Socal man, who was sentenced to prison because he killed wife and threw legs into trash cans

For more than two decades, Jack Potter had made people believe his dead woman, whose separate legs were found in a rancho San Diego waste container in 2003, the prosecutors say.

On Friday, one of the most disturbing cold cases in the region concluded when the 72-year-old Jack Potter was sentenced to 15 years in prison for murder on his wife Laurie Potter.

Potter owed himself guilty about the second degree murder and admitted to suffocating his 54-year-old wife in February, the prosecutors said.

According to the prosecutors, Potter lived great for almost 20 years and benefited from Laurie's death as she pretended that she was still alive. He opened fraudulent credit cards on their behalf and used a family court to sell their house in Temecula and to put the profits, said prosecutors.

He met a new girlfriend in a strip club and gave her a lobster SUV and a ski boat, rented an apartment and gave her a credit card with a limit of $ 30,000, the prosecutors said. The girlfriend shared the name of his wife.

Potter expressed remorse during the hearing on Friday, apologized and said he loved his wife.

“I let my feelings do better,” he said. “I don't know why. It just happened and I'm sorry.”

A maintenance worker in the Country Hills Apartment Complex in Rancho San Diego discovered Laurie's legs in October 2003, but the law enforcement authorities could not identify them and the case became unsolved.

This was until 2020 when new DNA examination techniques led to a breakthrough in the haunting cold case. Detective led the crime scene -dna through a national database and approved a distant relative.

Detective then gradually asked closer relatives to share their DNA until they reached Laurie's adult son – 20 people and six months later. His sample enabled them to identify Laurie, and a subsequent investigation showed evidence that combined their husband with the crime, as from a press release from 2021 from the Sheriff office of the district of San Diego County.

When Potter was arrested in 2021, Laurie's family thought that she didn't know her whereabouts, according to the sheriff's office.

She was never reported missing and without genetic tests – the same technology for the identity of the Golden State Killer and the cracking of cold cases – this murder would probably have been unresolved, the sheriff's office said in the press release.

Laurie's son, John Carlson, said during Potter's conviction that he had lost contact with his mother, but tried to contact her and renew her relationship.

Carlson said Potter told him that his mother “only wanted to be alone, which I unfortunately believed. And that really hurts to this day.”

Laurie's case was the first time that the Sheriff's office of the San Diego County tried to identify a murder victim in the investigative genealogy.

“This case is a strong memory that the pursuit of justice never stops,” San Diego County Dist. Atty. Summer Stephan said in a statement on Friday. “And also not the grief of those who lose someone through violence. Today we honor Laurie's memory and with her family are in their long -awaited moment of justice.”

The City News Service contributed to this report.