REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (Court TV) — The foreman dismissed from the jury deliberating murder charges against Scott Peterson Wednesday asked to be removed from the panel, a source close to the case told Court TV anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom.

"This juror wanted off the case," Guilfoyle Newsom reported Thursday.

The panelist, identified as Gregory Jackson, 46, quit the jury after his fellow jurors said they wanted another panelist to lead them, the source told Guilfoyle Newsom.

"He was removed as the foreperson and then decided he wanted off the case," Guilfoyle Newsom said.

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The courthouse was closed Thursday because of the Veterans Day holiday and jurors remained in sequestration at their hotel. The panel is not permitted to discuss the case except in the jury room.

Even the media took a day off covering the trial in observance of Veteran's Day. The normally packed media booths stood desolate.

Some panelists felt Jackson, a lawyer who also holds a medical degree, was leading the jury through the evidence too slowly and wanted Juror No. 6, a firefighter and paramedic, to take over. Others also resented him for his perceived role in the removal of another juror, the source said.

When he announced Jackson was being replaced by an alternate, Judge Alfred Delucchi did not offer an explanation.

Jackson is bound by Delucchi's gag order not to talk about the case and sent a letter to the judge as he left court asking to be left alone by the media.

He was elected foreman of the jury when deliberations began Nov. 3.

Jackson, who works for a pharmaceutical company, took more notes than any other panelist during the five and a half months of trial testimony, filling at least a dozen notebooks. He normally ate lunch alone with a book while other jurors ate in groups.

His medical and law degrees and obsessive notetaking may have made him an obvious choice to lead the jury in a case that includes disputed autopsy findings and hundreds of detailed pieces of circumstantial evidence, but experts say the serious demeanor and standoffishness he displayed during the five months of trial testimony may have led to problems in the deliberation room.

"My hunch is that they didn't dislike him. They respected him or they wouldn't have made him foreperson. Maybe they respected his thorough nature and they respected the attention he was giving to the case, but perhaps he was a little to attentive and perhaps a little too methodical," said Richard Matthews, a San Francisco-based jury consultant.

The jury has deliberated for six days, but each time a juror was dismissed Delucchi ordered them to start anew. After the foreman's dismissal Wednesday, the panel worked just over five hours.

A sign outside the Redwood City courthouse hosting the Peterson trial announces the building's closure for Veteran's Day. The Peterson jury remained sequestered in their hotel.

The jury is weighing first- and second-degree murder charges against Peterson, 32, a Modesto fertilizer salesman, in the death of his pregnant wife, Laci, and unborn son. She was last seen alive Dec. 23, 2002. Her body and that of the child they planned to name Conner washed up on the San Francisco Bay shore four months later.