The former massage therapist whose secretly recorded phone calls became central to Peterson’s trial has stepped back from public view — but a new A&E documentary has returned the case, and her part in it, to the spotlight.
More than two decades after becoming a pivotal witness in the Scott Peterson murder trial, Amber Frey is living a largely private life in the Fresno area of California, where she works as a massage therapist and is now the mother of two adult children. Frey came forward in late 2002 as the woman with whom Peterson was having an affair at the time his wife, Laci, disappeared on Christmas Eve that year. Her part in the story is back under discussion thanks to A&E’s two-part documentary Scott Peterson: The New Evidence, which premiered in July 2026 and is now streaming.
How a blind date drew her into a murder case
Frey’s connection to Peterson began with a set-up by her best friend, Shawn Sibley, who had met him at a convention in Anaheim, California, a few weeks earlier. As Frey recounted in the opening chapter of her 2005 memoir, Witness: For the Prosecution of Scott Peterson, the pair were introduced on 20 November 2002 at the Elephant Bar in Fresno.
At the time, Frey was a single mother of one daughter who had recently finished massage school and was hoping to settle down — and she believed Peterson wanted the same, after he told Sibley he was seeking a “committed relationship”. Frey has said Peterson told her he was a widower.
She revisited that period in Netflix’s August 2024 documentary American Murder: Laci Peterson. “When I first met Scott Peterson, I was living in Madera, Rolling Hills. I had just graduated from massage school and my really good friend at the time told me about this guy that she had met,” she recalled.
“She said he was funny, easy to talk to, he was nice looking and he was looking to meet ‘the one.’ As a single mom, that was something I was open to and wanting in my life.”
The two had planned to go to dinner after meeting at the bar, but Peterson first asked Frey whether they could stop at his hotel room so he could change. She agreed, and was struck by his self-assurance. “‘I was a little nervous about meeting you,’ Scott said en route, but he didn’t look nervous to me. He was smiling, and he seemed somehow relieved,” she wrote in the book.
The recordings and the testimony
Laci Peterson vanished on Christmas Eve 2002, and about a week later Frey, then 27, went to the police. By her own account, she did not regularly watch television and only learned of the disappearance when a friend who was a police officer showed her a newspaper article about the case and urged her to contact investigators.
She told detectives about the affair, then agreed to keep the relationship going while secretly taping their phone calls. Over the following months she recorded numerous conversations in which Peterson lied about where he was and what he was doing — material prosecutors later used to demonstrate his repeated deception.
Frey went on to testify against Peterson over several days, setting out the details of their relationship. Her attorney, Gloria Allred, has described that evidence as a turning point in the trial. Speaking in A&E’s The Murder of Laci Peterson, Allred said Frey “came across as one of the most credible people you could ever hear testify”, while Peterson “came across as one of the biggest liars one could ever hear”.
A quiet life away from the cameras
Frey, who gained sudden notoriety in late 2002, has kept a low profile in the years since. She married a California police officer in 2006, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later, and she has largely guarded her personal life ever since.
Professionally, she previously owned and ran Euphoria Day Spa in California and has continued working as a massage therapist, while also serving as an ambassador for the fitness supplement brand Bucked Up. Recent profiles report that she spends much of her time with family, attends church and enjoys live music, generally staying out of the public eye apart from occasional documentaries or interviews about the case.
She has, however, made her position clear: Frey has said publicly that she would testify again if Peterson were granted a new trial, and she continues to maintain that he is guilty despite ongoing legal challenges to his conviction.
Why the case is back in the headlines
Peterson himself broke more than two decades of silence in a filmed interview for Peacock’s Face to Face with Scott Peterson, which premiered in August 2024. Addressing the affair for the first time, he admitted he was an “a—— to be having sex outside our marriage” while denying that he murdered his wife.
“That is so offensive and so disgusting,” he said of the prosecution’s claim that he killed Laci because he was not ready to become a father and wanted to leave the marriage without paying spousal or child support.
“I certainly regret cheating on Laci, absolutely. It was about a childish lack of self-esteem, selfish me traveling somewhere, lonely that night because I wasn’t at home. Someone makes you feel good because they want to have sex with you,” he added.
Interest in the case has been renewed by Scott Peterson: The New Evidence, which examines claims by the Los Angeles Innocence Project that newly identified evidence could support Peterson’s bid for post-conviction relief.
