Written in Blood (19 page)

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Authors: Diane Fanning

BOOK: Written in Blood
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In early June, Judge Hudson set Michael Peterson's trial date for May 12, 2003, with the week before scheduled for jury selection. Once again, he warned the lawyers to limit their comments to the media. He also ordered them to comply with the law in sharing information.
Ann Christensen received a call from her mother, Eleanor Peterson, in the last week of June. She called to tell Ann she had broken her hip and was in the hospital. Ann suspected all was well, but doubt propelled her to book a flight and head to Reno.
Wednesday night, June 26, Eleanor was quite ill. As Ann kissed her goodnight, Eleanor grabbed her arm and said, “I don't think I'm going to make it out of this one.”
At 6 A.M. the next morning, Bill called Ann from the hospital. “Get here right away.”
Eleanor had slipped into a coma. By that afternoon, it was clear that Eleanor was not going to survive. Ann told the nurses that they had to keep her alive until Michael arrived. “You won't believe this, but he just lost his wife. He has to be able to say goodbye to his mother.”
Eleanor's youngest child, Jack Peterson, arrived from Las Vegas. Both he and Bill wanted to let their mother
go. By now, her body functioned only by the grace of the machines. Ann refused to allow the equipment to be disconnected. She wanted to wait for her oldest brother.
At 10:30 that night, Michael arrived at the hospital. He held his mother's hand. He kissed it with tenderness. Then he said, “Enough of this nonsense. Let's turn it off.”
The plugs were pulled at 10:45 and Eleanor Peterson slipped quietly into the eternal night. Michael stayed in Reno for the funeral. None of Eleanor's children discussed the courtroom awaiting Mike back in North Carolina. They did not mention Kathleen. They talked only about their mother. And they cried in each other's arms.
While Michael mourned the death of his mother, the Durham police—armed with a search warrant—were back in his home. Under the watchful eye of David Rudolf, they took measurements of the stairwell and other pertinent locations throughout the house. They retrieved fibers from a kitchen rug and from a blanket on a sofa.
In August, Caitlin talked to her stepsister Margaret one last time. Margaret had no interest in talking about Kathleen's death or Michael's impending trial. When Caitlin pushed, Margaret responded, “I don't need that in my life.”
She might as well have told Caitlin that her mother was irrelevant. Conversation over. Relationship done. Destruction accomplished—courtesy of Michael Peterson.
It was now eight months since the death of Kathleen Peterson and her gravesite still had no headstone. The
plot was in Michael's name and, legally, that small piece of land was his property. No one but the owner could erect anything on it.
Kathleen's family begged him to put up a marker. He did not. Candace tried every trick she had to lay a guilt trip on him and make him take action. She failed.
According to the contract with the cemetery, a headstone had to be put up within six months of the internment. That time was up. Candace asked what would happen now.
Their first response was: “We don't know. It's never happened before.” They checked their policies and told her that they would have to put up a small marker and bill the estate for it. Candace pleaded with them to give her a little more time. Recognizing the unusual circumstances, they agreed.
Candace was nervous about the outcome of the upcoming primary elections in Durham. She requested an interview with Sonya Pfeiffer of WTVD on September 6, 2002.
She had nothing against opponent Mark Simeon. It was just that she wanted an experienced D.A. to present the case before the jury. She also told the reporter that a murder weapon had been identified by the state.
Peterson's attorneys threw a hissy fit. They presented motions in court accusing Hardin of hiding evidence, using the case to his political advantage and attempting to influence the pool of potential jurors. Hardin denied that the interview was his idea in timing or substance. Candace insisted that she acted on her own. She admitted
that the murder weapon theory was hers and that no one in the district attorney's office had told her that they had identified the weapon.
The drama of the
State of North Carolina
vs.
Michael Iver Peterson
hit an even higher pitch in October. In court early that month, it was revealed that police and prosecutors wanted to know whether Todd Peterson was involved in an attempted cover-up in the death of his stepmother. They did not, however, uncover grounds to take any legal action against Todd. That same day, the attorneys bickered once again about the sharing of information and were admonished—again—by Judge Hudson.
In the middle of October, the public learned that the media frenzy had exceeded their expectations. Denis Poncet and Jean-Xavier de Lestrade of the French company, Maha Productions, were on the scene. Maha—a Sioux Indian word meaning “he who swims against the tide”—received national recognition in the States earlier that year. Their HBO movie,
Murder on a Sunday Morning,
won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film. The cable show involved racial profiling, police oversights and a wrongfully accused 15-year-old boy.
Maha did not have a movie deal for Kathleen Peterson's Sunday morning death yet, but they were already taping, certain that a deal would evolve soon. Many, however, were not confident that the product would be unbiased. Word spread through town that Denis Poncet was in Vietnam at the same time as Michael Peterson and that he was at UNC-CH when Michael was in law school. Poncet denied knowing Michael Peterson, but the extraordinary access he got to the defense made Durham wonder.
While everyone else was focused on Kathleen's death, D.A. Hardin had filed a request in the Texas courts for permission to exhume Elizabeth Ratliff's body at the end of the month. Caitlin Atwater trumped that with her dramatic move on October 29.
Her attorney, Jay Trehy, knocked on the door of 1810 Cedar Street just after 9 A.M. He served a court order and directed movers to retrieve Caitlin's belongings—bedroom furniture, clothing and personal effects. He said his client was too fearful to enter the home herself.
Just before 3:30 that afternoon, Trehy filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Durham against Michael Peterson. The suit asked for compensatory and punitive damages for the daughter of Kathleen Peterson.
A claim had also been filed on Caitlin's behalf in a courtroom in Greenville, North Carolina. In it, she requested that she receive the proceeds of her mother's life insurance policy. Kathleen had submitted a change of beneficiary form on her policy, removing her ex-husband Fred Atwater, and adding her new husband, Michael Peterson. She forgot, however, to sign the form.
Documents filed by Caitlin's attorneys concluded that if Fred Atwater was not the beneficiary, then Kathleen's daughter should be. North Carolina's slayer statutes prohibited Michael from receiving the money, since it did not allow a person convicted of killing another to profit from the death.
Michael Peterson carried a double burden—the death of his wife and his indictment for murder. That stress would be enough to induce writer's block in the most
seasoned and productive scribe. Not for Peterson—he sent the first one hundred pages and an outline of a new book to his agent. In March, HarperCollins made a sixfigure offer for the book Mike would co-author with Colonel Arthur Boyd. Then the publisher discovered that one of the writers was indicted for murder. They withdrew their offer quicker than a Marine could shout
“Semper Fi.”
When the first anniversary of Kathleen's death rolled around in December, Kathleen's sisters, brother, mother and daughter were in agony about Kathleen's stillunmarked grave. Candace's patience had expired. She took her case to the press. She said that although Michael sold the plot to the estate, he would not sign the papers to make the transfer legal.
Through his lawyer, Mike proclaimed his devotion to Kathleen and attacked Candace for ordering and attempting to install a marker that was totally out of character for Kathleen. He said he and his children were appalled.
Candace slapped back. She told
The Herald-Sun,
“I have never drawn on paper any design for a monument for any grave. My sister is still in an anonymous plot, which is heartbreaking to me. She's in a potter's field because he did not mark it.”
Michael signed the papers at long last.
On February 6, 2003, Margaret and Martha Ratliff wrote a bitter letter granting the district attorney permission to
exhume their mother's body. They attacked Hardin's character and decried his persecution of Michael Peterson. “We only hope that you treat our mother's remains with more respect than you have treated her memory.”
Caitlin, too, faced a sad task with her mother. She consulted with family members and purchased a black granite headstone. Because her mother loved roses, she had that flower entwined with ivy and engraved on the stone. She then added one line from “Ascension,” the poem by Colleen Hitchcock that was read at Kathleen's funeral: “Just whisper my name in your heart, I'll be there.”
Stuart Johnson, Steven Hunt's roommate at Virginia Military Institute, created a special wind chime for Kathleen. It was engraved with her name and hung in the stately branches of the tree that shaded her grave.
The minister who had presided over Kathleen's funeral service came to Maplewood Cemetery to lead a prayer service to bless her grave and her headstone. Nortel employees surrounded the last resting place of Kathleen Peterson for the somber ceremony. And at last, the hearts of Kathleen's family rested in peace.
But they would not rest for long. In two months, they would take the next step in their grief-filled odyssey in a courtroom in Durham where they hoped to find justice for Kathleen and closure for themselves.
In mid-April, Investigator Art Holland took the first airplane flight of his life. He flew to Texas with another investigator and a forensic technician to supervise the exhumation of Elizabeth Ratliff.
The gravesite, undisturbed since 1985, was sprouting wild flowers. Taylor Brothers Funeral Home began the morbid task at 8 A.M. on Monday, April 14, at the Cedarvale Cemetery in Matagorda County. In the wispy remnants of a lifting heavy fog, the workers and Bay City police officers erected yellow police tape around the area and across the service road. The forensic technician videotaped the official record. Outside, television cameras and reporters recorded the event for the evening news.
At 8:15, workers pried up the granite and bronze marker and set it to the side. An iron dowel was forced into the earth until it made contact with the concrete vault two feet below. With a small backhoe, the equipment operator dug down to the top of the sarcophagus surrounding the casket. Workers then dug the rest by hand, wrapped a chain around the two-ton container and
pulled it and its contents out of the ground just before lunch.
The tightly sealed lid was forced off the top, leaving a trail of stringy glue in its wake. The coffin was removed, wrapped in plastic and placed in the back of a blue Chevrolet Suburban. Elizabeth Ratliff and the three men from Durham traveled to Meridian, Mississippi, where they stopped for the night.
Early the next morning, they were on the road again, determined to get their precious cargo back to North Carolina that day. The autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday at the state medical examiner's office in Chapel Hill.
The white plastic-enshrouded silver-gray coffin of Elizabeth Ratliff rolled into the autopsy suite on a gurney at 9 A.M. on Wednesday, April 16. Yellow police tape secured both ends. When the lid of the casket was lifted, the musty smell of old news flew into the faces of the observers. Dr. Werner Spitz, a well-known and respected forensic pathologist, was present on behalf of the defense, along with Investigator Ron Guerette, who always seemed to be everywhere—many on the prosecution side of the case joked about getting him a “Where's Waldo?” tee shirt.
The autopsy team of Dr. Aaron Gleckman, forensic neuropathologist, and Dr. Deborah Radisch, forensic pathologist, examined the exterior of the body in its coffin. The disintegrating lace of Liz's wedding gown added a delicate poignancy to the macabre moment. She was surrounded by an array of items sufficient to melt a seasoned and inured heart. There was a book—one well loved by Dr. Radisch's children—
The Little Rabbit,
a
white stuffed lamb, a stained and broken seashell, a ballet slipper charm and soft brown plant material that once shone brilliant with the color of life.
Opening the book, the doctors discovered a metal unicorn window hanging, a card with a picture of a church in Frankfurt and inside the card, a photograph of two small girls. On Liz's fingernails, a tired gloss of nail polish blushed in an unnatural burst of color.
Using a mechanical winch and straps, they transferred the body to a stainless-steel table and more photographs were taken. Dr. Radisch was eager to find the answers to the questions that rose in her mind when she reviewed the original autopsy. In twenty years of experience, she had never seen a cause of death listed as a sudden unexpected death due to a spontaneous intra-cranial hemorrhage caused by von Willebrand's disease. Her curiosity was also inflamed by the absence of any diagrams to indicate the number and location of the lacerations.
The body itself was in an excellent state of preservation. The skin on her face had a layer of make-up and looked quite normal. When the cosmetics were removed, the pathologists uncovered bruising under Liz's left eye and a laceration on her eyebrow. Even this late, the bruising was distinct. The embalming process preserved the bruising because, although it removed the blood from the circulatory system, it could not retrieve blood from surrounding tissue.
In Liz's mouth, there was an area of small bruising and a tear on her upper gums. The skin on her body was dark and leathery with a small amount of mold on its surface. Dr. Radisch found evidence of bruising on the back of Liz's left hand and on her left wrist.
The doctors shifted their focus to the head—Dr. Gleckman's area of specialty. The multiple lacerations were all glued and sutured in the autopsy and embalming in 1985. He found and described seven distinct lacerations to Liz Ratliff's head—the same number found during Kathleen Peterson's autopsy. The number could be mere coincidence, but the biggest surprise was their location. One was on the very top of her head—its position made it more condemnatory of Michael Peterson than any found on Kathleen.
Dr. Radisch removed the thick cotton sutures from six of the lacerations on the head with great care. She then tackled the more difficult task of the fine blue suture material on the remaining laceration.
They observed a distinct fracture along the base of the skull that corresponded to the angled laceration on the top of her head. The fracture traveled from there down to where the spinal cord connects. Inside the skull were flecks of dried blood indicative of a pre-mortem injury.
When Dr. Gleckman and Dr. Radisch completed the procedure, they informed the observers that, pending a neurological consult, they believed that Liz Ratliff's death was caused by blunt force trauma to the head—the manner of death: homicide.
Investigator Art Holland paced the halls and peered through the windows throughout the procedure. Now, he had a phone call to make. When Margaret Blair picked up, he asked her, “Are you sitting down?”
She answered, “Yes,” but dread surrounded the word and muffled her response.
“Your sister didn't die from a fall down the stairs.”
Eighteen years of sorrow, eighteen years of uncertainty, eighteen years of loss crashed down on Margaret Blair with the intensity of a Nor'easter. An intense anger at Michael Peterson and a savage lust for justice burned a hole in her heart. She would not rest until the world knew the whole truth of her sister's death.

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