In the early morning hours of Dec. 9, 2001, Michael Peterson called 911 in a panic. “My wife had an accident,” he said.
“What kind of accident?” the dispatcher asked.
“She fell down the stairs,” Peterson, a novelist and local newspaper columnist, replied.
Peterson spoke frantically as he told the dispatcher that his wife, Kathleen — who lay in a pool of blood at the bottom of a back staircase in the couple’s 9,000-square-foot Durham, N.C., mansion — was breathing, but unconscious. He struggled to say how many stairs (“15, 20, I don’t know!”) she had fallen down. “Please,” Peterson pleaded. “Get somebody here right away.”
On Dec. 20, Peterson was charged with murdering his wife, a telecommunications executive with prominent ties to the Durham community. The district attorney’s office would argue that Kathleen Peterson’s injuries, which included multiple head lacerations, were inconsistent with a fall down the stairs. Rather, prosecutors alleged, Peterson had beat her to death.
In October 2003, after a three-month trial, a jury convicted Peterson of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison. But that was only the beginning of a confounding, often sensational legal saga. Over the past decade and a half, the Peterson case has been the subject of numerous documentaries, a BBC radio podcast and was even spoofed in an NBC comedy.