Popeye: ‘I’m your one and only exspring. See, we got the same bulgy arms’.

Dufus (Popeye’s nephew): ‘Did you kill any Japs?’

Michael Iver Peterson was born in Tennessee in 1943. He is a writer and a journalist. On December 9, 2001 his second wife Kathleen Hunt Atwater died in their Forest Hills mansion, North Carolina.
Kathleen was found at the bottom of the service stairs.Peterson was found guilty of first degree murder. After eight years, he was granted a new trial after the judge ruled a critical prosecution witness gave misleading testimony. In 2017, he submitted an Alford Plea to the reduced charge of manslaughter. The judge sentenced him to a maximum of 86 months in prison with credit for time previously served. He was freed because he had already served more time than the sentence.Kathleen’s case is the subject of the documentary “The Staircase” by French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade.

The focus of my analysis is on the murder weapon, the prosecutor said that Peterson killed Kathleen with a blow poke, a custom-made fireplace poker that was missing from the house at the time of the investigation. Peterson’s defence said that Kathleen had fallen down the stairs. I disagree.

Michael Iver Peterson didn’t use a special murder weapon to kill his wife Kathleen, he used his bare hands.

Michael Iver Peterson  grabbed his wife Kathleen by the hairs of her frontal area with his right hand and slammed the back of her head against the wooden stairs, again and again, till she died.

During the assault, he once grabbed her contemporary by her hairs with his right hand and by her throat with his left hand, in that occasion his thumb produced the fracture of the superior cornu of the left thyroid cartilage of Kathleen’s throat.

According to her post mortem examination, Kathleen suffered multiple lacerations of the head consistent with a flat object, that flat object were the stairs against which her head impacted several times, not because she fell down the stairs but because Michael Peterson slammed her head against those stairs.

Here the authopsy report:

“The number, severity, locations and orientation of these injuries are inconsistent with a fall down the stairs; instead they are indicative of multiple impacts received as a result of beating.

HEAD

Blunt force trauma of the head

Multiple (at least 7) deep, complex lacerations and avulsions to the posterior scalp

Multiple contusions consistent with lacerations

Multiple small abrasions and contusions on the face

Early acute ischemic neuronal necrosis

No abnormalities of the brain

NECK

One fracture with associated hemorrhage of the left superior cornu of the thyroid cartilage in the neck

No other neck fractures.

BODY

No long bone or rib fractures

HANDS

Contusions of back, posterior arms, wrists and hands

Hair in left hand — hair in right hand” 

On both Kathleen’s hands, on the bottom steps of the stairs and on the Diet Coke can found in the patio, that Michael Peterson drank from, were found several cut hairs by the crime scene operators. These cut hairs were from the frontal area of Kathleen head and were cut off by Michael Peterson right hand and by Kathleen hands when she tried to free her hairs from his hand, for this reason they found hairs on her hands too.

If these hairs were from the back area of her head, investigators should have found just crushed hairs, not cut hairs. It could be helpful to check the exhibits to see if they collected hairs with their roots to support this reconstruction.

The blood found inside Michael Peterson’s pants has a simple explanation: Michael Peterson attacked his wife twice, the second time he assaulted Kathleen, he sat on her upper legs close to her waist.

After the first attack a lot of blood drained on Kathleen’s waist, she then unexpectedly recovered and stood up. At that point, Peterson attacked her a second time and, while slamming again her head against the stairs, his pants absorbed the blood from Kathleen’s clothes because he was sitting astride on her waist in order to stop her from moving.

There were no fractures on Kathleen’s skull because she was slammed against a wooden surface.

Kathleen had contusions on her posterior arms and back because when her head was slammed against the stairs she hit her posterior arms and back too.

She had defensive contusions on her wrists and hands because she fought back at Peterson and finally she had no contusions on her ribs, legs, feet or knees because she didn’t fall down the stairs.

This reconstruction explains:

1- all the contusions on Kathleen body;

2- the distribution of the bloodstains found in the area of the murder;

3- the presence of low and medium velocity blood spatters on the scene;

4- the crucial absence of any cast off on the ceiling or on the walls;

5- the absence of any pattern of a weapon on the lacerations found on Kathleen’s scalp;

6- the absence of defensive wounds with a pattern of a weapon;

7- the absence of collateral damages with any pattern of a weapon in the narrow area where she was killed;

8- the impossibility to recover a weapon;

9- and the absence of fractures on Kathleen’s face too. Especially in a narrow area, a hit from behind that is able to cause a scalp laceration usually produces fractures of the nasal or cheek bones of the victim due to the crush against the wall or against the stairs followed the rebound of the blow to the head.

The blood found on the walkway leading to the house dropped from Michael Peterson bloody hands.

Weapons usually reflect killers’ personality. Michael Peterson is a kind of contemporary Popeye, for his face, his smocking the pipe and his muscular body and, as Popeye, to kill he used a personal weapon, his hands, at least twice.

Michael Peterson was very proud of his muscles and often put them on display wearing just a tank top, according to the pictures seen in the documentary “The Staircase”.

In 1985, Michael Peterson killed Elizabeth Ratliff in the same way.  Elizabeth was found dead at the bottom of the stairs of her house in Germany. She had suffered a fracture at the base of the skull. At the time Michael Peterson was younger and stronger and the surface against which her head was slammed was a floor made of terra-cotta tiles, not wood, like in Kathleen’s case. It could be quite interesting to ask people that saw and cleaned that first crime scene if they had found hairs on the scene.

For a complete analysis of this case read:

Michael Peterson’s 911 call

Michael Iver Peterson: a pathological liar and a murderer

Ursula Franco, M.D. and Criminologist