Old black magic: Does Scott Peterson have a dated defense strategy?
Modesto, California — When Jeffrey Victor, a sociologist who studies the occult, learned Scott Peterson’s defense team may blame a satanic cult for the murder of his wife and unborn child, he couldn’t help but shake his head. “Not this again, not this nonsense,” Victor recalled thinking. If much of the country seemed intrigued by reports that Laci Peterson’s disappearance coincided with a “satanic high holiday” and that her body showed signs of a ritual murder, Victor and others who were on the front lines during what he calls the “satanic panic” of the late 1980s and early 1990s were more circumspect. To them, Peterson may be the suspect of the moment, but his defense, if he uses it, seems a thing of the past. “What’s being raised in California is kind of a vestige from a national obsession of 15 or so years ago,” said anthropologist Phillip Stevens Jr. of the years when allegations of vast, international Satanic cults committing ritual murders and child abuse dominated afternoon tal
