that in the end the petersons were still worth $1.5 million. i had money. and it s not a matter it was not a financial problem. reporter: but what about that dramatic trial-within-a-trial the jury had seen? michael, implicated in not one murder, but two that friend, elizabeth ratliff s, death long ago in germany. so there you are in the court of public opinion this guy with two important women in your life and they re both dead in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. exactly. absolutely. has to be guilty. you re a writer of fiction. your editor would probably take that kind of coincidence out of the book. well, he would say, well, you know, come up with another one. she died in the bathtub or something. but no. but you re not immune to the irony of this, huh? no. of course not. but at the time because in in the course of this investigation didn t even occur to me. honest to god, it never even occurred to me. did you kill her? liz? no. of course not.
at tomorrow morning or this morning. keep it here for more coverage on this tragedy in southern california. you re watching msnbc. michael peterson was the last person known to have seen his friend elizabeth alive, just like his wife kathleen. it was the bow that wrapped up the state s case. do you really believe that lightning strikes twice in the same place? do you? reporter: so there was the prosecution s case for conviction, blood evidence, a staged scene, and the trigger, the violent confrontation between husband and wife that resulted when a secret appetite for men was exposed. and not a bit of that made any sense, the defense was about to tell the jury. the state s case lasted two months. and each day, michael peterson s girls, margaret and martha, sat in court, suffering as prosecutors labeled their dad a
reporter: as time went by, margaret blair had come to accept michael peterson s explanation of her sister s death years before, a tumble down the stairs in a german townhouse. i just believed what i was told about the cerebral hemorrhage and, you know, i m presuming that a doctor had, you know, made this diagnosis. reporter: but when she learned that kathleen had also been found dead at the bottom of a staircase, margaret began wondering anew about how her sister died. she started reaching out elizabeth s old friends from germany. when i talked to her friends, i found out that blood had been dripping down the walls. well, that doesn t happen when you have a cerebral hemorrhage. reporter: authorities in north carolina were thinking the same thing. if foul play had been involved
it was remarkable. reporter: they were stunned. the body was practically intact. her fingernail polish was still on. her dress was still perfectly in place. reporter: the m.e. took a closer look at the injuries to elizabeth s head. she was finding lacerations, deep gouges in the scalp. seven of them. seven lacerations. you could black: it was amazing count them. it was uncanny. the lacerations were very similar to the ones that had been perpetrated upon kathleen peterson. and in her findings, she made a decision that ms. ratliff had been had been murdered. reporter: investigators thought they d hit pay dirt. in death, they thought kathleen peterson and elizabeth ratliff could have been twins. i m just thinking that, that my case is getting a whole lot better. reporter: kathleen s sister candace thought that peterson had killed both women. i have a better chance of being struck by lightning than finding two people who i intimately know at the bottom of
in elizabeth ratliff s death, it might bolster their case. but the only way to know for sure, they concluded, was to dig up elizabeth s grave. assistant district attorney freda black. we decided that it probably would be worthwhile to try to exhume her body to determine whether the findings in germany were accurate or not. reporter: to do that, they d have to get the okay from elizabeth s daughters, margaret and martha. the girls, who believed in their father s innocence as fiercely as they mistrusted the authorities, struggled with the decision. the hardest thing i ve ever had to do was to write off on the exhumation of our birth mother. reporter: but ultimately, they agreed. and i signed off on it because we wanted to be, like, there is no way this could ve happened. like, please look at the evidence. i will do this to to free our dad of these accusations. reporter: on a beautiful blue