Grafenhausen, Germany, is a suburb of Frankfurt 4,000 miles from the Durham County courthouse. And that’s the unlikely place where the focus of the trial had now turned.

The judge—mid-trial—in the Peterson case was listening to arguments on whether to allow the jury to hear about something that had happened in the defendant’s life nearly 20-years before. In the light of what took place in North Carolina, something so unlikely that you couldn’t get quoted odds on it ever occurring twice to one man.

The bizarre story begins in the early ‘80s at America’s Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany, at the time, a busy intersection in the Cold War.

Among the U.S. citizens living around the base was Michael Peterson, his then-wife and their two boys. She taught at the American school there.

Peterson and his wife became fast friends with another teacher, a woman named Elizabeth Ratliff and her husband, a career air force officer.

Elizabeth Ratliff’s sister Margaret recalled those days.

Margaret Blair, Elizabeth Ratliff’s sister: They took family trips together all the time. They had dinner at each other’s house.

Then one day Elizabeth Ratliff’s husband was killed while on a secret assignment. The widow was left alone with two young daughters. The Peterson’s took her under their wing, Michael Peterson becoming almost a stand-in dad and father.

On November 24^th 1985, on a night like so many others, Elizabeth and her two girls had gone over to the Petersons for dinner. Later, Michael Peterson drove the widow and her daughters home, helped put the girls to bed.

The next morning Elizabeth’s sister back in the states got the dreadful phone call.

Blair: There’s been an accident. Your sister fell down the stairs and died.

Authorities arrived and discovered Elizabeth Ratliff face down at the bottom of the stairs. There was an official finding that she’d died of a spontaneous intracranial hemorrhage, a stroke, natural causes.

Blair: At that point there were gut feelings like something’s not right. But we didn’t find out until later that something was very wrong.

The dead woman’s will designated the Petersons as the legal guardians of her two daughters.

Not long after, Michael Peterson, his wife and now four children moved back to the States, to North Carolina.

Fast forward 16 years to December 2001 and then, of course, comes the bombshell, another dreadful phone call with an echo too eerie to be believed. This time it was a grown-up niece, one of Elizabeth’s daughters on the line, giving her aunt the news about Kathleen Peterson: dead at the bottom of the stairs.

Blair: I said, “Margaret, what’s wrong?,” and she said, “Kathleen’s dead. She fell down the stairs—she had an accident. She fell down the stairs, and dad found her.” And I said, “Oh my god Margaret! Do you know what you’re saying?” I said, “The same thing happened to...” and she just cut me off and she said, “I know.’”

The sister of the woman in Germany felt she had no choice but to pick up the phone and talk to the detective working on the Kathleen Peterson case.

Blair:  I said, “Are you aware that the same thing happened to Margaret and Martha’s mother and Michael Peterson was the last one to be with her?’”

Detective Art Holland did NOT know that.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: What did you think at that moment?

Det. Holland: Well, I was overwhelmed with, you know, here I have two cases. Two women that are dead. Two women that appeared to die the same way. Two women that are associated with Michael Peterson. Lightning don’t strike the same place twice.

The detective huddled with the prosecutor’s office and a decision was made to investigate anew the death of Elizabeth Ratliff, who’d died 16 years before in another country.

Her body had been brought back to Texas where she was buried. Now at the urging of authorities in Durham the dead woman’s sisters agreed to an exhumation.

Det. Holland: They didn’t feel comfortable with her cause of death, the way it was ruled in 1985.

For Detective Holland, a 22-year veteran, the Peterson case was suddenly exposing him to a wider world than Durham County. He made arrangements in Texas to recover Elizabeth Ratliff’s burial vault.

In April 2003 in Bay City, Texas, south of Houston, the remains of Elizabeth Ratliff, the onetime friend and neighbor of Michael Peterson, the mother of his two adopted daughters, were exhumed and placed under Detective Holland’s guard.

The body was driven to North Carolina and taken to the medical examiners office where it would be studied by the same medical examiner who’d ruled Kathleen Peterson’s death a homicide.

Murphy: There was a risk here wasn’t there? If you opened that coffin and found that the authorities in Germany had been correct in  ruling it a death by natural causes..

Holland: We just decided that it needed to be done.

The detective nervously peered through a morgue window as the M.E. prepared her tools, then began looking closely at the injuries to the head of the woman from Germany.

She was finding lacerations, deep injuries to the scalp. Seven of them.

Murphy: What are you thinking as you are watching the process?

Det Holland: I am thinking that my case is getting a whole lot better.

Murphy: What did the M.E. find in terms of injury to her head?

Det. Holland: The M.E. found that she had multiple lacerations to her head that were consistent with blunt force trauma. It was...

Murphy: Not a cerebral hemorrhage?

Det. Holland: Not a cerebral hemorrhage.

Murphy: She’d been bludgeoned?

Det. Holland: Exactly.

News that the medical examiner believed Elizabeth Ratliff to be a homicide victim was a deep shock to her sister up in Rhode Island.

Detective Holland had called right away.

Margaret Blair: He said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ and I said yes. And he said, ‘Your sister didn’t fall down the stairs. This just opened up all the questions that we had that were never really answered.’

So now there were two women in Michael Peterson’s life both lying dead in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs and the medical examiner in North Carolina believed each was a homicide.

Eerily similar circumstances but was there any hard evidence to link the earlier death to Peterson? The pressure was on the investigators.

The trial date was only a month away when Detective Holland took the second plane ride of his life. This time to Germany, to Grafenhausen.

There he inspected the staircase where Ratliff died.

Talked to onetime neighbors and reviewed what little official German paperwork there was on the death. And then he flew back home to North Carolina.

But were any of the detective’s findings and suspicions about what might have happened in Germany years ago admissible in the case of Kathleen Peterson?

For months there was courthouse buzz about whether the prosecutor would even try to get the mysterious Elizabeth Ratliff story heard by the jury.

In the end, the state decided to go with it.

Jim Hardin, prosecutor: We decided that there were sufficient similarities that it was admissible. We felt we were on very strong solid legal ground to introduce that.

The defense, naturally tried to block any testimony about another dead woman on a staircase.

Dave Rudolf, defense: I still think legally it was irrelevant...

The trial judge agreed with the state’s motions to admit testimony about the death years ago in Germany. The story of Elizabeth Ratliff would be recounted for the jury, almost as a mini-trial within a trial.

And the state hoped to prove more than a creepy co-incidence.

Hardin: We felt like this was the blueprint. He had seen it, been involved in it, in Germany. He knew what had to happen for it to look like, feel like, and persuade people that it was an accident because it had happened before.

Murphy: So, whether what happened in Germany was an accident or not, it was a learning curve on how one could benefit?

Hardin: It was the blueprint for this case.

The eyewitnesses to the death scene in Germany were about to tell what they saw that day and could never forget...blood spattered up the stairwell—so much like the bloody staircase on Cedar Street.

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