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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening. Michael Peterson was driven to succeed. An army brat turned marine, he
saw combat in Vietnam and returned a decorated soldier. An avid reader, his dreams of being an acclaimed novelists came true. His desire to find love was fulfilled when he married brilliant executive Kathleen at Water, the first female student accepted at Duke University School of Engineering. The Peterson seemed like
the ideal academic couple, well respected, prosperous, and happy. All that came crashing down in December of two thousand and one when Kathleen apparently fell to her death in their secluded home in an exclusive ay of Durham, North Carolina, but blood spattered evidence in a missing fireplace poker suggested calculated, cold blooded murder. Her trusted husband stood accused. Then the
most damaging evidence of all surfaced. Sixteen years earlier. Peterson was the last person to see his neighbor alive before she was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her home in Germany. A dramatic trial followed in the explosive final chapter of a life that no novelists could ever have conced. The book they're featuring this evening is Written in Blood, a true story of murder and a sixteen year old secret that tore a family apart,
with my special guest, journalist and author, Diane Fanning. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview, Diane Fanny.
Good evening, Dan, it's pleasure.
To talk with you again.
It is always a pleasure and it's going to be always a treat for the audience, especially with this book Written in Blood. I won't ask you how you became involved, because it's too much to talk about in too short a period of time, in such an involved story. In case, it's incredible. Let's go right to as You Do dramatically in the book to the nine to one to one call December ninth, two thousand and one in Durham, North Carolina.
And it's a call Mary Allen takes from Michael Peterson from eight ten eighteen ten part in me Cedar Street. What's the as You Do? In the book? What does he convey in a short period of time on the phone? Tell us about that call?
He tells us that his wife has fallen down the stairs, and he.
Says that he doesn't know if she's breathing or not.
And the most remarkable thing of all is that not once did he mention to the nine one one dispatcher that there was a lot of blood in the hallway. He never said it once, and yet that was the first thing everyone else.
Noticed when they came into the home.
Right now, when you talk about the phone call that he makes, and we won't, of course talk about it verbatim everything he says in that phone call. But they are trying to get information from him while they're on the line. But yet at the same time, they've already dispatched that ambulance and because of the particulars then the police are also alerted to get to this location eighteen
ten Cedar Street. Now the first person that the first people that arrive at ems Jay Rose and Ron Paige, and we say their name later in the trial, of course, and tell us a little bit about Durham, North Carolina and this house that Jay Rose and Ron Page the ems are arriving at. Tell us a little bit about that and what they find and who they find at that residence.
At that time, the house, it was huge.
It was about ten thousand square feet. It was an old mansion in a very nice part of town. The mansion had once been in a movie. Even the stairway. There was a scene in the original movie The Handmaid's Tale that was filmed on that stairway when the home was owned by the same guy that went up to New England and got involved in that kerfuffle with trying to get into his home own home and being stopped by the police that ended in the beer summit with Obama. Right.
So, the house was amazing, you know, it has a lot of history and it was very beautiful, but it did.
Need some extensive additional work on it. There were bats in the belfry as it were, and they had a number of just the structural things that needed to be corrected. The house wasn't about to fall down by any means, and you couldn't tell by looking at it that it happened. Did have some problems like many old homes.
To now, when the EMS arrived, Jay Rose and Ron Page, what is Michael Peterson doing? And you introduced Todd Peterson, which is Michael's son. What do these EMS people arrive to find? And again you mentioned that everyone responds or did respond to the amount of blood, and they remarked accordingly, So tell us a little bit about their arrival, and what do they notice anything unusual? Tell us about what they encountered.
They noticed that Michael Peterson wasn't wearing these shoes, and they noticed that the blood had started to dry already, and Peterson was telling them that there would only have been forty five minutes since he came in from the house and founder like this and the blood wouldn't be dry. There was also a spot on the wall that looked like someone had been smearing it, as if they were trying to clean it up. And Todd Peterson was there and he was doing most.
Of the talking.
Now, he supposedly just arrived there did, but there was evidence that came out later that indicated that that wasn't the first time he'd been back into that house since Kathleen died on the stairs.
Well, now, when police arrived, and to anybody that asks, what's the story, he says about where he was when Kathleen, his wife, falls to her death. Where is he?
This is a December night, late in the evening, and he claimed they were both sitting out by the pool. Now that's not impossible. Durham is a little balmy. But after some time Kathleen went in and Michael Peterson said he continued to sit out there in a pair of shorts for another forty five minutes, which is pretty hard to believe in that weather.
It was a little bit cool, he said.
When he came in, he found her like she was when they found her. But the thing of it is is there was one thing that was noticed almost ran away. There was a bloody footprint on the back of her pants.
Yeah, you saw you write about all the ID texts and the CID Criminal Investigation Division that show up and they see and remark the same thing that the blood is congealed already in all of the locations. But each one of them also respond and remark to each other and later that this doesn't look like it's consistent with accidental faull. Not that they're the people that can assess that properly, but that was their first responses, wasn't it?
That was the first reaction because there was an awful lot of blood in that stairway when someone falls, Yes, there's going to be blood, not that copious and not that widespread. It was really shocking to all of them at the quantity of blood that was there, and also the fact that it was starting.
To dry out.
You also have that right away Todd is making a statement to pull even without being officially interviewed, regarding alcohol, and also that Michael Peterson and it was corroborated story of Todd and a date that they had been at the house earlier. What's the story that Michael Peterson talks about involving the evening that they spent earlier and alcohol and what Todd had said to anybody that would even listen.
Well, Michael had said that they had watched a movie and had gotten a call saying that he's the option the movie option had been renewed on his book, and they were kind of celebrating and having a little bit of champagne and toasting the night and Peterson, Todd Peterson came in and he said to the police that he did everything would call her a drunk and said that she, you know, she must have stumbled and fell because she'd been drinking, and and really did make it sound like
that alcoholic misbehavior was a hallmark of existence, which since she was a very very successful six figure businesswoman, that didn't.
Seem very likely.
Now you have introduced them.
She used valuum. Yeah, he also said she used valium right.
Now. The valume actually though, happens to be correct. She did even say to some of her friends that she had been using Valume as of late.
Yeah. Things were really stressful at her job, and her boss had just been fired, so there was a lot of consternation in the office place and and and a lot of that was left for her to try to abduce. So she had to stay called for everyone else, and.
She was stressing a bit.
And there was also the economics of their life had been getting a little tighter. They were still pretty much supporting Michael's two grown sons, in addition to having three girls in the household who would soon be ready to go off to college.
Right, let's talk about a little bit about the situation that investigators find out soon enough, because this is just one little part of the story and this incredible story that it is. Tell us a little bit more about Kathleen, because we introduced her as this incredible intellectual basically and certainly it looked like a dynamic academic couple which introduced
in the beginning. Tell us a little bit more about her work at Nortel and the kind of financial success that she was having for a few years.
Yeah, at Nortel, she had been traveling all over the world, even to Russia to help them set up communication systems.
And she was a very busy woman.
In fact, the next morning she was preparing to go to Toronto for a business meeting. So she was a real dynamo. She had a lot of responsibility and it took her all around the world. She but that was only one side of her. She was much more than that as a person. Her favorite activity, believe it or not, was powerwashing the house. She loved to powerwash the house and she did all sorts of other things around the home, and she was a marvelous justice. She would have these
incredible parties and she'd prepare all the food herself. So she was both a domestic goddess and a business whiz at the some time.
At the same time, you also write that very difficult task. But coming into this marriage, there was already the adopted children Martha and Margaret, and also his son's Todd and another son. What was there her relationship like to all people that could look at it, but in reality, what was a relationship with those children.
Well, she had her own daughter, Caitlin, and she also became the stepmother to the two other girls who were not not adopted legally by Michael Peterson. And he said the reason he didn't adopt them was because their father had died in service.
To his country in the military.
Their mother had died while she was a teacher for one of the schools for the children in the military, so they were both veteral employees. They both That meant that they both the children got a lot of benefits because of that, and he wanted to keep the money rolling in so he never would adopt them.
Uh So.
Kathleen became like another mother to them. They you know, they lost their first mother by death when they were very little, and then they lost Chael's first wife who was their stepmother when the divorce happened, and they came with Michael, and now they had Kathleen, and they adored her, and she was she had a right relationship with them. And the two boys, on the other hand, didn't particularly care for Kathleen.
And it might be kind of understandable.
I mean, their mother was set by the wayside and this other woman was now with father, so some of that anti Kathleen sentiment could be understandable because of the situation.
Right now, with this, right away, the police within a short period of time, are looking for a search warrant. Michael Peterson seems to be very very surprised, but right away, even before his he is arrested, he contacts a lawyer. His friend, Carrie Sutton, tell us about what transpires. Shortly after, despite the story that he has given that she has felt to her death.
Well, they do try to obstruct the investigation.
And Michael's brother comes from Nevada and it sort of becomes an adjunct to the legal team and from then he says they need to hire a serious criminal lawyer. And that's when David Rudolph takes charge of the case and right after his arrest, and he is he's just making a big deal over being a grieving widower, and he's also trying to get all of the family onto
the same page to basically cover for him. And he even tries to do that with Kathleen's sisters, and he doesn't give them very much information, and so at first they're not suspicious, but then when they actually saw the scene of the crime, they knew that something had definitely gone wrong here. And when the autopsy came out, they had absolutely no doubt that Michael Peterson was responsible for Kathleen's death.
Right, you talk about Michael Peterson as well, and it comes out and as we talk about in the introduction, that it comes out at some point Martha A pardon me, Margaret, and Martha, we are talking about the children of this Elizabeth, and so tell us about Elizabeth and Germany and go backwards, as you do in the book, to tell us about Michael Peterson and his life after the army and in the military and his ability to become the novelist, which
was his dream. So take us back to Germany and how he became the guardian of Martha and Margaret.
Michael Peterson.
Was married to a woman who had a job working in Germany as a teacher, and in that way she met Elizabeth Ratliffe.
Who was also a teacher. They taught in the same.
School and they lived lived just a few doors away from each other. Elizabeth was married and her husband was in the military, and he was on a mission in animal and he was just found getting in his bed one night, and so suddenly Elizabeth is there with two young girls, just about two and five years old, and having to deal with her husband's death and everything else involved with being a single parent, and she was a
bit overwhelmed at first, as anyone would be. Michael Peterson stepped in and offered to help her with the financial stuff, and since you know, his wife was her friend, she was comfortable with that, and she and the girls often had Peterson's house. One night, after having dinner at their house, Michael brought them home and he helped He helped her put the two children in bed, And it is highly suspected by Elizabeth's sisters that there was something had gone
wrong in the financial picture of Elizabeth's Ratliffe. There were things missing that shouldn't have been and they suspect that Michael Peterson had in some way been ripping her off while he was supposedly helping.
Her with his with the finances, and that is what caused the confrontation.
And at the end of that confrontation, Elizabeth was dead at the foot of the stairs in a pool blood, with blood spatter all up and down the stairway, and Michael Peterson was seen running from the home.
Now, as you're read in the book, person named Barbara O'Hara which plays very prominently in the story, and she ends up being this very very caring nanny to help out with Elizabeth and children and Michael Peterson. At one time she had lived with the family. Michael Peterson advised the Liz to pay for her to have her own apartment in her own life. She is the person that discovered Liz that day.
Yeah, yes, and she was horrified. And of course it naturally draws of the big question why did Michael want that woman out of the home. Why did he intervened in that way because everything seemed to be working fine, the only thing that remained was without her in the home. Elizabeth would be alone, and during the day no one would be in the house, and then the evening, you know, on school days, and in the evening, Barbara would be gone.
And it was it was just kind of suspicious that he wanted her out of the home, as if he thought what he was doing would be picked up by someone else. He was messing with their finances, and also it left her even more alone and reliant on him.
Now, in this first case, back in nineteen eighty five, he's in Germany, knows you right, He knows a little bit of German, but not much, but he knows an And because this is associated with the military, they send somebody in and I guess, as you're right, because they have assumptions and based on the person going in is less experienced than maybe somebody might if they were assuming that it was foul play. Tell us how on earth he gets around this? It looks like murder. How does
he get past this? With the German authorities?
Michael sort of with the German authorities who were sort of backing down in to the military of the United States because these were Americans and so they were not asserting themselves in any kind of investigation, and Michael Peterson pretty much took charge of the scene, and he was telling them about a medical condition that she had, which I, you know, I do not think had anything to do with their death. Maybe it increased the amount of blood flow, but.
That would have been about it.
And he just basically was telling the story and there was no one else to speak for Elizabeth, and he basically conned everyone. And then the pathologist that did the autopsy, he was not a forensic pathologist. He had never done a forensic pathology. His main work was for people that died of illness, of sudden illness, or people who were killed in automobile crashes or other vehicular accidents, and so he was inexperienced and untrained in any kind of forensic
approach to an autopsy. And he was just in above his head and he basically took the word of Michael Peterson and the military who believed him.
Yes, you write that, they end up writing something that is basically disputed later obviously, but something to the tune of cranial hemorrhage spontaneous cranial hemorrhage due to this disease that she may have had pre existing. So anyway you say it didn't have really any good experience in forensic pathology whatsoever. And so they went along amazingly by the conning of Michael Peterson, who was able to get away
with this. Interesting though too, is that he there was no will, or they didn't find a will, but he created another will as helping out Liz, and that's where he wrote a provision and changed from the original will as you write, to a provision that he would be the guardian he or his wife would be the guardian of the two daughters, but also that he would also be able to control the finances to be able to support them and educate them as they saw fit. Isn't that correct?
Yes, he was very very adept at taking charge of almost every situation. He was a very good manipulator, and he was a narcissist. He really felt that regular standards did not apply to him and that whatever he needed he could get.
Now back to the murder at hand, and back to the question at hand. Here he eventually, with the aid of his lawyer, eventually is granted a bail so that he is back out on the street and trying to work and and also most importantly try to rally the support of his family, like you say, and at the same time try to convince members of Kathleen's family that he's innocent. Tell us how that proceeds, and also what the police are doing and finding in their investigation.
Well, one of the things that the police found was that there was a lot of homosexual pornography, both printed and on his computer. They found correspondents with a male escort that he engaged in trying to set up a meeting. They heard from a number of people that he used to solicit men at the YMCA, So basically he was leading a double lot. And for Kathleen this would have been a big problem, not because she had any problem
with homosexuality, but because she had problem with infidelity. She left her first husband because he had an affair, and she certainly wouldn't have tolerated second husband fooling around on her, whether he was having an affair or just having one night or so he was, you know, and that is probably what brought everything to the tipping point that night.
But the family Number one, oh, Michael Peterson and his family were telling them that Kathleen knew all about that she was okay with it, and they knew that couldn't be true because that was just not Kathleen. And then they were also you know, pushing her stumbling on the stairs because she'd had too much to drink, and none of it was really making sense. This is somebody who was getting ready to make a big business trip the
next day. She was checking on the computer for details, and Michael's computer was one that she seldom ever went to because she usually used her business laptop, but she left it in the office, so it was highly unusual for her to even go into Michael's work space at all. The loango on his computer, so she probably encountered some of that material. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, the autopsy report finally gets released, and Kathleen's sisters when they.
See that autopsy report.
And they see about the marks on the back of her skull, they know that, you.
Know, this was not just a simple fall.
And they talked to Kathleen's biological daughter, Caitlin, and they tell her that she needs to look at the autopsy report because up to the point she was supporting her stepfather Michael Peterson. I mean, she wasn't thinking that he could be responsible, and when she sat in her dorm room and looked at the autopsy report online, she was absolutely horrified.
She's a bright girl. She knew that this wasn't right.
And that's when she broke off with the family, and Michael Peterson's efforts to have everybody all together with him singing his praises and telling the media.
That everything was okay started to disintegrate.
It's a particularly chilling scene that you have in the book where Caitlin calls Martha and Margaret or one of them, pardon me, and tells one of them that they need to look at the same documents that she has, and they refuse. And that is if that's not the beginning of the rift, that certainly widens that rift in the family, doesn't it.
Oh yes it does. And you know, on a psychological level, you can really understand a lot of what was going on with Margaret and Martha. Here they were they lost their dad, then they lost their mom, then they lost their first step mom, then they lost the second one, and all they have left the only.
Person that is Michael Peterson.
Denial is a very strong thing that can come in to protect your psyching, and I think it clearly did for those two girls. And plus not only that, a manipulative feedback from Michael Peterson are you know, sort of painting this picture of its us against the world, And
they were all I had to cling to. And I can understand why they went that way, but I think it's very tragic because they lost contact with their mother, sisters, their aunts, and just been lost contact with their uh stepsister, Caitlin, And it was really tragic all that Michael Peterson stole from them and they never fought back against.
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thousand and one. You have witnesses or heard like doctor Radish, agent Deaver, and the original investigator Art Holland. And there was an indictment. So let's fast forward to what happens after that indictment with Michael Peterson and the entire family and the media treatment of this case and their interest in it.
The indictment charged Michael Peterson with first degree murder, and he was trying to use the media to his advantage. He also allowed a French production company to come in and start filming the documentary which ultimately ended up on the staircase. And they came in and I talked to them at the trial, and they were thoroughly convinced of Michael Peterson's innocence, and they wanted to be the big
heroes and do a documentary on that. And they had this attitude that they were in the South, and the South is so backward, that he was just being picked on by the public because he was bisexual, and that he was just being picked on by the police because in his column in the newspaper he had written things that were negative or judgmental of some of the things
that happened in the police department. And honest, you know, the administration and the police department may have had issues with him, but the rank and file policemen and detectives who were on the scene had nothing against him. They thought that some of the things he brought out were important and he and some of them they wouldn't miss one of his columns for the world. So in including
the lead detective. So they they painted a picture that was not reality, and it was something that the defense attorney took and ran with. He was always bringing up things in the trial without calling Southerners backwards, leaving that impression that.
He believed that.
And it was to me it was a little disturbing because every day that I watched a trial, I was getting more and more evident that pointed to Michael Peterson's gills. And I couldn't understand why anyone couldn't see that.
You talk about and people have seen the tactics used by David Rudolph, and a lot of people say, well, it's just a zealous, you know, very zealous defense, you know, a vigorous defense. But some of the stuff, as you write about in the book, and I agree, is very questionable to the extent that he goes to defend his client, and how he treats some people on the witness stand in what you would think would be a sensitive try to be a sensitive nature. Tell us about some of his behavior.
Well, he was really very rude and aggressive and nasty to the sister of the deceased woman. Most defense attorneys won't do that, they won't.
Bring the.
Family members stand to tears, but he did, and he didn't care if he angered them, and I just to me.
I watched the jury's.
Faces and some of them were horrified by the way he was behaving towards her, and I thought it was absolutely ruthless and dreadful when he cross examined them. And then another time, when when the prosecution had something that was gory or disturbing to show the jury, he put the screen up to the jury so that you couldn't see it unless you deliberately.
Went around over to that side of the room.
So the family didn't see that, and it was they were very set so that the only thing everybody see was like the picking nice pictures of breathing, living Kathleen. But when Mike, when David Rudolph got up there to defend Michael Peterson, he had this huge, big screen that you could see from every.
Corner of the courtroom.
He didn't warn the family members to look away. He just suddenly threw up on that screen a photograph of Kathleen laying dead at the foot of those stairs. And the expression on her face at that moment is something that has burned into my head and has stayed there to this day, I can still vividly see that picture.
She just looked.
Horrendous and the horror on her face was unbelievable.
Yes, I can't even imagine what the people at the jurors have to witness and endure, and also the victims, the families members themselves incredible and anyone attending the court actually tell us how it is that this the former nineteen eighty five murder, becomes admissible, and how it becomes that the exhamation takes place. Tell us about this incredible effort to add weight, even more weight to this murder trial.
When Kathleen's sisters are informed the police about the death of Elisiamu's right lists and they knew about it because of thee to girls Margaret and marsh Martha, and so they went over to Germany. That Texas went over to Germany.
And checked it out and looked at the scene, and we.
Got all the reports and they got aximation order to exhume Elizabeth Ratliffe's.
Body, and.
They brought it back to Durham so that the same person who did Kathleen's autopsy, Gebraah Bradish, could then do an autopsy on this body and One of the amazing things she discovered was that the marks on the back of elizabeth skull were extremely similar to the marks on the back of Kathleen's skull, and blunt force trauma was something that couldn't be too heavy, but was hit hard enough to you know, leave marks you could see on a skull. And that was very troublesome and they investigated it.
They talked to people who had been there at the time of the crime, and they brought a bunch of witnesses to Durham, and outside the presence of the jury, they had a hearing before the judge to determine whether or not the evidence was admissible. And it was the similarities more than anything that got that in into the courtroom. I mean, how often is one person the last person to see a victim who found dead at the foot of the stairs in a pull of blood two times?
I mean it's like, you know, lightning just doesn't strike in the exact same place twice. And this is what it all looked like. And it was a similar crime. And the reports that had been filed were highly inadequate, and it was obvious that no one had really investigated this, and no one was forensic experience, had looked.
At the body at all, the person we haven't spoken about at all, And if someone were listening carefully, they'd say, well, how about Michael Peterson's wife, Patty her unique situation with her friend dying and knowing, as she says later, on knowing Michael Peterson for forty years, what was her position about guilt or innocence and what did she have to say to the police.
I think she could have seen him. I think she could have seen him kill Liz and would have still not believed it.
That woman was so.
Into standing by her man that she wouldn't even entertain the possibility that he was responsible. And in fact, she still, even though they were legally divorced, she still considered herself his wife and she would always be his wife in mind, because that you can't break who God has put together, you know, you can't.
Bring in asunder.
So she obviously had been controlled and manipulated by Michael Peterson for years, and somehow, even when she was free from him, she allowed herself to be that way with him anyway, And it was it was kind of bizarre. Actually, you don't see someone who is that intentionally blind and
it wasn't just these two dead women. I mean, she knew that another good kind of herders accused him of stealing money and credit cards from her wallet, and she'd seen him use the cards, and it just like you, no, if it's anything bad about Michael, I refused to entertain the possibility that it's true. And there were a lot of incidents like that where he took advantage of people
and got what he wanted by hurting others. And she just blew it all off, as if she too thought Michael was so exceptional that the rules didn't apply to him, just like Michael himself thought.
When we talk about the main motive for at this trial, and what has been conveyed and what's theorized, is that they talk about the financial situation, the deterring financial situation of Kathleen and then the deteriorating financial prospects of Michael Peterson in terms of being an author as a motive, tell us about what they did find out on both those fronts.
Well, the couple was in serious.
Credit card debt.
I mean, you know, it was like six figures of credit card debt and the house needed some money injected into it. It was really getting to the point.
That it was critical. It needed a new roof, it needed the.
Bats cleared out of the attic. I mean, there were a number of things that should have been regular maintenance for a house that old, that just hadn't been done.
For a few years. And and so.
Also, Kathleen was putting the majority percentage of her salary back into an account that the coup but he kept of her salary.
So that she was retaining it for the future. And she was the winner.
I mean, kat Michael was getting a pension from his service in the military, and he was getting very of diminishing.
Returns on his royalties.
And yes, he did have this one potential movie deal, but you know that doesn't really pay the bills. Well, I mean, when you have an option on one of your books, they give you a small amount of money.
Relative to the production cost of a film and look.
Into the possibilities of making a film and writing a script and all this. Until the movie's made, you basically don't see much at all. So that wasn't a big deal.
The possibility was.
A big deal that it would eventually get made into movies, but most of them that her option do not, so, you know, his prospects were slimmed aon, and the three girls were in college and the two grown boys were still getting money from them, and so things were getting a bit dire, and Michael Peterson never wanted anyone to think that he didn't have the money, so he just kept bringing up.
Debt and he when.
What the police believe is Kathleen had found out that he had been unfaithful to her and that she had.
Threatened to leave.
And when she threatened to leave, that meant she was taking all her income and taking her daughter away from that house. And that meant that Michael would now have four people that were financially dependent.
On him, and he would have his income just about cut off. So there was.
There was greed as a big incentive for ending her life.
And also he had gotten away with throwing somebody down a staircase, easily getting away with murder. Why not try it again?
A crime? When you've committed a crime and you get away with it and don't pay the price, it enables you to commit that same crime again or something even worse.
Now in the book, and for those people that watched the Netflix staircase, you also see somebody that was very very interesting in oj Simpson case, I thought, and he has done thousand the thousand cases doctor Henry Lee. How does doctor Henry Lee interpret this same crime scene? What does he have to say? And as you write in a book, it's very odd his again demeanor and behavior on the stand.
Yeah, and it was very clear that there was no love lost between doctor Lee and David Rudolph. It was pretty strange. I have never seen that kind of reaction between a defense attorney and their expert witness. Doctor Henry Lee said something that the nurses on the jury panel thought was particularly unintuitive, and that was that it was too much blood for a beating. Now, that doesn't even sensible by any.
Stretch of the imagination.
And he also did this weird fitting with watery ketchup and spitting it to show aspirated what aspirated blood spatter looks like. And it seemed as if it wasn't an accident that he got a bunch of that all over David Rudolph's suit. So, yeah, there was some antagonism there. But the one thing that he said that I thought supported Michael Peterson's guilt was that after he gave Tennis a testimony on direct about how stringing is.
Not a method that's used anymore. Nobody uses that. It's ridiculous, which is what the state guy had done.
The prosecutor had had him admit that, yes, he still does stringing himself. And he also said on the stand that he had reviewed Dwayne deavers of information in his reports and he said that it was clear from the photographs of the scene that there had been a point
of impact in mid air that caused blood spatter. Now, the defense was trying to say that all the blood spatter came when she fell back and hit her head, But here was their own witness saying, no, it wasn't hitting her head on the wall or the steps of the rail or anything like that. There was a point of impact with an object in Kathleen's head that was mid air, And to me, that was one of the most damning pieces of evidence in the whole trial. The other piece that to me is the most damning piece
of evidence were the red neurons in Kathleen's brain. Kathleen had red neurons that were found by a neurological pathologists with forensic experience. He found these red neurons, and the only time they appear in anyone's brain they've ever appeared is when someone slowly bled to death over a period of at least two and a half hours, and they're not even sure that it might be as much as
three hours. She had those in her brain. That means there was a very long time between when she was injured and knocked unconscious and when she bled to death. Michael Peterson said she was in loan in the house for forty five minutes. That piece of eva evidence made Michael Peterson's story a total lie.
You right too, And we just mentioned previously that the timeline is that she spoke to a Canadian colleague that you mentioned that she was going to have a meeting with on Sunday morning, and there was no evidence that she was slurred or that she was anything but her professional self at eleven pm that night, and then you're talking about two forty eight am when the ams arrived. I believe, yes, yes, very contrary to history, Oh.
Very much so.
And you know, and then there was another interesting piece of evidence that was not submitted in trial that I think explained some of the unanswered questions, the question or the big question is where.
Was the murder weapon and what was the murder weapon.
Well, here's an interesting thing about Todd Peterson. On the shoulder of the T shirt he was wearing.
Or I'm not sure whether it was a T shirt or was a sports.
Shirt with the collar, but anyway, in the shoulder of that shirt, there was a contact bloodstain, which meant that something that had blood on it rested on his shoulder for at least a brief time. Also, on the back of his shoe there was a perfectly round drop of Kathleen's blood, so it was clear that whatever was on his shoulder had dropped a drop of blood straight down to the back.
Of his shoe. What the police believe is that he came.
To the house, probably called by Michael Peterson, and saw what his father was doing trying to clean up the scene, and told him to stop, and then he is left and got rid of the murder weapon. Then he returned just as the first responders were arriving.
And that would explain a lot of the behavior that Todd does trying to interfere. Initially, when the EMS and other investigators come to the home, he's trying to leave. He's trying to offer his opinion. Of course, he's very very strongly says, in my opinion, I think she was just shit faced and fell down the stairs. So he is doing everything will be consistent with somebody that has something to hide or some affiliation with the crime.
Certainly, And you know, when he was told not to talk, not to talk to each other about what's going on, just sit in this room quietly, he wouldn't stop talking. He tried to talk to everybody and including his father, and he you know, he just was not listening.
To the police and following instruction.
He was making a major nuisance of himself.
And there's a dead woman laying there. Come on, grow up.
Yeah, Now you chronicle this entire ordeal, especially is striking to picture because I have seen their photos of Marissa, pardon me, Martha and Margaret. The people with the most, I guess, the most to lose the most, the most, the people that lost the most, but the people that lose the most by having to realize that everybody, the people closest to them, they have to walk away or
Todd was involved, their stepfather was involved. And then this incredible realization of the horror that is Michael Peterson, despite Rudolph and despite Henry Lee. What does the jury come back with with a verdict and what is what's Michael Peterson's reaction.
They came back with a verdict of guilty and he was sentenced to life without parole, and.
The jury.
Was pretty resolute in their feelings. I talked to a number of the juries about jurors about it, and Michael Peterson. He continued to claim his innocence and he, uh, you know, told the kids that everything would be all right. But he's saying he was marched off in handcuffs and center prison.
Yes, it's an incredible tale too. Kathleen's sister Candace and all of the people that are on the side of justice that want to see Michael Peterson get his due and then his fragile, damaged and family and this con man and you can see him in the dock like that.
It's just.
To me, he's just not a sympathetic character at all. And in the book more so of exactly less so the one sidedness of a documentary as it's limited. This book covers every single aspect of this case. What made these jurors convict him, what made people in his own family finally realize that he was a double murderer. I want to thank you very much Stean for coming on and talking about Written in Blood, a true story of murder in a sixteen year old secret that Torah found
only a part. I guess people want to take a look at your other work. How do they Do you have a website? Facebook page? Tell us how about that?
Yes, I've got a website. It's Dianesanning dot com and you can find all my true crime and all my fiction books on there. And my next true crime book comes out April thirtieth and it's called Death on the River. Wow.
Looking forward to that. We'll have to have you back on talking about that certainly. Thank you very much, Diane. You have a great evening. Thank you once again for coming on talking about Written in Blood. It's been fascinating.
Thank you, Dan, thank you.
Good night.