For the defense—as for the prosecution—the case would rise or fall on how persuasively it accounted for all the blood and the deep lacerations to the victim’s head.

Defense attorney Rudolph countered the state’s medical examiner with an expert of his own, a neuropathologist—he noted what he DIDN’T see: no skull or bone fractures.

Dave Rudolf, lead defense attorney: Were there any fractures of the skull, any facial bones, mandible, any bony structures of face?

Expert: None reported. No.

Rudolf: Or the hands or arms?

Expert: No.

Rudolf: Any of the common injuries one sees in beating deaths?

Expert: No.

The defense expert said everything pointed to an accident and not murder.

Expert: Kathleen Peterson’s injuries were the result of a fall and not the result of a beating.

Rudolf: If someone is beating someone over the head with a blunt object, you’re trying to inflict maximum damage. And you’re gonna get a brain contusions, you’re gonna get a skull fracture. And there weren’t any here.

And to drive that point home, the defense lawyers took the jurors on a field trip to the house itself, to the back staircase where they hoped jurors would see it was too narrow to freely swing a longish murder weapon like a fireplace tool.

Rudolf: It is impossible to conceive of Michael Peterson beating Kathleen Peterson to death with a blow poke or anything else for that matter in that stairway.

Not a beating, an accident, said the defense. And to help the jurors envision the way Kathleen may have died, the defense hired a body motion expert, to describe a likely accidental plunge.

First, the expert said,  forget about stairway falls in the movies like this particularly dramatic one staged in the film, “Dolores Claiborne.”  In real life, the expert claimed,  people don’t take a spill that way.

To help jurors imagine how a woman in flip flops, medicated with valium, maybe tipsy with drink, might have fallen:  the body-motion expert showed an animation he’d had made. In it, Kathleen climbs the stairs to go to bed. She suddenly loses her balance and falls backwards from the fourth step, hitting her head on the molding, cutting open a nasty wound to her scalp. Stunned, she tries to get up but slips in a puddle of blood and falls again, doomed now to bleed out.

Dave Rudolf, defense attorney: What we had to overcome were the pictures and the blood. That was very clear right from the beginning.

And to account for the blood spatter—the spray that the state’s analyst said resulted from Michael Peterson striking his wife over and over with a blunt object...

Defense attorney: At this time the defense would like to call Dr. Henry Lee to the stand.

....the defense put on a celebrity expert witness, none other than Dr. Henry Lee, the medical examiner of O.J. case fame.

Dr. Lee explained the blood spatter in a theatrical manner.

He swigged a small amount of ketchup, took a deep breath and then spit it out...replicating he said the victim of the fall coughing up blood, staggering about the stairwell in a daze.

Dr. Lee: At the scene the injured person can be walking, can move, can shake her head, can move her arms step forward.

The result: blood splatter up the wall of the staircase and on the inside leg of Peterson’s shorts as he tended to her making the stain the prosecution thought so damning.

Rudolf: Obviously, the blood all around was due to her being alive and moving around for some period of time.

Murphy: Couldn’t that also be consistent with the state’s theory that Peterson attacked her once. She revived and he had to attack her again?

Rudolf: Well  but that makes no sense. If you’re going to kill somebody then you finish it.

And whereas the prosecution said there was too much blood to be explained by a simple fall, Dr. Lee—perhaps counter-intuitively—asserted just the opposite. Saying there was way too much blood on and around the staircase for it to have been a beating.

Dr. Lee: Too much blood spatter. Ordinary beating case you don’t have that many blood spatter...

And as for those suspicious observations the police and EMT’s made about the victim’s blood being already dry by the time they arrived: on cross-examination those same prosecution witnesses conceded they hadn’t really looked at the blood all that closely at the time.

In fact, lawyer Rudolf argued that the first police in the door may have had it in for the husband once they realized he was the same Michael Peterson taking regular potshots at them in his newspaper column, accusing them of only solving a small fraction of crimes and not getting a handle on drug trafficking in the city. Maybe this was payback time.

Rudolf: It wasn’t that hard for them to look at the blood and assume the worst about Michael Peterson.

And for all their measuring and collecting evidence at the scene, defense attorney Rudolf had a Perry Mason moment up his sleeve about a huge clue the police missed altogether.

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