Peterson

When business executive Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a staircase, investigators figured she fell after a night of drinking. But when pathologists concluded Peterson's injuries looked more like a beating, prosecutors pointed the finger at her husband, novelist Michael Peterson, who now faces life in prison.

    Michael Iver Peterson, 59, was born in 1943 and knew from a young age he wanted to be a writer. A military brat who moved from place to place during his childhood, Peterson read Hemingway and fantasized about being a hard-drinking, hard-living writer one day, he told an interviewer in 1996.
    Peterson attended Duke University in the early 1960s, majoring in political science and editing the student newspaper. He graduated from the Durham, N.C., school in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in political science. He briefly studied law but never finished. A year after graduating from Duke, Peterson took a civilian job at the U.S. Department of Defense and was assigned to research arguments in favor of increased military involvement in Vietnam. The experience propelled him into action.
    Peterson enlisted in the Marines and saw combat in Southeast Asia. Although he is a decorated soldier, Peterson was forced to admit during a failed bid for Durham mayor in 1999 that his Purple Heart citation was the result of a car accident in Japan and not fighting in Vietnam, as he had long claimed.
    Peterson was married twice: first to Patricia Sue Peterson, the mother of his sons Clayton and Todd. In 1997, he married Nortel executive Kathleen Atwater, who has a daughter, Caitlin, from a previous marriage.
    A former newspaper columnist, Peterson is the author of three novels that draw upon his military experience in years living and traveling in the Far East, The Immortal Dragon, A Time of War: A Bitter Peace, and Charlie Two Shoes and the Marines of Love Company.

BBC does Peterson murder case

By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun
jstevenson@heraldsun.com
Mar 9, 2005 : 8:02 pm ET

DURHAM -- When ABC News last summer aired a two-hour documentary about the Michael Peterson murder case, District Attorney Jim Hardin Jr. thought it was too heavily defense-oriented.
"I think that was clearly their intention all along," he said Wednesday. "There was very little attempt to balance it so that the prosecution's perspective was fully portrayed."
The ABC documentary was filmed by a French company called Maha, which was granted unprecedented access to Peterson's five-month trial in 2003, including access to behind-the-scenes discussions between Peterson and his attorneys.
Now, Hardin sees a chance to get his side of the case on the air.
He said he was interviewed Wednesday by a crew from the London-based British Broadcasting Corp., which seemed to have greater interest in the prosecution's viewpoint.
Hardin was told, he said, that the BBC's program will air early next month. A precise date apparently has not been set.
Hardin said he was growing somewhat tired of being interviewed by foreign television crews. However, he conceded that it might serve a worthwhile purpose.
"Any time I have an opportunity to help educate the public about what we do, I think it's a good thing," he told The Herald-Sun.
According to Hardin, the BBC earlier interviewed Peterson in prison.
A successful novelist, former Herald-Sun columnist and one-time mayoral candidate, Peterson was convicted in October 2003 of first-degree murder in the slaying of his wife, Nortel Networks executive Kathleen Peterson.
Peterson was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty........

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http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-725644.html.

Peterson lawyers: Friend's death, bisexuality unfair as evidence

April 18, 2006

By MARGARET LILLARD, Associated Press Writer

The prosecution of writer Michael Peterson was filled with inflammatory, irrelevant evidence and judicial mistakes that prevented him from getting a fair trial on charges of murdering his wife, his lawyer told a state Court of Appeals panel Tuesday.

The novelist, newspaper columnist and one-time mayoral candidate was convicted 2 1/2 years ago of first-degree murder in the death of Nortel Networks executive Kathleen Peterson.

Defense lawyer Thomas Maher argued Tuesday before a three-judge appeals panel that Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson repeatedly erred in Peterson's trial by allowing evidence that had no clear connection to the case, and asked the panel to overturn his client's conviction.

"We think the issues in this case -- none of them would be harmless by themselves," Maher said. "But clearly, to the extent that there are multiple errors, it is much tougher for a court to say 'Well, that didn't cause a problem.'"

In particular, Maher cited testimony regarding Michael Peterson's bisexuality and evidence comparing Kathleen Peterson's death to that in 1985 of Elizabeth Ratliff, a friend of Peterson and his first wife, who like Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the foot of a staircase.

Prosecutors implied that Peterson was guilty of killing Ratliff, though he was never accused of doing so, and that Kathleen Peterson was killed during an argument after she found e-mail correspondence between her husband and a male prostitute, though they presented no proof she had seen the messages.

"What I saw was a connecting problem with a number of the pieces of evidence, which is the level of speculation you have to rely on to make it relevant," Maher said. "That was true with Ratliff -- you had to speculate he was responsible for it. It was true with their evidence about material on the computer -- you had to speculate that (Kathleen Peterson) found it and speculate that it led to a fight."

Peterson's team also complained that the court allowed speculative testimony about Kathleen Peterson's job security and finances as prosecutors tried to show a motive, and that police used excessively vague grounds to get the search warrants that allowed them to examine computers found at the house.

There was no indication when the appeals court would rule.

Kathleen Peterson was found Dec. 9, 2001, in a pool of blood in the couple's house in Durham. Peterson, 62, now serving a life sentence in prison, insists that she died in an accidental fall.

State attorneys said the defense opened the door for a discussion of Peterson's private life by raising the issue in opening statements and insisting that the Petersons' five-year marriage was a happy one.

Michael Peterson's correspondence with a male prostitute a few months before his wife's death indicated that picture was false, Assistant Attorney General Jack Barnwell argued. State lawyers also argued that the uncanny parallels between the deaths of the two women were drawn through forensic evidence and could not be ignored.

"The evidence was not just strong that (Kathleen Peterson's) death was homicide, it was powerful," Assistant Attorney General William Crumpler told the appeals panel.

He cited the testimony of Dr. Deborah Radisch, an assistant state medical examiner who performed autopsies on Kathleen Peterson and on Ratliff's exhumed remains, concluding that both women had been beaten to death.

But Maher said having the same doctor examine both women created a "problem of bootstrapping."

"You've got a weak case on both of them, but the state's argument seems to be 'Well, it couldn't happen twice.' And if you look at one it proves the other and if you look at the other, it proves the first," he said. "It's kind of like this hall of mirrors where everything gets expanded."

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Peterson civil suit settled for $25M

February 1, 2007

By John Stevenson, The Herald-Sun

Lawyers have agreed to a $25 million settlement in a civil lawsuit that accused Michael Peterson of killing his wife, according to documents reviewed by The Herald-Sun, but the deal may be meaningless because the once wealthy Durham novelist is serving a life prison sentence and reportedly has little more than an $8 wristwatch to his name.

Weather permitting, the settlement will be officially announced today at the Raleigh law office of Jay Trehy, who represented Peterson's stepdaughter in the case.

The stepdaughter, Caitlin Atwater, had accused Peterson of maliciously and fatally beating her mother, Nortel Networks executive Kathleen Peterson, in December 2001.

Kathleen Peterson was found dead in a massive pool of blood in the Forest Hills mansion she shared with her husband on Cedar Street.

Michael Peterson contended Kathleen Peterson died from an accidental fall on a steep, narrow, dimly lit stairway. But prosecutors convinced jurors she was repeatedly beaten on the head with a blunt object, perhaps a fireplace poker.

Peterson, a failed 1999 mayoral candidate who is now 63, was sentenced to life in prison without parole after jurors found him guilty of first-degree murder in October 2003.

The conviction recently was upheld by the state Court of Appeals, but the N.C. Supreme Court has yet to review it.

Lawyer Trehy had no comment Wednesday about the civil settlement.

However, he said earlier that a civil judgment would be symbolically important even if Peterson couldn't pay it.

Among other things, a judgment would demonstrate that Kathleen Peterson's life had value and that the community cared about her, according to Trehy.

Settlement documents reviewed by The Herald-Sun on Wednesday confirm the $25 million amount, while emphasizing that the agreement is "not to be construed as an admission of liability, guilt or fault on the part of Michael Peterson for the death of Kathleen Peterson."

Underscoring that point, the agreement further states that Michael Peterson denies any liability, fault or guilt for his wife's death.

Kerry Sutton of Durham, one of Peterson's attorneys, agreed with that assessment Wednesday.

She said Peterson "had absolutely nothing to do with Kathleen's death. He thought her life was precious and beyond priceless. He'd pay anything to have her back."