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Remembering The Monster

KILLER COP CRAIG PEYER has spent the last 22 years in prison for strangling golden-haired San Diego State University student Cara Knott during the cold Christmas aftermath of 1986, dumping her body off an abandoned overpass in a then-undeveloped black hole at Mercy Road.

His crime may seem like ancient history, but the doughy and balding Peyer was and remains the first and only California Highway Patrolman convicted of murder on duty. His crime shook the very foundation of public faith in law enforcement, and its impact remains a permanent scar on the public psyche. During his first failed bid for parole in January 2004, the female prison guard who escorted him into the hearing was shocked to realize he was the man her mother warned her about when she was just starting to drive. The details of his crime may fade, but Craig Alan Peyer, the killer the victim’s family calls The Monster, is one of California’s most notorious boogeymen.

In late January, California’s parole board turned him down again after an emotional hearing lasting almost four hours. Technically, Peyer gets another crack at freedom in 2012——he’ll be 61——but no matter how much the rules may change regarding parole, it’s doubtful he’ll ever taste freedom, for two key reasons:

First, the Knott family. Before crime victims became household names——think Meghan Kanka of Meghan’s Law, Ron Goldman’s father from the O.J. case——there was the Knott family, whose quiet strength and refusal to stay on the sidelines changed laws, policies, procedures and many minds on how to keep the world a safer place from predators like Peyer.

Hours after stopping for dinner with his wife and three children, including an infant daughter, 13-year CHP veteran Craig Peyer strangled 20-year-old Cara while her close-knit family sat by the fireplace in their hillside El Cajon home, watching Sleeping Beauty. The Knotts spent nine hours combing the highway searching for her after law enforcement dismissed their concerns.

Fighting The Monster and other boogeymen out there slowly killed Cara’s father, her eldest sister, Cynthia, told the parole board. The Monster robbed their family of all joy. And the strain is slowly draining her mother, Joyce, who suffered a heart episode that prevented her from joining her family at the second parole hearing.

“I am the voice of my father,” Cynthia Knott told the board. “I am the voice of my mother.”

The family formed a wall against Peyer in the hearing, bolstered by San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and San Diego Police Sergeant Bill Nulton, one of the cops who broke the case. Cara’s baby brother, John, and wife Okeet Herbst attended. Cheryl Knott flew in from her professorial duties at Harvard University and read the essay a 17-year-old Cara had written about how much she wanted to change the world.

“We wanted to put a human face on this,” Cheryl said. The two oldest Knott girls wore oversized amethyst necklaces——Cara’s birthstone. On February 11, she would have been 42.

The second reason Peyer will likely remain behind the razor wire of the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo is his steadfast insistence he is innocent——though he continues to hide as if no one might notice him. He won’t allow the media to photograph his face. He’s refused to submit DNA samples that might have proved his innocence ——although fiber and blood evidence, along with witnesses and a mountain of circumstance, linked him to Cara Knott. How did gold fibers from a vintage CHP patch land on Cara’s broken and battered body beneath that bridge? Asked such questions at his parole hearing, Peyer merely shrugged.

“To my last breath, I’ll profess my innocence,” he said.

A clearly frustrated parole commissioner, Robert Doyle, kept asking Peyer to at least express some remorse, saying, “If you didn’t do it, you were in law enforcement; how do you think this happened?”

“I have no idea,” Peyer responded.

More than 300 people sent letters to the parole board demanding Peyer stay behind bars. More than 350 sent letters for the first hearing——none of them form letters, according to Deputy District Attorney Richard Sachs, who represented the D.A. opposing parole at the hearing. A handful of supporters wrote in asking that Peyer be released, including his parents, Hal and Eileen Peyer.

There was much testimony that prison suits Peyer. He mixes well with the 6,500 other killers, thugs and thieves in the gloriously beautiful valley near Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo, officials say. He’s only been in trouble once——for keeping an unauthorized box of stationery supplies in his cell. He sometimes talks to jailhouse chaplains and has read the pop-psychology tome Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Twice. A little too late to save his three failed marriages, he acknowledges. In retrospect, he says, he feels guilty about putting his badge before his family.

Despite intense questioning from Commissioner Doyle , it was the only guilt Peyer would admit——that he was guilty of being a bad husband.
——LISA PETRILLO

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