They both stay up late, taking their meals at their desks and putting their social lives on hold, to pore over the Laci Peterson murder case.
He has studied tidal charts and the location of navigational buoys around the Berkeley Marina to try to unravel Scott Peterson's alibi. She has staked out Laci's neighborhood, taking photographs of streets and parks where witnesses say they may have seen Laci walking her dog the day she vanished.
But Buzz Mills and Amelia Gloria are not Modesto police detectives. They're not forensic investigators or private eyes. And they're not tabloid reporters snooping for a scoop. Mills is a 63-year-old retired Silicon Valley missiles telemetry engineer with time on his hands. Gloria is a 45-year-old private security guard in Modesto looking for a little adventure.
They are Laci Peterson addicts. Meeting through an Internet forum, the unlikely pair have become amateur sleuthing part ners trying to nail the murder case against Scott Peterson.
Do these people need to get a life, or what? Well, if they do, then so do scores of others across the country and around the world who, instead of watching reality TV each night, are logged onto their home computers, trying to solve a puzzle: How were Laci Peterson and her unborn son killed, and how did their bodies end up on the banks of San Francisco Bay this spring?
``We're junkies,'' said Angela Rock, who lives deep in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and nightly logs onto Websleuths.com. ``We know the ins and outs, the backwards and forwards, every single detail that the guy next door to me would never know.''
The mystery is all the more intriguing because information is so scarce. Arrest and search warrants are sealed. A gag order is keeping all lawyers and law enforcement officials mute. The public has little more to work with than Scott Peterson's story about fishing on Christmas Eve, his affair with a massage therapist, and people in the neighborhood who say they saw Scott, Laci or a suspicious brown van that morning. The preliminary hearing, where the prosecution will lay out its case for the first time, was postponed from early September to Oct. 20.
Until then, in this virtual community, any tidbit of information generates wild speculation and irrepressible enthusiasm -- like a neighbor's account that Peterson loaded something wrapped in a blue tarp into the back of his truck Christmas Eve morning.
``We won't know until the pre-lim/trial, exactly WHAT he was un-loading or loading!!!!!!,'' writes one poster on Websleuths, tthoman from Alabama. ``SO EXCITING! PLOT THICKENS!''
Just since August, the Laci Peterson forum on Websleuths has received more than 9,000 postings -- many from as far away as Australia and England. The rape case against basketball star Kobe Bryant, on the same site, had a mere 162 as of late Saturday.
Though most of the Websleuthers insist Peterson is guilty, over on aimoo.com more posters are giving him the benefit of the doubt. For example, barbdouglas finds it fishy that after the district attorney ``begged Scott to produce the bodies to spare the death penalty,'' the bodies happened to wash up where Peterson had gone fishing.
``The desperate D.A. was looking for a reason to arrest Scott and the kidnappers handed it to him on a silver platter,'' barbdouglas wrote. ``The fact that Scott Peterson is the target of a sophisticated plot to frame him does not get any clearer than that.''
Mills had been hooked on the Peterson case for months before he met Gloria online. Fresh out of a four-year romantic relationship, Mills found the case to be a perfect obsession. Just as he had uncovered defects in missile systems for 35 years as an engineer at Lockheed, he looked for holes in Scott Peterson's story.
A fitness nut who starts each day eating pure, plain, non-fat yogurt with dried fruits and nuts, Mills found it hard to pull away from the computer to take his routine vigorous hikes. For days at a time, he stayed online from morning until after midnight studying the wind velocity off Point Richmond where the bodies were found, plotting the lighted buoys that he theorized Peterson used to navigate into the bay after dark to dump the bodies, and logging the astronomical, nautical and civil twilight times. He even traced the route the bloodhounds took through Modesto following Laci's scent.
He plugged all the information, with links to maps and charts, into ``Scott's 24-Hour Timeline.'' It goes on in minute detail for 31 printed pages. ``Laci's 16-Hour Timeline'' fills 14 pages.
``Truly, things got a little unbalanced there,'' Mills said in a recent interview at his Cupertino ranch-style home, nearly empty of furniture except for a computer desk and folding chairs since his girlfriend moved out nearly a year ago. ``A lot of my personality is spending an inordinate amount of time perfecting things. Call it an affliction or an obsession, but that's my nature. That's who I am.''
In Modesto, Gloria, a grandmother of seven with black hair that hangs below her waist and a rose tattoo on her forearm, became intrigued by the case the day Laci Peterson disappeared. She heard about it on a police scanner while working in a county government building in Modesto. Her job as a private security guard paid the bills, but her 13 years patrolling parking lots and office buildings lacked excitement. She had once dreamed of a career in law enforcement, but by the time she had raised her children, ``I was too old and out of shape,'' she said. ``I would never have made it around the obstacle course.''
While surfing the Internet looking for updates about the Peterson case in June, she came across one of Mills' queries on the Websleuths forum. To flesh out his timeline, Mills wanted to know whether a footbridge crossed Dry Creek through La Loma Park, where Peterson said his wife planned to walk the dog the morning she disappeared.
Gloria, who lives near the park, confirmed to him that a bridge, indeed, crossed the creek there. And from that moment on, the life of the security guard who admits she gets ``scared easy'' got a little more thrilling.
With a list of questions from Mills and a disposable camera in hand, Gloria headed to the Petersons' neighborhood. To try to prove that witnesses actually saw a different pregnant woman walking in the neighborhood instead of Laci, Mills asked Gloria to take pictures of the witnesses' houses and intersections where they say they saw Laci.
Gloria would get so nervous sometimes -- afraid someone would think her suspicious -- she would stick her arm out the car window to take pictures.
Once, she scribbled an address so quickly, she wrote it incorrectly and had to go back a second time.
``It's fascinating, but it's scary at the same time,'' she said. ``I didn't want somebody to call the police on me.''
Mills has sent his timelines to Modesto police, and is disappointed he hasn't heard from them because he is so sure his information would help their case. (``If it was any other case,'' he says, ``they would have contacted me.'')
Modesto police detective Doug Ridenour says a gag order prevents him from even acknowledging whether he received the timeline. He says he forwards all information to investigators, adding, ``I take everything seriously.''
Mills and Gloria have never met. They know only each other's gender and online names -- buzzm1 and royalpurple209. But that's all they need to know because it's all business to them. And business that Gloria, at least, keeps mostly to herself.
``I don't tell my family,'' she said. ``They're going to think I'm nuts.''
