The 2001 911 call that made paramedics find a staircase pool of blood

🚨 THE 2:40 A.M. CALL THAT BROUGHT PARAMEDICS TO A STAIRCASE POOL OF BLOOD…

The call came in shortly before 2:40 a.m.

Michael Peterson told the dispatcher his wife had fallen down the stairs.

Paramedics and police arrived at the Durham, North Carolina home to find Kathleen Peterson unresponsive at the base of the staircase.

She was in a pool of blood.

She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The initial assumption was a tragic accident.

A woman in her late forties, a telecommunications executive at Nortel Networks, loses her footing in the dark.

That happens.

But the scene did not look like a simple fall.

The amount of blood was wrong.

The nature of her injuries was wrong.

Blood was on the walls.

Blood was on the ceiling.

What kind of fall does that?

The call was the only initial report.

The cause of the injuries was not established at that moment.

Not by the dispatcher.

Not by the responders on the floor beside her.

Her husband said she fell.

The house said something else.

What happened between the fall and the call?

That question would take years to answer.

That question would take a trial.

That question would take a missing fireplace tool, a death in Germany, and a jury's verdict to even begin addressing.

The responders did not know any of that at 2:40 a.m.

They only knew the blood.

They only knew the body.

They only knew the staircase.

She was on the ground below.

THE NOVELIST AND THE EXECUTIVE

They were a couple the city knew.

Michael Peterson was a novelist and a former newspaper columnist, a man who had once run for mayor of Durham.

Kathleen Peterson was a telecommunications executive at Nortel Networks, his second wife.

The house on Cedar Street was their home, and the only person present when she died was her husband.

He was the one who called 911 shortly before 2:40 a.m.

He was the one who told dispatchers she had fallen down the stairs.

Before that night, the couple's standing was unremarkable, the stuff of a quiet, professional life.

But Peterson carried a detail that would not stay quiet.

He had written about the death of a close friend, Elizabeth Ratliff, who had been found at the bottom of a staircase in Germany in 1985.

That death had been ruled an accident.

The nature of his relationship with Ratliff beyond friendship is not in the record.

What is in the record is that he wrote about it, and that the prosecution would later use it.

The case would be argued by Jim Hardin, the lead prosecutor, and defended by David Rudolf.

Hardin would call it a killing.

Rudolf would call it a fall.

They were two men, one staircase, and a body that told neither story cleanly.

At the start, the police treated it as an accident.

The scene did not.

THE SCENE: A POOL OF BLOOD

At the start, the police treated it as an accident.

The scene did not.

Kathleen Peterson was pronounced dead at the scene, at the base of the staircase in her Durham home.

Paramedics had arrived to find her unresponsive in a pool of blood.

The blood was the first problem.

Blood was spattered on the walls.

Blood was spattered on the ceiling.

Blood was pooled on the floor around her body.

Investigators argued that pattern was inconsistent with a simple fall.

A fall does not throw blood upward.

A fall does not paint the walls.

Kathleen had suffered multiple lacerations to the back of her head.

Not one wound.

Multiple.

The lacerations were deep and numerous, and the medical examiner would later struggle to explain them.

Was it a beating?

Was it a fall?

The exact mechanism of the injuries is not yet determined.

That question would define the trial.

The prosecution saw a weapon.

The defense saw a staircase.

But at that moment, in that house, the physical evidence was already telling a different story than the 2:40 a.m. call.

The call said accident.

The walls said otherwise.

The ceiling said otherwise.

The pool of blood said otherwise.

She was on the ground below.

The body did not lie, but it did not explain itself either.

THE MISSING BLOW POKE

The prosecution’s theory was that Michael Peterson beat his wife to death with a fireplace blow poke.

The blow poke was missing from the house.

Not lost in a drawer. Not misplaced in the garage. Missing, as in never produced, never photographed, never held up before a jury.

Prosecutors said he used it and then disposed of it.

The defense said it never existed.

That is the gap the whole case turned on: a weapon that was central to the state's story, and that no one could show the jury.

Kathleen had suffered multiple lacerations to the back of her head, and blood was on the walls and ceiling.

A fall can do that, the defense argued. She had been drinking wine and taking a muscle relaxant that night.

She fell, they said. The blood patterns were consistent with a fall.

The defense also pointed to the 911 call and the CPR. Peterson called for help. He tried to revive her. That, they argued, was not the behavior of a killer.