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Fladager's debut also coincided with the appearance of one of the prosecution's strongest witnesses, Detective Grogan. Grogan was the one who at last connected the dots in the government's case against Peterson. After weeks of Geragos suggesting that investigators had ignored other leads in their rush to blame Scott for the murders, Grogan tallied what he said were the 41 clues that led police to suspect Peterson: "Mr. Peterson was the closest person to Laci Peterson. He discovered her missing. He was the last to see her alive. It didn't appear that he had an alibi. He was by himself when she disappeared. He didn't call the police," Grogan said. At another point he related how, after the bodies that turned out to be Laci's and Conner's washed ashore near the Berkeley marina in mid-April 2003, Scott, who was arrested a few days later, never even bothered to call to see if they had been identified.
Under Fladager's questioning, Grogan also adroitly led the jury through the strange saga of the missing concrete. He explained that Scott had acknowledged making a single 8-lb. concrete anchor for his boat, but that it was discovered he had purchased an 80-lb. bag of the mix and that the remainder could not be accounted for. That seemed to dovetail with the prosecution assertion that residue at Scott's warehouse showed that he made five anchors – and that he had used the four others to weight down his wife's body. "It's very possible that some jurors might latch onto that as the missing link in terms of needing one more bit of real evidence to finger Scott," says Goldman.
