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The scripted series includes context about the Peterson family that was left out of the 2004 docuseries, reframes some of the story with what we’ve learned since, and makes the filmmakers characters in the drama.
Now, the eight-part HBO miniseries, also called The Staircase, written by Antonio Campos, a filmmaker who attended the original trial, and Maggie Cohn, a writer on Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story, deconstructs the story by revisiting the making of the documentary. But that didn’t settle the endless Reddit threads and internet theories proposing that Peterson was a sociopath who had murdered two women or, even more outlandishly, that an owl might have been responsible for Kathleen’s death. Its construction of the case emphasized prejudicial aspects, like the judge allowing evidence of Ratliff’s death, which a state medical examiner also deemed a homicide, and the prosecution exposing Peterson’s sex life so as to use jurors’ potentially anti-gay attitudes against him.īombshell revelations that a state examiner had fabricated evidence against Peterson came out in 2011, and Peterson was eventually released from prison. The docuseries focused on how Peterson’s family and the defense withstood prosecution.
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The result was 2004’s The Staircase, which used Peterson’s trial as the focus of a skeptical look at the US criminal justice system. French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, who was looking for a follow-up subject after his 2001 Academy Award–winning documentary about a wrongly accused Black teenager in Florida, Murder on a Sunday Morning, was given an all-access pass to cover Peterson’s defense. The court proceedings culminated in a guilty verdict and spawned books, a Lifetime movie, and countless hours of cable news coverage. Peterson’s sons from his own first marriage and his adopted daughters supported him. Kathleen’s sisters and a daughter from her first marriage, Caitlin, sat on the prosecution side. He had also been the last person to see close family friend Elizabeth Ratliff, the mother of his adopted daughters, alive before she, too, died at the foot of a staircase in 1985. More shockingly, they claimed his wife’s death fit a pattern. They brought out a gay escort he had corresponded with, speculating that Kathleen’s discovery of his bisexuality might have led to a confrontation that ended in murder. Days later, Peterson, a novelist and former mayoral candidate, was arrested for murder.Īt the trial the following year, prosecutors argued Peterson had led a double life.
The copious amount of blood around the staircase made her death suspicious, with her husband the prime suspect.
“She's still breathing! Please come!”īy the time police arrived at their 19-room Durham, North Carolina, home, Kathleen, a 48-year-old Nortel Networks vice president, was dead. “She fell down the stairs,” he told the operator, apparently in hysterics. In December 2001, Michael Peterson called 911 to report that his wife, Kathleen, had had an accident.