On the night of December 27, 1986, 20-year-old Cara Knott was driving south <snip> when Peyer, who was on duty in a marked CHP patrol car, directed Knott to pull off the freeway on an unfinished off-ramp. It was later known that Peyer had also been harassing a number of other female drivers in the same area and pulling them over on the same off-ramp <snip> Peyer then bludgeoned her with his flashlight and strangled her with a rope. He then threw her body over the edge of an abandoned bridge where she fell into the brush below.
Coincidently, two days later, while covering the investigation of the murder, a reporter with KCST-TV interviewed Peyer during a ride-along segment about self-protection for female drivers. <snip>He tried to explain that they were caused when he fell against a fence in the CHP parking lot, but the fence was found to be too high to be relevant to the scratches on Peyer's face.
Just after the KCST broadcast, nearly two-dozen telephone calls, mostly from women, were received by authorities, with the callers reporting that Peyer was the officer who had pulled them over on the same off-ramp, even though in these cases Peyer was not hostile or violent towards them. They said that while he may have been friendly with them, he also made them uncomfortable. In addition, there had been complaints about him prior to the murder by several women but were dismissed because of his reputation within the department.
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Peyer's fellow officers, including a female San Diego police officer, testified to the defendant's strange actions following the murder, with his continuous requests regarding the investigation's status and his attempts to justify the perpetrator's crime as a mistake. An internal investigation showed that while he stopped many drivers for various legitimate violations, most of them were females who were driving alone. Additionally, they were of the same age group and physicality as Cara Knott.
