Michael Peterson guilty of second-degree murder in 2003 staircase death; conviction later overturned

Just before 2:40 a.m. on December 9, 2001, novelist Michael Peterson called emergency services from his home in Durham, North Carolina, reporting that his wife, Kathleen Peterson, had fallen down the stairs. Paramedics and police arrived to find Kathleen, a 48-year-old telecommunications executive at Nortel Networks, unresponsive in a pool of blood at the base of the staircase. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

At first, the death looked like an accident. But first responders noted the volume of blood and the nature of her injuries, which included multiple lacerations to the back of her head. The initial assumption of an accidental fall quickly gave way to a homicide investigation.

Michael Peterson, a novelist and former newspaper columnist, had been married to Kathleen for four years. The couple’s children—including Kathleen’s daughters from a previous marriage and Michael’s adopted sons—were present in the home that night, though no one reported witnessing the fall.

Police treated the scene as suspicious from early on. The amount of blood was far greater than typical for a simple fall, and the lacerations on Kathleen’s head were inconsistent with a single impact. Investigators found blood spatter on the back of her head and on the staircase walls. Prosecution experts later argued this pattern was consistent with a beating from a blunt weapon—specifically, a blowpoke, a metal fireplace tool found in the home. The blowpoke, however, was never definitively linked to the injuries, and no weapon was ever recovered.