A Perfect Husband (26 page)

In fall 2001, Kathleen's
boss
was fired by Nortel. Just days before her boss was let go, he had warned her that her job had been placed on the “optimization” list, and secretly confided that he'd managed to save her job position. It was at that point that Kathleen Peterson developed a sense of impending doom. In the months before her death, Kathleen felt certain that she was about to lose her only real source of income. Nortel Networks was axing everyone who worked around her. Kathleen was taking on more responsibility with each firing, but that would only be a temporary solution for her plight. No matter how hard she worked, Kathleen could see the darkness waiting for her—she had come to the end of the corporate tunnel.

“But Mike Peterson, the creative thinker, the writer of fiction, was able to figure out the perfect solution,” Jim Hardin explained. “The solution was to make it appear as though Kathleen accidentally fell down the steps and died. And then like magic—no more money problems. Like magic—with Kathleen's death, Michael Peterson goes from a point where they're having to sell assets and live off credit to survive . . . to having 1.8 million dollars in his hand.”

That would be the amount Michael Peterson stood to get, Hardin told jurors, between his wife's life insurance policy and her deferred payment benefits. And that money, of course, would solve a lot of problems. It was a wonderful solution to the financial fire that Peterson had built for himself. But there was only one catch . . .

Peterson would have to kill his wife to get the $1.8 million....

Jim Hardin told jurors about the gamble that Michael Peterson took when he placed the first 9-1-1 call. Peterson was gambling that the police were as dumb as he thought they were. Peterson was gambling that the police would see his wife's death as he wanted them to see it. Peterson had called 9-1-1 to say there had been an accidental fall, and Jim Hardin asked the jurors to listen carefully to the tape of that first call. He would contend that Michael Peterson had selectively given information to the dispatcher, saying that his wife was still breathing—then hanging up.

In the second 9-1-1 call, Hardin emphasized, when Peterson had called again, moments later, suddenly his wife was not breathing. As the 9-1-1 operator continued to ask questions of him, Peterson didn't answer. Peterson was being very cautious about the information he was giving, the prosecutor said, because
he knew the call was being taped.

A question Hardin didn't raise, but something many people in the courtroom were wondering—especially as the 9-1-1 calls were later played by David Rudolf so jurors could hear the “panicked” voice of Michael Peterson—was why the distraught husband would deliberately hang up on the operator as his wife lay dying.

Peterson had initially reported that Kathleen was breathing.

It would make sense, then, that Peterson would have stayed on the phone with the dispatcher, that he would have wanted to get emergency instructions to try to save Kathleen. It would seem rational, since Peterson was clearly so upset on the phone, that he would do what most people did in an emergency. Most people would hang on the line to wait for help to arrive; they would want to keep the dispatcher on the line to help guide them through an attempt to save their spouses....

David Rudolf began his opening statement by playing the first 9-1-1 call that Peterson made on the night of his wife's death. The defense attorney wanted jurors to hear it for themselves—the voice of a frantic man. Rudolf wanted them to listen to all of Peterson's emotion on tape, asking jurors to decide whether he was evading questions or was a husband in a state of distress.

The defense attorney took the jurors back in time—to 1988—when Michael and Kathleen first met and fell in love. He wanted them to know that in the beginning, when his client met Kathleen Atwater, she was not the high-powered Nortel executive making oodles of money. Back then, Kathleen was a newly separated single mom who was working for Nortel as a technical writer, making $37,000 a year.

It wasn't her money that Michael was attracted to. It wasn't anything like that at all. Rudolf told jurors that Kathleen and Michael had connected in a way that only a few lucky people in the world ever experience. Their love had nothing to do with tangible things; they were soul mates. They were happy living together in a modest house. And when Michael Peterson sold his book
A Time of War
, then he was able to buy the Cedar Street home. This house was
not
a Hollywood mansion; it was just a very lovely, big, old house.

Rudolf pointed to Margaret and Martha Ratliff, sitting behind his client in the first row. He explained to jurors that Michael and Kathleen had raised the girls, that with the death of Kathleen, Margaret and Martha had lost a mother, just like Caitlin had lost a mother. The attorney wanted it known that Michael and Kathleen had worked hard to build a family. They had woven together the strands out of their prior families, and they had created a strong household.

The attorney stressed that what kept the Petersons together for
thirteen
years was their love and strong bond. It had nothing to do with furniture, or any earthly goods. The Petersons liked nice things, sure, but their love for each other was something so great, most people envied it. To prove his point, Rudolf read from an essay Caitlin Atwater had written in 1999, describing what Michael Peterson meant to her mom.

“Michael stopped my mother's tears,” Caitlin wrote. “I used to sit at the top of the stairs, leaning through the banister, and listen to my mother sob every night for a year after my father left. But Mike was able to restore her strength and confidence, and to show her that she could find true love. From the beginning, I was in debt to Mike in my heart and mind, for bringing back my mother's happiness.”

Rudolf continued reading Caitlin's essay, making certain that the jury heard the loving feelings Caitlin had toward her stepdad. So, it wasn't only that the Petersons were in love—they were also good parents. The Petersons took care of each other and their children with pride. They had the kind of bond that no one could deny. Their love couldn't be faked. Their relationship couldn't have been more perfect. Michael and Kathleen were so in tune with each other.

The defense attorney painted an image of Michael and Kathleen as being very affectionate with each other. In early December 2001, the couple had already gone out and bought their Christmas tree, and the weekend Kathleen died, they had been out dancing at a holiday party, until very late on Friday night. On Saturday, December 8, they had been celebrating a call about a potential movie deal. Michael's books had yet to be made into movies, but Rudolf explained that wasn't unusual. That was the way things went in Hollywood. Regardless, the Petersons were still excited at the prospect of a movie production, and they had reason to celebrate.

The two of them had decided champagne was in order, and that night they had made dinner and had settled in their cozy family room to watch a romantic movie,
America's Sweethearts
. Their son Todd had stopped by with a friend at about 9:30
P.M.
, and he had witnessed the Petersons drinking champagne and wine. The Petersons seemed happy and content. There was nothing unusual going on.

Not long after Todd and his friend left the house, at 11:08
P.M.
, Kathleen received a call from a coworker. It was Helen Preslinger calling from Ontario about a meeting that Kathleen was flying up to Canada to attend. The phone records had logged the call, Rudolf explained, and Preslinger would report that when she spoke to Kathleen, she could hear Michael in the background. Preslinger could hear no fighting going on, no tension in Kathleen's voice.

“Kathleen didn't say she had to get off the phone,” Rudolf told jurors. “It was a completely normal conversation.”

According to Rudolf, at around midnight, Kathleen and Michael had gone out to the pool, which was their habit, so he could smoke his pipe and she could sneak a few cigarettes. Then, somewhere in the vicinity of 1:45 to 2:00
A.M.
, Kathleen had excused herself to go upstairs to get some sleep. She wanted to be bright-eyed for a conference call she was expecting the next morning.

And that was the last time that Michael had seen his wife alive.

The defense attorney told jurors that on the night she died, Kathleen Peterson had a blood alcohol content of .07—just one point below the legal limit. He also pointed out that Kathleen had Valium in her system, which was not a good mix. The two substances together had what Rudolf called “a potentiating effect,” explaining that “each one makes the other more inebriated.”

David Rudolf told jurors, “It was a particularly bad combination for Kathleen Peterson, because she had been having headaches and dizziness for weeks. And she was wearing flip-flops, and she was climbing a narrow and steep and poorly lit stairway, a stairway that was made out of oak, hardwood, without any kind of floor covering.”

David Rudolf would describe how upset his client was when he found his wife at the foot of the stairs. He explained that Todd and his friend Christina had pulled up to the house at the same time the EMS and the Durham Fire Department had arrived. And, as expected, Rudolf would attack the quality of the police work in the case, suggesting that Durham police had allowed the scene to become altered and contaminated, while they were “looking for red flags” at the same time.

“Police had reason to think the worst of Michael,” the attorney told jurors, explaining, “the reason, just to put it bluntly, is because Michael Peterson had been criticizing the police for years.”

Peterson was one of those people—for better or for worse—who said what was on his mind. In his newspaper columns, Peterson wrote about the problems he had with the way the Durham police conducted their business. Rudolf claimed there were twenty or thirty different columns Peterson had written criticizing the police. He read from a sample 1999 column, where Peterson had complained that the police were doing little to fight drug dealers, calling them “incompetent.” In that column, Peterson had written that in Durham “the chance of a criminal getting caught is only slightly better than getting hit by lightning.”

In September 2000, Peterson had accused the Durham police of manipulating the crime statistics. In March 2001, Peterson had criticized the police for minimizing gang problems in Durham. The list went on.

And because of all the years of criticism, Rudolf asserted, the Durham police had developed what he called “tunnel vision” against Michael Peterson. Rudolf would argue that it wasn't hard for them to look at all the blood at the scene, the altered and contaminated scene, and assume the worst about Michael Peterson. His client became the suspect, Rudolf asserted, merely because he had blood on him. But Michael Peterson had been holding his deceased wife. Of course there would be blood on his clothes. Yet the police took him, like a suspect, and put him away in a room, and they wouldn't let him talk to his own son.

“Can you imagine?” Rudolf asked.

The police conduct was particularly offensive, in Rudolf's view, after Dr. Kenneth Snell, the state medical examiner, had arrived, and had then formed an opinion about what he personally observed at the scene. The medical examiner had found that Kathleen Peterson's death was a result of her head hitting the stairs, that it was an accident. And to impress jurors, Rudolf read aloud from Dr. Kenneth Snell's report:

“Probable cause of death, closed head injury, due to blunt-force injury to head, due to a fall down the stairs” was what Snell had written.

In Rudolf's opinion, because of the tunnel vision of police, because of the bias they were operating under, the die had already been cast against Peterson from the moment police arrived on the scene. The defense attorney would virtually tell jurors that once the indictment was obtained, the police went on a witch-hunt, looking for evidence that supported their view, ignoring any evidence that didn't. Rudolf would state that the Durham police had indicted first—then had gone out looking for evidence to support their indictment.

But Rudolf's view seemed out of sync. There were many things Jim Hardin had talked about in his opening statement, things that, with common sense, added up to murder. Hardin had said that when EMS had arrived at the scene, they had seen Michael Peterson standing over his wife, covered all over with blood. Hardin had said that Peterson was barefoot, that his shoes were bloody, sitting next to his dead wife. And he would offer a reason as to why Peterson would have taken his shoes off—the luminol testing, done by Durham police as they processed the scene, showed there were bloody footprints leading from the stairwell, through the kitchen, to the laundry room.

Durham investigators would later testify that Peterson's bloody footprints—had been invisible to the naked eye. The luminol, a chemical used to highlight the presence of blood, had picked up Peterson's steps, and they had documented a path that went through the dining area, to the kitchen counter, into the laundry room, and back to the stairwell. Those invisible bloody footsteps, the investigators would testify, looked like “rabbit tracks.”

Hardin had also spoken about the massive amount of blood all over the walls. Some of the blood in the stairwell was over six feet high. And there was cast-off spatter outside the stairway that was ten-feet high. Hardin had shown the jurors the crime scene photos, and he had described all the blood that was on Kathleen, under Kathleen, and below Kathleen—
blood that was all dry.

Based on the evidence, the jurors learned that Kathleen Peterson had been dead for some time, that there would be evidence to prove that she had been deceased long before EMS workers had arrived.

When David Rudolf addressed that issue, he would assert that after Kathleen Peterson had fallen, she had been lying at the bottom of the steps for some period of time. But Rudolf would contend that no one could say exactly how long Kathleen had lain there.

Her head had hit the steps and had split open “like a pumpkin,” Rudolf contended, which caused the massive loss of blood. The drawings and diagrams made by Dr. Deborah Radisch, he would tell jurors, were misleading. Rudolf explained that Dr. Radisch hadn't done it on purpose, but she had drawn diagrams of the splits in Kathleen's head that made them look wider than they actually were.

In short, Rudolf wanted jurors to know that his team of experts, including Dr. Henry Lee, would testify that the lacerations on Kathleen Peterson's scalp were more consistent with a fall. The defense attorney would assert that because Kathleen Peterson had suffered no brain contusions, because she had suffered no brain swelling, no internal hemorrhages, no skull fractures, the physical evidence supported his client's innocence.

“I mean, can you imagine somebody beating somebody over the head, whacking them as hard as they can, trying to kill them,” Rudolf asked, “and there's no skull fracture, there's no brain contusions?”

Rudolf went on to talk about the blood spatter, about the expensive replica Durham police had built of the bottom of Peterson's stairwell. He asserted that the tests conducted by Agent Duane Deaver, the blood spatter expert of the State Bureau of Investigation, were inaccurate. Rudolf took cheap shots at Deaver's work, going so far as to point out that the tests Duane Deaver conducted were done with blood from the Red Cross.

The attorney never mentioned that the blood Deaver obtained from the Red Cross was already dated, that the blood had a shelf life, that Duane Deaver hadn't used any blood that could have possibly saved a life.

Rudolf showed a video of Deaver's tests in which the expert used a sponge, putting blood on it, to discover how the cast-off blood might have gotten into such strange places along the Peterson stairwell. The defense attorney attacked Deaver's methods, and he contended that the amount of blood in the stairway, as horrific as it might seem, wasn't consistent with a beating. Rudolf had a completely different explanation as to how all that blood splattered along the Peterson stairwell.

“You all have seen dogs shake water off, and it goes all over,” Rudolf told jurors. “Well, that's what happens with blood as well. Hands or clothes coming in contact with the wall. Or coughing up blood. Or sneezing blood. That's what causes all the blood spatter that you'll see.”

Regarding the autopsy photos, Rudolf insisted that photos could be “misleading,” that they could express a point of view “designed to show something.” He implied that prosecutor Jim Hardin had tried to shock people by showing them such gruesome photos. He told jurors that with his display of harrowing photographs, Jim Hardin was trying to
haunt
them.