a decade after he was arrested for killing his wife, kathleen, an older-looking michael peterson was back in a north carolina courtroom arguing for a retrial on the grounds that the state s crucial blood pattern expert had given false testimony against him. but as far as kathleen s sister, candace, was concerned, prison was where peterson deserved to rot. my sister s dead for eternity. oh, no, no, no. he murdered my sister. he took the prime of her. he needs to be held accountable for what he did. over the course of a seven-day hearing rudolph dissected the testimony of duane deaver.
becoming a family together. they sat me down and said, you know, caitlin, how would you like it if martha and margaret come to live with you? and i just immediately thought, a permanent sleepover! and that s exactly how michael presented it to his two girls. margaret s the older. it s really funny. i think he put it, we re gonna have a long sleepover, and we said, yeah! reporter: her younger sister martha. of course we want to live with caitlin and kathleen, and play barbies, and, um, be a family together. so michael and his four kids and kathleen and her daughter became a blended family. he was a former u.s. marine-turned-full- time writer who liked to draw on his wartime experiences in vietnam. one of his vietnam books got a big advance, money that went towards buying that fine house. they said, we re thinking about moving into this house. and they drove us over. we didn t even go inside. we just looked and we thought, oh, my goodness, you know, this is ama
michael peterson was the last person known to have see 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? 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. the state s case lasted more than two months. and each day, michael peterson s girls, margaret and martha, sat in court, suffering as prosecutors labeled their dad a killer. they would accuse my father of double murders, or the wife murder, or the staircase murders? and we couldn t stand up and say, wait a second. this isn t true. michael peterson did not testify at his trial but he did sit down with us recently to
on a beautiful blue sky day, the remains of elizabeth ratliff were exhumed from their resting place in texas. julia sims, the reporter who covered the story from the beginning. and the bells started tolling right as they started pulling that casket out of the the ground. hmm. a lot of people were very antsy about that, about what they were gonna find. her body was driven to north carolina where it would be studied by the same medical examiner who d ruled kathleen peterson s death a homicide. r there was a risk here, wasn t there? if you opened that coffin and found that the authorities in germany had been correct in ruling it a death by natural causes. we just decided that it needed to be done. roll the dice, basically. exactly. reporter: the detective the detective peered through a morgue window as the top was pried off elizabeth ratliff s coffin. it was so airtight it was hard to use the crank to get the casket to open. once it was raised you could see par
kathleen s body, suggesting she may have been attacked well before peterson called 9-1-1. according to prosecutors, lab tests backed that up. kathleen s head injuries had produced something called red neurons, which they say form after oxygen is withheld from the brain for at least two hours. that gives mr. peterson at least two hours to do things before the 9-1-1 call is placed. what was he doing during all that time? the state argued he was staging the scene. detectives saw what they thought were wipe marks on the stairs. to them, it was an attempt at a clean up. and there were those two wine glasses on the kitchen counter suggesting an evening of maybe too much drink, followed by a tumble down the stairs. thing was, kathleen s fingerprints weren t on either glass. in fact, the prosecution said, kathleen s blood-alcohol content was low enough that she could have passed a roadside breathalyzer test. she wasn t drunk.