Written in Blood

by Diane Fanning

  On re-direct, Hardin asked him, “The new autopsy indicates death caused by blunt trauma. Do you dispute the conclusion of the medical examiner?”

  “It is at significant odds with what I thought at the time. But, no, I don’t dispute it.”

  “Can you say that the external bleeding was spontaneous vessel rupture or blunt trauma of a fall down the steps?”

  After an objection by the defense and a sidebar, Dr. Barnes answered, “No. I cannot say ‘spontaneous.’ I can’t definitely say it was caused by a blow to the head. No, I can’t say it was caused by a fall down the steps.”

  [ …] “If you had been told that there was suspicion about the cause of death other than as an accidental or natural cause, would you have handled it in the manner that you did?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I would have appealed to higher command that this be taken from our section and given to someone more qualified to do it.”

  “More qualified? In what way?”

  “With forensic training.”

  Margaret Blair was the next witness to face the jury. When Freda Black presented Elizabeth Ratliff’s will to her, she said, “I recognize the will—the only thing I don’t recognize here is my sister’s handwriting. But the will, yeah.”

  “Do you know your sister’s handwriting?”

  “Well, my sister was left-handed like I am, and she always wrote with a backwards slant, and that’s a cursive with a total right-handed slant, so I’ve never seen—I’ve never seen her write like that.”

  After the trial, Margaret compared the signature on Liz’s will to a letter written to her by Michael Peterson. The similarities she found sickened her. The letters were squished together in an unattractive way so unlike the artistic nature of Liz, and it appeared to be missing an “e” and an “a” in “Elizabeth.” To her eyes, the loop on the “R” in “Ratliff” looked the same as Michael Peterson’s loop on the “k” in “talk.” The little curls in the “a‘s” and the shaping of the “f’s,” “l’s” and “t’s” were identical in the signature and in Michael’s letter. Margaret was convinced and expressed her suspicions to the Durham District Attorney’s office. In her eyes, the document filed in Matagorda County, Texas, in 1985 was a forgery.

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  Arguing that contact between the lay witnesses for the prosecution may have altered their testimony, Rudolf requested the opportunity to question Barbara Malagnino and Amybeth Berner out of the presence of the jury. He based his objection on the heavy email correspondence between those two witnesses and the viewing of the Peterson home video at the district attorney’s office, but reserved the bulk of his outrage for the dinner party over the weekend attended by out-of-town witnesses and arranged by Assistant District Attorney Freda Black.

  David Rudolf implied nefarious intent on the part of Ms. Black. The Northern media outlets and the defense attorney guests sitting in a studio in New York echoed Rudolf’s sentiments. They just didn’t get it. For folks south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the intent was clear. It was nothing more than old-fashioned Southern hospitality at its finest. It was darn near required to welcome strangers to North Carolina with a good meal. Freda Black had even brought along her two children to ensure that conversation did not drift to the discussion of murder.

  The judge had Southern sensibilities, too. At the end of the testimony by Barbara and Amybeth, and the arguments by counsel, he ruled that no violation of ethics or law occurred.

  The prosecution called to the stand Steven Lyons, a special agent for U.S. Army Command at the time of Liz’s death. He reported that he saw no significant blood, but admitted that he interviewed no one, took no photographs and did not examine the body.

  After Lyons was excused, Barbara Malagnino took the jurors on a journey to that distant, dreadful morning she arrived at Liz Ratliff’s home. She entered the house with trepidation—uncomfortable because of the atypical lighting. She saw a body and her mind fled into the shadows of denial. She was forced to accept reality when she looked into Liz’s face. She also testified about all the blood on the stairway.

  Amybeth Berner followed, relating her memories of her friend’s demise. She told the jury that she was suspicious from the start that the official cause of death was not correct. At first, she told them, she did not suspect Michael Peterson. As time went by, however, her doubts about that night frequently turned to him. There was his talk about his CIA connections and all the death and rape that oozed from the pages of his book, The Immortal Dragon.

  Then she spoke of blood—massive quantities of blood—spattered high and low, far and wide. Tears filled her eyes as she ran the memory of that vision through her head, but she soldiered on.

  The next witness to face the jury was Dr. Aaron Gleckman, a neuro-pathologist involved in the second autopsy of Elizabeth Ratliff. He pointed out that the cuts to the brain tissue in the original autopsy were not at all conventional. Although some of the brain tissue was missing, he was amazed that after seventeen and a half years, the remaining tissue was remarkably well preserved.

  He read his conclusion from his report that Liz Ratliff had died from blunt force trauma to her head. That trauma, he testified, was the result of a beating.

  On cross-examination, Rudolf tried to make Dr. Barnes appear as a superior authority on the death of Liz Ratliff, but Gleckman was non-plussed.

  “Based on what you were able to see in 2003, you cannot rule out the possibility that Elizabeth Ratliff had a vascular malformation that burst in 1985, correct?”

  “I can’t rule it out,” Gleckman agreed, “but it wasn’t the cause of her death.”

  Next, Dr. Thomas Bouldin, neuropathologist, testified about his role in the neurological examination of Kathleen Peterson. He was the doctor who made multiple sections of the brain to search for abnormalities and discovered the presence of red neurons. In brief, he told the jury that injuries to Kathleen’s brain were consistent with head trauma. The red neurons proved that she lay on the stairs for hours before she died.

  Two days earlier, Candace Zamperini was in the witness box for voir dire examination before the judge. On September 3, she repeated her ordeal in front of the jury. During cross-examination, it was clear that there was no love lost between her and David Rudolf.

  Rudolf attempted to destroy her credibility by pointing out inconsistencies in some of her previous statements. Many on the jury, however, were not buying it. With every jab he threw, their empathy for Candace grew.

  Rudolf handed Candace photographs of the stairwell stained with Kathleen’s blood. Under direct testimony, she had marked the places where she had cleaned.

  “Just so we’re clear, can you initial next to the areas you said you cleaned up, what you say you did in terms of the area you cleaned up?” Rudolf asked.

  Candace’s face contorted in anguish as she looked at the pictures. Her head bobbed from side to side as if her mind were rebelling against her vision.

  When Rudolf pushed her for specifics, Candace interrupted. “Do you want me to go before the jury and show this?” The pitch of Candace’s voice was rising as her level of stress increased. She now sounded more like a distressed child than a grown woman. Hearts broke for her all over the courtroom.

  “Well,” Rudolf said, “what I would like you to do is write on here, if you could, the areas that you feel like, as best as you can recall right now, that you cleaned up and then we’ll try to identify it for the record.”

  As he spoke, Candace’s ragged breath echoed like a background bass beat through the crowd of riveted spectators.

  “I realize this is hard on you,” Rudolf said, “and I apologize, but you’ve indicated that you were spraying on the step area there were you put ‘X’s’ now.”

  Candace, her forehead resting on her hand, answered, “Yes.” She struggled to answer questions on the locations of her cleaning, but her emotional stamina was disintegrating with every response.

>   “Are you okay?” Rudolf asked as Candace blotted away tears.

  A deep sigh blew through the silent, transfixed audience. “It’s her blood! It’s just unnerved me.”

  “Maybe we should take a brief recess, Your Honor,” Rudolf said.

  As the judge dismissed the jury for a five-minute break, Candace collapsed forward on the stand.

  To many present, it seemed as if Rudolf had crossed that delicate line. Any doubt he raised in his earlier questioning was now washed downstream on a river of empathy for Candace Zamperini.

  Candace’s testimony reverberated far outside of the courtroom. In California, Michael’s sister, Ann, discarded her denial and tossed aside the Peterson public persona of a family united. She had told Herald-Sun columnist Tom Gasparoli a few months earlier, “I don’t think anyone could easily believe one’s brother could be a murderer. It’s just something you don’t fathom.” After the last few days of testimony, her perspective had changed. “I’m not keeping it a secret that I think he killed both Kathleen and Liz.”

  Ann also called Patty Peterson. “Don’t you get it, Patty? He killed your friend.”

  “I know his character,” Patty said, “and I know he didn’t.”

  “What about all the blood on Kathleen? What about all the blood on Liz? Can’t you see she was beaten to death?”

  “No. It’s not true.”

  The prosecution followed Candace’s emotional and moving testimony with cold, hard facts. Dr. Deborah Radisch of the medical examiner’s office was now in the hot seat. Certified in anatomic, chemical and forensic pathology, she had performed more than 3,200 autopsies—most of them forensic.

  On direct examination, Hardin walked her through indepth descriptions of every abrasion, contusion and laceration on Kathleen’s head.

  When he handed her the blowpoke and asked if the injuries to the scalp were consistent with injuries caused by a similar fireplace tool, Radisch agreed. “It’s not solid—it has weight to it, but it is not solid. Since there are no skull fractures, a hollow metal object like this could cause severe laceration without fracture.”

  “Are they collectively consistent with a fall down stairs?” Hardin asked.

  “No.”

  “With respect to these injuries cumulatively?”

  “In my opinion, the injuries were the result of being struck by an object or against an object.” She added that some of the injuries may have been caused by striking the stairs or being struck against the stairs by force.

  She then testified about the fracture and bleeding of a small piece of cartilage in Kathleen’s neck—an injury that is present with attempted strangulation. She also pointed out the many defensive wounds on Kathleen’s hands and arms.

  Hardin shifted the questioning to the autopsy of Elizabeth Ratliff. Dr. Radisch’s conclusions were succinct: “In my opinion, the cause of death of Ms. Ratliff is blunt trauma to the head. In my opinion, the manner of death in Ms. Ratliff’s case was homicide.”

  On cross-examination, David Rudolf started off on the wrong foot. “Ms. Radisch,” he said.

  “Doctor Radisch,” she responded.

  That afternoon, Rudolf badgered Radisch without making much headway. She admitted that she made mistakes in her life, but conceded nothing else.

  In the next day’s questioning, though, Rudolf sought payback. He brought two enormous white three-ring binders containing records from 1991 through 2003, and set them on the rail of the witness stand. “Obviously you’re not going to be able to read these all, but I want you to just tell me if they appear to you to be, just by looking at them, a collection of all the autopsies involving blunt trauma to the head for this time period?”

  She lifted up the cover of one book and flipped pages. She shook her head. She pulled one book toward her with a rueful grin at the jury.

  “Objection, Judge, grounds of relevancy,” Hardin interrupted.

  Radisch gave the judge a pleading look.

  Rudolf said, “I think she can look …”

  Judge Hudson responded, “He asked her to look at them. I think she can respond however she wishes.”

  Radisch flipped a notebook open. She sighed. She looked at the jurors and grinned again. “I don’t really think I can give you an accurate answer to your question,” she said with a laugh.

  “All right,” said Rudolf.

  “Not today.”

  “Well …” before Rudolf could complete that sentence, the courtroom’s decorum dissolved in a tidal wave of laughter. David Rudolf had met his match.

  Radisch expected a tough cross-examination. After all, she had consulted with David Rudolf when she wanted pointers on testifying years ago in her early days as a witness. What she did not expect was what went on outside of the courtroom. It seemed Peterson’s friends spread unfounded rumors and insinuations that attacked her professional credibility.

  On Friday, September 5, after fifty-one witnesses, the prosecution rested. The defense made the perfunctory motion to dismiss. As usual, that motion was denied. Rudolf responded, “We don’t know if we’ll put on evidence. We’ll know on Monday.”

  No one doubted that he would. The only question was who?

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  The defense opened its case on Monday, September 8. Their first witness was Dr. Jan Leestma, a forensic neuropathologist. At the request of the prosecution, he was first questioned outside the presence of the jury.

  “With regard to Kathleen Peterson, do you have an opinion whether or not injuries she sustained both externally and internally are consistent with a beating?” Rudolf asked.

  “Yes, I do have an opinion.”

  “What is that opinion?”

  “That they are not consistent with that scenario,” Dr. Leestma said.

  Rudolf waved the blowpoke around in the air. Dr. Leestma examined it and declared he disagreed with Dr. Radisch’s testimony that it could inflict the wounds of Kathleen Peterson.

  “Dr. Radisch also testified that, in her opinion, the injuries, both internal and external, on Mrs. Peterson were not consistent with an accident in that stairwell. Do you agree or disagree with that?”

  “I disagree with that interpretation.”

  While the district attorney cross-examined, boisterous laughter and loud voices emerged from the jury room. The noise had begun as a distant murmur, now it was the dominant sound in the courtroom. Judge Hudson stopped the proceedings to have the jurors moved to the jury pool room upstairs.

  Broadcast pundits seized on this incident. Some thought it indicative that the jury did not take the case seriously. Others expressed the opinion that if the jury was in a good mood at this point of the trial, they would never convict Michael Peterson.

  After lunch, the jurors were seated again in the courtroom. Dr. Leestma reiterated his disagreement with the opinions of Dr. Radisch in both autopsies. He expressed the view that there were four lacerations on Kathleen’s head—the result of two falls causing two impacts each.

  When Rudolf asked, “Could Radisch and Gleckman, with just half a brain, overrule the decision of AFIP and Dr. Barnes?” the doctor said, “No, I think she had a stroke.”

  He claimed that there were abnormalities in Kathleen’s heart tissue that could account for dizziness. He concluded by repeating his assertion that Kathleen Peterson’s injuries were inconsistent with a beating—that they were not typical wounds from a round object and that they were not consistent with blows of any sort. He insisted that there was, “robust and reliable evidence that her injuries were the result of a fall.”

  After the defense portion of Leestma’s testimony, Rudolf and Michael Peterson looked at each other and grinned hard. Michael Peterson slapped Rudolf on the back. They were certain of victory.

  Jim Hardin took the offensive when he began the cross-examination. “How much do you charge per hour for sworn testimony in the courtroom?”

  Leestma testified that his in-court testimony rate was $500 per hour. He charged $350 per hour to review recor
ds and $75 per hour for travel during a normal workday. He had billed for services two or three times since inception of the case—for a total of about $10,000.

  Next, Hardin attacked his conclusions in Kathleen Peterson’s death. Leestma equivocated about the number of falls and in his certainty that all of her injuries had been caused by those falls.

  When asked about the injuries to Kathleen’s face, he said, “One possibility I considered, and I have no way to go with it any more than saying, ‘Well, maybe something like this happened,’ is that she ended up somehow on her hands and knees trying to get herself up after one of these falls and somehow either she fainted or she slipped and her face went down on the stairs. I really can’t do much better than that, and that borders on speculation on my part.”

  “Well, how many times would she have to do that to cause these?”

  “Uh, it could be one or two times. I don’t know.”

  “Could it be more?” Hardin pressed.

  “That’s possible.”

  “Can you say with certainty that she wasn’t struck with some instrument to cause them?”

  “Those don’t look like, uh, blows with some instrument. There’s virtually no pattern to them—they’re just bruise-like things. Could there be some instrument of some sort that could do that? Sure, there could. I just don’t know what the impacting surface is.”

  Asked about what surfaces would cause the injuries to her left shoulder and down to her left hand, he replied, “These look like blunt impacts to something. The floors, the stairs, the wall, who knows?”

  “[ …] At least it’s possible that each of them is individually caused?”

  “I suppose it is possible. I think that’s unlikely,” Leestma said.

  Dr. Leestma stated his belief that original 1985 Elizabeth Ratliff autopsy results were correct. “So, are you eliminating completely the possibility that Elizabeth Ratliff was struck by some instrument?” Hardin asked.