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Detective Ray Coyle, who was involved in searching the Peterson home on Dec. 26 and 27, 2002 testified on Monday about a list of 309 parolee and sex registrants that he tried to track down to determine whether they could have been involved in the disappearance of Laci Peterson.
Under questioning from Deputy District Attorney Rick Distaso, Coyle claimed that he and other officers tracked down 285 of those on the list.
"Where is this list?" defense lawyer Mark Geragos demanded during cross-examination.
After Coyle presented Geragos with an 8-page document, the defense attorney waved the papers in the air before the jury and said that he had never received it from the prosecution. "They just invent this stuff as they go along," Geragos declared.
An irate Judge Alfred A. Delucchi said before sending the jurors out of the courtroom: "This is a recurring problem in this case. How old is this case now?"
After the lawyers for both sides emerged after being called from the jurist's chambers, Geragos continued a blistering cross-examination of Coyle, noting that as many as a third of the names on the eight-page list had not been eliminated at all.
Coyle claimed that the list was not up to date, and that he had personally contacted about 40 of the people named.
Prosecutors accuse Peterson, 31, of murdering his pregnant wife in their Modesto home in December 2002 and dumping her body into San Francisco Bay from his fishing boat. He has pleaded not guilty.
