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[Saurabh Cloudas]

Michael Iver Peterson (born October 23, 1943) is an American novelist who was convicted in 2003 of murdering his second wife, Kathleen Peterson, on December 9, 2001. After eight years, Peterson was granted a new trial after the judge ruled a critical prosecution witness gave misleading testimony.[1] In 2017, Peterson submitted an Alford plea to the reduced charge of manslaughter. He was sentenced to time already served and freed.

Peterson's case is the subject of the French documentary miniseries The Staircase, which started filming soon after his arrest in 2001 and followed events until his eventual Alford plea in 2017. In 2019, he released his own account of his life since his wife's death in an independently published memoir, Behind the Staircase.[2] Miniseries The Staircase starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette, also covers the case and its aftermath. Several other documentaries have been produced about Kathleen's death, including a sequel to the 2004 French documentary, podcasts, radio shows and other media.

Michael Iver Peterson was born near Nashville, Tennessee, the son of Eugene Iver Peterson and Eleanor Peterson (ne Bartolino). He graduated from Duke University with a bachelor's degree in political science. While there, Peterson was president of Sigma Nu fraternity and was editor of The Chronicle, the daily student newspaper, from 1964 to 1965.[3] He attended classes at the law school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[citation needed]

After graduating, Peterson took a civilian job with the United States Department of Defense, where he was assigned to research arguments supporting increased military involvement in Vietnam. That year he also married Patricia Sue, who taught at an elementary school on the Rhein-Main Air Base in Grfenhausen, West Germany. They had two children, Clayton and Todd. In 1968, Peterson was commissioned in the United States Marine Corps and served in the Vietnam War. In 1971, he received an honorable discharge with the rank of captain after a car accident left him with a permanent disability.

Years later, during the 1999 Durham mayoral election, Peterson claimed he had been awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Valor, and two Purple Hearts. He had all the medals, but said he did not have the documentation for them. Peterson claimed he had received one Purple Heart after being hit by shrapnel when another soldier stepped on a land mine, and the other when he was shot. He later admitted his war injury was not the result of the shrapnel wound in Vietnam, but was the result of a car accident in Japan, where he was stationed after the war as a military police officer.[4] The News & Observer said records did not contain any mention of the two Purple Hearts that Peterson said he had received.[5]

Peterson and his first wife Patricia lived in Germany for some time. There they befriended Elizabeth and George Ratliff and their two children, Margaret and Martha. After George's death, the Peterson and Ratliff families became very close. When Elizabeth Ratliff died in 1985, Michael became the guardian of her two children. After Michael and Patricia divorced in 1987, Clayton and Todd lived with Patricia, and Margaret and Martha stayed with Michael, who then moved to Durham, North Carolina. Clayton and Todd later also joined their father. In 1989, Michael moved in with Kathleen Atwater, a successful Nortel business executive. They married in 1997, and Kathleen's daughter Caitlin became the fifth sibling in the blended family.[6]

Peterson wrote three novels based "around his experiences during the Vietnamese conflict":[3] The Immortal Dragon, A Time of War, and A Bitter Peace. He co-wrote the biographical Charlie Two Shoes and the Marines of Love Company with journalist David Perlmutt, and co-wrote Operation Broken Reed with Arthur L. Boyd. Peterson also worked as a newspaper columnist for The Herald-Sun, where his columns became known for their criticism of police and of Durham County district attorney James Hardin Jr., who would later prosecute Peterson for the murder of his second wife, Kathleen.

On December 9, 2001, Peterson called emergency services on 911, to report that he had just found Kathleen Peterson unconscious in their Forest Hills neighborhood home in Durham, North Carolina, and suspected she had fallen down "fifteen to twenty, I don't know" stairs. He later claimed that he had been outside by the pool and had come in at 2:40 am to find Kathleen at the foot of the stairs. Peterson said she must have fallen down the stairs after consuming alcohol and Valium.

Toxicology results showed that Kathleen's blood alcohol content was 0.07 percent (70 mg/100mL), her alcohol in urine was 0.11 and she had taken between 5 and 15 mg of Valium. The autopsy report concluded that the 48-year-old woman sustained a matrix of severe injuries, including a fracture of the superior cornu of the left thyroid cartilage and seven lacerations to the top and back of her head, consistent with blows from a blunt object, and had died from blood loss ninety minutes to two hours after sustaining the injuries.[7] Kathleen's daughter, Caitlin, and Kathleen's sister, Candace Zamperini, both initially proclaimed Michael's innocence and publicly supported him alongside his children, but Zamperini reconsidered after learning of Michael's bisexuality, as did Caitlin after reading her mother's autopsy report. Both subsequently broke off from the rest of the family.

Although forensic expert Henry Lee, hired by Peterson's defense, testified that the blood-spatter evidence was consistent with an accidental fall down the stairs, police investigators concluded that the injuries were inconsistent with such an accident. As Peterson was the only person at the residence at the time of Kathleen's death, he was the prime suspect and was soon charged with her murder. He pleaded not guilty.

The medical examiner, Deborah Radisch, concluded that Kathleen had died from lacerations of the scalp caused by a homicidal assault. According to Radisch, the total of seven lacerations to the top and back of Kathleen's head were the result of repeated blows with a light, yet rigid, weapon. The defense disputed this theory. According to their analysis, the lacerations were not consistent with blows of any sort, because there was a lack of underlying injury, such as skull fractures or bruising, swelling and hemorrhaging of the brain.

The trial drew increasing media attention as details of Peterson's private life emerged. Hardin and his prosecution team (among them Mike Nifong) attacked Peterson's credibility, focusing on his alleged misreporting of his military service and what they described as a gay life he led and kept secret. The prosecution contended that the Petersons' marriage was far from happy, suggesting that Kathleen had discovered Michael's alleged secret gay life and wanted to end their marriage. It was the main motive that the prosecution offered at trial for Kathleen's alleged murder (the other being a $1.5 million life insurance policy). According to Assistant District Attorney Freda Black, Kathleen

The prosecution said that Kathleen's murder was most likely committed with a custom-made fireplace poker called a blow poke. It had been a gift to the Petersons from Kathleen's sister but was missing from the house at the time of the investigation. Later in the trial the defense team produced the missing blow poke, which they said had been found in the garage.[9] A juror contacted after the trial noted that the jury had dismissed the idea of the blow poke as the murder weapon.[10]

Elizabeth Ratliff, a friend of the Petersons, who died in Germany in 1985, had also been found dead at the foot of her staircase with injuries to the head. Her death had been investigated by both the German police and U.S. military police. An autopsy at the time of her death concluded Ratliff died from an intra-cerebral hemorrhage secondary to the blood coagulation disorder Von Willebrand's disease, based on blood in her cerebrospinal fluid and reports that she had been suffering severe, persistent headaches in the weeks leading up to her death.[citation needed] The coroner determined that the hemorrhage resulted in immediate death, followed by Ratliff falling down the stairs after collapsing. The Petersons had dinner with Ratliff and her daughters, and Peterson had stayed and helped Ratliff put the children to bed before going home. The children's nanny, Barbara, discovered the body when she arrived the next morning. Peterson was the last known person to see her alive.

Before Peterson's trial, the Durham court ordered the exhumation of Ratliff's embalmed body, buried in Texas, for a second autopsy in April 2003.[11] Arrangements were made for the Durham medical examiner, who had initially performed Kathleen's autopsy, to perform this reevaluation, over the objections of defense counsel who argued that the autopsy should be performed by Texas medical examiners. The body was then transported from Texas to Durham. The Durham M.E. found sufficient evidence drawn from the results of the second autopsy, along with new witness statements describing the scene,[11] to overturn the earlier findings and list Ratliff's cause of death as "homicide".

The prosecution declined to accuse Peterson of Ratliff's death but introduced the death into the trial as an incident, giving Peterson the idea of how to "fake" Kathleen's accident. Despite police reports that there was very little blood at the scene of Ratliff's death, the nanny, who was the first to discover Ratliff's body in 1985, took the stand at Peterson's trial and testified that there was a large amount of blood at the scene. Another witness testified to spending much of the day cleaning blood stains off the wall. Doubt as to the admissibility of the Ratliff evidence in court was one of the grounds for the subsequent appeal against his conviction, lodged by Peterson's lawyers in 2005.

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