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As someone who’s been intrigued since childhood by fair crime stories and forensics, I was transfixed by this magnificently crafted documentary when it premiered some years ago on the Sundance Channel. The sinuous plot that the epic unfolds, how starkly the characters on all sides advance to sing themselves, the mystery of what actually happened to Kathleen Peterson, the tragedy of three families torn asunder over two decades, and all of it framed by truly haunting modern music…I often found myself gasping in amazement and appreciation. What a rare opportunity to be a soar on the wall, an insider regarding this unbelievable and deeply disturbing tale! I remember starting out with a strong feeling of sympathy for the dreadful husband, Michael Peterson, and identification with the twin tragedies of losing a loved one and being unjustly accused.
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Nonetheless, even though the film was clearly sympathetic to the defense – chapter titles like `Prosecution Trickery’ and `A Mature Case’ leave no doubt – and granted grand more time to their arguments and concerns, a gut feeling began to emerge: neither Michael Peterson nor his sage added up. How on earth could a descend down the stairs cause those injuries, or result in that powerful blood? And if it was an accident, why did he pick off his shoes? Try to wipe the walls neat? Lie to 911 about Kathleen breathing when she had clearly been tiresome for some time? Lie to the EMTs about being in the house honest prior to the tumble and saying it must have happened when he fair went out to the pool for a few minutes? Change his account for the detectives when he realized the evidence told a different account? Despite extensive opportunities to provide a detailed explanation and get a strong case for reasonable doubt – including a computer-simulated multiple-fall scenario – the defense’s hired guns failed to persuade, perhaps because Peterson’s gain comportment was often so damning.
Long after seeing `The Staircase’, I realized I was detached bugged by the case. I began to read more about the trial, survey at the evidence…and was timid to accept a report almost completely different from the film! What director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade left on the cutting room floor was a towering mountain of irrefutable forensic evidence pointing to Peterson as a vicious, calculating killer. Fair the blood spatter evidence alone would have been more than sufficient to reveal that this was cancel, committed by Michael: spray patterns high on the walls indicated that a long, thin weapon with the victim’s blood on it was whipped around in the stairwell; some of the spatter was from blows where the victim’s head was nowhere advance the steps, stairlift, or track; comely spatter from struck blows – not footsteps, say – found its design upward into the crotch of Michael Peterson’s shorts, proving he stood over her, striking the top of her head; his bloody footprint was stamped onto her pants leg; there were layers of fresher blood on drier blood, with later impacts spraying an set of the wall that had already been wiped down in a furtive attempt to orderly up. The blood evidence strongly suggests that Michael opinion she was unimaginative and already had attempted to alter the scene when she revived unexpectedly – probably while he was in the kitchen – prompting a second, fatal attack at the foot of the stairs.
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`The Staircase’ doesn’t exactly describe how it was almost immediately positive to investigators that the scene had been staged; that attempts had been made to camouflage the bloody flow to the kitchen; and that in all this blood there was not a footprint, fingerprint, or other brand of an intruder (one cramped feather aside, no evidence of a killer owl, the defense team’s latest Hail Mary assertion) . Furthermore, the autopsy findings were replete with complex, time-dependent trauma you don’t hear about in the film, including defensive wounds; facial lesions indicating a struggle; the lack of congruence between the scalp lacerations, the steps, and the stairlift; and the presence of `red neurons’ in the brain, indicating that principal blood loss occurred by 12-12:30am at the latest, over two hours before Peterson’s highly suspicious 911 calls starting at 2:41am. There was also a attractive lack of valuable bruising on the hips or legs – an absence highly unlikely in the multiple-falls-down-stairs scenario proposed by the defense but consistent with the two theorized rounds of head and upper body assault (which seem to have included some punches and throttling as well) .
Basically, it appears Peterson failed to understand that the timeline of his staged scenario – he claimed at first that the descend had unprejudiced happened, a short time before the 911 call – wouldn’t bear up. Nor had he imagined that a forensic meteorologist would easily disprove his second account – that he sat alone by the pool between 1-2am, wearing petite more than a tee shirt and shorts in 50 degree December weather, and only discovered Kathleen when he came inside. Like most calculating murderers, especially narcissistic ones, he underestimated the investigators’ skill and insight. To their trained eyes there was a world of incompatibility between Kathleen Peterson falling down the stairs and being beaten to death over a period of an hour or two.
Artful and compelling though `The Staircase’ is, I have to contemplate that Lestrade, director of the righteously beneficial `Murder On A Sunday Morning’, former this case to near a point of concept familiar to those who know his work: that Peterson was a victim of bias, a grieving husband prosecuted by narrow-minded people who loathed his politics, were intimidated by his intelligence, resented his success, and aimed to exploit his bisexuality in court. The fact is that Lestrade has said as worthy in interviews since the film’s release. There can be no denying that the prosecution did play the sex card for all it was worth, but perhaps it would have been malpractice to do otherwise: the defense’s opening statement was that Michael & Kathleen had an almost storybook, `soulmate’ kind of marriage, which his compulsive pleased tomcatting at the Y (uncovered by the defense team’s investigator) seemed to belie. And the lethal confrontation could well have been triggered by Kathleen stumbling across some of Michael’s explicit emails to overjoyed escort `Brad’ when she surprised her husband by asking to exhaust his computer slack that evening and proceeded to spend his email myth to receive a work-related document from a colleague. So, the defendant’s sexual behavior was highly relevant to both prosecution and defense, and the jury was spared some of the more incriminating parts.
Politically, Lestrade and I probably have alot in accepted, and his other films have argued powerfully for justice, but unfortunately `The Staircase’ dons the blinders again and again. If the director had truly aspired to fairness, he would surely have given the prosecution a chance to present how great the financial motive was – they did this quite effectively at trial, moral in front of Lestrade’s cameras. The film also sidesteps the arrangement the prosecution demonstrated that a serious marital rift had started to unfold the Friday evening before Kathleen’s death, with Michael’s Saturday email reference to an argument they had while out for dinner, followed by Peterson quick deleting thousands of blissful porno pics from his computer that afternoon, objective hours before the fatal events. He didn’t delete them all, though, and the forensic data expert’s testimony left no doubt that Kathleen had been using Michael’s computer – a rarity, according to other testimony – unbiased minutes before the neurological evidence shows she started to lose massive amounts of blood.
Lestrade stated some time later in an interview that Michael wouldn’t have been prosecuted if he hadn’t been satisfied. There is indeed a expansive deal of cruel prejudice in this world, and not objective in Durham. As regards the Peterson case, however, the director’s assertion is unsupported by the facts, which strongly suggest otherwise. No experienced investigator coming upon that scene at Forest Hills could possibly have failed to realize in short order that this was a brutal, cold-blooded assassinate, staged to survey like an accident. And then to learn that Michael Peterson had also been the last person to discover Liz Ratliff alive before she ended up at the bottom of stairs drenched in blood, years earlier…of course he would be a strong suspect. Lestrade should know that every single juror who was interviewed later insisted that there was never any contrast or doubt on the panel that a abolish had been committed, and that physical evidence like the ‘red neurons’ and blood spatter were incontrovertible. And Lestrade to the contrary, the juror interviews I’ve read suggest that jury members were far from narrow-minded about Peterson’s sexual orientation – what seems to have mattered most to them about the defendant was his duplicitous behavior. One comes away with the impression that the panel was relatively thoughtful and conscientious.
Frankly, from a forensic standpoint, the Peterson case turns out to have been alot more straightforward than most people, including many of the film’s reviewers, seem to reflect. That suggests to me that this riveting but deceptively selective film has misled many of us. I’m reminded a cramped of Oliver Stone’s shamelessly truthy `JFK’, a fictional film masquerading as fact. ‘JFK’ purported to respond the riddle of Dallas but actually led viewers about as far from the truth as it was possible to go, meandering off into the byzantine, self-aggrandizing paranoia-realm of the thoroughly discredited Jim Garrison.
As with that film, `The Staircase”’s tragic flaw stems from a luminous but self-righteous director’s blindness to his beget prejudices. The result: an unforgettable film whose dishonesty makes for an irony I can’t quite pick up out of my mind.
I watched the Peterson trial on Court TV in 2003, heard all the witnesses, and was convinced of Peterson’s guilt. I rented this DVD the other day and watched all 6 hours compulsively. The inside eye at Peterson, his defense team, and their strategy sessions was spellbinding. But one broad problem: the filmmaker was so entranced by the defense case that he left out majorly primary evidentiary facts. As another reviewer on this residence indicated, the filmmaker left out the very evidence that the jury archaic to convict Peterson. Broken wineglass, his bloody footprint on her encourage, red neurons in her brain (indicating she’d been bleeding to death and unconscious for over 2 hours), ruptured hyaline cartilage in her throat (characteristic of attempted strangulation; not possible from a drop), blood spatter on the inner, wrong-side-out leg of his shorts, evidence that he tried to orderly up the scene, and noteworthy more. Too terrible for Peterson that there were 3 nurses and one clinical researcher on the jury. They weren’t fooled by Henry Lee’s assertion that ‘there was too noteworthy blood for a beating’! Such an absurd statement.
Interestingly, in one of the DVD’s ‘extra’ features, the filmmaker complains about how unfair the American justice system is! Well, I’m complaining about how unfair this film is! I give it 4 stars because it was well done and I couldn’t end watching. But don’t be taken in by this section of propaganda. The precise evidence against Peterson was overwhelming.
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