spirits roaming the area. Under the highway, hidden from view from above, her parents find Cara’s abandoned VW. The driver’s side window is opened halfway, and the keys were still in the ignition. Cara’s purse sat untouched in the passenger seat. Investigators arrive and comb the entire area. 70 feet below a nearby bridge, they find what looks to be a woman’s body. It seemed she had been tossed from the bridge overhead. Cara’s parents are still there and they see the reaction of the cop that comes across the body. He asks if they found his daughter. They reply yes, and she’s dead. His response is heart-wrenching and the investigators at the scene never forgot it. He said, I wish you could have known her. She was an angel. Since Cara’s purse lay untouched on the seat of her car, robbery was not a likely motive. Her autopsy didn’t show evidence of sexual assault. There were ligature marks around her neck and large facial bruising. The only thing police found to give them something of a lead was a Chevron gas station receipt in her car. The gas station was about 15 miles from the crime scene, so it was obvious she had stopped there before she had been killed. Police find the workers who had been on shift when Cara had pumped gas. They do remember her, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. No one was with her or in the car and she didn’t seem distressed. They didn’t see anyone talking to her or following her, so that was a bit of a dead end. Examining the area of the crime scene, police notice fresh skid marks on the bridge above where her body was found. Just in case they had anything to do with the case, they photographed and measured the marks. The distance between the tires indicated a vehicle larger than Cara’s little VW bug, so they obviously weren’t from her car. From what they could gather, it seems Cara purposely drove herself down the exit ramp to the dead-end area, but why? Since Wayne was her boyfriend and the last person they knew saw Cara alive, he’s brought in for questioning. They have a feeling that Cara had pulled over for someone since her window was halfway down, and Wayne is certainly someone she would trust and pull over for. Wayne claimed he had been home with the flu all night and his sister who lived with him confirmed his alibi. Of course, she would have an interest in keeping him out of trouble, but for now, police put him aside as a suspect. Investigators decide to turn to the public for help. They ask a local TV station to feature Cara’s story on their crime-stoppers program and they do. Just a couple of days after Cara’s murder, a reporter joins forces with a California highway patrolman, Craig Peyer to host a ride-along segment about self protection, especially for women drivers. He gave tips like, if you’re stranded and someone should offer help, instead of just accepting, ask them to go to the nearest phone and call the highway patrol to help. He also emphasized that you should never get out of your car and accept a ride with a stranger, because as soon as you’re in their car, you’re totally at their mercy. Calls started flowing into crime stoppers and it wasn’t what they were expecting to get. 300 calls rolled in and of those, about 30 were from women who had been pulled off the road at that same location, talked to and detained by a deputy. Each caller described a California highway patrolman that pulled them over, instructed them to drive down the exit ramp at the same location Cara’s car was found. The deputy would get into the passenger seat of their car and question them for very long periods, sometimes an hour. Several of the women said the questions became increasingly personal and sexual. With some of the women, the deputy would ask them for dates or stroke their hair and shoulders. Many of these women looked similar to Cara. Other witnesses came forward as well. One person remembered seeing a CHP patrol car make a U-turn on the road outside of the Chevron gas station just after Cara pulled out and went the same direction she did. Another witness recalled seeing a patrol car accompany a Volkswagen Beetle in that I-15 exit area at the time period the murder occurred. Even more disturbing, many of the women who called in with stories of being inappropriately detained by a CHP officer, claimed that the deputy that had pulled them over was the man they saw on the news program, Craig Peyer. Of course police are not excited to have to look at one of their own as the perpetrator. What made it even more difficult was that Craig Peyer was known as a bit of a golden child of the force. He’s a 13 year veteran, highly respected and liked as well as extremely reliable and great at his job. He’s known to be very proud to be an officer of the law and after hearing of Cara’s death, he seemed very concerned. Craig was working the night of Cara’s murder, but he provided an alibi with his logbook that showed he was miles away at the suspected time of Cara’s death writing a traffic ticket. Investigators are a little relieved at this information, but they decide to fully look into his alibi anyway. They bring him in for an interview and they note several marks on Craig’s face. He has scratches on his forehead and trauma (as they described it) on his arm. It seemed he had been in some sort of fight. They ask, “how did these scratches and marks on your arm happen?” He says he tripped in the police barracks parking lot and fell into the chain link fence there the exact night of Cara’s murder. The problem they found with that excuse was that where his cruiser was parked was about 10 feet away from the fence and from the size of the short fence, he would have had to take a running leap to hit his face on it. Additionally, an off-duty San Diego cop had noticed a disheveled and scratched Deputy Peyer drive into the barracks at high speed that night. And, the off-duty officer noted this was a full hour before Craig had claimed to have gotten the injuries. In fact, on the video of Craig giving safety tips to the public, the scratches are visible on his face. Getting a little more suspicious, detectives check Craig’s alibi, his logbook. The entry for 9:30, the time that was determined to be when Cara died, had the entry he claimed, where he seemed to be miles away writing a ticket at that exact time. However, there was an obvious erasure mark, like he had written something different then erased it and changed it. Craig fervently denied any involvement with Cara’s death and he quickly turned over his uniform he had worn the night Cara was killed, sure that the lack of evidence on it would clear his name. Several other deputies began to question in their minds and between one another if Craig could be guilty since he was known to write many tickets at that exact off ramp. In one early morning briefing at the station, one of the other patrolmen joked with Craig, asking if he killed Cara Knott. The entire room got quiet with everyone turning to look at Craig. Craig became seriously uncomfortable and acted odd in everyone’s opinion. This was when the others truly became suspicious of him. Digging into his work and checking back on the calls that they had received from those saying Craig had pulled them over to “flirt,” investigators see that the month before Cara’s murder, 2 people had called the CHP to report Craig’s conduct with his weird off-ramp traffic stops. One woman had called and spoke with an officer and told him that her 23 year-old daughter had been pulled over by a deputy (later identified as Craig Peyer). He had turned on his lights and told her to exit at the Mercy Road offramp. The upset mother didn’t like that the officer had taken a young woman off the freeway in the dark and isolated area. She said Craig had pulled her daughter over because he was “concerned with her headlights because it could cause a problem in the summertime when trucks lose their treads.” Now, I’m not sure if this article got the details wrong or if this cop was trying to make shit up thinking that a young person wouldn’t know much about cars. Then, Craig has asked this woman’s daughter to get out of the car to look at the headlights, making the creepy dark area even darker. The mother questioned if this is normal operating procedure as it seemed weird and wrong to her. The officer on the phone responded that officers have the discretion to ask people being pulled over to pull off the freeway because of the danger of passing vehicles. The mother did tell investigators who later interviewed her that Craig had been a gentleman and courteous but she had been uncomfortable with her daughter being pulled off and down a creepy, isolated exit ramp. After that phone call, Craig had been commended for his conduct and smart thinking on taking the young woman off the freeway for safety. About 2 weeks later, Craig stopped a young woman named Donna Ziegler while she was driving her VW on I-15. Again, Craig ordered her to drive down the Mercy road offramp. At the time, Donna’s husband was with her, but he had the passenger seat reclined and was napping. Craig was surprised to see the man when he got to Donna’s car. He quickly wrote her a speeding ticket and left. Donna’s husband later called the station to complain that the location of the traffic stop seemed dangerous. He was told (the same as the other caller) that it’s up to the officer’s discretion as to where to pull someone over and that several officers had been killed or injured while making stops on the shoulders of freeways. The husband didn’t choose to put in a formal complaint. Other witnessed told investigators that a scruffy white man, possibly a homeless person, had been hitchhiking in the area of Cara’s murder the night of her death. He was acting strangely, lunging at cars. This helped to put in some degree of doubt that Craig was her killer. Break Cara’s clothing was examined for evidence. A single gold fiber that didn’t match any of the clothes she was wearing or anything in her car was found on the clothing. The fiber was so distinct and usual that he knew it could be an important clue. The examiner set it aside in case anything was found to test it against. The uniform that Craig turned in was examined. The examiner noticed that on the shoulder was a golden-edged patch. He examined it under a polarized light microscope. The gold fibers in the patch looked quite similar to the one on Cara’s clothing and were in fact microscopically consistent. Just because the fibers look the same, even under the microscope still doesn’t mean they are from the same source. They send off the fibers to a forensic microscopist (My-craw-scapist). Under high magnification, the fibers were found to be rayon with an outdated method of coloring applied to them. The fibers hadn’t been colored with a dye like modern rayon is (even for that time). It was colored with a pigment. Rayon is rarely found to be pigmented. The researcher took additional steps to see if the fibers truly matched. A tiny piece of each fiber was put in a solvent which separated the pigment from the fiber. They he studied the pigment granules from each fiber in a spectro-pho-tom-eter. The spectrophotometer sends light through the pigment to see how much of it is absorbed and how much passes through. The machine builds a chart with curves of the data from each pigment sample. The results from each chart weren’t just similar, they were an exact match. Police collect 3 more uniforms of Craig’s and none of those had fibers that matched, just that one that he had worn the evening of Cara’s death. Evidence keeps building against Craig when purple fibers were collected from Craig’s police boots and his gun. These fibers were tested in the same process and were found to be an esact match to the fibers from the sweatpants Cara was wearing at her death. The evidence showed the two had definitively been around one another. They go to check out Craig’s police cruiser. The trunk is sprayed with luminol, but comes back clean. But, under the spare tire is a piece of yellow rope. When compared with the ligature marks on Cara’s neck, the size and pattern matched her marks. To add to all of that, on Cara’s shoes, scientists find a tiny drop of blood. DNA wasn’t a largely used technique at this time, and bloody typing was widely used. The blood wasn’t Cara’s and it came back as the rarest type in the US, type AB. Guess what blood type Craig Peyer’s is… Remember the skid marks on bridge? They matched the size and width of the tires on Craig’s police cruiser. As for the bruises on Cara’s face, they were determined to be similar to the size and shape of a police flashlight. Twenty-one days after Cara’s murder, Criag is charged with first degree murder. Prosecutors believe Craig first noticed Cara while she was getting gas at the Chevron station. Then he followed her on the interstate until she was just a short distance away from his favorite interrogation spot. They think he turned his lights on, used his loudspeaker and told her to follow him down to the underpass. Once there, they suspect that Craig tried to get into Cara’s car but Cara may have refused and told him she would report him. He likely demanded she exit the vehicle. Cara became scared, felt threatened and fought him, scratching his face. He struck her on the face with his flashlight, knocking her out. Now that he had gone too far and that Cara could identify him, he decided he had to get rid of her. So, he took the rope from his trunk and strangled her. It appeared he put her body on the hood of his car to avoid getting hair and clothing fibers in his car and drove to the bridge. He then threw her off the 70 foot bridge, not realizing he had left a tiny fiber from his patch on her clothing. Craig is sentenced to 25 years in prison on the charge of 1st degree murder. Craig continues to swear to his innocence, but when the innocence project came to ask if he wanted the blood on Cara’s boot tested using the latest DNA technology, he declined. Cara’s family decided to change the way her crime scene appeared, wanting to erase the tomb-like feel. They created a memorial garden in honor of Cara and other victims of crime underneath the bridge. It was renamed in 1995 as the Cara Knott Memorial Bridge in her memory. Oak trees, beautiful plants and flowers now give the area a peaceful feel. Cara’s family visited the garden often, upkeeping it and remembering Cara. In 2000, Cara’s dad was tending to the garden when he suffered a fatal heart attack, dying just feet from where his daughter’s body had been found. Because of Cara’s murder, police have changed their policy and now allow solo drivers to drive until reaching a populated or safe area before pulling over during traffic stops. Cara’s father had also advocated for change, campaigning police agencies to monitor the locations and activities of their officers at all times while on duty. He also worked to get law enforcement to ease the standard 48 hour waiting period before issuing missing persons alerts to officers in the field. As for Craig Peyer, he’s been denied parole three times and will not be eligible again until 2027. He will be 77 years old. Sources: Medium.com, cbs8.com, unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com, uaptsd.org, forensicfiles “badge of betrayal” 10news.com, sandiegouniontribune.com, LA times, sandiegoreader, caselaw.findlaw.com/