Kathleen Peterson dead at the bottom of one in North Carolina.

Elizabeth Ratliff at the bottom of another in Germany.

Both women in Michael Peterson’s life.

Now it was eerily as though the murder trial in North Carolina was continuing with a substitute victim...the neighbor and friend standing in for the wife.

But the state drew up just short of accusing Michael Peterson of murder in Germany years ago by the same m.o.—a bludgeoning homicide disguised as a fall down the stairs.

Jim Hardin, prosecutor: What we wanted to show was the similarities. The scene was very very similar to what we had in Kathleen’s death.

Just as he’d done in setting the scene in the house when Kathleen Peterson died, the prosecutor led a parade of witnesses through their stories about what they saw and heard in November 1985 at a residence in Grafenhausen, Germany.

The victim’s nanny from those days testified about making the awful discovery when she came to work early in the morning.

Prosecutor: Once you put the key in the door and opened the door what happened next?

Former nanny: I see all the lights are on and I see this body lying there.

Dead or alive she didn’t know. The nanny told the court she ran upstairs to her employer’s bedroom to grab the phone to call the Peterson’s for help but the line was dead.

At first she wasn’t even sure the person on the stairs was her boss, Liz, but when the nanny came back downstairs there was no doubt.

Former nanny: I see that these boots and feet were Liz’s. The body was Liz, on the stairs. She had boots on.

Prosecutor: Were they a certain type of boot?

Former nanny: They were snow boots.

Snow boots that Elizabeth routinely took off and left by the front door. Why was she still wearing them in the house?  The state was implying that Michael Peterson had killed the woman before she’d had a chance to remove them.

The former nanny told the court she ran down the street to get Michael Peterson. She remembers him coming back to the house and taking charge.

Former nanny: He says ‘She was dead’, and I say ‘No no, I felt her, she is warm.’ And he said ‘She is not warm Barbara, and he took me by the arms and said she is not warm Barbara, she is dead.’ The warmth comes from the floor heating.”

Soon the German police showed up and Michael Peterson explained to them what likely had happened.

Former nanny: Michael was speaking to authorities. He was telling them there had been an accident.

Now came the payoff for the prosecution. Elizabeth’s friends from Germany testifying to what they saw that day at the bottom of the stairs. Vivid memories so like testimony already heard by the jury in the Kathleen Peterson death. Suspicious looking blood stain stories:

Surely the jury couldn’t miss how eerily similar the eyewitness testimony from Germany seemed to the accounts told by those arriving at the Kathleen Peterson scene. An otherwise healthy woman, dead at the bottom of a staircase, pooled in blood. But unlike the authorities in North Carolina, the German officials didn’t question the amount of blood they found. The accepted the theory of the friend—Michael Peterson—that the woman had died in a fall. Very little investigating was done and the death was ruled the result of natural causes.

The prosecution called this U.S. Army pathologist, who’d performed the autopsy on Ratliff in Germany years before. He testified that he did see lacerations on the back of her head, but determined that the woman died of a cerebral hemorrhage, partly because authorities did not think there had been foul play.

Authorities in Germany felt the most likely scenario was that Ratliff blacked out and fell down the stairs, causing lacerations.

Prosecutor: How many did you locate on Ms. Ratliff’s head if you remember?

Pathologist: More than four.

Prosecutor: Could there have been as many as seven?

Pathologist: Yes.

Another weird parallel. Seven lacerations: exactly the same number that the medical examiner had found on the scalp of Kathleen Peterson.

The M.E. who’d studied the exhumed body of the woman from Germany told the jury what she found—homicide. Homicide of the mother of the two young women sitting in court in support of their step-father Michael Peterson. It was industrial-strength innuendo that Peterson was somehow involved in the homicide of Elizabeth Ratliff without actually accusing him or suggesting a motive as to why he wanted the family friend dead.

The defense was going to refute the testimony by arguing: coincidence but so what?

Rudolf: Even if, Elizabeth Ratliff had died from a fall down the stairs in Germany in 1985 is that such an amazing coincidence?  Falling down the stairs as a cause of death is a heck of a lot more common, for example, than drowning.  Weird things happen all the time. The evidence will show that Michael Peterson had no reason to hurt Elizabeth Ratliff and didn’t. What we have, we contend and we will show you, is a false coincidence.

The defense responded to the new charge as it had with Kathleen Peterson, by calling its own expert, the same neuropathologist who’d testified earlier. The expert said he thought German authorities got it right the first time: Elizabeth Ratliff DID die of a cerebral hemorrhage, a stroke.

Rudolf: Is the blood in all of the ventricles of the brain consistent with a stroke from natural causes?

Expert: It is consistent.

That close friend of Elizabeth Ratliff’s who’d testified so forcefully about her memories of blood-spatter up the staircase wall— on cross-examination by the defense added some perhaps important detail about the dead woman. The friend recalled she’d complained of not feeling well in the days leading up to her death.

Defense: Shortly before she died, you talked with Liz and she talked about suffering some severe headaches?

Shumacker: Liz looked very bad. She was pale, she looked bad. And she held her head like this and I asked her what was wrong and she said she had the most severe headache. And that she did make an appointment to go to the medical facility. And she had an appointment Tuesday.

Defense: The following week?

Shumacker: Yes.

Defense: And she never got to see a doctor?

Shumacker: No.

The defense, that had accused the police officers in North Carolina of misunderstanding and failing to preserve their crime scene, had nothing but confidence in the work of the German and U.S. authorities in Grafenhausen.

The defense questioned this former U.S. military authority who’d been dispatched to the scene there.

The defense elected not to quiz the nanny about what she saw that morning in Germany because attorney Rudolf believed her account spoke to Peterson’s non-involvement in the death.

Rudolf: The evidence was that when the nanny found her at eight o’clock in the morning, her body was still warm. It was not stiff, there was no rigor. And a telephone that she only brought into the bedroom when she went to sleep at night was there in the bedroom.

Therefore, reasoned the defense—the phone in the bedroom proved that Elizabeth Ratliff went to bed that night. Whatever happened to her didn’t happen that night.

Rudolf : All of the evidence was if there was a homicide, it was that morning, not the night before. Now where was Michael Peterson that morning? He was at his wife’s side in bed in his own home.

In the end, the defense treated the death in Germany as, granted, maybe a weird coincidence, but legally—here, now in Durham North Carolina—completely irrelevant.

Still, how many guys have two women in their lives dead at the bottom of the stairs?

It was a question of relevance for the jury, which was about to get the case involving Michael Peterson’s dead wife. Fiendish killer or grieving husband wrongfully accused? Which would the jury decide?

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