A decades-old murder mystery was finally brought to a grim resolution when 72-year-old Jack Potter was sentenced to 15 years-to-life for the 2003 murder and dismemberment of his wife, Laurie Diane Potter, after her severed legs were discovered in a San Diego dumpster, according to a news release by the San Diego County District Attorney's Office. It wasn't until the use of Investigative Genetic Genealogy in 2020 that a break in the case was achieved, offering a thread that would eventually lead to the identification of the victim and then to her killer.
DA Summer Stephan expressed the weight of the long-awaited justice, remarking that this was a brutal, calculated murder that shattered the lives of Laurie’s loved ones, who then had to endure nearly 20 years of unanswered questions and unimaginable grief and capping that sentiment with Peterson's chilling escalation to murder, fuelled by obsession over another woman who eerily bore his wife's name, it's not just the human dismemberment that horrifies, but the years of pretending, the audacious living off her credit, the selling of their home as if Laurie Potter was still somewhere out there, living and breathing when in truth she was neither.
After initially going cold, the case saw a resurgence when the San Diego County Sheriff’s Homicide Cold Case Team leveraged DNA evidence to identify Potter's wife tentatively. It was the first instance of using Investigative Genetic Genealogy to name an unknown homicide victim. With confirmed identification, Potter's web of lies began to unravel, leading to his indictment by a grand jury in August 2024, before pleading guilty to second-degree murder one month before his scheduled trial in February 2025.
