Scott Peterson, Cary Stayner among infamous Death Row killers named in EDD fraud case
Scott Peterson, convicted of killing his wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn child, was among the inmates at California’s prisons and jails who filed hundreds of millions of dollars in unemployment claims since the pandemic started, district attorneys said Tuesday.
Along with Peterson, convicted death row inmate and serial killer Cary Stayner, who murdered four women near Yosemite in 1999, filed fraudulent claims in the widespread scam.
On Tuesday morning, district attorneys from California, including Sacramento, El Dorado, Kern and San Mateo counties, announced the findings from their investigation into the unemployment fraud.
The district attorneys said state’s Employment Development Department fraud occurred in every California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation prison facility and every type of inmate.
Those accused of committing the unemployment fraud included at least 133 death row inmates amounting to $421 million in losses just through August, according to the district attorneys. They said there are 58 county jails with additional hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims.
“We believe at this point (it) is the largest taxpayer fraud that’s ever occurred in California history,” said El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson.
Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said Peterson received money, but officials would not say how much money he received because the it’s still an active investigation.
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California McGregor Scott, who joined the district attorneys for Tuesday’s news conference, said the majority of the unemployment money was funded by the federal government for those without work as the COVID-19 pandemic forced a shutdown of many businesses in March.
“This is federal money at the end of the day,” Scott said.
But the U.S attorney said the committed fraud occurred at the state level; not the federal agencies that provided the money to state agencies.
Peterson could soon be transferred from death row in San Quentin Prison to the jail in San Mateo County, The Modesto Bee reported. There, the penalty phase of his case will be heard again 16 years after he was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury there.
The California Supreme Court sent Peterson’s case back to the lower court to determine if prejudicial misconduct occurred when a juror failed to disclose she’d been the victim of a crime and got a restraining order against the perpetrator.
Stayner was sentenced to death in 2002 for the four murders between February and July 1999, including victims Carole Sund, 42, her daughter Juli, 15, and 16-year-old Silvina Pelosso, a family friend from Argentina. They were touring Yosemite and stayed in the lodge where Stayner worked.
Other notorious beneficiaries allegedly involved in the unemployment scam included Wayne Ford, who confessed to at least four Northern California murders in 1997 and 1998; Isauro Aguirre, who tortured and murdered his girlfriend’s 8-year-old son in Palmdale in 1999; and Royal Clark who was sentenced to death for strangling a 14-year-old Fresno girl in 1995, the district attorneys said.
This story was originally published November 24, 2020 at 1:01 PM.
