The jury was coming in. It had a verdict. Pagers and cellphones summoned the prosecution and defense back to the courtroom.

The judge called the clerk to read the verdict to a hushed courtroom.

Guilty: Michael Peterson guilty of bashing his wife about the head and letting her slowly bleed to death.

The judge asked him if he wished to say anything. Peterson turned and mouthed a silent message to each of his children.

Then, he began life as a convict.

Peterson’s family sat stunned. Then sobs burst from daughters Margaret and Martha Ratliff: two young women who’d lost so much in their lives, both blood parents, their step-mother Kathleen, and now their adoptive father, going away forever.

During the course of the investigation and trial, the Ratliff girls had become estranged from other family members—their aunts—who believed Peterson guilty.

And the little girl down the street they used to play with and who then became their sister: Caitlin? They hadn’t spoken in more than a year. Michael Peterson was now the uncrossable divide between them.

After asserting her father’s innocence to the cameras when he was indicted.

Caitlin, like the jury, had not been able to get past the autopsy photos and report. When she first read it she called her step-sister Margaret immediately.

Caitlin, Kathleen Peterson's daughter: I said, you need to read this, you need to understand that mom was not… she did not die from falling down stairs and she was beaten to death.

The sisters never spoke again. Caitlin had all her belongings removed from the house.

Caitlin: I’ve lost obviously far more than just my mother. I did lose my family and my home.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Do you think Michael Peterson beat your mother to death?

Caitlin: Yes.  I absolutely do.  There’s no doubt in my mind.

Murphy: What do you think happened in their house that night?

Caitlin: I think it was truly a culmination of a storm.

It was a storm that raged though a mansion on Cedar Street and swept away all it found there. Love and a sense of family was displaced forever by shame and a gaping horror.

Michael Peterson appealed his conviction. His lawyers argued that testimony about the death of Elizabeth Ratliff in Germany should not have been allowed into evidence. In September, a North Carolina court rejected the appeal. It now moves to a higher court.  

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