Who’s The Real Villain In True Crime TV Series, The Staircase?

If you haven’t actually watched it yet, you surely have heard something about Netflix’s latest true crime docu-series, The Staircase. And, yes, it is ever bit as riveting as the myriad reviews online and in the mainstream press say it is. I can attest to that since I binge-watched all 13 episodes.

The episodes, amounting to approximately 650 minutes of docu-drama, were edited down from 650 hours of video footage filmed by a French director and his television crew over a period 15 years. The TV crew became virtually embedded with Michael Peterson and his family and legal team of highly-priced defense attorneys after Michael, a 61-year old novelist and former columnist for a Durham, North Carolina newspaper was arrested and indicted on charges of first degree murder. The victim? His 48-year old wife of five years, a telecommunications executive named Kathleen.

Michael’s Story

She was found unconscious at the bottom of a staircase in the couple’s 9,000-square foot home in a tony neighborhood of Durham. Michael told paramedics and cops that after a night of drinking champagne by their pool, Kathleen had come inside to go to bed while he stayed outside for a while longer.

Michael claimed that subsequently when he came into the house, he found his wife lying at the foot of the stairs in a pool of blood. He posited that she had slipped and fallen down the stairs after drinking and taking Valium. Cops and the Durham County District Attorney, Jim Hardin said differently. They said Michael had beaten his wife to death.

Let’s Go To The Videotape

Michael’s subsequent legal travails unfolded first in an eight-episode documentary which aired in the U.S. in 2005. Those eight episodes ended with the jury verdict in the trial court. One of those episodes included stunning disclosures about Michael’s secret life as a bi-sexual who arranged encounters with male prostitutes while married to Kathleen; another episode depicted the court-ordered exhumation of a close woman friend who had died 17 years earlier after — ? You guessed it. A fall down a staircase.

A further two episodes were added in 2013 after a court found Michael was entitled to a new trial. And, the last three episodes of the current 13-episode offering were completed in 2016 when the DA offered Michael a plea deal instead of retrying him.

High Hopes for Michael

So far, so good. I had high hopes for Michael. I started out biased in his favor, if only because I’d heard nothing but bad things about Durham County DA’s office. For example, most recently that DA, Mike Nifong, was jailed and disbarred in 2007 for falsely accusing three Duke University lacrosse players of rape.

Then, there was Michael’s family: two sons and two adopted daughters (in fact, the daughters of his woman friend who had died in the first staircase fall) who were firmly in their father’s corner. Not only did they remain unwavering in their support of him throughout the trial, but they were joined by his ex-wife, Patty who stated that Michael had never been a violent or abusive husband to her.

Then, there was the blood spatter expert, Duane Deaver from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation whose testimony, interpretation of the blood spatter, and videotaped experiments at jury trial pointed the finger unequivocally at Michael as his wife’s killer, and was a major factor in getting Michael convicted. In 2011, however, as The Staircase documented, he was famously discredited and found to have falsified evidence in 34 different cases including Michael’s. The result: Deaver was fired from the SBI, and the court ordered a new trial for Michael

The real villain?

At this point, I turned my attention to Deaver, a weaselly individual who had testified on cross-examination with an unyielding, surly demeanor. In the old days he would have been described as “straight out of Central Casting” if you were looking for a “corrupt civil servant or bureaucrat ready to perjure himself on the stand for the good of the state.”  According to the new 2013 episodes of the TV series, his falsification of evidence on the stand led to the conviction of Greg Taylor a young husband and father who spent 17 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In another case, Deaver falsified evidence against a doctor who killed his wife, but in self-defense after she attacked him.

I became increasingly curious about Duane Deaver.  Had I still been news editor of The Star, or assignment producer with A Current Affair I would have assigned a reporter to go dig further into Mr. Duane Deaver and his personal life, and all the lives he had wrecked during his 25-year career testifying for prosecutors. I wanted to know more about a civil servant who would lie under oath. Was it to mask his incompetence? Did he construct fanciful experiments on blood spatter to prove theories he had already established in his own mind? Or did he falsify evidence in order to bolster his image with prosecutors? What was in it for him?

Maybe, I thought, there was a more deep-seated, psychological reason for why he would offer misleading, and/or incorrect blood spatter analysis where the lives of good-looking husbands were at stake. Maybe, if I dug around more, I’d discover that his own marriage was a hellhole, and that he envied any husband who was about to get away with murdering his own wife???

5-Star Reviews

In any event, having finished watching The Staircase, I was in total agreement with so many of the reviews which presented The Staircase as riveting viewing because, for example, as Nick Schager in The Daily Beast wrote: “more than just about whether Michael Peterson is a killer, this […] is a warts-and-all portrait of the frustrating intricacies of the American judicial system.”

Jen Cheney in New York Magazine wrote: “It humanizes a man accused of committing a horrific crime, provides evidence that he’s been railroaded by the system, and provides a profound education in the complexities and flaws of our legal system.”  Vanity Fair called it a “true-crime masterpiece … for its exceptional access and quiet observation of both the justice system and the media climate of the early aughts.”

But wait!

Then, I discovered that the 13 episodes of The Staircase had not quite covered the whole story. Initially, I read a report which acknowledged that the editor who worked on the 650 hours of raw footage was Sophie Brunet who had apparently fallen in love with Michael while working on the TV series. Her boss, the director said, however, that she “never let her feelings affect the course of editing.” Hmmmm!

When you’re editing 650 hours of footage down to 650 minutes, something’s got to give. So, what was left out of The Staircase? Was it important?  My further googling took me beyond the reviews for the Netflix TV series. I discovered a non-fiction narrative in a book titled A Perfect Husband by true crime TV reporter Aphrodite Jones. The book was based on interviews with Kathleen Peterson’s sisters (members of the family who did not support Peterson,) on court transcripts and police reports.  I found a website Behind The Staircase dedicated entirely to a view of the evidence which had been presented at the jury trial, but which was not the focus of any episodes in The Staircase. Finally, I read the entire decision of the North Carolina Supreme Court, State of North Carolina v. Michael Iver Peterson which, among other things, reviewed the undisputed facts and the relevant evidence presented by both sides in the case.

Psychopath Or Charming Enigma?

The final legal resolution for Michael Peterson, as documented in episode 13 of The Staircase left the issue of his guilt or innocence unresolved in the minds of most viewers. Not even director Jean Xavier de Lestrade who spent 15 years documenting Michael Peterson’s life after his arrest for the murder of his wife offers any conclusive view on the outcome, or on the character of his subject.  He said recently, “I’m not sure I (now) know any more about Michael Peterson than the first day I met him.”

Next Week:  The Surprising Evidence Against Michael Peterson You Didn’t See In The Staircase 

Photo Credits: Netflix