The Staircase: Is this a tale of justice being done, or are we seeing how to get away with murder?

Accused: author Michael Peterson, in court charged with the murder of his wife Kathleen, faces a scale model of the staircase he says she fell down
Netflix
Alastair McKay12 June 2018

There is so much to admire about Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s long-form documentary series, The Staircase, that it’s easy to lose sight of the question at the centre of it.

That question is there at the start, and it reappears sporadically, but for most of the eight or so hours of the show’s running time, the viewer will be side-tracked by the grinding logic of the process.

It is a show about a murder — a real killing, a real victim — but the “who did it?” in this whodunit seems to slip away on a tide of legal point-scoring. Nor is the film a neutral participant.

It appears to be at first, when it has access to both the accused and the investigators, but as it rolls on, it becomes a documentary about the defence, and the business of getting the accused man off the hook.

The Staircase: Caitlin Atwater, Clayton Peterson, Kathleen Peterson, Michael Peterson, Todd Peterson, Martha Ratliff, Margaret (Ratliff) Blakemore
Netflix

Some facts, then. There are many, though the absence of external witnesses in this case make some of them contestable. The one, unquestionable thing — the central tragedy — is the death of Kathleen Peterson, who was found by her husband, writer Michael Peterson, at the foot of a flight of stairs in their home in Durham, North Carolina.

It’s Michael’s voice you hear on the 911 call, and his version of events at this stage is that Kathleen has fallen down the stairs and is dying, though not yet dead. Michael, a storyteller, fills in some of the details later. It was a nice night — “a very nice night” — they had watched a DVD from Blockbuster, and gone outside to the pool. After a while, Kathleen went in to bed. And that, says Michael, was the last time he saw his wife alive. Then he corrects himself. “No… she was alive when I found her… barely.”

Did he do it? Well, at this point in the film, you’d think so. The police certainly do. Art Holland, the lead investigator, notes the “very abundant amount of blood — on her, on the floor, on the walls. That was just not consistent with her falling down the stairs.” Jim Hardin, the district attorney, believes she was bludgeoned to death. The photographs are gruesome, showing multiple lacerations to the head.

And so the legal process begins. Slowly, steadily, the question of who did it seems to disappear, to be replaced by another, subtly different one, reframed by the efforts of his lawyer David Rudolf. It becomes instead a matter of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Peterson killed his wife.

This, of course, is how the legal system works, and it isn’t necessarily the same as finding out the truth. At one point, Rudolf talks about the Scottish verdict of “not proven”, though that is not an option in North Carolina.

The Staircase, then, is an odd form of murder mystery. It has none of the artifice of fictional murder stories, though there are some shocking narrative twists. Watch out for the missing “blow poke”. As a piece of forensic filmmaking it established the formula for Making A Murderer and the Serial podcast. Legally, it is interesting.

At its core, there is an extraordinary study of the character of a man, Michael Peterson, a storyteller caught up in his own drama, playing along. Is he guilty? Of some things, certainly. Is justice done? Technically, maybe, in the end.

To some questions, there are no good answers, but in addressing them, the neutral observer may become expert in bloodstain pattern analysis.

***** - Netflix

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