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Adam Peterson, 20, told his parents during calls from jail and detectives who arrested him that he stabbed Joel Marino in his home in a robbery attempt, according to transcripts and testimony during a preliminary hearing in Dane County Circuit Court.
“I just ... I felt so numb ... and I, and I ... I wanted money,” Peterson told his father, according to a transcript.
“I just stabbed him out of nowhere,” he said, adding later, “I just wasn’t thinking sanely.”
Madison Police Detective Alix Olson testified she was among a half-dozen investigators who arrested Peterson at his mother’s home in Grant, Minn., on June 26. She said Peterson told them flat out he killed Marino.
“He said, ‘I know. I committed this.’ When asked why, he said ‘no reason,’” Olson said.
Marino’s family, sitting next to Madison Police Chief Noble Wray in court, broke down in sobs.
Peterson’s attorney, Dennis E. Burke, didn’t contest the transcripts.
He questioned Olson about Peterson’s demeanor but Olson said he seemed calm. Burke offered no arguments about why Peterson shouldn’t face trial.
Judge Shelley Gaylord ruled there was probable cause Peterson committed a felony and bound him over on one count of first-degree intentional homicide.
Burke entered a not guilty plea for Peterson. Peterson, rail-thin and pale in his jail jumpsuit, left quietly with bailiffs.
The death of Marino, 31, sent a wave of fear through Madison. His was the second of three unsolved homicides in less than a year; 22-year-old Kelly Nolan was killed last summer and 21-year-old Brittany Zimmermann was killed in her apartment in April.
DNA tests on a bloody knife found in Marino’s house matched Peterson, according to the criminal complaint, but authorities have said they had no forensic evidence linking him to the other two murders.
According to the call transcripts, Peterson told his father he didn’t know Marino. He told his mother detectives didn’t trick him into confessing, and hurting Marino was part of his plan to rob him.
“I thought it was like the only way I could make money, which is really dumb,” Peterson tells her.
She tells her son this isn’t how life is supposed to go.
“Oh, baby I’m sorry. What can I do to fix this?”
He tells his father he wasn’t drunk or on drugs during the stabbing.
His father, Melvin Peterson, tells him he clearly wasn’t in his right mind. Melvin Peterson has told reporters he believes his son has been suffering from serious mental problems for months.
He tells his son it’s no wonder he’s gone nowhere in therapy for months given he was keeping a homicide secret, telling his son he told jailers he had tried to kill himself a month earlier.
His father goes on to say he won’t hire an expensive lawyer because his son confessed. Adam Peterson asks him why since his “only chance” is an insanity defense.
His father then decides to hire an expensive attorney because he or she would be able to win a reduced sentence.
“We’ll try to get you off on ... being mentally ill at the time of the crime,” he says. Later, he says “I cannot believe, um, that argument will not be successful.”
Peterson, a former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student, dropped out of UW-Madison in October, his father has said. He went on living in Madison until he returned to Minnesota in March after a week-long stay in a Madison hospital’s psychiatric ward.
