The Divine Feminine Three Women, One Water, One Shadow
Three pregnant women. Three lives turned toward birth, toward beginning. Two were found dismembered in the same grey body of water. One escaped into the dark and never stopped looking over her shoulder. What they shared was not merely geography. It was the condition of carrying life — and the attention that condition drew from something that could not abide it.
The Water
"The Bay does not care what it receives. It receives everything. It is patient in the way that only something very cold and very old can be patient." — fictional investigator's notes, 2003
The San Francisco Bay is 1,600 square miles of brackish water, tidal current, and industrial darkness. It receives the drainage of four hundred rivers and streams. Its floor is silt and sediment and, over the decades, everything that men have decided the water should keep. It is not picturesque, except at a distance. Up close — in the tidal zones along the Richmond shore, beneath the Bay Bridge where the Embarcadero runs — it smells of salt and diesel and the specific deep cold of water that does not warm in summer.
In the spring and summer of 2002 and 2003, the Bay gave something back. It gave back what had been put into it — or part of what had been put into it. Never all of it. The Bay keeps some things. The heads. The children. The parts of a story that would explain the whole story, if anyone could find them.
What washed ashore were torsos. Women's torsos, dressed in maternity clothing, bloated and stripped of the extremities that would have made identification simple — stripped, investigators understood, deliberately. The dismemberment served a purpose. It made the women harder to name. It made them harder to carry in the mind as full human beings, as mothers, as women who had been planning baby showers and choosing names and going about the enormous ordinary work of preparing to bring a life into the world. A torso is not a woman. But it was a woman. It had been a woman. It was carrying a woman's child when it entered the water.
The Bay is cold and it is patient and it does not care what it receives. But we are not the Bay. We are supposed to care. The question this account asks is simple: did we?
This is not a simple crime narrative. It is an inquiry into a pattern — a pattern that appears in the same geography, in the same year, against the same category of victim: women heavy with new life, accompanied in some cases by existing children, chosen at or near the moment of maximum vulnerability and maximum generative power. The divine feminine, in its most literal form. Pregnant, radiant, open to the world. And hunted.
Three Women
"They were not symbols. They were specific people, with names that belonged to them, and children who were waiting to be born, and boys who were waiting to be picked up from school." — fictional prosecutor's brief, undated
Three women. The number matters less than the pattern. Each was pregnant — not tangentially, not as background detail, but overwhelmingly, physically, unmistakably so. Each was carrying a child, or children: Laci carrying Conner in her eighth month; Evelyn carrying Fernando five days before his due date, with five-year-old Alexis at her side; Kathleen seven months along with her second child, ten-month-old Jennifer in her arms. They were not chosen despite their condition. The evidence suggests they were chosen because of it.
There is a profile within a profile here. Two of the women — Laci and Evelyn — vanished in the same calendar year, from the same metropolitan area, and washed up in the same body of water within months of each other, both dismembered, both partially unrecovered. The San Francisco Bay received them both. The Bay Bridge, which Evelyn surfaced beneath in July 2002, is visible from the Berkeley Marina where Laci's husband claimed to have been fishing in December of the same year.
The thirty-two years between Kathleen Johns's escape in 1970 and the deaths of Laci and Evelyn in 2002 is not nothing. But the geographic circle — Highway 132 near Modesto, the Bay Bridge, the Berkeley Marina, the Richmond shoreline — is tight. The women who entered this geography pregnant did not always leave it whole.
The media disparity: The San Francisco Chronicle published 32 stories about Laci Peterson between her disappearance and Scott Peterson's arrest. In the same period, Evelyn Hernandez had received fewer than five local news items. The Chronicle itself later acknowledged the failure. Both women were pregnant. Both women vanished from the same metropolitan area. Both were found dismembered in the same bay. One was remembered. One was not. The difference was race, immigration status, and the presence or absence of a telegenic husband. This is not incidental to the account. It is part of the pattern of erasure.
The Bay
"In tidal water, a body does not simply float. It is moved — carried on currents, distributed. The bay becomes a collaborator in the concealment." — fictional forensic hydrologist, 2003
Evelyn Hernandez disappeared on May 1, 2002. Her partial remains surfaced on July 24, 2002 — eighty-three days later, floating beneath the Bay Bridge. What remained was a torso and a pair of legs, clad in a maternity blouse. No head. No hands. No feet. Her unborn son Fernando was not with her. Her five-year-old son Alexis was not with her. The Bay had received them separately, or had kept them entirely.
Laci Peterson disappeared on December 24, 2002 — seven months after Evelyn. Her partial remains surfaced April 14, 2003 — one hundred and eleven days later — on a rocky outcrop along the eastern shoreline of the Bay near Richmond. What remained was a torso, missing her head, her forearms, one lower leg, and her internal organs. Her uterus was intact. Her son Conner had been found the day before, separately, about a mile away, a length of nylon cord wrapped around his remains.
Two women. The same bay. The same year. Both dismembered in ways consistent with deliberate concealment — the removal of the head and hands being the classic forensic strategy for defeating identification. Both found in maternity clothing, which was never removed, perhaps because the perpetrator could not bring himself to complete the desecration, or perhaps because the clothing was part of the statement.
"You dumped her body in the bay like a piece of garbage." — Sharon Rocha, Laci Peterson's mother, at Scott Peterson's re-sentencing, 2021. The same sentence could have been spoken by Evelyn Hernandez's family. No one said it for Evelyn in any courtroom. No one was ever charged.
The question that investigators insisted upon answering separately — were these cases related? — may be the wrong question. The right question is broader: what does the Bay represent to someone who would do this? What does the water mean, in the psychic architecture of someone who chooses it as a disposal site for a dismembered pregnant woman? Not a river, not a dumpster, not a field — the Bay. The large, grey, public water. The water visible from the freeway, from the bridge, from the ferry.
In many traditions, water is the feminine element. It is the element of birth, of the womb, of the unconscious, of the tidal body that mirrors the lunar cycle. To dispose of a pregnant woman in water is, in this reading, not merely practical. It is a statement. It returns the divine feminine to the element it is associated with — reduces it, compresses it, makes it disappear into the thing it was supposed to embody. It is a form of erasure with symbolic architecture.
Forensic note: Scott Peterson's defense team requested access to Evelyn Hernandez's autopsy reports during the 2003 trial. Only photographs were provided, not the full report. The defense suggested the cases were related. Investigators insisted they were not. The geographic and chronological convergence — the same body of water, the same calendar year, both victims pregnant and dismembered — was officially treated as coincidence. No formal comparative analysis was ever made public.
The Convergence
A visual rendering of where these three women intersect — geographically, temporally, and in the symbolic field they share. Each marker rises from the water. Each tells a part of the pattern. Hover to reveal.
Hover markers for case details · Schematic visualization only · Not to scale
The Pattern
"A pattern is not a proof. But the refusal to acknowledge a pattern is also not neutrality. It is a choice." — fictional forensic analyst, undated
| Factor | Laci Peterson | Evelyn Hernandez | Kathleen Johns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | December 2002 | May 2002 | March 1970 |
| Pregnancy status | 8 months — first child | 9 months — second child | 7 months — second child |
| Other children present | No — Conner was her first | Yes — son Alexis, 5, was with her | Yes — infant Jennifer, in her arms |
| Geography | Modesto / Berkeley Marina / SF Bay | San Francisco Mission District / SF Bay | Highway 132, 90 miles from Bay |
| Body of water | San Francisco Bay — Richmond shore | San Francisco Bay — Bay Bridge | N/A — escaped before disposal |
| Dismemberment | Head, forearms, one leg missing | Head, hands, feet missing | N/A — survived |
| Maternity clothing | Green maternity blouse — in laundry | Maternity blouse — found with body | Pregnant — no injury to clothing |
| Children's fate | Conner found separately in Bay | Alexis and Fernando — never found | Jennifer — survived with mother |
| Known perpetrator | Scott Peterson — convicted 2004 | Unknown — case open 2026 | Zodiac claimed responsibility |
| Police response | Immediate — 30+ officers, 900 volunteers | Delayed 35+ days — "embarrassing" per SFPD | Treated as low-credibility report |
| Media coverage | 32 Chronicle stories before arrest | First story — 42 days after disappearance, page 6A | Mentioned briefly in Zodiac coverage |
| Threat stated to victim | Unknown | Unknown | Yes — "I'm going to kill you" repeated |
What the table above makes visible is not a single perpetrator. Scott Peterson has been convicted; the Zodiac's identity remains officially unknown; Evelyn Hernandez's killer has never been charged. These are three separate legal cases. But the pattern they collectively describe is not a legal case. It is a behavioral one. It describes a type of victim — a specific category of human being at a specific moment of vulnerability — and a specific geography of disposal or attempted disposal.
The pregnant woman with young children in or near the San Francisco Bay region. The dismemberment that removes identity. The water that receives and distributes. The official response calibrated to the victim's social position rather than the severity of the crime. The erasure that follows — administrative, journalistic, historical.
The Shadow
"He was not interested in them as people. He was interested in what they represented. The fullness. The visible abundance. Something was being answered, in those acts, that we do not fully understand." — fictional behavioral analyst, undated
In the behavioral science literature on offenders who target pregnant women, there is a recognized subcategory — sometimes called fetal abduction killers or maternal homicide perpetrators — whose crimes share a specific structure: the woman is killed in order to gain access to the child, or the child is killed in order to control the woman, or both are killed because the perpetrator cannot tolerate the existence of a relationship — between the woman and the child, between the child and the world — that he does not control. The pregnancy, in each of these configurations, is not incidental. It is the trigger.
Scott Peterson told his girlfriend Amber Frey that he was "a widower who had lost his wife" before Laci disappeared. He researched boat launch ramps in San Francisco Bay on December 8, 2002 — sixteen days before Christmas Eve. He purchased a boat on December 9. The fishing trip that placed him on the Bay on Christmas Eve was prepared before the murder, not after it. The pregnancy — Conner, the first child, the child that Scott had told multiple people he was not ready for — was not the background of the crime. It was the center of it.
Herman Aguilera, Evelyn Hernandez's married boyfriend, had told Evelyn he was single. When she became pregnant and threatened to pursue child support, he hired a lawyer and stopped cooperating with police. His wife provided his alibi. The wallet containing Evelyn's cash and disability check was found near a canal in South San Francisco close to the limousine company where Aguilera worked. A full forensic investigation — the kind mounted within twenty-four hours of Laci Peterson's disappearance — was never deployed for Evelyn. No one was ever charged. No perpetrator was named.
The crime against Evelyn Hernandez was compounded by the response to it. The first erasure was the act. The second erasure was the silence that followed — 42 days before the first news story, years before the first serious documentary. She was disappeared twice: once by whoever put her in the Bay, and once by the mechanisms of a society that decided she was not worth the resources Laci Peterson received.
The Zodiac told Kathleen Johns, in the car, on Highway 132, in the dark: "You know I'm going to kill you." He said it more than once. He had already loosened her wheel, already gotten her into his car under false pretense, already driven past the gas station she had asked for. She had her infant daughter pressed to her chest. She was seven months pregnant with her second child. When he stopped at a stop sign she opened the door, jumped, rolled, and ran across a field in the dark. She hid in an irrigation ditch until his flashlight passed over her and he drove away.
What he wanted from Kathleen Johns — whether the act he was building toward was the same act performed against Laci and Evelyn thirty-two years later — cannot be known. What can be known is what he said. He was going to kill her. The child in her arms and the child in her body did not make him hesitate. They may have been the point.
The One Who Ran
"She jumped from a moving car in the dark with an infant in her arms and a child in her body. This is not a small thing to have done." — fictional account, undated
Kathleen Johns is the only one of these three women who was given the chance to run, and she took it. She was the only one who looked up at a police station wall and recognized the face of the man who had held her. She was the only one whose story did not end in the Bay — though it nearly did, and she has said she is certain it was intended to.
The night of March 22, 1970 proceeded with the specific, methodical quality that investigators have come to associate with the Zodiac's more controlled operations. The approach was indirect — a concerned citizen flagging a loose wheel, offering help. The offer to drive her to a gas station. The gas station passed without stopping. The rural roads. The repeated declarations of intent: "I'm going to kill you." The deliberate, drawn-out quality of the captivity — two hours of driving before he stopped — suggests an offender who needed the time, who had ritual requirements that preceded the act.
She did not ask him to let her out. She later said she was too afraid to speak. But she was watching. She was cataloguing the road, the darkness, the moment when the car would have to slow — a stop sign on an off-ramp of Interstate 580. When it came, she moved. She held Jennifer to her chest and she opened the door and she rolled out of a moving vehicle in the dark and she ran across a field and up an embankment and she did not make a sound.
She saved three lives that night. Her own. Jennifer's. And the child she was carrying, who was born and lived and grew up in a world where the Zodiac Killer never had a chance to put them in the Bay.
At the police station in Patterson, a passing motorist had brought her and Jennifer. She was giving her statement when she looked up at the wall. The wanted poster. The composite sketch. The crosshair symbol. "Oh my God," she said. "That's him." She said it and then she had to sit with the knowledge of how close it had been — how close the Bay had been, how close she had come to becoming another name on a list that officials would decline to connect to each other.
The Zodiac confirmed her account four months later, in a letter to the Chronicle dated July 24, 1970. He wrote that he had given "a rather interesting ride for a couple hours one evening a few months back that ended in my burning her car where I found them." He claimed the woman and her baby were on his list. He burned the car after she escaped — returned to the scene where she had left it on the highway and torched it, methodically, because the car was evidence and evidence was the enemy.
Kathleen Johns died in 2002 — the same year Evelyn Hernandez and Laci Peterson were murdered, the same year the Bay received their bodies. She died of a heart attack, having lived for thirty-two years with the knowledge of what that night on Highway 132 had almost produced. Whether the same man who stalked the Bay in 1970 had anything to do with what the Bay received in 2002 is not established. But the geography holds. The type of victim holds. The water holds.
What Remains
"A torso in a maternity blouse is not an abstraction. It was a woman who had picked out a name for her son." — fictional obituary writer, 2003
Laci Peterson had chosen the name Conner. She and Scott had a nursery. She had been to the salon the day before she died, getting her hair cut alongside her sister. She was planning to walk her dog on Christmas Eve morning. She was eight months and some days away from the beginning of the life she had imagined, and then she was not alive to live it.
Evelyn Hernandez had chosen the name Fernando. She and her sister were finalizing arrangements for a baby shower. She was planning to attend a citizenship class — she had been attending them regularly, because she was building something, because she had come from El Salvador at fourteen and was in the process of making a life that would be stable enough for Alexis and Fernando to grow up in. She was five days from her due date. She picked up Alexis from preschool, she used an ATM, and then she was gone, and the Bay eventually returned some of her, and Alexis is still missing, and Fernando was never found.
Alexis Hernandez would be in his late twenties by now. His family believes he may be alive. They continue to search. The cold case unit of the San Francisco Police Department continues to list the case as open. In 2025, a Hulu docuseries revisited Evelyn's story. The $100,000 reward for information about her murder has not been claimed.
The divine feminine is not a symbol. It is a woman named Laci, a woman named Evelyn, a woman named Kathleen. It is a boy named Conner who washed ashore tangled in cord. It is a boy named Alexis who has not washed ashore at all. The pattern does not end with these three. But it is visible here, in this geography, in this water, if anyone is willing to look at it clearly and say what they see.
What the Bay holds is not just evidence. It is the accumulated weight of women who were chosen at the moment of their greatest generative power and returned to the water — reduced, distributed, made difficult to name. The act of dismemberment is the act of making a woman into something that cannot be fully recovered, cannot be fully identified, cannot be fully mourned.
The act of telling their names — Laci, Evelyn, Kathleen — in the same sentence, in the same account, is not an accusation. It is a refusal. A refusal to allow the pattern to operate without being seen. The Bay gives back what it can. The rest is ours to carry.
Current status (as of 2026): Scott Peterson was re-sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2021. In 2023, the Los Angeles Innocence Project took up his case, filing a 400-page petition citing new evidence. A court hearing was scheduled for 2024. Evelyn Hernandez's murder remains unsolved. Her son Alexis has never been found. Fernando's remains have never been recovered. The SFPD cold case unit continues the investigation. No arrest has ever been made in her case.
THIS DOCUMENT IS A NARRATIVE ANALYTICAL WORK grounded in publicly documented case facts. All case details regarding Laci Peterson, Evelyn Hernandez, and Kathleen Johns are drawn from publicly available court records, law enforcement statements, and journalism. The narrative framing and analytical connections drawn between these three cases are the author's theoretical and analytical work. Nothing in this document asserts criminal guilt beyond what has been established in courts of law. Scott Peterson was convicted in 2004 and his case is currently subject to ongoing legal proceedings. Evelyn Hernandez's murder has not been solved and no individual has been charged. The Kathleen Johns incident remains officially unconfirmed as a Zodiac Killer crime. Alexis Hernandez is listed as a missing person. If you have information about Evelyn or Alexis Hernandez, contact the San Francisco Police Department cold case unit: 415-553-1071.