How Did Kathleen Peterson Die? These Are the 4 Main Theories From The Staircase

This is the theory that Michael presented to the police and prosecutors: that December night in 2001, Michael had been sitting by the pool on his luxurious property smoking his pipe while his wife went back into the house to do work. The novelist claims to have gone inside 45 minutes later to find Kathleen unconscious at the bottom of their stairs. He told paramedics that she must have fallen down 15 or 20 steps because she had been drinking and wearing flimsy flip-flops.

But of course, investigators soon dug up evidence that put Michael's narrative under scrutiny.

On the surface, this is the story with the strongest evidence — but that evidence has been put under question over recent years.

Prosecutors claimed at the time of the trial that Michael had used their family blow poke to beat Kathleen to death . . . but there was no blow poke to be found. This was suspicious to the prosecution, and Michael's son found the blow poke toward the end of the trial. There was no blood on it or damage, so it was ruled out as a murder weapon. In The Staircase, Michael and his team found out that investigators had discovered the blow poke early in the investigation and even took pictures of it, but never gave this information to the defense team.

The crime scene pictures are pretty damning. Michael's wife Kathleen lay in a pool of blood with seven deep lacerations to her head. According to forensic scientists, the blood did not look fresh and the wall appeared as though it had been washed. There were blood drops in Michael's shorts and a bloody shoe print on Kathleen's pants leg. It also struck investigators as strange that he wore shorts when it was 51 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

Besides the physical evidence, the court also admitted circumstantial evidence. Investigators found gay pornography on Michael's computer, as well as correspondence with male escorts. Michael asserts that Kathleen had known about his sexuality and trysts with men. On the flip side, prosecutors claimed that Kathleen did not know and that he murdered her when she found out.

Then, there are the eerie parallels between his wife and Elizabeth Ratliff's deaths. When he lived in Germany with his ex-wife, Michael had been friends with Elizabeth, who was a widow with two daughters. In her will, Elizabeth indicated that she wanted Michael to take care of her daughters and her personal properties. Elizabeth was eventually found at the bottom of her stairs with lacerations on her head, with Michael being the last person to have seen her alive. Her death was presumed to have been due to a cerebral hemorrhage. Her body was exhumed two decades later for Michael's case, and American investigators ruled her death a homicide, though did not charge him for her death. Michael did in fact adopt her two daughters, who stand by his innocence to this day.

In 2003, the Durham county jury found Michael guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Then again, there is reason to doubt this theory. In 2010, the defense team dug up forensic incompetence in the case by a blood analyst named Duane Deaver, who had been accused of falsifying evidence on other cases. In 2011, Michael, who had spent eight years in prison, was granted a retrial hearing. Michael's team called for a dismissal, arguing that most of the evidence had been, by now, contaminated because of movers and improperly sealed evidence bags. They also found out that Kathleen's clothes were never tested for DNA. The judge would later deny the motion, asserting that the DNA testing fell on the defense team.

The possibility of an intruder is not completely out of the question. Half a year before Kathleen died, Michael reported a burglary, saying that his phone had been stolen. He clarified the report the next day, saying that his son's phone had been taken and that his son probably knew who took it. At one point during the year of Kathleen's death, Peterson also mentioned five automobile break-ins on his property.

While creating a request for a dismissal, Peterson's attorneys also built their argument by pointing to Michael's past columns, and targets as a mayoral candidate (specifically, drug dealers). The lawyers suggested that people may have felt threatened by Michael and went after his family. Again, even if there was an intruder, no one will know for sure since Kathleen's clothes were never DNA tested.

In The Staircase, David Rudolf (pictured above), Michael's original defense attorney, shared his thoughts. "Can I rule out that it's an intruder? I can't. No one can. You can say there's no evidence of that, but it's well known that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so we don't know," the lawyer explained.

To argue that an owl attacked Kathleen might seem like a far stretch, but this theory actually has credibility. Since de Lestrade's documentary focuses on the legality of Michael's case, we don't hear much about this argument in the 13-episode saga.

It's a theory that was spearheaded by Durham lawyer T. Lawrence Pollard, who lived near the Petersons but had no hand in the trial itself. The available evidence showed that Kathleen had microscopic feathers and slivers of tree bark in her left hand, and that cedar needles were found on her body. As for the blood on the walkway and the front door? They could have been made by Kathleen falling after being attacked by an owl outside.

Pollard contended that the lacerations on the back of Kathleen's head were consistent with gashes made by owl talons. As wild as it sounds, bird experts and scientists have backed up his theory. Kate Davis, the executive director of the organization Raptors of the Rockies, conducted an ad hoc experiment with her own barred owl by using a metal salad bowl covered in clay. On the bowl, the bird created deep cuts, which were similar to Kathleen's injuries.

Additionally, bird enthusiast and reporter Joe Bargmann writes in Audobon, "An owl strike can definitely cause blunt-force trauma. What's more, the raptors are known to dive-bomb humans when they feel threatened, almost always targeting the head."

In March 2017, Rudolf filed a motion to obtain the feathers, but once the case ended, there was no funding to test them. So whether she was murdered in cold blood or attacked by an owl, we'll never know with certainty what prompted Kathleen Peterson's tragic fate.