Season 08 Episode 28: Oh, Steel Thy Sweetheart Woman

on with the show. It was two forty am on December ninth, two thousand and one when a call came in to the nine one one Emergency Services Center in Durham, North Carolina.

of his wife, forty eight year old Kathleen Peterson. She was positioned awkwardly against the lower steps, with her head resting against the wall of the stairwell. Her pajamas were soaked with blood. The walls and several of the steps had also been splattered with blood, while under her head was a wet roll of blood soaked paper towels. As the police worked to calm Michael down and keep him away from the scene, the paramedics dashed in to assess

the victim. Even in those initial moments, the officers couldn't help but notice some peculiarities about the scene. First off was the sheer amount of blood and the unusual spatterings, both seemingly inconsistent with a simple fall. Then there was the oddness of a pair of trainers and white socks, assumed to be Mica, alongside a pair of flip flops, presumably Kathleen's, just next to the body. It wasn't long

before the paramedics realized that Kathleen was dead. With a wail of emotion, Michael pushed past the officers and threw himself down beside Kathleen's body, caressing her as he cried. Only when Michael's son Tod arrived soon after, was he finally prized away from the scene. By now, neighbors up and down the street had begun to appear in their doorways, woken by the persistent howl of emergency vehicles as one after another arrived at the Peterson property. They watched on,

bleary eyed with a growing sense of dread. As a team of investigators in white protective coveralls disappeared into the Peterson's home. It was clear that something very bad had just happened there, but quite what exactly would turn out to be one of the most confounding and potentially bizarre mysteries of recent times. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean smith. Kathleen Hunt Peterson was an engineering graduate

who worked for a telecommunications manufacturing company in town. Following her death, neighbours described her to the press as a sweet, good natured friend and a loving mother who'd lived life to the full. She was active in the local Historic Preservation Society and served on the board of the Durham

Arts Council, helping to raise money for local arts. By all accounts, as he told it to police, Michael Peterson had very much picked a winner when the two first got together, and the pair, who'd been married for four years, were very much in love. When police began their questioning, Michael said that prior to her apparent four he and his wife had been sitting outside by the swimming pool

at the rear of the house, drinking wine. After some time, Kathleen left, saying that she was going upstairs to bed. When he finally got up and went inside, Peterson said that was when he found his wife lying at the bottom of the stairs leading up to their bedroom. A veteran of the American Vietnam War, Michael Peterson was an author. He'd written four books based on his combat experiences and had been a freelance columnist for a while for Durham's

herald Son newspaper. He'd also run as a candidate to be Durham's mayor. Despite his insistence that his and Kathleen's relationship was solid, it wasn't long before the police began to question his version of events. For a start, there was the large amount of blood at the scene, too much it seemed to police investigators to be an accidental fall. And then there were the wounds to Kathleen Peterson's head.

Unlike blunt force trauma as you might expect from a fall, these wounds were narrow and much more likely to have been caused by a sharp implement weel did with force. It didn't help that Peterson's past behavior had not always been exemplary. He had lost his bid to become mayor when it transpired that the permanent injury to his right leg, which he claimed had been sustained in combat, had in fact been sustained in a car accident in Japan some

years later. There were whispers too that he had secretly been consorting with sex workers and might be bisexual, a fact he had concealed from his wife very quickly. Michael Peterson became the prime suspect in what was looking increasingly like an open and shut case of murder. The police and public prosecutor began to build their case against him. During multiple visits to the Peterson home, they found items including a used condom, bloody hair from a diet coke can,

a knife, a wine bottle, and a wineglass. They sampled hair, traces of blood, and what they described as Christmas tree needles from the staircase. In the end, the state medical examiner who performed the autopsy determined the cause of death to be from multiple injuries to the back of Kathleen Peterson's head, inconsistent with the fall down the stairs. On December twenty, two thousand one, just eleven days after Kathleen's death, a grand jury indicted Michael Peterson on a charge of

the first degree murder of his wife. Michael Peterson turned himself in at the Durham County Jail, surrounded by his two sons from a previous marriage, his brother, and a media throng. He wept openly, insisting that he was innocent, missed Kathleen terribly and looked forward to exonerating himself in court.

His defense team had its work cut out. Led by a prominent lawyer named David Rudolph, they filed a counterbrief claiming that missus Peterson had either fallen down the stairs or more likely been attacked by an intruder to the family's home. They accused the police of botching the investigation by failing to seize important evidence during their initial search of the Peterson property, having returned to confiscate additional items.

They also described how the couple's home had been broken into several times, including just six months before Kathleen's death. After eighteen months of investigations, on July first, two thousand three, under leaden Gray Skies, a phalanx of TV trucks, journalists, and camera crew jostled for the best positions in front of the Durham County Court House for the opening day of the trial. Inside, the court house was filled to capacity. After Judge Orlando Hudson had seated the jury, the lawyers

made their opening statements. Prosecuting District Attorney Jim Hardin stood in front of a jury of eight women and four men and told them that the alleged fairy tale marriage that they were no doubt here described by the defense team was very likely a lie. He then held up a blow poke, a four foot long metal poker with a mouthpiece at one end used to blow air onto a fire and a short hook on the other. This Hardin claimed was an example of the implement very likely

used to murder Kathleen Peterson. He claimed that the actual murder weapon from the deceased's house had conveniently disappeared immediately after her death. Defense attorney David Rudolph responded, insisting that Kathleen had died from a tragic but accidental form. The arguments and counter arguments went on for almost two months. At one point, defense lawyer Rudolph stunned everyone in the courtroom by playing a loud recording of the defendant's desperate

nine one one calls. Peterson wept as he was forced to relive those moments, potentially humanizing him to the jury, just as Rudolph intended. The defense yints team then presented a stop action animation they'd commissioned, showing Kathleen falling backwards down the stairs, cracking her head not once but twice on the way down, then slipping and cutting her scalp

one more time on the corner of the staircase. As David Rudolph's case for the defense went on, he again accused the Durham police of bungling the death scene investigation, contaminating the crime scene with too many officers. He also alleged that the police were out to get Michael Peterson because he'd been publicly critical of them for years, including in columns he'd written in the local paper in the

late nineteen nineties. Rudolph also showed the jury a video of officers from the State Bureau of Investigation or SBI, attempting to reach create the blood spatters in the stairwell. They used a poker to bludgeon a mannikin's head containing a large blood filled sponge on a mock up stairway. The attempt clearly failed to reproduce the spatter found at

the scene. A forensic expert for the defense was then called to testify that the blood spatters at the death scene were in fact consistent with a fall, not a beating. David Rudolph concluded his case while stood in front of a photograph showing a relaxed and laughing Kathleen sat on Michael's lap, gesturing to the loving image. Rudolph wrapped up by insisting this was a couple who deeply loved each other and that the idea of Michael murdering Kathleen was

simply out of the question. In response, the prosecution called paramedic Jay Rose, one of the first to arrive in response to the nine one one call. A veteran of over thirty callouts to accidental falls typically, he said, if someone had fallen downstairs from a similar height to Kathleen, he wouldn't expect to find more than a broken bone or two and at worst a broken neck. Never had he come across an accident seen in that regard with

such a huge volume of blood. An eSPI Eye agent then told the jury that investigations of Peterson's phone records and emails on his computer contained evidence that he'd been in touch with a male escort service. A former escort named Brent Walgamot testified that Michael Peterson had arranged to pay him for sex just three months before Kathleen's death,

although the two never actually met. The prosecution clearly wanted to show that, far from being in a happy marriage, Peterson was in fact a frustrated bisexual suffering from the pressure of keeping his sexuality hidden. When his alleged infidelities had been discovered by his wife, they suggested a violent

pulside argument had ensued, resulting in Kathleen's murder. After fourteen hours of deliberation, on October tenth, two thousand three, the jury found Michael Peterson guilty of first degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Kathleen's

family felt that justice had been served. It was subsequently revealed that back in November nineteen eighty five, when Michael and his first wife were living in Germany, Elizabeth Ratliffe, godmother to one of his sons who lived near by, had also been found dead at the foot of a staircase. According to Peterson, he was asleep when it happened, and the death was due to a cerebral hemorrhage. Judge Hudson

correctly ruled the information as inadmissible. Though it spared Peterson the awkward problem of having to explain how two women he'd been close to had ended up dead at the bottom of a staircase, its eventual revelation only served to further cement his apparent guilt. As Michael Peterson began his sentence in North Carolina's Nash Correctional Institution. He continued to protest his innocence, but despite an appeal, the state Supreme

Court upheld his conviction. Three months later, Durham based lawyer and businessman Larry Pollard was just starting his day at the office when his phone rang. When he picked up, he was startled to hear the voice of his former neighbor from Forest Hills, Michael Peterson, calling him from jail. As Peterson explained he was in the prison wreck room the previous day when his attention was suddenly caught by a local TV report involving two men in the nearby

town of Apex. Both had been attacked by a territorial barred owl. Peterson wanted Larry to follow up on the story for him, in the hope that it might prove to be a possible explanation for what had happened to his wife and exonerate him. A little skeptical but intrigued, Larry agreed to help and promptly track down Chris Cox,

one of the victims of the owl attack. When Larry and Chris Cox discussed the details of Kathleen Peterson's murdericates the two men felt strongly that many things didn't add up. The supposed murder weapon, the blowpoke that was said to have disappeared from the Peterson's home, was later claimed to have been found in the garage with no traces of blood or damage to it. That only Kathleen's scalp was injured without any damage to the skull appeared to undermine

the theory that she'd been struck forcibly by an assailant. Additionally, there was no physical evidence of a struggle, such as skin found beneath her fingernails, although of course, had she been attacked from behind, she might not have had a chance to struggle before falling down the stairs. All this, coupled with Chris Cox's recent experience with a bardow, was

enough to convince Larry to dig further. A few days later, one of Pollard's team was down in the local police archives sifting through endless boxes of evidence relating to the trial. Flicking through the pages of one document, he suddenly saw something that stopped him in his tracks. It was an SBI laboratory report containing an entry which hadn't been given a second glance during Peter Sisson's trial. Now primed with the new owl theory, one worked jumped off the page.

Feather or three microscopic feathers to be precise, discovered and twined in some strands of Kathleen Peterson's hair. The hair that had been pulled out by the roots close to the wounds on the back of her head were found clutched in the dead woman's left hand. Though he was met with disbelief or ridicule whenever he mentioned his burgeoning our theory to people, the more Larry Pollard researched, the

more convinced of the theory he became. Records of owl attacks in the US between eighteen seventy seven and nineteen fifty showed there were seventy nine reports of owl's attacking people at a rate of around two year. One on an elderly farmer in Pennsylvania in nineteen eleven, was fatal. Two others resulted in prolonged hospital stays, and at least three left the victims unconscious. Around half the attacks resulted in serious lacerations to either the arms or head. Seven

victims lost one or both eyes. Many of the other attacks left scratches to the head or face, with numerous reports of hair being torn out, ribbed scalps, and severe blood loss. One report of a barred owl attack was accompanied with photos showing an eye injury and puncture wounds made by the claws of the attacking owl that looked

strikingly similar to those on Kathleen Peterson's scalp. For Larry Pollard, the timing of Kathleen's death was suggestive two It's in December when bard ours in North Carolina begin to establish breeding territories, which they are known to defend aggressively. There were many instances of them dive bombing humans, almost always targeting the head, and so Larry Pollard began to construct

a different timeline of events. On the night Kathleen Peterson died in two thousand and one, North Carolina was experiencing a drought. The established timeline showed that Kathleen Peterson had been drinking wine with her husband by the back yard pool, where there was also a fountain. Could it be Larry wondered that with it being such a dry year, small mammals would have been drawn to the Peterson's fountain, in

turn drawing in barred owls that preyed on them. Toxicology reports found anti anxiety and muscle relaxant medication in Kathleen Peterson's blood. Pollard theorized that at some point, woozy from the combination of boos and drugs, Kathleen had headed to the house and then out into the front yard out of earshot from her husband. That, according to Pollard, was

when the owl could have attacked. Even though bard owl's only typically weigh between one and a half and two pounds, when one strikes at a speed of thirty five to forty miles an hour, the impact can feel surprisingly intense for such a light animal. Pollard proposed that the bird struck Kathleen in the back of her head without warning.

It then dug its claws deep into her scalp, causing the seven lacerations revealed by the autopsy, lacerations he believed now were far more consistent with the pattern and size of owl talons than the end of a fireplace tool. While not cracking the skull, the owl's razor sharp talons

would have caused huge amounts of bleeding. With the owl now entangled in Catherine's head, Pollard suggested it would be reasonable to assume that Kathleen panicked, tearing clumps of hair from her own scalp as she fought desperately to free herself from the owl. Kathleen was also found to have cedar needles stuck to one of her hands with a tiny fragment of wood, as well as more cedar needles

under her fingernails. Could these have in fact come from an owl being transferred to Kathleen's hands when she supposedly fought it off. Finally, as Pollard's theory went on, having eventually freed herself from the owl's grip, he suggested that Kathleen then staggered into the house as blood from her wounds dripped over the front steps and smeared on the inside of the door, in an attempt to climb the stairs,

presumably on route to the master bedroom. In shock and pain from the attack, Bleeding heavily and feeling woozy from the wine and pills, she lost her balance as she reached the top step and fell backwards to her death. In August two thousand eight, Larry Pollard held a news conference on the steps of the Durham County Courthouse with a pair of stuffed owls as props. In front of a small crowd of local media, he delivered his hypothesis

about the potential owl attack. However, in the end, his theory never had the chance to be tested in court. In twenty eleven, emotion for a new trial was granted based on evidence that State Bureau of Investigations agent Dwayne Diva misled the judge and jury while giving his testimony

at the original trial. It turned out that Diva had failed to report the results of lab tests that would have been perceived as favorable to Michael Peterson, and so in December twenty eleven, Peterson was essentially released from prison on a technicality, after serving only eight years of what should have been a lifetime sentence without parole. In February twenty seventeen, he was allowed to take an Alford plea, a bizarre legal arrangement which enabled him to avoid any

further jail time. The plea constituted an acknowledgment from Michael that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him of voluntary manslaughter without actually having to admit guilt. Peterson was then sentenced again to time served and set free as unbelievable as it may be, bard owts have continued to regularly

attack people in parts of the US. In the early spring of twenty twenty two, conservation biologist Margaret Fowl was cross country skiing near her home in Vermont when she felt something hit the back of her head, followed by a sharp pain. Putting her hands up, she felt two legs with sharp talons gripping onto her head and hat. With prior experience of working in a wraptor rehab center, Fowl knew straight away that this was a barred owl.

It took several minutes before she managed to free herself and the owl flew off, only to turn around and continue swooping at her, striking her on the head several more times. Having made its point, the owl eventually stopped its attack and flew off with her hat. In twenty twenty four, a man in Mobile, Alabama, was struck twice by an owl in the same week while out on a morning run. The first time it occurred, Trace Galloway thought he would being mugged when he was hit on

the back of his head. Then he saw the owl flying away with one of his Apple AirPods in its talons. Five days later, he was assaulted again, this time by two owls seemingly working together. After one owl hit him on the side of his head, he turned just in time to see another flying right at him from the opposite direction. As he dodged the second owl, the first attacked again, delivering a blow that knocked the man off his feet. Thankfully, a friend happened to be driving by

at that precise moment. Galloway jumped into his truck and escaped with just a few wounds on his hands from the fall. Even still, it would have taken an extraordinary series of events for Kathleen Peterson to have fallen victim to a similar attack, all without the knowledge of her husband, who would have been with her only moments before. For his part, Michael Peterson continues to protest his innocence and

ignorance as to what really happened to his wife. He's also spoken out against what he claims is a crooked justice system in which duplicitous law enforcement officers and crime scene analysts deliberately stacked the odds against him. Kathleen Peterson's family and many others, however, insist that only Michael knows the real truth about what happened to Kathleen, and whether he takes that to his grave or not is up to him. This episode was written by Diane Hope and

produced by me Richard McLean Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordeded in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book

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nineteen forty seven. That's seventy two years, in which time he wrote books and poetry, painted pictures, and started a publishing company. He developed an entire system of ceremonial magic. You could actually argue he started a whole religion. He traveled the world, climbed mountains, met a ton of celebrities, lived through two World Wars. Probably worked for British intelligence, may or may not have worked against British intelligence. He

supposedly chatted to the god Horus in Egypt. He met an alien in New York, got kicked out of India for shooting two men who tried to mug him, got kicked out of Sicily for running a sex cult. He was addicted to heroin, hollowed out his nose on cocaine, and shagged pretty much everything he met with a pulse. The British tabloids called him the wickedest man alive.