RedHanded - FROM THE VAULT - The Staircase: Michael Peterson - Parts 1&2

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in North Carolina, to revisit the infamous staircase of Michael & Kathleen Peterson...From the outside the Petersons had it all; the perfect family, a beautiful mansion and more money than they could spend. But on 9th December 2001 all that changed, when Michael Peterson claimed to have found his wife, Kathleen, dead at the bottom of their stairs.What followed would become a bizarre tale of strange family secrets, shocking revelations and a true crime case obsessed over like nothing before, or since.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

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dear listeners, we are taking you on a virtual road trip through the whole of North America. We haven't been for a few years now, and it's just quite hard. Visa's are hard, guys. So we're going to do it with the power of the back catalogue and your imagination. What are we doing this week, Hannah? Well, apparently the staircase. But in a meeting the other week, I had to ask if we had covered it. And apparently we did.

How dare you? I just had forgotten about it, which is quite rare for me. So I don't know if I'm actually qualified to be doing this topple right now. I can't remember. Fuck. Oh my God. Well, I wrote our staircase script, two-part a script. So I do remember it.

And I fell down a big fucking staircase while researching this. It is a fucking bonkers story. I mean, obviously you guys are going to listen to it now. Hopefully you've already heard the episode. If you haven't, don't worry. It's about to be played for you. It took place in North Carolina. Let's say that, firstly, while we're here on our big North American road trip,

we're stopping off in North Carolina. And honestly, people are like, what comes to mind when you think of North Carolina? It's the fucking staircase case for me. It is mad. It's basically the story of this woman who falls down or is pushed down, a flight of stairs and dies at the bottom. Was she pushed? Did she fall? Was it an owl? Was it her husband? Are owls the new husbands? Oh, it's the owl one? It's the owl case. It's the fucking owl case.

I obviously started off thinking, well, obviously the fucking husband did it. But by the end, I don't fucking know. And I think it could have been an owl. As you will understand when you listen to this episode again. I feel like it is creeping back to me. I think I am also team owl. So do you know what? I'll listen to it. Thank you. And you can do it too. You can listen to it right now because here it is. Enjoy. I'm Saruti.

I'm Hannah. And welcome to your end of year. I know. Red-handed class. Welcome everybody. This is it, guys. This is the final two-parter of our red-handed journey here for 2023. Yeah.

And I just remembered this as I heard you say your own name, which I've obviously heard you do many, many times. I am always saying my name. Do you know, or have you seen, what YouTube has auto-corrected your name to in the subtitles of our videos? Is it Surrante? No.

What is it? S-T-I. S-T-I? YouTube. Someone tweeted us this morning. Brilliant. To not a specific S-T-I. She's called me gonorrhea.

Well, Merry fucking Christmas from SDI. Let's start again. Hello, I'm STI. Fuck off. That is outrageous. Anyway, we'll deal with that later. For now, we've got too much to deal with. We've got quite a lot to deal with.

Too many things. Almost like having a very vigorous SDI is how it has been to research this case. Because I could not stop. It was relentless. I said on Under the Duvet a few weeks ago that this was by far the hardest case I've ever had to research because it never ends.

Every time you go on to Google and search the name Peterson in some combination of question, it is filled with articles that I've never seen before. And I'm like, how is this happening? Every other case you do, you hit a point where you've read everything there is to read. Or you're coming across what you think are new articles

but they're actually just repeating stuff you already have. And I've also never seen a case where there are so many articles by reputable places that I feel like that must be worth reading. Right, right, right, right. So here we are. After many a week researching this case, we're ready to finally talk about it, and I'm very excited for it to be fucking done.

So, one of the bazillion articles I did read, whilst researching this case over the past month or so, started with the line. If you've heard of Michael Peterson, you probably have a strong opinion about whether or not he murdered his wife Kathleen. If that is true, which I do believe it is, then I think I am massively in the minority. Because after sitting with this case for weeks, reading, watching, listening to everything I could get my hands on,

I still don't know what I actually think. So you can go into this two-parter, guys, because that is what it's going to have to be. It's going to have to be the Christmas red-handed two-parter. Whatever happens over the next two-week, you know that I, I'm not saying I'm not biased, But what I'm saying is I don't know what happened. I'm not trying to convince you of a point of view. I'm just going to tell you the story along with my non-esty-eyed-riddled friend. Here's hoping.

But what I do know, of all the things I don't know with this case, what I do know is that we do have a lot to get through. Because whether you know this case, whether you think he's guilty or not, it is massive. And if you don't know this case, well, strap in. because over the next two weeks, we will be delving into one of the most obsessively discussed cases in the world of true crime, with all its twists and turns, bizarre coincidences, crime lab corruption, and an alternative theory to murder. Which I did originally write, we'll leave your head spinning, but I didn't know if everybody would get the little gross pun that I was making. You need to go to prison. Prison. SDI prison. So we'll just say an alternative theory.

to murder, like when we haven't come across before. An owlaby. Maybe we could call it. I can't stand you. So let's get into it. Michael and Kathleen Peterson had been married for 13 years, and they lived in a beautiful mansion in the wealthy neighborhood of Forest Hills, Durham, North Carolina.

The Peterson's had moved into this grand 11,210 square foot extravaganza of a house in 1992. And fun fact, in 1989, the house was used as the set for the film The Handmaid's Tale as the home of the commander. You can quite literally fit my house into that house ten times. Just to put it into perspective for everybody. And the Peterson's themselves lived up to their grand home. Michael was a Vietnam War veteran, author and columnist, while Kathleen was a successful executive at a telecoms company called Nortle.

Nor tell. Most hell. It's because it's like two words smashed together. Nor tell. Yeah. Michael and Kathleen were also well integrated into the local community. Michael had actually run for the mayor of Durham. And Kathleen worked actively with all sorts of arts charities,

raising money for the American Dance Festival and the Carolina Ballet. Kathleen was affectionately known as the Martha Stewart of Durham, because she didn't pay her taxes. I'm kidding. due to the fabulous parties that she threw. And also due to the fact that she did her own cooking, perhaps much to the shock of the other people in this area because they all have maids, I would assume.

It's like the, like, playwright, did you hear that she cooks her own? She cooks her own lasagna. But everybody is like, everyone fucking loves Kathleen Peterson. It's like she is the one that throws all of the parties. The holiday party you want to go to is at Kathleen's house. They are the party house. and she loves it.

She throws massive parties. She cooks everything. She decorates her house. She is through and through an entertainer, a host. And so, the couple lived what people would call a lively and sociable life, along with their blended family of five children. It was Clayton 27, Todd 25, Margaret 20, Caitlin 19, and Martha 18. So, thank grown-ups.

So from the outside, the Peterson's had it all. and then some. But then, tragedy struck. At 241 a.m. on Sunday the 9th of December 2001, 911 received the following call from the Peterson home. It was Michael. John 911, what are you, markets? 1810 feet of street, please.

What's wrong? By one time of accident, she's still breathing. What kind of accident? She's still breathing, please. Is she conscious? What? Is she conscious? No, she's not.

How many stairs did you fall down? How many stairs? How many stairs? How many stairs? Calm down, sir. Calm down, sir. Oh, 15-20. I don't know. Please, get somebody here right away.

Okay, somebody's this back in the ambulance while I ask you questions. It's a force shield, okay? Please. Sir, somebody else. Is this back in the ambulance? Okay, is she awake now? She's awake now? Hello?

Hello? So Michael Peterson at that point hangs up the call, and then six minutes later, he calls 911 again. Tom, 911, where is your emergency? Where are they? It's an 18th century. She's not breathing.

Please, please, would you hurry up? Is it so far? Yes. They're on the way. Can you tell me for sure she's not breathing? Sir? Hello. Hello.

And then he hangs up again. Paramedics arrived at the Peterson home at 2.48 a.m. So within seven minutes of being called. But Kathleen was already dead. And the police were at the house by 3 a.m. ready to question Michael. This is what he said about the timeline of events that day. Michael said that he had been to the gym. Then he and Kathleen had rented the movie America's Sweethearts at around 7pm.

And then they just hung out, having dinner and drinking. At 9.45pm, Christine Tomasetti, a friend of Todd Peterson's, so Michael's son, stopped by the house to pick him up for a party. Christine saw the Peterson's enjoying a bottle of wine together and would later say that they seemed totally normal that evening. Someone then used the computer in Michael's study at 10.40pm. The user, Atwater, was the one that was accessed, which was Kathleen's married name from her previous marriage.

So I think it's safe to say that this was most probably Kathleen logging on, because we know Kathleen had left her computer at work, but she had an important conference call the next day and she was using her login, and we know that she's still alive at the. this stage. Because a colleague of Kathleen, someone called Helen Presslinger, spoke to Kathleen on the phone shortly after this login. Helen said that she was going to send Kathleen some files for the meeting the next morning. At 11.53 p.m., the files arrived in the inbox, but they were never

opened. According to Michael, around midnight, he and Kathleen took their glasses of wine and went down to the pool. And he said that they sat out there from around about midnight until 2 a.m. At this point, according to Michael, Kathleen decided that it was time to go to bed because she needed to prep for that meeting in the morning. I said, 2 a.m. the day before a big meeting is hard. It's tough because it's like, we'll go on to talk about the kind of state of not hell. Like it wasn't doing particularly great at the time. Stocks were plummeting. I think Kathleen was worried for her job. So that's probably the reason she's, you know, taking a very important conference meeting on a Sunday morning that was being planned.

But yeah, they're up until, according to Michael, they're up until at least 2 a.m. Kathleen then says she's going to bed. Michael said that he said goodnight to Kathleen, she went inside and he stayed by the pool a little bit longer because he was smoking a cigar and he wanted to finish it. At just after 2.30 a.m., Michael said he also then went inside. And this is when he found Kathleen, at the bottom of the stairs, covered in blood and barely alive. Quick point here.

This house is a mansion. There is no other way to describe it. It is absolutely enormous. When you see pictures of it, you'll see a grand, sweeping staircase. That is the main staircase. That is not the one we are talking about. The one we are talking about would have been used by the servants of the house back in the olden times when it was built.

And it's a very narrow back staircase that just leads up to the bedrooms. They were still using it, but it isn't like the nice swish one. just like a very narrow, badly lit staircase that's at the back of the house. Michael Peterson told the police that he didn't know what happened, but he thought that Kathleen must have fallen down the stairs. And the initial medical examiner at the scene, Dr. Snell, agreed that this was likely what had happened. But the police were suspicious.

The scene was an absolute bloodbath, and they couldn't believe that a 48-year-old woman had fallen down the stairs and died like that. If anybody listening hasn't seen the crime scene photos, I'm not going to suggest that you do it because it is honestly one of the most grisily, like, scene of crime photos that I've ever seen. There is, and that cannot be understated,

there is so much blood at the scene. I'm looking at it now. Yeah, and it is all over Kathleen. Like, there is just a lot of blood. Oh, fuck. Yeah. It's really bad. Yeah.

And so I do understand the police saying or the police thinking immediately when they see that. She's not an elderly woman who's like slipped down the stairs. She's a 48 or a woman who was healthy, who was active, who was physically fit, falling down the stairs and dying in that much blood. I can understand why on first sight, first view, that is incredibly shocking. And those pictures that you are looking at Hannah and that you just went, oh fuck at, they are incredibly important to the entirety of this story. The police would also say

that they thought it was weird that Michael went off on his own to his office and was heard mumbling to himself. And at 4.15am, someone did log on to his computer, using Michael's login. Does this look odd when your wife is downstairs and dead? Yes, it does. But Michael could tell that the police were giving him the wonky eye, so at 5 a.m., he actually called his lawyer, who arrived at 1810 Cedar Street at 5.20 a.m.

So could Michael logging on to his computer, when the police were there, as weird as it might look, just have been him trying to contact his lawyer? And I've seen people say that, and I think that is very plausible. You know, it's the early 2000s. I don't think he even had a mobile phone. He was just using the house phone to call the police. So you might not have all of your contacts readily at hand like we do these days. So maybe he was just logging into his computer to find his lawyer's number.

And again, people would be like, well, why was he calling his lawyer so quickly? Like, again, guys, like, we always do say if you do think that the police are going to question you interview, they were already questioning him at the scene to get a lawyer. But you do see a lot of people being like, well, he lawyered up so quick, he must be guilty. I hate that argument, man. We've said it in other episodes. You've said this so many times. Like, you can't use that as a stick to beat him with because he called a lawyer.

So anyway, that could be a reason as to why he did this. Now, those of you who know this case, I hear you, I hear you screaming at your phones at me, saying, but he deleted files off his computer. Yes, he did. But Michael Peterson deleted files off his computer in the week leading up to Kathleen's death. And then, yes, he did delete some on the day she died, but at 3.30 p.m. So long before Kathleen died. And long before we know there was any problem if they had had an argument because people had

witness them. Todd's friend who had come to the house said that they seemed perfectly ordinary, perfectly normal. I'm not saying that the file deletions are irrelevant, but he wasn't deleting files when the police were there, according to the evidence. But I promise we will come back to him. For now, let's talk about Kathleen and the injuries that she had sustained. Like I said, anyone who's seen these police photos will know that the scene was an absolute mess. It was a complete bloodbath. There is no other word for it. But this is because Kathleen had multiple deep lacerations to her scalp. And anyone who has ever had a head wound will know the head wounds bleed a lot.

The only time I've had a head wound was when I was in Cambodia and I crashed that motorbike, cut my face up. And I only had to get three stitches in one and the other cut that I had, because I had like two cuts on my head. The other cut, they didn't even put stitches in. So three stitches, I looked like Carrie. Oh, yeah. I believe it.

Blood all over my face. And it wasn't just from the side that the cut was. It was all over my face. Like it was pouring down me. I caught sight of myself in, because I was lying on the side of the road. We had to like, my best friend was with me and she like flagged down these like lorry drivers who picked me up and put me in their lorry and drove me to the nearest hospital. And when I was in the front of the lorry, I looked at myself in the mirror and I almost had a heart attack.

It looked so much worse than it was. Headwinds generally do. It looked so bad. When I turned up at the hospital, they dropped everything and took me straight in to be examined because they thought I was dying. But when they cleaned all the blood up, I just needed three stitches. So imagine, Kathleen has seven deep lacerations to her scalp. That explains why there is so much blood loss. And also, we will talk about this in more detail next week.

She had also urinated herself. So there was a lot of urine mixed in with the blood, which made it look like there was even more blood. than there was because it's diluted it and spread it around even more. That's why you should never run, but if you're particularly funny about blood or whatever if you cut your hand, for example, when you run it under a cold tap, which feels like the right thing to do, it actually just makes it look a lot worse than it is because there's so much more because the water is diluted in the blood. Looking at the autopsy report for Kathleen Peterson, this is what the medical examiner

who carried out the procedure, Dr. Deborah Raddish. Radish, like the vegetable. Honestly, whenever I picture Dr Deborah Radish, and I've seen Pitch of Her, I watched the documentary. Just a little radish in a white coat. Yeah, I, well, I picture like a little Slalvanian family otter wearing a fucking lab coat. Okay, this is what Dr. Deborah Radish had to say. Kathleen had at least seven lacerations on the back of her scalp, several of which had slightly penetrated her skull. Although, and this is important, there were no actual skull fractures. Kathleen did have some subarachinoid hemorrhaging on her brain,

but she did not have any other hemorrhaging or contusions to the brain itself. And there was no brain damage at all. Both very important points. There is no brain damage and there are no skull fractures. And while Kathleen also had multiple abrasions and contusions to her face, particularly around her eyes, and she also had some on the back of her hands and arms, but none of them were very significant.

Kathleen also had no foreign DNA under her fingernails, just her own blood. Kathleen's neck, however, did show a fracture on her thyroid neck cartilage, which many people take to mean that she had been strangled, although there were no other signs of strangulation like bruising around her neck or patikial hemorrhaging. Which is like hemorrhaging in the eyes, which you would see if somebody is been strangled. Oh, yes, absolutely. Interestingly, the autopsy also found Kathleen's own hair in both of her hair. hands. Many of these hairs had been pulled out from the root, and it appeared that she had pulled

them out herself prior to her death. Kathleen also had her own blood on the bottoms of both feet and on her face, and two pine needles embedded in her hand. Toxicology tests revealed that Kathleen's blood alcohol level was 0.07. I've seen some places 0.08, but it kind of makes not much difference because 0.08 is. and 0.07 are both under the legal limit to drive in North Carolina. So yes, Kathleen had been drinking, but she wasn't hammered by any stretch of the imagination. In that state, she could legally have gotten her car and driven around.

Though it was also concluded in the toxicology report that Kathleen had diazepam, cyclobenzaprine, and nicotine in her system. That sounds lovely. So this is explained by the fact that Kathleen had been smoking with Michael in the garden that night. And she was also on anti-anxiety medication and muscle relaxance at the time. In fact, she'd been on these for a few months

because, in September, remember this is happening in December, in September, when their youngest daughter Martha went off to university, the Peterson's threw a big, empty nest party. At this party, Kathleen had a few too many drinks and jumped into the shallow end of the pool. Michael actually had to pull her out. And it freaked everybody out because they thought she was dead. Oh, God, I bet.

But he pulls her out, and she'd basically just hurt her neck and her back. Kathleen was prescribed the muscle relaxant and the valium after this. And she actually wore a neck brace for a couple of months leading up until her death, basically. So could the neck injury found in the autopsy have been from this incident? Very possibly. Like we said, a strangulation would have left other signs, and also a strangulation would have been much more likely to have damaged her hyoid bone, which was completely intact.

The other thing worth mentioning was the presence of red neurons in Kathleen's brain. These develop when someone is still alive, but oxygen is failing to reach their brain tissue. And typically these take a while to develop. We're talking a couple of hours. So they could point to the fact that Kathleen had been at the bottom of the stairs dying for at least two hours before she actually died. And if this is the case,

then Michael's timeline of Kathleen going inside at 2 a.m. and him finding her at 2.30 a.m. doesn't match. Especially if the paramedics turn up at 248 and she's dead. And if you remember, Michael said that Kathleen was still breathing on the first 911 call. If the neurons had taken hours to form, he's either lying or he's mistaken. But we'll have to come back to that next week.

Much like many two parties we do, there's a lot of breadcrumbing in this episode. I am very sorry, but... that's just how it has to be today. Because for now we need to focus on the autopsy. Dr Deborah Radish determined that Kathleen's cause of death was severe concussive injury of the brain caused by multiple blunt force impacts of the head.

Though it was noted that heavy blood loss may also have been a factor. And according to the autopsy, the verdict given by Dr. Deborah Radish was that Kathleen's fatal injuries were, quote, received as a result of, of a beating. That is literally what she writes down. And the box marked homicide,

because they have a little like checkboxes, where it's like accidental, unknown, homicide, etc., etc. She ticks and circles homicide. And she writes, this was as a result of a beating. And she uses the words severe concussive injury of the brain even though there was no brain damage and even though there was no skull fracture.

And she says it was caused by multiple blunt force. impacts to the head. I am laboring these points because they are very important. On top of this, the police, who already had Michael in their crosshairs, had made another couple of discoveries that they felt pointed to a motive. And this is where we bring in the sex and the money. Firstly, the police had uncovered the fact that Kathleen and Michael Peterson were in quite a lot of debt. That house was enormous. Secondly, and much to the media's scandal, delight, on Michael's computer, investigators found thousands of images of gay pornography,

and numerous emails between Michael and male escorts discussing meeting up for sex. So, based on all of this, the autopsy, and given that Michael Peterson was the only one home that night, the police moved quickly, and Michael Peterson was arrested for the murder of his wife, 11 days after Kathleen's death. Now, at first, all of Michael's children stood by him. Remember that big blended family we talked about? And this included Caitlin, who was actually Kathleen's biological daughter

from her previous marriage. And Caitlin actually even led on the press conferences when Michael is first arrested. And when the family were addressed by the media, she usually acted as the spokesperson, telling them that Michael would never, ever hurt her mother. mother. And the feeling that Michael and Kathleen were a very happy couple seemed universal. Everyone who knew the Peterson said how in love they were. Now, we're obviously not saying

that just because you're in love with somebody doesn't mean you can't murder them, but they seemed happy. Caitlin had even written an essay once saying the following, Michael stopped my mother's tears. My father, so that's Kathleen's first husband, tore her apart, destroying her dignity and pride. Mike restored her. So as you can see, even Kathleen's own daughter has a very high opinion of Michael. No one had anything bad to say. No one could point to any red flags or incidents where Michael had been abusive or controlling or hurt Kathleen in any way. And Kathleen also had two sisters, Lori and Candice Zamperini. And Kathleen was very close to them. And she never complained about Michael. They seemed to have been genuinely happy. But when the autopsy,

results came out, Caitlin was horrified. And soon she joined her aunt, Candice Samparini, Kathleen's sister, in supporting the prosecution. And now, Caitlin and Candice said that Michael must have just manipulated them all for years. And if they hadn't seen any red flags from him, it was because he'd hidden his true nature from them. And we can't even begin to imagine the pain that Kathleen's family would have been going through. So we're not going to in any way criticize them for blaming Michael. But later on, it would transpire that Dr. Deborah Raddish, the state medical examiner, had sat down with Kathleen's sisters and daughter, and explained to them how Michael was guilty. And we know that because they literally sent Dr. Deborah Radish a fax to thank her for this.

So already, right out of the gate, the little radish in a lab coat, is hardly an impartial expert. But again, We're going to come back to Radish Face next week. It's a breaded radish. A deep-fried breaded radish you've got to look forward to. But yeah, like the idea that the states, like pathologists, the state's medical examiner would sit down and explain to the family. To the grieving family. To the grieving family of a potential victim.

How exactly the man who was currently being investigated for this murder is definitely guilty. My God. levels of like already like maybe corruption is too strong a word but the levels of like issues here are incredibly ginormous so in january 2002 michael peterson was allowed out on bail as preparations for his trial began michael hired very aptly christmas themed named defence attorney david rudolph to represent him. And in February 2002, one of the many things

that would go on to make this case as infamous as it is today happened. French filmmaker, with the most fucking French name I've ever heard in my entire non-French life, Jean-Havier de la Strad, and his team

began filming the game changer of a documentary that is The Staircase. It is on Netflix. I watched it all. 13 episodes, 10 hours of this documentary I watch for this two-part-up. And look, is it my favourite true crime documentary ever? No.

Is it skewed towards the defence massively? Yes. Yeah, I have to hold my hands up and say that I never finished the staircase. I would say 90% of people who have started the staircase who I've spoken to said that they didn't finish it. I think my mistake was watching the jinx first. Yeah. And then expecting the staircase to be as good.

The thing is with the staircase. What I will say about it is it is a completely different type of true crime documentary. Right. In the jinks, the big payoff is the big payoff. I'm not going to ruin it, but, you know, it's a 10-year-old documentary. But you know what I mean? There's like a big, like, oh my God, moment in it. Yeah, and you really are jaw on the floor.

Like, yeah. This documentary was intended to do something else and is a game changer in many ways because of how it is. shot. And I'm not going to sit here and be like, go watch it, definitely go watch it. It's a slog. I found it a slog. Yeah. But parts of it were fascinating. The filmmakers had originally wanted the staircase to be a blow-by-blow account of the legal system from every angle, defence, prosecution and the judge. But the prosecution changed its mind and pulled out. So obviously, the filmmakers worked with whoever was willing to give them access, the defence. And my God, did they get access?

Yeah, and I think at times when I was watching it, there's like courtroom footage or shots of the verdict being read out and then like film footage of immediately after the verdict being read out, like, I don't say backstage, but behind the scenes. And I genuinely thought at first, like, are these dramatizations? But no, the film crew were actually allowed to film everything. I have never ever watched a documentary that has had the kind of access to a court case, to a trial of this high stakes ever before on my life.

It is really, really eye-opening. Apparently, Lestrade got in touch with the defence team following an Oscar he had won for his previous film, Murder on a Sunday morning. And Michael Peterson agreed, because he said he wanted everything documented, because he didn't believe that he was about to get a fair trial. So, yeah, Michael Peterson is very much convinced from the start that he is going to be unfairly, unjustly, treated by the legal system in Durham, North Carolina. His son actually says, I can't remember it's Todd or Clayton, probably Todd because Clayton's nuts, that you're going to be sat at a crooked table. And the reason for this, the reason Michael thinks this, is because he had during his time

as a columnist in Durham written some rather scathing articles about the DA and about the police force in that area. And he felt that they were therefore, in turn out to get him. Now, how true all of this is in terms of law enforcement in North Carolina wanting to lock Michael Peterson up because of these articles? I don't know. There is a very famous book on this case written by a lady called Aphrodite Jones, who is a true crime author. I read it and I found it incredibly biased, like everything on this case. But she basically says in their like, oh, the police in Durham didn't care at all about the articles he'd written. In fact, they loved it because they loved to hear their bosses getting skewered.

No, they didn't. No, they didn't. because he wasn't just talking about the top brass, he was talking about all of them. Now, Michael Peterson is not a local to North Carolina or to Durham. He is a quote-unquote, as they often call him throughout this story, a northerner. Him and David Rudolph, his defense attorney, are constantly referred to as northerners. And I think there is an element there of like, or was an element there of people feeling a bit like, who is this guy to come into our town and tell us that everybody in North Carolina,

including the police, including the DA, is a racist. because that was the theme of the majority of Michael Peterson's articles were saying that the establishment in this town is corrupt, it's crooked, they're racist, etc, etc. So could I see them taking umbrage with that? For sure. Am I saying that that's why they tried to prosecute him? Not necessarily.

Do I think that's maybe why they made certain decisions like why they go after first degree murder? Possibly. And yes, I am going to be infuriatingly unclear about my opinion throughout all of this. But yeah, we just don't know. We don't know. But that's what Michael Peterson claims

was the motivation for why they went after him. So coming back to the film that LaSrade is making, if I was Michael Peterson, would I want someone, especially as someone with an Oscar cabinet a calling, for more accolades? Would I want someone like that following me around, filming me, recording everything

and putting me under a microscope if I had killed my wife? Probably not. one hell of a double bluff. It would, wouldn't it? However, might I think I could outsmart anyone and everyone and just want to make the whole thing about me and place myself at the centre of all of that attention

if I was some sort of big, fat, narcissistic wife murderer? Possibly, yes. Would I also be even more convinced of the fact that everything in the edit of this particular documentary would go my own way if I had a decades-long love affair with the editor of said documentary? Maybe even more of it, yes. So again, I don't know.

I don't know what his motivation is. Because, yes, Michael Peterson did give the team access, so there were naturally going to be more on his side. Documentaries do better when they have a clear angle, like exposing a wrongful conviction or police corruption. And yes, Peterson also had a relationship with the film's editor, Sophie Brunette, for 13 years, including the time when she was editing the documentary. We can't speak to Peterson's motives for doing the documentary or for Lestrade's angle,

but we do have to be honest in saying that Lestrade shot hundreds of hours of film and only aired eight. So, you know, if you haven't seen it, go and watch the staircase if you must, but like anything, it is biased. Yeah, and just to be clear, it's like eight hours is what's filmed because Netflix commissioned two extra episodes that come out later that don't use the original footage. But yeah, the point you're making is very clear, Hannah. It's like, yes, they get all sorts of crazy access. And yes, it makes it look like here's this very transparent view of the justice system at work. But they have hours and hours and hours and hours of footage that they siph through, and they cherry pick eight hours that they're going to use.

And they have a very clear Michael Peterson is not guilty angle. Because, if I've learned anything in the seven years of true crime, is that a wrongful conviction story is a lot easier to sell. Yeah. For now, let's get back to the timeline. Later that year, on the 29th of October 2002, Surruti's birthday, Caitlin, Kathleen's daughter, filed a wrongful death suit against Michael Peterson, and she was eventually successful and was awarded $25 million.

The standards in a civil case like this are much lower than in a criminal case. So, although Caitlin won here, it didn't mean that it was a surefire thing that therefore Michael Peter, would be found guilty of murder at a criminal trial. But then, in June 2003, came probably the biggest bombshell of the entire investigation. Any other case, any of these particular bombshells, like the gay porn that they find, the debt they find, all of that would be shocking enough.

In this case, it just keeps coming. So in June 2003, another death close to Michael Peterson was being re-examined by police. not in North Carolina, however, but 4,300 miles away, in Darmstadt, Germany. But, before I tell you what the hell I'm talking about, this is a good opportunity to fill in a little background on Michael Peterson. Long before he met Kathleen, back in the mid-60s,

Michael had lived in Germany with his then first wife, Patty. He had been a captain in the Marines, but was already retired by this point and making a good living writing books about the war. And people always say, like, Michael Peterson is like a failed novelist. He wasn't. His first two books did really, really well. And he was doing well enough that he could live a fairly good life just off the proceeds of his book.

And during this time, Michael and Patty had two sons, Clayton and Todd. These Peterson's were good friends with another American military family who lived out in Germany, the Ratlifts. George and Elizabeth Ratliff had two very young daughters, Martha and Margaret. In 1983, shortly after Martha was born, and when Margaret was just two years old, their father, George, died while on duty. And two years later, tragically, the girl's mother, Elizabeth Ratliff, also died. Both of the Ratlifts had said that in the eventuality of their deaths,

they wanted the girls to go and live with the Peterson's. So that's what happened. But soon after, Michael and Patty separated, and Michael moved to the US with the two girls. And you will see it said that taking on the girls was a bit of a stressor for their marriage because Patty hadn't signed up for four kids. Though it is also suspected that Michael was cheating on Patty with men and with women, and Patty found out about it.

Yeah, so like you said, he goes to the US and he takes the two girls with him, Todd and Clayton stay with their mum in Germany. So once in the US, in 1986, Michael met Kathleen, who already had her daughter, Caitlin, from her first marriage. A few years later, Michael and Kathleen, and their three girls all moved in together. And after a few more years, they were joined by Michael's two sons from Germany,

Clayton and Todd. And it turns into this big old blended family that we told you about. And they all lived together for the next 14 years. And while the boys were close to Kathleen, they already had a mum, Patty. But for Martha and Margaret, Kathleen became mum in every possible way.

Which is why. It's all the more disturbing. when you discover that the other woman whose death was now being re-examined by the police was Martha and Margaret's biological mum, Elizabeth Ratliff. And how had she died? Well, doctors in Germany ruled that Elizabeth Ratliff had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. But she was found dead at the bottom of, you guessed it, the staircase of her house. And then there's the black cat.

At the bottom of the Cedar Street Mansion stairs where Kathleen died, there hung a print of T.A. Steinland's Chaut Noir. You've seen it. It's in every Café Rouge in the country. Elizabeth Ratliff's sister, Margaret Blair, who was actually the one to call the police about the connection between the staircases, said that the same print had hung at the bottom of Elizabeth Ratliff's staircase in her house in Germany, where she had died. And Margaret claimed that the print actually belonged. to Elizabeth. Many on the internet who believe that Michael Peterson is some sort of serial killer of women using

staircases as his weapon of choice believe that the whole black cat thing is a sick literary nod on Peterson's part to the Edgar Allan Poe story, the black cat, which is a story about a man who murders his wife on the stairs. Yeah.

I like, I don't know what to say. I was in two points about even including it, but I was like, you know what, let's just stick it in but come on it's very if you push someone down the stairs you do not know that they're going to die if you are going to be somebody who murders people using stairs it is not a full proof method of murder it's also such a common image yes it is and it might well be the same image because Michael Peterson inherited the estate because he took on the girls yeah so he might have just got the print and taken it to his new house the idea that it's some sort of because he's a

He's a psychopathic, narcissistic, literary... It is quite nice now, isn't it? But, you know, we'll mention it because it's all over the internet. So yes, obviously, when Elizabeth Ratliff's death became known to the police in North Carolina, they were calling the Germans before they'd even finished picking their jaws up off the floor. And after a miserable few weeks, eventually, Martha and Margaret, being the next of kin to Elizabeth, gave permission for their mother's body to be exhumed. Obviously they didn't want to do this,

as they fully believed that their adoptive father, Michael Peterson, is innocent in relation to the deaths of their biological mother and the woman they called mum, but they felt they had no choice in the end. And just to be clear, all those years ago, 17 years before she is exhumed, when Elizabeth Ratliff had died, there hadn't been any hint of suspicion of foul play.

So we're not talking it's a cold case that they never solved. And now he strikes again. It was never even suspected of being anything other than a horrible incident. Michael Peterson had been at the Ratliff home the night before Elizabeth died. A lot of people point out they say he was the last person to see her alive. That may well be true. But after George Ratliff died, Elizabeth Ratliff actually moved next door to the Peterson's so that they could help her with the girls.

So Michael was over there quite a lot, like helping them, driving them around, doing chores, because he was retired. And it was actually, just to be clear, because, again, people say that Michael Peterson was the one to find Elizabeth Ratliff's body. That's not true. Her nanny, or should I say the ratlifts nanny,

was the one to find Elizabeth's body the next day. And Elizabeth, like I said, was found to have died of a cerebral hemorrhage. And this was the opinion of three doctors who examined Elizabeth. her death was even investigated by the US military police in Germany and you can bet your ass if they'd found anything that made it look even slightly suspicious they would have been all over it.

Neighbours and friends also stated that Elizabeth had been complaining about headaches in the weeks leading up to her death. And also, it's very important to point out that Elizabeth hadn't been a well-woman. She actually had a rare blood disorder. So, you know, I get it. It's a huge, huge, huge coincidence that Any prosecutorial team wouldn't be able to just look past. But what happens next is might blowing.

Because now, Elizabeth, a whopping 17 years after she had been buried, was taken by a hearse from Texas to North Carolina. Why a hearse? Is that how they normally move them? I don't know. I would assume an ambulance. I would have thought so. But the ambulance is a really fucking expensive in America, so maybe that's why. And she was driven in this her specifically to the examination table of Dr Deborah Radish.

The very same Dr. Radish who had conducted the autopsy on Kathleen Peterson, but we have to ask, why on earth do they have to take the body 1,200 miles to a radish and a lab coat? They could have just used another pathologist, a third party, impartial pathologist in Texas, where Elizabeth was buried. That's not going to hurt anything. If anything is going to be your objective. Exactly. And we're not desperately keen on the fact that the medical examiner who would have had to testify in court about Kathleen's autopsy

also did the post-exhumation autopsy on Elizabeth. It makes things very complicated. It muddies the waters. Get a fucking unbiased pathologist to do the autopsy in Texas. Do Elizabeth the dignity of just exhuming her, doing the autopsy and reburring her. Why are you dragging her across the country? and then conducting this incredibly biased autopsy on this woman

by the same woman who's going to have to testify and call what about Kathleen? It is unbelievable that this was allowed to happen. David Rudolph also agrees with us and he requested that an unbiased pathologist carry out the autopsy. But it made no difference Dr Radish was given the job regardless. And Dr Radish found that Elizabeth Ratliff had died in 1985 from blunt force trauma to the head in a homicidal attack, rather than of a brain hemorrhage whilst climbing the stairs,

which is what literally three other doctors said. Homicidal attack! You can't, like, a pathologist's job is not to say things like she died of a homicidal attack. Your job is to say, she died of blood loss, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage, she died of this, that or the other, and to me, when you come to the checkboxes, it's like to me it looks most likely that this would have been a homicide.

To say she died of a homicidal attack, that is shocking. And don't you worry, the controversy around Dr. Deborah Radish is something we're going to come back to later on. And so, after a long and arduous pretrial period and an even longer and more arduous jury selection process, The trial of Michael Peterson began on the 1st of July 2003 in Durham, North Carolina.

The prosecution's case was that Michael had murdered Kathleen with a blowpoke after she had discovered that he was having affairs with male escorts. I did have to look up what a blowpoke was. Yes. So, yeah. The first article when you Google blowpoke comes up. Of course it comes up. Of course it is. What the hell is a blow poke at the staircase?

So just in case anybody is wondering what a blow poke is, A blow poke is, if you have an open fire, it's basically an instrument that you would use to blow into the fire in order to relight embers. So it is a long, cylindrical, hollow, metal implement that you would have in your house. It's not like a fire poke, which you might be thinking of. It's hollow, and it's a tube-like piece of equipment. So that's what they say it is. They say it's the blow poke. And yeah, like I said, they said it was because of the affairs that he had been having and she had found out about it. They also supposed that money had been a motivator. The couple, like we had said, had been in debt, roughly to the tune of $142,000 of credit card

debt. The Peterson's were definitely spending more than they had coming in. Plus, their kids were in expensive private schools, and also the ones that were in uni, they were still dependent on them, and even the adult children, Todd and Clayton, were insignificant debt themselves and still financially dependent on Kathleen and Michael. Kathleen also had a $1.8 million life insurance policy on her, for which Michael was the beneficiary. So the prosecution claimed that on the night of the murder, Kathleen had gone into Michael's office and used his computer,

something they claimed that she would never normally do because Michael wouldn't allow it. So many people out there. I listen to podcasts and I'm not like, you know, I'm not going to like drag anybody. Everybody has very different opinions, a very strong opinions about this. People were like, she never would have been allowed to use his computer.

I'm like, really? Well, then why would she have a profile on them? Precisely. So, some claim that Kathleen discovered emails from Michael to men that he was paying for sex and then she lost it. She was furious that she had been working herself into the ground trying to save this family and hold it all together and this was a huge and horrendous slap in the face from her husband.

So, Kathleen confronted Michael, who in turn not wanting his big secret about being bisexual to get out and thinking about all that money that he would get if Kathleen died, he killed her. And as for the weapon, the prosecution stated that Michael must have used a blowpoke that Kathleen's sister had given her for Christmas one year, because it was hollow.

And because it was hollow, it would allow for the damage to Kathleen's head, as in the lacerations, but it wouldn't have been capable of actually fracturing her skull, they argue, I think that's bullshit. This is the problem for the prosecution, right? the prosecution go gung-ho down the line of first-degree murder. For first-degree murder, they can't say he pushed her.

They've got to say he beat her to death. And to say you beat somebody to death, but they've got no skull fractures or brain injury or brain damage, they need to point to a very specific murder weapon and say that's what he used because you couldn't give anyone a skull fracture with a hollow metal tube. Could you not? Of course you could.

Exactly. It's about how hard you hit. Like, it's ridiculous. And the prosecution have another problem. The blow poke was missing. So the prosecution couldn't point to it and say that it had Kathleen's blood on it or that it was damaged after having been used to beat a woman over the head multiple times. But we'll be doing more blow poking next week.

Yeah, and it's Candace that comes to them. They don't pull the blow poke out of nowhere because they don't even have, they think the blow poke is missing. So Candice comes to them and says, I know what he used to do this. It was that fucking blow poke I gave to everyone in our family. And then they're like, Candice, you're onto something. It must be that blow poke and it's missing.

So he must have got rid of it because it was so damaged after he used it to beat Kathleen to death. But like Hannah said, we'll come back to her. Now the defence, on the other hand, at the trial, argued that Kathleen hadn't been murdered at all. She had died as the result of a tragic accident. They said that Kathleen had been drinking. She wasn't drunk, but she'd been drinking.

She was on muscle relaxants, was wearing flip-flops, and she'd slipped and fallen down that narrow, dark staircase. I can also say that there's only one light at the bottom of the stairs, like in the corridor, and then one at the very top of the stairs on the landing. So the staircase itself doesn't have a light on it. So it was dark, and it was narrow. And they basically said that when Kathleen slipped and fell, she'd hit her head on the stairs and or the wall and died as a result of blood loss.

Michael, according to the defence, had been out in the garden for the entire horrendous event and hadn't heard anything. And by the time he found Kathleen, it was already too late. So let's now go through all of the points raised by each side. Firstly, we're going to start with the debt. It is true that the Peterson's were in debt. Michael had been so worried about his boys that he had even phoned their mother, Patty, and asked if she might be able to take out a home equity loan to help them pay off their debts. And he told her that he just couldn't talk to Kathleen about it. And that might be because Kathleen felt like Todd and Clayton were both in their mid to late 20s and probably should just have to figure it out on their own.

And Michael had to go to Patty because he was retired and while he was still writing wasn't always a guaranteed income. Yeah, like Todd and Clayton are like 25 and 27 by this point and still financially dependent on the Peterson. Yeah. And I think, you know, Kathleen has done an amazing job for almost, you know, a decade and a half. although the boys still have their mother, essentially raising five kids in her home. And I think she probably got to the end of her tether with all the stress she had at work, the debt they were in and just being like,

look, we can't keep bailing them out. And other podcasts also sort of paint Michael Peterson as being very narcissistic saying he didn't care about anybody else apart from himself. I think the fact that he's calling Patty and begging her to take out a home equity loan to help the boys, I think shows that he's too indulgent off the children. Like, I don't think he doesn't give a shit about them. I think he's weak and he doesn't put in boundaries and say you need to now stand on your own two feet.

He bells them out constantly. And he's not the breadwin at Kathleen is. Yes. Like Michael Peterson, we do have to say like, again, people basically say that he's a bum. Like he's a bum, Kathleen earns all the money. But we do have to say that he was retired and he had a pension coming in because he had been honorary discharge from the Marines and therefore he had a disability pension coming in every month, which we'll talk about later. and also his book, the second book that he had sold, he'd got $500,000 advance for that.

And $250,000 of that money, he had put straight into the deposit of buying that mansion. So although he doesn't contribute in a more regular way like Kathleen with her paycheck, he is by no means not contributing to the household, which I do find that some people who talk about this case make it sound like that. I see. Because, yes, Kathleen did have a great job. She made $150,000 a year, which is about $330,000 in today's money. But the economy wasn't doing great.

Nortel's stock was falling off a cliff, and the company was in the thick of mass layoffs. Kathleen was worried that she was next, and the Peterson's absolutely could not afford for her to lose her job. So that life insurance, that $1.8 million, could have come in quite useful for Michael. The prosecution even linked this to Elizabeth Ratliff's death, so the debt, saying that after Elizabeth died, Michael, who took on the girls, well, he had got his hands on the entire Ratliff estate. But to be honest, the amount that he got from the Ratlifts seems to have barely been enough

to take care of the girls for a few years after their parents died. I think when people hear the word Ratliff Estate, they're like, The Ratlifts were not wealthy people. They didn't have that much money. They were just an ordinary family. And the girls never seemed to have gone without during their time living with the Peterson's. They went to good private schools and expensive universities. So what did he really have to gain from Elizabeth Ratliff's death financially speaking?

I think he was left 70,000 in cash when the Ratlifts died. And then he inherited like the house and whatever. But like, come on, how expensive it is to raise kids? and they were babies. Margaret was two and Martha was like a few months old. So, again, am I going to murder somebody and then have to take on their two kids and raise them for the rest of their lives so I can get my hands on like maximum, say, 250 grand? No. If I was, I'd have dumped those kids and he never did that. Also, Michael wasn't destitute. Like I said, he had the pension coming in from the Marines

and this pension actually gave him $45,000 a year. And remember, this is back in the early 2000s. In today's money, that's $75,000 a year coming in from just the pension. For a retired guy who was still working and still writing and still earning money from his books, that's not a bad income. So I don't think he was destitute by any stretch of the imagination. And yes, Kathleen may have been concerned about losing her job. But also Kathleen, especially as we'll go on to discover next week,

was a brilliant woman. she would have found a job somewhere else in the blink of an eye. And if she was worried about money, I think it is quite hard to explain away the fact that she was deferring 80% of her annual income. So I had to look this up. And it seems very specifically a North Carolina thing. Or it might be just because of this fucking case and everybody Googling it. But it seems that in North Carolina, you can defer however much of your salary you want

to avoid paying income tax on it. And she was deferring 80% of her salary. Would you be doing that if you were that worried about money? No. Exactly. 80%. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So the Peterson's also owned multiple properties that brought in roughly around $5,000 every single month in rental income. So again, I don't know, the fact that some places kind of make Michael out to seem like this sort of scrounger and Catalina's the sort of breadwinner with this in a stable sense. I understand the breadwinner thing with Kathleen, but Michael Peterson definitely wasn't not contributing. And in the days leading up to Kathleen's death, Michael Peterson had also received some exciting news.

Back in 1988, Michael had co-authored a book with a guy called David Permont called Charlie Tushus. It's the story of an 11-year-old Chinese boy who's befriended by a company of US Marines. And in early December 2001, David, had called Michael to tell him that a Hollywood film producer, with the most Bond villain-sounding name we've ever heard, Stratton Leopold,

was interested in turning Charlie Toeses into a film. And this wasn't just like, pipe dream, top of the pipeline kind of chat. Stratton Leopold was like, this is happening, we're doing this, we're turning this book into a movie. That was going to bring in so much money for the Peterson's. Absolutely. If it had worked out,

it would have actually solved pretty much, if not all, of the Peterson's money problems. So I'm not really 100% sure what Michael Peterson would have gained from killing Kathleen money-wise. Even if she'd lost her job at Nortel, Kathleen was a very talented woman. She would have just got another job. So it does seem quite short-sighted to kill Kathleen for life insurance. It's like killing the golden goose. It does seem that way, doesn't it? Yeah.

So then let's look at the second motive that the prosecution. offered up if we believe that it wasn't to do with money and to do with debt. And remember, this is important to say as well, the prosecution don't have to show motive. They don't have to prove it. They don't have to do any of that. But it obviously definitely helps because, as we've said, multiple times on this show, the best story at trial wins. And if you are also going to be talking about the images and emails that they found on Michael's computer, then they feel like this is a clear motive, right? That's motive too.

They're talking sex. So at trial, the prosecutors, Jim Hardin and Freda Black, would repeatedly refer to the countless gay male porn photos that they discovered on Michael's computer as filth. Freda Black is a very interesting woman. If you watch the documentary, you

see a lot of her. Jim Hardin and Freda Black are both Southern. They both have that very, like, southern accent. Like, they're going for it in court. They're definitely appealing, I think, to the jury more than somebody like David Rudolph is because he speaks in a very different way. I do think that played a role in this.

And Freda Black, she constantly refers to the images found on Michael Peterson's computer as pure T-filth. Is that a phrase that people use? It's not one I'd pure T, like the letter T, filth. What does that mean? I don't know, and I have to confess when I read the script this morning, I thought you just typed it wrong. No, I don't know what that means. Is it pure trash?

Maybe. But I don't, I've never heard that. No, it must be a North Carolina thing and that's why she's doing it to really like, you know, speak to the jury. So yeah, they claim that Michael Peterson was gay or bisexual and they claimed that he was desperate for the world not to find out. And that because Kathleen now knew what he'd been up to, she was going to leave him.

And so now they're saying, if she is the golden goose, she was about to leave and that's why he killed her because he was like, well, the stable monthly income is going anyway, I might as well kill you and take the $1.8 million in life insurance. And also he tried to kill her because he doesn't want the secret to get out, they claim. So, you know, wrap it all together in a neat little sex and money bow is what they do. The defence claimed that Kathleen knew about Michael's sexual proclivities and that she was fine with it.

And this got a bit confusing because Michael said at first that Kathleen did know. And then he later changed his story. to we haven't discussed it, but there was a silent understanding between us. Does that ring true? Maybe, maybe not. It's impossible to know. So many people are like, she would never have been okay with this. She would have been totally okay. It's like, there's no way to know. Yeah. And you never, ever, ever, ever, ever know 100% of another person's relationship. The prosecution pointed to the fact that Kathleen had left her first husband after he had cheated on her.

So why would she put up with more cheating from her second husband? But let's put some context around these claims. Yes, Kathleen's first husband, father of her child, a physics professor, had cheated on her and that had ended their marriage. But Kathleen had also cheated in that marriage too. We're not sure which infidelity came first, but Kathleen wasn't as naive to the world as some people like to claim that she was. And again, like we have it on good authority from Caitlin, her daughter,

that Kathleen was destroyed by the ending of her first marriage. So I'm not saying she wasn't completely devastated. But so many places kind of paint Kathleen as this very like pure person who took her marriage vows very seriously. I'm not saying she didn't. And that she could never put upward cheating or anything like that. She never saw any grey area. It was black and white.

You didn't cheat in a relationship. And they leave out the fact that she was also cheating. Again, like I said, don't know which came first. But there is that part of it. Also, further context. Her first husband cheated on Kathleen with his university students. I know. He would bring younger women, I mean girls.

I'm going to say fucking girls. If you're at university, come on. Bringing these younger girls back to their house to have affairs. Is there a bigger slap in their face than that? Absolutely not. Michael, and again, I am not excusing what Michael did. I am simply giving you guys the context. Michael, in his emails to the male escorts that he was messaging, said,

and this is a quote that we can prove because the emails exist. He said, I'm married, I'm happily married, with a dynamite wife, but I'm by, and I have an itch that needs scratching. Even the man with whom Michael Peterson was emailing, a man named Brad Wolgamon, testified at the trial, saying that most men he saw were indeed married to women. But Michael was pretty much the only one he'd ever met in years of being an escort who talked openly and so positively about his wife.

Apparently Michael would tell Brad all the time how much he loved Kathleen. Michael had even used the home phone on occasions to call Brad. So he's not trying to be that secretive about it. And I don't really see what Brad's incentive would be to lie. No, no, I don't see that either. And any place that you do sort of go to learn about this case, everyone always gushes over Brad and it's not hard to see why. If you watch the documentary and you get as far as the point that you watch the footage of Brad

testifying in court, he's very charming, he's funny, he's charismatic. And yeah, like when he testifies, the jury's laughing, even Martha and Margaret, who basically spend the entirety of the documentary crying, laugh when Brad is on the stat. But we do have to say that since all of this happened, since everything came out, Brad has come out and said that when he was giving evidence he was not okay and he was on a lot of drugs. Brad had struggled with opioid addiction for years and he also said that he actually felt forced into testifying by the prosecution, who were really going for this gay affair being the motive. But it kind of backfires on the prosecution a little bit because Brad's just like,

I think Michael fucking loved his wife. I think he just sometimes needed to sleep with a man. And we're going to stick with Michael's sexuality for a bit. Michael's brother also claimed that it wasn't a big secret. He'd known that Michael was bisexual since they were teenagers. And it also seems that Patty, his first wife, knew as well because it seems like it was a contributing factor to the downfall of their marriage. And even the Peterson kids knew that their dad had books on homosexuality. They even used to steal these books from his office and hide them in each other's rooms

and then call each other gay. Which is just like the most... Peek kid. Peak kid thing you could ever hear of. But yeah, like, he literally has books on being gay in his office. We're not defending what Michael did. A lot of people sway one way or the other to the absolute extreme with this point of the story. Downplaying the infidelity because it was with a man.

Like somehow, if it had been with a woman, it would have been worse. There's definitely a lot of people out there being like, well, he had to do it because he was bisexual. And because he was sleeping with men, it's not really an. affair and I'm like, yeah, it fucking is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Of course it is. If the other person knows that you have those sexual proclivities and is fine with you doing that, then sure, have at it. But if you were secretly sleeping with somebody else, whatever their fucking sex is, it's cheating. Absolutely. And then on the other hand, you also have people implying that because Michael had an interest in men, he was much more likely to be a deviant killer.

Yeah, like absolutely weaponising his homosexual tendencies being like, oh well, you know, he's sick. And I'm like, it's not one or the other guys. Yeah, right. Like, things can be two things, as I've said before and I will say again. So, did Kathleen Peterson know that her husband was bisexual? No idea. But we're not sure that they ever had an actual conversation about it.

But Kathleen wasn't stupid. I think she knew. The kids are fucking hiding his books in their rooms. And calling each other gay in the house. Michael Peterson's brother definitely did know. Michael Peterson's brother also says that their parents knew. Patty knew. Is Kathleen really the only one who didn't know? Again, I really, really don't know. Maybe, you know, people also see what they want to see. Maybe she ignored it. I definitely don't think they ever spoke about it. The more important question here is, does this serve as a motive? So does Michael Peterson being bisexual, sleeping with, male escorts, does that serve as a motive? Maybe. I think we need to compare this to the likes of Scott Peterson and his case. In that, case that we covered this time last year, Scott Peterson was having an affair with a woman.

So we lied to his wife Lacey and to his girlfriend Amber. And he sold Amber his girlfriend, the dream. He was absolutely planning a life with her. Like we said in that episode, he wanted to start fresh. He wanted to get rid of Lacey and the pregnancy and the potential baby and all of that because he wanted to start anew. And to do that, he had to get rid of Lacey. In this case, however, it's not the same thing. We said even in the Scott Peterson case, just because somebody's a cheater, just because somebody's a liar,

doesn't make them a killer. You really have to think what is to be gained by Michael Peterson killing Kathleen. And again, I'm not saying it's okay for a husband to sleep with men behind their wife's backs, but Michael Peterson didn't seem to want to get rid of Kathleen for a man. He seems to have been a selfish man, a weak man who wanted to have his cake and eat it too,

but I don't know he wasn't trying to start a new gay life and there's also the big red flag of how the prosecution weaponised Michael's sexuality at the trial Freda Black like I said she kind of continuously says purity filth she shouts her over and over again and a lot of people take issue with this and her repeatedly mentioning things like anal sex

saying that it was homophobic and yeah she probably was trying to sort of stoke something in a jury from a more conservative part of the US. There's no doubt about that. But the defence did claim that Michael and Kathleen's marriage was perfect. The defence said that. And when they said that, they did leave the door open for the prosecution to rebut that by saying, hey, how are you going to say it's perfect when he's going behind her back? Because you have no evidence that Kathleen knew as sleeping with men. So some people take a lot of issue with the fact that the bisexual stuff was up at all. I think the defence kind of fell into that trap by allowing for it to be brought up.

And people say all the time when talking about this case, if it had been a woman, they never would have gone on about it so much. I think they fucking would have. Need I bring up Scott Peters and Amber Frey again. Like, I don't believe it's true that they only went on about it because Michael was sleeping with men. I think that added to the scandal. But I think an affair in a murder case. Come on, it's always sex, money, revenge. So, the most likely scenario, if Kathleen was indeed murdered by Michael, was that she had found out about Michael's paid-for affairs when she used his computer the night she died, and she told him that she wanted a divorce. He may have been hopeful that the film deal would close, but that could take months to hash out.

and Michael was desperate. And so, terrified his secret would get out, even though everybody in his life seems to already know, Michael Peterson killed his wife Kathleen. And of course to get his hands on the 1.8, to tide him over until the film deal goes through. But we've got a couple of problems with this theory. First off, the state's own computer expert had to admit under cross-examination

that the email her colleague sent to Kathleen was never opened. Yeah, so her colleague phones are and is like, I'm going to send you this file. She has that call at around 10.30. 1150 something the email comes through. Michael says by that point he and Kathleen were getting ready to go set by the pool and do their nightly drinking, which they did do on the regular. And they would be out there for the next two hours.

That email, her colleague, Helen Prestinger, sent, was never opened. So when is Kathleen finding these emails? And also these emails to Brad from Michael were sent months before the night Kathleen died. So it would be pretty tricky for her to have accidentally found them. They're not going to be at the top of the pile. No. Helen's email is at the top of the pile and nobody opens that. And that's the only thing Kathleen would have been looking for.

Why would she go scrolling back through the inbox? But we don't actually need to ask why she would do this or do that because the prosecution could never prove that Kathleen ever saw the Brad emails. And if the whole, oh my God, you're sleeping with a man and cheating on me, revelation, had been the big fight that the couple had. had had that night that led to the murder, why didn't Michael delete all of the incriminating evidence on his computer? Because he didn't.

Didn't delete any of it. He did delete some emails, financial ones pertaining to debts in the week leading up to Kathleen's death, and even on the day itself. But why would you leave the other stuff if you're hiding? Probably was just like, I don't want to look at that. Yes, 100%. It was 100% I think like,

I don't want to look at these fucking emails about how much debt we're in. And also some of the emails were Michael reaching out to like Patty, asking for her to take out the home equity loan to help the boys. And also Michael reaching out to Margaret and Martha's uncle. So Margaret and Martha's uncle was actually a very wealthy doctor who lived in the US. And Michael had emailed him saying, you know, I've raised the girls for this long. I have no interest in not continuing to raise them.

But could you, being somebody with means, help me pay for. their universities and help me pay for their schooling. And the uncle agreed. The uncle's like, yeah, sure, no problem. Here's some money. But maybe Michael deleted it because he didn't want Kathleen to know. Because I think maybe him and Kathleen were having arguments about the fact that he had brought a lot of children into this marriage and was putting a lot of pressure on the situation. But it seemed like him trying to ease that pressure and find other ways to do it rather than sponging off Kathleen. Not that I'm saying she felt that way because she also loved the girls like they were her own.

But he deletes these kind of emails. He doesn't delete the gay pictures or the emails with Brad. So why wouldn't he do that if that was the reason he killed her? But even more than this issue of why, more than this issue of why did he kill her, if he did. Is to me the crucial question of how. How did Kathleen Peterson die? Her injuries are so odd. she's got these deep lacerations to her skin,

but no skull fracture or brain damage. The defence attorney, David Rudolph, pointed out to Dr. Deborah Radish at trial, and this is like one of the really good moments of the trial that they do capture on film, is he hands her a stack of 500 beating deaths in North Carolina over the years before Kathleen's death. It's like a stack of files. And in those 500 beating deaths that have taken place over the years, years, there wasn't a single case where someone had been beaten to death and there hadn't been a skull fracture and or brain injury. And Deborah Radish has nothing to say to that, really.

No one can explain this. Neither side, I feel, had a good explanation for Kathleen's death. The prosecution said that Michael Peterson had beaten her to death with a blowpoke, but the injuries don't really fit. You'd have to beat somebody so carefully just to tear their skin but not break the skull. And also the question is, why would you do that? So that there would be some big question mark about how she had actually died? Like, no one would think that way if you were in a rageful, murderous rampage. No, you're not going to be tempering the force with which you hit them. Exactly.

So that doesn't really fit. And the defence said that Kathleen fell down the stairs. But again, like, does it really fit? I don't know. In the documentary, world-famous forensic pathologist, Werner Spitz appears in episode one, talking about Kathleen's injuries, and he talks about his particular theory behind them. He says that when you first see the tears and splitting of the skin on Kathleen's skull, you'll think, oh my God, this woman must have been attacked.

But according to Spitz, you need to think of the head like a watermelon. And consider how a watermelon, that is spherical, may hit in several places, even after just one impact with a flat surface. And especially with stairs, if you hit something round and large on some stairs, it's going to hit in one impact multiple places. And he says, when that happens, like it did with Kathleen's head according to him, although she maybe hit her head once, maybe twice, the impact caused the skin on her head to split in multiple places, like when you drop a watermelon onto a flat surface. And he says that the skull wasn't fractured and the brain was left undamaged because the impact. simply split the skin.

I don't buy that. I can buy the thing of one impact on a spherical object causing multiple points of splitting. Yes. But again, it's very, very like, how is she hitting her head on the floor? And then there's still no skull fracture. I don't know. I don't know.

But the wounds being head wounds, like we said, bled significantly. And because Kathleen wasn't helped quickly enough, although she did not brain damage or skull fractures, she sadly bled to death. And that's his theory. Crucially, though, Spitz never testified in court. Why is something that we couldn't really get to the bottom of,

but it does seem that he refused to say one way or another what had actually happened. He said that he was willing to say that there was not enough evidence to say if Kathleen had been murdered or not. Spitz said that after all, he couldn't be sure that she wasn't pushed down the stairs, for example. Yeah, so he's like, she could have fallen, but I can't say that's not murdered because she could have also been pushed down the stairs that could have led to the same injuries that I'm seeing. All he says is he doesn't think that she was beaten over the head.

So his testimony wouldn't have been that useful, and he's an expensive man. But the defence did present other experts who said that Kathleen's injuries were consistent with a fall. They explained that she likely fell because the staircase was narrow, just 42 inches. There was only a light at the top and at the bottom. she was wearing flip-flops and she'd been drinking.

People argue that she could have driven, but those people are ignoring the valium and the muscle relaxant that she had in her system, which would have made her feel a lot more drunk than 0.7%. A fall could have resulted in Kathleen hitting her head on the sharp crown molding. There was, in fact, Kathleen's blood and hair on the moulding,

which could indicate that that was the point of impact. Kathleen then hit her head on the floor again. resulting in two blows, but four impacts, because she hit the stairs that had multiple angles to them. And that is what led to the splitting of the skin on her skull. So, the defence say she falls unconscious, but then she comes too. Her blood is pulled all around her, and Kathleen tried to get up, which is how she got blood on the bottom of her feet.

And then she falls again. She slips, possibly for the third time. And the blood smears on the doorframe could back up the fact. that she was trying to pull herself up. Yeah, because there's like her own blood smiths from her hands on the outside of the doorframe at the bottom of the stairs. Like she's fallen down the stairs, hit her head, and then try to pull herself up and possibly slipped again.

And the reason they say she had to be unconscious is there had to be enough blood on the floor for her to get it all over the bottom of her feet. And also the unconsciousness period could explain the red neuron development, even though the prosecution's experts say it would have taken a lot longer. So nothing perfectly explains it. But there's some explanations there.

Now, the defence also brought out Dr Henry Lee, again, a very, very highly regarded forensic pathologist. And Dr. Lee, who, if you have seen the Jean-Beney-Ramsie-CBS documentary, is the one who likes to say panties. And Dr. Lee was much more emphatic at trial. He took the stand and said that there was nothing to indicate that Kathleen had been attacked. Leave alone the lack of skull fracture,

Dr. Lee pointed to the fact that there was no. cast-off blood spatter on the ceiling of the staircase. If Kathleen had been bludgeoned, as the prosecution was claiming, there would have been blood spray on the ceiling, according to Dr. Lee. Now, the scene was incredibly bloody, so something repeatedly striking Kathleen's head and then being lifted up to do it again and again and again, leading to seven lacerations of the skin on the scalp,

as the prosecution stated had been done with the blowpoke, Dr Lee argued that there definitely would have been blood splashed above Kathleen's body because every time you raise the blow poke covered in blood, you would have sprayed it on the ceiling. And there was a lot of blood sprayed around the staircase, but most of it was tiny little droplets and most of it was at ground level or just above. None of it was on the ceiling.

Dr. Lee claimed that the 10,000 drops of blood spray that were splattered all over the staircase came from Kathleen, shaking or moving her head and from expiring. And he said that the expiration blood would have come, not from internal bleeding, which only would have occurred had she had a skull fracture, but rather from the blood from her head wounds pouring down her face and then her coughing or breathing out

that would have then led to that blood being sprayed onto the walls. Could this be the case? Very possibly. But we just don't know. The defence also pointed out that some of Kathleen's hair was mixed into the blood on the walls, again suggesting that this is where the impact had occurred, and again the fact that there is blood in her hair,

he says if she had just moved her hair, it would have again sprayed more blood around at a ground level. But it's still quite difficult to understand how one or two impacts falling down the stairs could split the skin into seven lacerations. As Werner Spitz said, if this was down to the watermelon hypothesis, why were there no examples of,

comparable fall deaths that the defence could point to. They never bring out, they bring out the 500 cases of, like, beating deaths and say they all have skull fractures. Could they not find any falls that had resulted in similar injuries to Kathleen? If they did, they never brought them up at trial. And there weren't even banisters on the stairs that could have led to multiple sharp impacts. There was a mechanical chairlift with rails, which definitely could have caused some damage. And we're not really sure why anyone isn't pointing to that. Rudolf mentions it in the series

but it never comes up again so Kathleen's blood probably wasn't on it Yeah I think when you see the footage of the staircase you're like oh my god there's like rails running down the side of the staircase for an old chairlift I'm like oh my god you could have easily fallen and slashed your head on that

but the defence never bring it up and I think it's because her blood wasn't on it So we don't know whether or not Kathleen was murdered is a huge question mark but one that we are not going to solve today because we are going to see you next week for part two, the conclusion

of Red Handed Does Staircase. And yes, we know that was a lot of information to take in. Well done. Go give yourself a Christmas treat. And we will be back next week with part two of this very, very long and convoluted case. And we will see you then. Bye. Goodbye.

Hello. I'm Surruti. I'm Hannah. Oh my God. I've forgotten you who I am. It's because of all the STI. It's been a long old year. But can I just clarify before everyone believes, like, they believe that I fucking take heroin in them,

but I don't actually have a bunch of rusty eyes. Because you guys will believe anything, apparently. So, yes, I don't have that. But hello, and Merry Christmas, kind of. It's so nearly the time for us to hibernate for two merry weeks. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Glorious.

We are contracted 50 weeks a year. and we do them filled with joy. But we are very excited to have two weeks off. But do not despair, lovely red-handed, spooky bitches. We will be off for the next two weeks. But we will be back with a bang. With an under the duvet on the 10th of January. We're back with our very first short hand of the year on the 9th of January.

And we're back with full fat red-handed on the 11th. Good research. I didn't know any of that. She's looking at it. Because my brain hasn't rotted from syphilis. So yes, Merry Christmas, Merry whatever you are celebrating and have a lovely time. Mary, happy Karen McGuire's birthday. Oh, yeah, it's Hannah's mom's birthday. Oh, she's Karen McHugh now, actually.

Oh, oh, well. So yes, happy all of those things. And hopefully, if you are driving somewhere, you're on a long journey, you have got us to accompany you for the next however many hours we have to talk about Michael Peterson and this case. But this week, we are going to start the episode by. talking about Kathleen Peterson. Guys, you don't need me to remind you this is part two, go listen to part one, this will make

no sense, but let's start with Kathleen. She really was a very, very remarkable woman. I think sometimes that's like overstated, especially in the world of true crime, but Kathleen was fucking amazing. And the kind of person who was just like good at everything and like listening to some of her sisters talk kind of annoyingly good at everything

was Kathleen. She was president of the debate team in high school. She was confident. She worked hard. She was even, Hannah get this, taking university-level Latin lessons as a teenager. A dog. And she graduated her school as the number one student in her class. And then she went on to become, and this is, I find so amazing. Such a great fact. She became the first woman ever to be accepted onto and graduate from Duke University's engineering program. That's some serious business. That is some serious business and Duke University's YouTube channel

is the only reason I have a degree. It is the Harvard of the South, I believe. So yes, top tier work there from Kathleen. And she actually did her undergraduate degree in civil engineering and then did her postgraduate because she couldn't get enough of it in mechanical engineering.

And she fucking kicked ass. When she entered the world of work, Kathleen just kept killing it. She became a hugely respective executive at Nortel, traveling all over the world with work, winning awards and absolutely raking it in as director of communications. She even had a meeting room at Nortel H.Q named after her. And I can't stress how big a company Nortel is.

And there's literally a Kathleen Peterson meeting room. She's it. She's killing it. But no matter how busy she was at work, Kathleen earned the nickname the Martha Stewart of Durham, as we talked about last week. She cooked, she baked, she had a beautiful home where she regularly hosts all sorts of parties and events. and she even raised hundreds of thousands for local charities and public education. Kathleen even campaigned for a new sports stadium not to be built,

and for the existing one to just be fixed up, to avoid ticket prices skyrocketing and becoming unaffordable for people in the area. I think that's important to say because I think sometimes the Peterson's particularly, you know, because Kathleen is definitely either a victim of murder or a victim of a horrible situation, come across as being a bit out of touch, being very rich. Like, Kathleen actively campaigned and raised money for public education. She felt really passionately about education. And like I said, she was, like, very conscious of the fact of, like, if they built a new sports stadium, all of the people in that area.

Because Durham and North Carolina is not a super high-income state. She was like, people should be able to go to this. Like, she genuinely cared about people. But I think most tellingly of all with Kathleen, what really shows throughout everything is her kindness. She took on four children that weren't hers, and she raised them with love and so much compassion. All of Michael's children absolutely adored Kathleen. And she seems to have been very much the glue that held that family together.

Now, we can't do justice to all that Kathleen was. So I would actually highly recommend checking out episode 13 of the Beyond Reasonable Doubt BBC podcast. In that, they talk to Kathleen's sister Candace, And I think that they just sat down to do that interview to kind of get some background colour on Kathleen. They probably use a few sound bites here and there. But in the end, they actually end up releasing the entire interview with Candace.

And it's almost just 45 minutes of her talking about Kathleen. And look, I don't want to sound crass, but it took a fucking lot of work to put these episodes together. And when I saw that, I was like, I don't have time to listen to this. I have time to skim through this, but I don't have time to listen. I ended up listening to the whole entire thing. because it's just so, you just learn so much about Kathleen as a person. And I think when you listen to it, you'll understand why.

So now, let's pick up where we left our story off last week. The trial of Michael Peterson was in full swing, but there were a lot of questions that no one seemed able to answer. Let's discuss how Kathleen managed to bleed to death. If, as Michael claims, he stayed sat outside that night after Kathleen decided to head in. Why didn't he come running when she fell? Kathleen surely would have screamed.

How did he not hear? Especially when we know that Kathleen didn't just fall and immediately die. She lived and was conscious for at least a while after she was first injured. And we know that because there was blood on the bottom of her feet. She had at least tried to get up. And possibly, according to the defence, she had tried to get up and then slipped on the slick of blood and hit her head again. So how had Michael Peterson not heard her?

Well, the defence carried out a sound test, playing a recording of someone screaming from the stairs. And in the test, you can't hear the noise from the pool area. You have to remember this is a very big house. But when the police arrived, Michael was just dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. And the prosecution questioned at trial how he could possibly have been sat outside by the pool for hours that December night when the temperature was, according to them,

a rather frigid 15 degrees Celsius or 59 degrees Fahrenheit. I mean, I wouldn't sit outside in 15 degrees in short, but it's not like it was minus four. No. I don't know. It's kind of like a non-starter for me, especially because the bigger question for me is if Michael did beat his wife to death as the prosecution claim,

because remember they're going for first-degree murder, not unlike a crime of passion, he pushes her down the stairs. and the shorts and the t-shirt were what he had been wearing all night, as they also say because they say how he's outside wearing those, why weren't his clothes covered in blood? How can you beat someone to death? Leave no skull fractures, no brain injuries, and also get no blood all over your clothes.

Now there was some blood on him. There was some blood on his shoes and also up the inside leg of his shorts on one side. But we'll come back to this data. The question here is, if that's all there was, how could the prosecution claim that Michael Peterson had beaten Kathleen to death? Especially when they never ever discovered any bloody clothes or, of course, a murder weapon, despite searching the house and its surroundings.

So they can't even point to any evidence pointing to the fact that he disposed of bloody clothes before they arrived. We do have to point out that Michael not having more blood on him doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't kill Kathleen. After all, as Werner Spitz said, the evidence doesn't rule out Michael having pushed Kathleen down the stairs. Though, if he was trying to kill her, that doesn't really guarantee death. Unless, of course, you wait for the person to bleed out, which according to the prosecution is what Michael Peterson did.

By the time the paramedics arrived, the claim was that a lot of the blood at the scene had dried. although we do have to mention that this particular point about the blood being dry was never written down in any contemporaneous reports or notes at the time by anybody at all. Police officers testified to this at trial, but how they were allowed to bring something up that they didn't have notes on from the night or any evidence of is a bit beyond me. They have hours and hours of footage from the scene that they filmed loads of photos,

but in none of the photos and none of the video and none of the witnesses, anybody can back up with notes or actual video evidence that the blood was dry. They just say it and they're allowed to say it, even though their notebooks don't say it from the night. I also feel like if you're murdering someone for life insurance purposes or like keeping your big secret, chucking them down a few stairs isn't particularly fail safe, is it? No, nothing is guaranteed whatsoever.

So either it's premeditated first-degree murder like the prosecution. and say, and he gets very lucky that Kathleen dies. She sustains just enough injuries that she bleeds to death, he waits for her to bleed to death, and then he calls the police and he's like, oh my God, my wife fell down the stairs. Or it's a crime of passion, and he pushed her down the stairs, and she died. And it was an accident, and then he tries to cover it up. Or she fell, or something else I will go to later. But you know what I mean? Like, how are they using the evidence that they have and coming up with first-degree murder? That's the big question for me. And it's not the only one.

There are a lot of weird things about this trial, a lot of questions that need answering. And as we'll go on to see, the North Carolina SBI, State Bureau of the investigation, didn't have many qualms at all about changing up their evidence to suit their story. But stick a pin in that one for now. Because now we have to talk about Elizabeth Rath.

As we told you last week, Elizabeth, Michael's neighbour and friend, and mother of Martha and Margaret, was found dead at the bottom of her stess in 1985, in Germany. She was found to have died of a cerebral hemorrhage. But Dr. Deborah Radish, everybody's favourite Slavonian fucking nightmare,

who did the post-exhumation autopsy, claimed that Elizabeth had died of a homicidal attack. How she came to this conclusion that Elizabeth had died of multiple blunt force traumas to the head after 17 years, and also, this is another crucial point, when Dr. Deborah Radish did the post-exeimation autopsy, she only had a third of Elizabeth Ratliff's brain tissue left

because three different people had conducted the original autopsy on Elizabeth Ratliff. It was one German and two Americans. So parts of her brain had been sent to different people to assess a various things. So there was only a third of it even left. So how the fuck is Deborah Radish saying with any certainty that Elizabeth Ratliff died of a homicidal attack resulting from certain? several blunt force traumas to the head. Now something I will point out that is very coincidental, again,

is that Elizabeth Ratliff had seven lacerations on her head the same number as Kathleen Peterson did. So again, everyone's like, oh, but I'm like, that is a very strange and inefficient way to try and be a serial killer. Yes, it is. And it just feels like Michael Peterson is the world's unluckiest man. Yeah, or the most, like, magical serial killer we've ever come across. But more importantly, I think, than Dr. Deborah Radish coming to the conclusions that she did,

is how Elizabeth's death was allowed to be brought into Michael's trial. This is a hugely controversial part of this story. Because in the US, there is something called the 404B rule. Now, I am not a lawyer. But... I am a lawyer. Shana is a lawyer. But this is the most simple explanation for this rule, the 404B rule, that I am not.

I could find on the internet. Basically, this is a copy and paste. The 404B rule makes inadmissible most character evidence regarding crimes or acts for which no charges were filed. But this rule should not be used to eliminate evidence of criminal activity committed by the defendant at the same time as the crime charged as a predicate to the crime. So basically, what it's saying is, if somebody was accused of a crime or suspected of a crime and they never had criminal charges filed against them for that other thing.

You cannot bring that other thing into another trial that they are undergoing. That is crystal clear in that statement. Hello? How was Elizabeth dead that something that wasn't even considered a crime, let alone one that Michael Peterson had ever been even suspected of, let alone charged with? How the fuck was that allowed to be brought up? If he had even been arrested for Elizabeth Ratliff's suspected murder but never been charged, that wasn't allowed to be brought up.

But something was brought up that wasn't even suspected of being murder at the time. It is shocking. Now, you might think, dear listeners, like, this is too much of a coincidence. The Elizabeth Ratliff thing is too much of a coincidence. I cannot move past it. It doesn't matter. That never, ever, ever, legally speaking, should have been allowed to be brought up at Michael Peterson's trial. So feel how you want, but you have to stand for.

that a fair trial is a fair trial and the rules are there to prevent miscarriages of justice. So, I don't know, how could it ever be considered anything other than massively prejudicial that Elizabeth Ratliff's death was brought up at Michael Peterson's trial? Elizabeth, and I have to say this,

even looked exactly like Kathleen. If you look up a picture of Kathleen Peterson and a picture of Elizabeth Ratliff, they look like they could be twins. This is all so prejudicial for Michael Peterson. But just to be clear, despite the prosecution's assertions at trial that Michael Peterson had been having an affair with Elizabeth and that he killed her for the 70 grand life insurance that he got when he got his hands on her estate after he took on the girls, firstly, there's absolutely no evidence anywhere that Elizabeth and Michael were having an affair. People just say it. And I'm like, you can't just say things. You can't just say things and make them true, yeah.

Where is your evidence that they were having an affair? The prosecution even went as far as to get DNA testing done to check the paternity of the girls. And the rumor, by the way, that Margaret is actually Michael's daughter has never, ever gone away, even though it was proven conclusively to not be the case. Can I just pause the second to say how sick that all is? Like Martha and Margaret, whatever you think of Michael Peterson, whatever you think of Clayton, he's done a lot of weird shit, like trying to fucking, he built a pipe bomb and put it in his university and stuff like this.

Yeah. That's a whole can't even go into because we'll be here forever. Martha and Margaret are so victimized and so traumatized throughout this entire thing. And then the prosecution spreads her rumor that Margaret is actually Michael's child. And she's proof that him and Elizabeth were having an affair. There's like pictures all over Reddit of comparing Margaret to Todd and to Clayton and to Michael's face. Like look how similar she looks. Like give it a fucking rest.

And they proved that she wasn't Michael's child. And secondly, sure, Michael Peterson did get the life insurance and the Rackcliffe inheritance. But it wasn't that much money, especially when you considered that he took on two actual babies to raise. And the girls also had wealthy relatives in the States, but Michael never tried to fob them off on these people either.

And just in case people think that we're not right in saying this, the judge himself later admitted that the Elizabeth Rathleth incident, should never have been allowed to be brought in court. So now let's move on to the bloody footprint. There was a footprint slash shoe print on the back of the trousers that Kathleen was wearing when she was found dead.

The prosecution claimed that this footprint came from Michael standing on top of her to finish the job when he was beating her to death. But not cracking any bones? Maybe, maybe. But it could also just have come from him slipping at the scene because there's fucking blood everywhere

and accidentally stepping on Kathleen when he's trying to check if she's still alive. And since the print wasn't smudged, it's a very clean print on the back of her leg. It seems unlikely that Kathleen was still moving or like conscious or wriggling and trying to get away from him at this point. So why would he have needed to hold her down with his foot?

And also Michael Peterson had taken off his shoes and socks when the police arrived. A lot of people point to this and say, why did he take his shoes and socks off? But I'm like, people say that without explaining why that, what like forensic countermeasure that is. He says that he took it off because the floor was really slippery. I would argue that you'd probably be less slippery in shoes maybe than in bare feet.

I don't know. Depends on the shoe. I very often like if I'm on holiday and I'm wearing flip flops and it's steep and it's sweaty, I'll just take them off. Everywhere it says he was wearing tennis shoes, which I would probably say is like the equivalent of like what we would call plimpsoles. So maybe, maybe. But I still don't understand why taking them off.

like what that would achieve. So I don't really know why he took them off. So that's the footprint. That's, you know, the whole Elizabeth Ratliff situation never should have been brought in. Let's get back to the 911 call that we played you guys last week. Let's hear it again.

John 911, what are you, emergency? 1810 street, please. What time? By one time of accident, she's still bringing... What kind of accident? She still burning, please. Is she conscious? What?

Is she conscious? No, she's not conscious. Okay. How many stairs did you fall down? What? How many stairs? How many stairs? Calm down, sir.

Calm down. No, 15, 20. I don't know. Please, get somebody here right away. Okay, somebody's disinfect in the ambulance while I ask you questions. It's a force shield, okay? Please, please. Sir, somebody else is this back in the ambulance?

Okay. Is she awake? Now. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi. Tom 91.

Where is your emergency? Where are they? It's 18102. She's not breathing. Please, please. Please, would you hurry up? Sir. Can I hear me?

Sir? Please, please. Would you hurry up? Sir? Yes. Yes. They're on the way. Can you tell me for sure she's not breathing?

Sir? Hello. Now, if you listen to most of the content out there on this case, you will hear people taking this 911 call apart. There are literally entire YouTube videos that are gone for two hours, entire podcast episodes that just talk about the 911 call. Now, I don't really see the point of all of that. It's interesting, of course it is.

Yes, that is true. But I don't think that people are all that good. at analysing this sort of thing. When you hear it, for example, at the start, Michael Peterson sounds really out of breath. And people are like, it sounds so fake. It might well be fake, but I don't know that I can tell that it sounds fake.

I think the opposite. The first time I listened to it, I was like, God, is that the most authentic sounding 911 call I've ever heard? Or am I just so desensitized now that I don't know? I really don't know. I think let's not focus on how he sounds. Let's focus on what he says. So the first thing he says,

when the operator picks up the phone is he gives the address. He says 810 Cedar Street. Now he gives the address and he says, please. It sounds like he's really trying to get someone there fast. If I was trying to waste time and just make a 911 call to everyone could hear how upset I was, I would want the operator to coerce me to telling the address. Now, you could say he's already waited two hours and left her bleeding at the bottom and says he knows she's dead and that's why he's doing it.

He's a smart guy. I don't know. Sure. Okay, let's move on to the next thing. Some people point to the fact that he sounds frustrated when he's being questioned by the operator about how many stairs Kathleen fell down. And they say, look how angry he's got, it's because it's a question that he didn't have a scripted answer for. It's an unexpected question. And that's why he sounds frustrated and angry.

He's thrown off. I know. If I, I know that this is complete conjection and speculation. But if I rang 911 and I was like, my wife has fallen down the stair, and someone asked me how many stairs, I would be like, are you all right? Yeah. Like, it doesn't matter how many stairs. The point is that she's at the bottom of them and she's bleeding.

So I think people say he sounds frustrated because he's being asked a question he hasn't prepared for. He's showing his anger or, you know, he's trying to waste time by being, because he's like, huh? What? And it's like he's trying to kill time. He's already given the fucking address. Why does he want to kill time now on the phone with the operator? I think how many times of all of us, as people who live in the world of true crime, how many times if we listen to emergency calls, where we're like, ah, why is the operator asking that question?

Why is the operator not showing more sympathy, more compassion, more like, oh my God, are you okay? The point is the operators aren't trained to be nice to you. They are trained to get answers. And yes, as frustrating in that moment as it would feel to be asked how many stairs she felt out, the operator has already dispatched somebody to come. That's true. They're asking you questions so they can try and establish what's happened. But Michael Peterson being frustrated or angry even by that question and not having an answer doesn't ring strange to me.

No, I don't think so either. I think most of us in that situation would be like, huh? What? Which is apparently what people take issue with with the 911 calls. People also don't like the fact that he hung up and then rung back. Would you stay on the phone? Would you hang up once you know help is on the way? I don't think it makes too much difference.

especially when you take into account that he's already annoyed with the operator. But he does call back when no one had arrived just six minutes later. Why would you call back? He hangs up, I think, because he's like, I can't, I don't know what else to say. You said you've sent somebody. Let me just, and he does other things during that time. Like he puts towels under Kathleen's head and things. So, I don't know.

One thing that is peculiar, though, is that Michael never mentions how much blood there is at the scene. That is strange. There is a lot of blood at the scene, and he never says, oh my God, there's blood everywhere. I feel like you would say that, because you'd want them to understand

how bad the situation is. Also, Michael never seems to have even attempted CPR on his wife. However, saying that CPR isn't particularly successful out of a hospital setting, and he, being a Marine, may well have known that. He also would have known not to move Kathleen and just to wait for professional help. I don't know. Like so much with this case, you can look at everything Michael does from opposing perspectives

and come out with totally different conclusions. Then, like I mentioned, there are the bloody towels that were placed around Kathleen and under her head. Michael said that he did this to cushion her and also to try and control some of the bleeding, or at least maybe soak it up. The police claimed that this wasn't Michael trying to make Kathleen comfortable, it was actually Michael trying to clean up the scene. Maybe. Maybe he was trying to destroy some of the evidence and wipe it away,

as the prosecution stated at trial. Again, if you've seen the crime scene photos, you will know that there is no way that a few towels were going to clean up that mess. And the police really, really screwed up the handling of the crime scene themselves. Firstly, it was not. not secured properly on the night of Kathleen's death for hours. Neighbors poured into the house. Officers walked all over the place. The medical examiner, Dr. Snell, even walked up and down the bloody staircase, spreading the blood around more. And what's more, the crime scene analyst, the blood spatter

analyst who later comes in, I'm not giving him any, like, you know, cutting him any slack for the fuck-ups he does. But he wasn't even told that people had walked up and down the stairs in the blood when he first came and analyse the scene. Also, Michael Peterson had thrown himself on top of Kathleen after the paramedics confirmed that she was indeed dead. He did this in front of police officers. And his son Todd had to drag him away. But that did move Kathleen's body,

and it did transfer yet more of the blood onto Michael. Michael also washed his hands in front of the police, and no one stopped him. Later, the forensics teams would claim that bloody footprints had been found, using luminal leading from the staircase to the laundry room. I'd love a laundry room. Wouldn't it be the dream, honestly? But firstly, these footprints were never actually recorded.

There's no pictures of the luminal that exist or the trail that they claim to have seen. And even if the footprints were there, it easily could have been one of the offices because everyone's just tramping around everywhere. And somehow, again, without ever... Any notes or evidence from the scene, the prosecution, we're allowed to bring these magical footsteps up in court.

It's shocking. It's shocking. They're just like, it's like they just look at it and they're like, what's missing? Let's just say some shit. And it kind of backfires in some ways because they say the thing about the bloody footprints leading from the staircase all the way down to the laundry room. But they then have to admit in court that they found no blood in the laundry room.

There was no blood in any of the sinks or in the washing machine or in the mop that was down there. So even if Michael Peterson had been the one who walked down there, there was absolutely no evidence that he had made any attempt to clean up the mess, using the actual things in the house that you would use to clean up the mess. And just coming back to what you said about him washing his hands in front of the police, he had blood on his hands because he threw himself on top of Kathleen. And then he walks around the house in like quite a day state. The paramedics actually wrote down in their notes that they thought Michael Peterson was clearly very upset. Again, he could have been acting, of course.

but he touches loads of things after he's got blood on his hands and then he washes his hands in front of the police and at trial they're like, look, his bloody handprints were on the cabinet, his bloody handprints were on this bottle of like Coke or whatever, but I'm like, that could have happened after when you were already there. They were pointing at it to being like, look, he was killing two hours, waiting for us, sat around with bloody hands apparently. I don't know. It's so messed up.

So now, coming back to the towels that were under Kathleen's head, if Michael Peterson had been trying to wipe away some of the blood, even if he had managed to clean up some of the blood around Kathleen, I don't really know what that would have achieved. And also, it wouldn't have removed cast off blood from the ceiling, which again, like we mentioned last week, just wasn't there. There were also no marks in the wall like you might expect from the blowpoke or any other weapon being wheeled up and down in such a narrow space.

That blowpoke, we'll come back to how to how. we know this exactly, but it was 40 inches long and the stairwell is 42 inches long. Are you going to wheel something that's basically the same size in there, hit somebody multiple times, and it doesn't leave a mark on the wall from you hitting the wall even once? So he would have to be like, whack, whack, whack. It's so like, you have to do so many mental gymnastics to believe that the bludgeoning is what happened. Now, just to be clear what we mean by cast off, just in case anybody doesn't know, It's basically the blood spatter that would have been on the wall or the ceiling

that would have come off the weapon as it delivered the blows to Kathleen's head. Dr Henry Lee testified that there being no cast-off pattern if Kathleen had been beaten to death in such a confined space would be incredibly odd. Enter the prosecution's blood spatter analyst, Duane Diva. A man I hate with every fibre of my being. And here's why. Diva theorised that if the killer had wiped the weapon clean in between strikes, there would be no cast-off pattern.

What? I can't even... It's so farcical. The idea that somebody would beat someone to death, just enough that they split the skin and let them bleed to death, but not enough to cause a skull fracture, and also wiped the weapon between every blow, is un-feworthy.

believe. He says this in court. Nobody. I just, I can't. Nobody would do that. Nevertheless, Deval was on the stand for seven days, giving his expert in inverted evidence and sharing the results of his Dexter-esque blood spatter experiments. Experiments that he claimed proved that Michael Peterson had bludgeoned his wife to death. And we're going to tell you all about it later, but for now, it's blowpoke time. If you remember, the prosecution needs to be. needed a weapon that could explain the injuries that Kathleen had sustained.

And they had gone full force down the road of claiming that it was the blowpoke that Kathleen's sister had given her many years back. The prosecution had even purchased a replica and passed it around for the jurors to hold and feel. This was so they could see that it was hollow, therefore making it the perfect weapon to tear and split but not fracture. Apparently. Yeah. The prosecution also claimed that the blowings. poke would have been bent, maybe even destroyed after the attack so Michael had disposed of it. But yet again, they had absolutely no evidence that this happened. Then, this is where we have yet another shock twist in this story.

A couple of days before the trial was due to wrap up, Todd Peterson, Michael's son, actually found the fucking blowpoke in the family boiler room. It was there, just leaning against a wall covered in cobwebs, so it had clearly been sat there for a while. It wasn't missing. It had been missed. Or had it? The whole thing looked incredibly fishy, and people accused the Peterson's of having planted this blowpoke.

The prosecution even stated that Michael had purchased three blowpokes during the trial. He said, of course he had. He wanted to disprove their theory. But the fissiness backfired onto the prosecution. because it later turned out that the police had actually found the blow poke during their initial search of the house. They had even photographed it outside, so it had been taken out of whatever room it was in and snapped.

This picture, as it turned out, was in the DA's files, but it had never been turned over to the defence during discovery. Clearly what happened was that when the police found the blowpoke, It wasn't bent up and covered in blood, so it was just ignored. And it was only much later when Candice suggested the blowpoke that she had given her sister might be a good fit for the murder weapon, that the police even started to look for it.

And they had clearly forgotten all about the one that they had already found in the Peterson's home and the picture that they had of it, not looking bent or very murder weapony. Now, I have to say that what we've just told you was a very generous version of events, A much less generous version of this situation might be that someone at the police department or in the prosecution team did know that they had this picture of the blow poke and chose to exclude it from discovery.

I mean, isn't it a bit of a coincidence that this picture of the fucking blowpoke was just one of the items excluded from the defence handover? Either way, it is shocking. The prosecution made such a big deal out of the police. blow poke. And the fact that they hadn't handed over exculpatory material evidence is a huge deal. It's a very clear Brady violation.

But after the undamaged blow poke was found, the prosecution just claimed that they never said it was definitely the blowpoke. It was just something like it. Even though they had handed out that fucking replica blowpoke for all of the jurors to touch and feel and wave around. Give me strength. It's like that sentence. where the meaning changes when you stress a different word. I never said she took it.

Like, do you know what I mean? Or one of those grammar exercises where you take the comma out. Yes. So, okay, that's blowpoke, done. Let's now move on to those red neurons that we mentioned last week. As we said, they form when the brain is struggling to function while not receiving the oxygen that it needs for hours. Therefore, according to the testimony of the prosecution's expert,

a University of North Carolina neuropathologist, these neurons found in Kathleen's brain proved that she had been lying at the bottom of the stairs alive for hours. This contradicted Michael's version of the night and how long he said he had been alone for. But, according to the defence's expert, who was the former chief of neurology at Northwestern University, these red neurons could have developed in just 30 minutes.

rather than two hours when the victim has suffered a major trauma. And Dr. Lee also back this up. So essentially we have a situation that we see all the time in criminal cases, the battle of the experts. The defence can pull up an expert that says one thing. The prosecution can pull up an expert that says something else. And this is honestly one of the biggest, biggest flaws in the kind of jury system that many countries follow, because you can basically find an expert to fit your version of

events. And then you leave it to a lay jury to figure out which expert is more credible. How is a jury equipped to decide which of these experts is more credible? You know? It's ridiculous. I think all you can say at that point is this issue should have sort of become a neutral point. Because if you can find one expert who is credible, who says that it could have happened in 30 minutes, it should kind of become a bit of a moot point. But it didn't help in this case that the prosecutions, Freda Black,

was busy making comments constantly throughout the trial that the state's experts worked for the jury. But the defense experts, well, they are just paid guns for hire. She literally says this. She literally says this. And basically what she's doing here is undermining defense experts as just being willing to say whatever they need to or whatever they're paid to and saying that the state's witnesses are completely beyond reproach.

so here she's referring to the likes of Dwayne Diva and Dr Deborah Radish. This would be a tactic that would later blow up very much in their faces though. So yeah, the trial went on and on and on for over three months, becoming one of the longest trials in North Carolina history. And finally, after four days of deliberation, on the 10th of October 2003, the jury returned the verdict of guilty. Guilty of first-degree murder.

and Michael Peterson was sentenced to life. In the staircase documentary in the footage of the verdict being read out, even the prosecution looked shocked. Two years later, on the 10th of October 2005, Michael Peterson made his first appeal. It was unsuccessful.

Another two years later, on the 17th of October 2007, he made his second appeal to the North Carolina Supreme Court. And again, no luck. The North Carolina Supreme Court did rule that the search of Michael's computer was unconstitutional, but not prejudicial enough for a new trial to be granted. And then four years later in February 2011, Michael Peterson made a motion for a new trial,

based on some new and disturbing revelations that had come to light about one Dwayne Diva. The SBI agent and Bloods Batter, analyst for the state and the only person Suriti hates more than pandas. I can't stand him. You just go look at his little weasily face. It's never been a more punchable face than that of Dwayne Diva. Because it turned out that since 1993 until 2010, when he was eventually caught, Diva had been fabricating and concealing evidence in criminal cases that he worked on to suit,

the prosecution. He had been committing perjury for years as a state's expert witness and lab authority, and he had completely lied about his qualifications and level of experience on the stand at the Peterson trial. It all came out during an independent audit of the SBI in 2010. They reviewed 228 cases, and Dwayne Deva's years of lies were finally revealed. It turned out that in at least 36 of his cases, it could be proven that Diva had manipulated, hidden and lied about evidence. And he still couldn't come up with something better than he just wiped it in between. Ugh. The most talked about case was the 1993 conviction of a man called Greg Taylor.

Greg was arrested after his truck was found parked near the body of a murder victim. And there was something on the front of this truck that Dwayne Diva said was blood. This evidence was key for the state and absolutely pivotal in the conviction. Until it finally came out that Duane Diva had carried out more tests, more accurate tests, that had shown that the blood on Greg's truck was not even human. But Dwayne Diva never turned in those test results. Greg Taylor was finally acquitted in February 2010. He had spent 18 years in prison.

It's disgusting. One point Dwayne Diva even says, I can tell just from a picture if something is blood or not. This man is a narcissistic egomaniac who, honestly, the number of cases he was involved in that he lied about is unbelievable that he is not in prison today. And this sort of thing on Dwayne Diva's part was shown to be a malicious pattern, not a one-off mistake.

He also claimed to have written reports for 200 cases, worked on 500 and been at the scene of over 30 falls. But none of that was true. It was all bullshit. He'd never, ever worked on a fall case at all. He sat in the Michael Peterson trial just like, I've been at the site of countless fall cases and I've never seen anything like. He's never been at one. And as far as being a blood expert, he'd actually only done two courses on bloodstained analysis. I've basically done more than that. It's unbelievable. Now, I don't know if Michael Peterson killed Kathleen Peterson or not.

If I'm honest, maybe he probably did. I can buy the fact that he pushed Kathleen down the stairs. I really can. But that's definitely not good enough. As in the fact that we can't prove it, they cannot prove it, they do not have the evidence, and that is not good enough for a criminal conviction. And there really isn't anything that ever made me believe

that he did it, especially murder in the first degree, a reasonable doubt. I'm not even totally satisfied if I'm honest that Kathleen was definitely definitely murdered. Like that is still a big question. I don't think the explanation anyone gives as to how she got her injuries makes total sense. But I don't know, maybe the fall, maybe somebody pushes you, could it happen possibly, but first degree murder? I honestly don't know how the jury arrived at that conclusion. First degree obviously means that the murder was premeditated. willful, planned and deliberate. Malice of forethought.

That is the definition of first-degree murder. Now, of course, the prosecution don't have to show or prove motive, like we already told you. But given that their claims were that this was a planned attack, their explanation of the motivation does feel important. And honestly, it was just all over the place? Was it money? Was it the emails about the sex with men? If it was about the mail escorts, how was it planned if Kathleen, only found out about the emails with Brad on the night that the murder had happened and that's what

had caused the fight to break out. How is that then planned? Now people will question how the murder was also premeditated in this case, but there is a difference between planned and premeditated. We've talked about this before. Premeditated could just mean that during the crime itself, you had time to stop and think and change what you were doing, knowing that your actions would likely cause death and you didn't. So it could still be premeditated even if the argument had only broken out that night. But there's still questions. And there's no evidence that Kathleen's death was planned. The only evidence, and we use that word in the loosest possible terms,

that the prosecution presented at trial that pointed at premeditation, came from Duane Diva. He said clearly that this was a homicide. And Diva claimed that the experiments he did showed that Michael Peterson had stood over Kathleen Peterson and beat her a second time, so he had time to stop and think after the first time. first blow, which could have been the spur of the moment. He is the

only person there that can provide any quote-unquote evidence that this was premeditated. And Diva claimed that this is how Michael got blood spatter on the inside of his shorts. Even though the defence expert said

that this blood likely got there from Michael placing the towels under Kathleen and also throwing himself on top of her body after the police arrived. Like it's not definite but it's not unbelievable, you know. And he does that in front of the police. Duane Diva pointed at his experiments, but these were filmed.

And in no way reflect how a truly scientific experiment would be carried out. Instead of looking for what the evidence actually showed, Diva started out by looking for what he wanted to find, basically the opposite of how you do science. He essentially tries, in his little experiments that are filmed, to recreate the blood spatter at the scene, trying to find a way in which a beating could occur and those marks could have been left.

He's working backwards. He's trying to prove a scenario rather than open-mindedly looking at what could have happened. It's insanity. And you can go check out these videos. They're on YouTube. There's clips of them in the documentary, but you can find longer-form footage of them elsewhere.

and in these videos of him conducting these experiments, you can see Dwayne Deva striking a blood-soaked sponge to try and get the spatter to match the spatter at the scene. As he hits it, and he hits this sponge, in a way that no one would ever hit someone they were trying to murder. He hits the sponge, which is meant to be Kathleen's head, from I shit you not Hannah, 12 inches up. And also, he even stands in a completely unnatural way

and holds the shorts open so that the blood can spray back onto his leg. It's crazy. I guess what? It takes him 40 attempts to recreate the spatter. And when he finally gets it, he and another SBI agent who is standing there do a little victory dance and high five. That's not science and that's not impartial. So there are big discussions going on about the problems with blood sputely. batter analysis in general. There's actually a great multi-part article series out there by ProPublica, which we will link in our sources below.

And I just have to say the journalist who wrote that multi-part series for ProPublica went through more hours of bloodstain analysis than Dwayne Diva ever went near. And basically the article talks about how Bloodsbatter analysis has gained the credibility it has, but it's not actually really science. The results are often too dependent on the experience and the perception of the analyst, and a report published in 2009 by the National Academy of Science cast doubt on the whole discipline. And more studies since have shown an alarming level of errors.

But that doesn't explain Duane Deva. He purposely lied and altered and hid evidence for years in multiple cases. In one case, a man was actually executed based on Deva's evidence. He should be in prison for the rest of his miserable little life, but somehow he is not. And he even had the audacity, to sue the SBI for wrongful termination when he was sacked. I have no words.

It's astonishing. I have no words for how I feel about Dwayne Diva. The man needs to be in prison. Ugh, right, enough talking about him because he makes me sick. He looks like a politician. Yeah, a weasley little politician. A politician in the Slovenian family world where he's a weasel. So after all this came out, the whole Dwayne Diva debacle.

And remember, Freda Black was busy. Telling the whole court how the SBI and the state's witnesses, they are beyond reproach. They work for you, the jury, they work for the state, they work for justice, God damn it. Fuck everything. So after all this came out, Michael Peterson, like I said, tried for another appeal.

But the state claimed that Diva's testimony wasn't what convicted Michael Peterson, but it absolutely fucking was. Like I keep saying, the only thing that came anywhere near to point, at first-degree murder was Dwayne Diva's evidence. The prosecution had also used Diva as their star expert witness. He testified for seven days at this trial.

And Freda Black, one of the prosecutors, even said in her closing statement, if you believe otherwise, i.e. you believe that Kathleen wasn't beaten to death, you're just going to have to believe that Dwayne Diva is a liar. He is. But that's like her closing statement at trial before it all comes out. and it's like how much this bites them in the ass. So it's just shocking that afterwards they say, oh, well, he wasn't even that important.

Right, right. And the jury also said that he was the most convincing expert that they heard from. So now, on the basis that Diva had misled the jury and the judge, Michael Peterson was granted a new trial. And he was released from prison after having served almost a decade behind bars. He was released on a $300,000 dollar bail.

and placed under house arrest with an ankle monitor. But nothing about the next stage of this process would be quick. Michael Peterson lived under house arrest for the next six years. Because now all of the blood evidence was tainted. And because it was also decided that since the search of Michael's computer, which had been seized back during the first search, was deemed to be unconstitutional and illegal, that evidence would not be allowed at the new trial.

So that's no gay porn and no emails with male essay. courts. And then, remarkably, the judge also conceded that the Elizabeth Ratliff evidence should never have been introduced at the first trial. So now, the new trial would have to be done without any of these crucial talking points from the prosecution's side. So the prosecution obviously knew that without all of this, another trial and another conviction would be very difficult to land. So they offered Michael an Alfred plea. which is a plea that we've talked about before on this show, and it's essentially one in which a person is allowed to register a formal admission of guilt

towards charges in criminal court, while simultaneously expressing their innocence towards those same charges. Essentially, I'm not guilty, but the state has enough evidence to convict me. But, Kathleen's sisters were not happy with this at all. They said, fine, we'll let him take the plea, but he is not allowed to say that he is innocent. He has to stand up in court and say that he is. is guilty. Admit to his guilt and then we will be okay with time served. And yeah, it's tricky because then you're changing what the Alford plea actually would be. Now, I totally understand the

sister's rage. This is not me trying to criticize them in any way. I can absolutely understand their rage and Caitlin's trauma. So I have no gripes with them doing what they felt they needed to do to get justice for Kathleen. Because also, if you look at it from their point of view, it just looks like he's still guilty, but the prosecution fucked up. And they fail to convict him, properly and it was an unsafe conviction and now we're not going to pay the price for that man being allowed to go free. And so, yeah, I don't blame them. I blame the prosecution. And then, just to prove what a mess this all was, yet more information about the state's case came out. Remember the initial medical examiner who went to 1810 Cedar Street, Dr. Snell?

He had been told by police at the scene that they thought the husband had killed Kathleen because there was so much blood. But Snell, despite hearing this repeatedly, wrote down that he thought the scene and Kathleen's injuries were consistent with a fall. Snell later changed his mind, however, even crossing out his initial findings and authorising a new cause of death, stating that he now believed that Kathleen had died of multiple blunt force impacts of the head, which is indicative of a beating. And maybe you're thinking, well, he saw Kathleen at the scene, and then when he got a closer look, He changed his mind. What's wrong with that? Well, quite a lot. It turned out that Dr. Deborah Radish, the medical examiner who carried out the autopsy on Kathleen, had also initially recorded that there was no evidence of blunt force trauma.

And she stated that Kathleen had died of blood loss. Dr. Radish even sent a handwritten note to her boss, Dr. John Butts. Dr. Seymour Butts, the then chief medical examiner, this. But she was told no. Dr. Radish was told to write down that Kathleen Peterson had died from blunt force trauma. It would appear that Seymour Butts was under pressure from the chief of police. So Dr. Radish did as she was told and didn't think to mention that to anybody ever again. And this handwritten note from Radish to Seymour Butts was found in the defence files years later. And yet again, it had never been given to the defence as part of discovery.

Dr. Radish would go on to succeed John Butts as chief medical examiner years later. It kind of seems like the way you climb that greasy pole is by doing what you're told. Yeah. So even after all this came out, the prosecution did not want to overturn the conviction. Because it would have made them look even more stupid and even more incompetent. and corrupt. So what they did instead was lower the bar, and they offered Michael another Alford plea to the reduced charge of manslaughter. Michael didn't want to take this plea, however. He wanted a new trial, and he wanted to clear his name. But his kids begged him to just take it

and put everything behind him and finally move on. Because remember, it's been going on at this point for like almost two decades. And so that's what Michael Peterson did. On the 24th of February 2017 Michael Peterson was released on time served and became a free man 15 years after the death of Kathleen Peterson It's exhausting just thinking about it So we've been through the trial

We've been through the appeals, we've been through theories We've been through all of this But now I think we have to get to the part That you have all been waiting for Hoot Hoot! The Owl Theory This theory was first pitched back in 2003, almost immediately after it happened. But it has slowly gained momentum ever since.

Now when I first heard of the Michael Peterson story, because a lot of times Hannah and I will sort of have like a vague idea about these big cases. When I was first aware of the Michael Peterson case, I thought it was a guy who had definitely killed his wife and he had got off on a technicality. And now he was out there spouting a bunch of nonsense about how a fucking owl had killed her.

That's what I genuinely thought. But having done the research, firstly, I don't believe that Michael Peterson got off on a technicality. I don't know if he killed Kathleen or not, but he definitely didn't get off on a technicality. The state acted in a totally corrupt manner to get that conviction, and he did not have a fair trial. Whether he killed Kathleen or not, I don't know. Did something else do it? I'm open to it. The fact is, one of three things happened that night. Kathleen fell. Kathleen was murdered by Michael or by someone else or behind door number three

an owl did it I feel like the owl is the butt of so many true crime jokes and like I kind of hate myself for thinking it was the owl but I kind of do think it was the owl let's talk about it we have to say that the idea that Kathleen just fell and tore her head open very specifically like that it's possible but it's not very probable

it feels like there just would have been other comparable examples for injuries like that if that were the case. It doesn't feel totally believable. People fall over all the time. Yeah. Why is there not another example of that? Option number two. Murder.

Just can't really see how Kathleen was murdered by being beaten. There was no cast off, no weapon. What sort of attack could tear the skin like that but not fracture her skull, all of the stuff we've spoken about? Now, like we've said before, I definitely think she could have been pushed. That would explain the lack of weapon, the lack of weapon, lack of cast off and the lack of blood on Michael. But the prosecution was so gung-ho in going for first-degree murder that they didn't look at that possibility.

Either way, when it came down to it in court, I just don't think that the prosecution or the defence gave a really clear explanation of what happened to Kathleen in a way that anyone with a brain can get on board with. So how do they manage to get that conviction? Duane Deva definitely helped. But also the jury said that the amount of blood was the main reason they believed Kathleen was murdered.

But, as Dr. Lee explained, head wounds bleed a lot, a shocking amount. And there was also urine mixed into the blood as well, which made it look like there was a lot more blood than there actually was. Also, no one seems to mention that anti-anxiety medications can thin your blood and alcohol does that too. And Kathleen had been on those medications for months. So let's take a look now. at the owl theory.

And I have to say, I find it quite slash reasonably compelling. And before you all think I've totally lost my mind, let me explain. The owl did it scenario is essentially this. After Kathleen left Michael smoking his cigar outside by the pool, she headed inside. But instead of going to bed or going to check her emails, she decided to start putting up some Christmas decorations. Now that might sound weird, but she and Michael had actually planned to spend the next day putting up Christmas decorations,

and now Kathleen had to take that pesky work conference call instead. And guessing from Kathleen's very intense Taipei personality, she'd probably like things done in a certain way. So let's just assume she heads inside. She's not that drunk, it's not 0.07 blood alcohol level. She's like, I'll stick up some of the Christmas decorations. no Michael will do wrong, and then I'll go to bed, and I'll get a head start on the whole situation. So she goes up, she's doing that, she's putting up her big old Christmas decorations outside from the front door,

when suddenly she gets a tap by an owl. The owl grabs at Kathleen's head, scratching her scalp, possibly thinking that these Christmas decorations she's putting up are in some way like predators or it feels under threat because of whatever. And it scratches her scalp. Kathleen panics and confused she grabs her head and her hair wrestling with the owl to get it off her and in doing so she pulls out clumps of her own hair Now to get very specific about it

Kathleen had 25 strands of her hair in one hand and 36 in the other and crucially while some of these hairs were definitely ripped out from the root some had been cleanly cut had they been cut by the talents of an owl So then Kathleen manages to free her from the owl and she runs inside.

She's already bleeding though and that explains the blood found on the outside of the front door frame and the blood drops in the walkway from the main door into the house. That nobody ever explains. Yeah. Everyone just ignores it. Now, that blood could have come from Michael checking if the ambulance was there after he phoned 911

but blood drops would have meant that he was soaked in blood, which he wasn't. So if we stick with the owl theory, Kathleen's now inside the house and bleed and in shock, and she runs upstairs, wearing flip-flops, and she falls. Michael doesn't hear any of this. Kathleen tries to stand up after her fall and slips and falls again,

consistent with the blood on the bottom of her feet, and the two impacts that Dr. Snell originally suspected. This also explains the deep, trident-like lacerations on Kathleen's head as having been talent marks, because owls have talents. They do indeed They can also sit with their legs crossed What? Yeah

Have you Google Owl sitting crisscross Applesauce Apple sauce Is what American say Apple sauce Apple

I just said Apple And typed owl Owl sitting Criss cross Criss cross That's fucking weird They are weird They are weird

And they're dangerous Oh yeah. They are predators. They're vicious, yeah. I think people think, oh, it's a bird. They're predators. It's a bird off prey. Yes.

Yes. So, the owl theory also gives a reason for the pine needles found embedded in Kathleen's hand. It also turned out that on the hair in Kathleen's hand were microscopic owl feathers, consistent with the type of feathers that grow under the talons of an owl. Oh, come on. It's the owl. It's the owl. It's the owl. Look, I don't, I look, if he did it, I don't want to be here being like. No, yes, fine.

But it's really confusing. It's really fucking confusing. And, you know, let's give you the full context. If you're sitting here thinking like, a fucking owl, what are they talking about? Because another man in the area also came forward and said he had been attacked by an owl. And this attack was actually caught on camera. So you can go watch it. It is out there on the internet, you can see this attack. And this man claimed that when the owl attacked him, it felt like being hit in the head with a baseball bat.

I bet. And they are also flying down with intent to attack. It's not like it just winged you. It's like coming down to attack you. And this man actually ended up with claw marks on his head. He had to go to hospital, but also tiny scratches near his eyes, very similar to the ones that Kathleen had that again no one could explain. Now, my issue with the owl theory, and I do have some, just so you all know that I am not completely insane, is why didn't Kathleen have beak marks on her hands, right?

If she's trying to grab her hair when the owl is attacking her head, why wouldn't the owl peck her hands? There are some abrasions on her hands, but like not that many. Also, why weren't there more feathers? In some places I read there was only one microscopic owl feather, in some places I read there was one that was sort of broken up. Why weren't there more feathers? Also, the question is, why would Kathleen run upstairs?

Why would she run inside and upstairs? I mean, I guess you might think that being in the house is safer rather than running back out into the garden to try and get Michael Weathers out or could attack you again. I could understand that I might stay inside, but she was probably completely disorientated. I find it easier to suspend my disbelief about those things than... that he beat her to death.

Yeah. I do not believe that he beat her to death. And the other thing people say is like, well, maybe the blood drops in the walkway and the blood on the doorframe, which feels like it explains that Kathleen was already bleeding and she came back into the house because it's her blood. Could point to an intruder who had blood on them

and that's why the blood drops were on the way out rather than on the way in. But it still doesn't explain how this intruder killed her because you're back at the point of what murder weapon was used to carry out that attack and give Kathleen those particular injuries. So yeah, like I said, I went into this thinking that Michael Peterson definitely did it and just got off on a technicality appeal, but that is definitely not the case. The prosecution lied and manipulated the situation and hid evidence,

and the judge allowed information into the court that never should have been heard by the jury. Kathleen deserves to be remembered, and if she was killed, she and her loved ones deserve justice. But justice has to be achieved fairly. The ends don't justify the means Even if Michael Peterson is guilty The sanctity of the justice system And what it means to have a fair trial is important

And the state of North Carolina In this case trampled all over that right I think there are lots of cases Where you hear people throw that phrase around me Like he might be guilty but he didn't get a fair trial People say that about Scott Peterson He got a bloody fair trial

And like Michael Peterson Did not get a fair trial No. I think I'm with you. I can believe he pushed her. I can definitely believe that. But that would be second-degree murder, manslaughter. It's never first-degree murder because you've acted in the spur of the moment. And it's happened and you could regret that afterwards. But it's too late. You've already killed this person. The red neuron stuff of the defence expert gives me enough like reasonable doubt that she may have only laid down there for 30 minutes. Yeah. Or that he didn't leave her dying for hours. So I could still believe the push theory.

I could still believe the fall theory. The lack of blood on him, the lack of cast off pattern, the lack of weapon, these are all things that make me think she, and the lack of skull fractures, the lack of brain injury. Kathleen Peterson was not beaten to death. At worst, Michael Peterson pushed her down the stairs. Or she fell and it was a horrible accident. Or the fucking owl did her. I think I'm team owl.

Honestly, I probably think I am as well, which I know people are going to think of it. insane. But like, I really urge people to look at the evidence on this and not get, like, like I said, lost in the feeling of whether you like or dislike Michael Peterson. Because I think when you watch the documentary, people have strong feelings about him, whether you sympathize with him or whether you think of him as an unsympathetic character. I actually found him, I felt sympathetic towards him in the documentary, but I also know it was making me feel that way. But at the same time, as much as it was making me feel that way, it doesn't change the facts that make me question the fact that he beat her to. death. You know, it doesn't change the fact that there was no cast-off pattern. And yes, is he a performer? Is he very confident? Yes, that doesn't make you a murderer. Does he lie? Has he lied? Yes, there's all the stuff about, you know, he didn't win the mayoral election that he ran for

in Durham because it turned out that he had possibly fabricated some things about medals that he had won. Right. The injury that had got him honorably discharged from the Marines, he said that he had got them on duty. It actually turned out that it wasn't in Vietnam at all. He got those injuries driving a truck and getting into a truck accident in Japan. So, you know, there were lies in there. But again, being a liar doesn't make you a murder.

No. So you really have to look at the evidence and at most it was second-degree murder or manslaughter because he pushed her. And the state went for first degree, possibly because they did have a vendetta against him, as he said. So I don't know.

But there you go. That's it, guys. I'm exhausted. So good thing, it's the end of the year. Yeah. That is it. That's your last red-handed for this year. So we hope you guys enjoyed it.

We hope you had a very good year. Thank you for everything that you did for us, as ever. We got the hat trick at the British Podcast Awards listeners choice. It was honestly the most amazing thing ever. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you to everybody who came to our US tour. Oh, God, yeah. Which was in fact this year.

And stay tuned for loads more exciting things coming next. year we're really so pumped to tell you guys all about them but you're just going to have to wait a little bit and Hannah's doing a big yawn so go it's my Christmas yawn enjoy your Christmas have a fabulous new year and we will see you in January goodbye twit-to you!