A Perfect Husband

by Aphrodite Jones

  It wasn’t that he was trying to sever Margaret Blair’s relationship with her nieces. That was not his intention. But Michael had thought long and hard about the Ratliff girls, and things were going to be different. After much soul-searching, Michael wrote, he had determined he would accompany his wife, Patty, back to Germany. Patricia Peterson had accepted her old job as a second-grade teacher for the Department of Defense, and Michael and Patty and the four children would be living together as a family. Michael explained that the matter of giving the Ratliff girls to Margaret Blair for adoption had become a moot point.

  There were many reasons Michael had for deciding against any possible adoption. Of course he didn’t really need to explain himself, because Elizabeth Ratliff’s will, on file in Matagorda County in Bay City, Texas, was very clear. But still, Michael realized that Margaret Blair had grown so attached to the girls, she deserved some kind of reasoning behind his decision.

  Peterson wrote that he had been the “sole male figure” in the girls’ lives ever since the time their father, George Ratliff, had died. For seven years, Michael claimed, he had been their active father. He had taken care of Margaret and Martha from the time they were babies, from the time Martha was just an infant. And then after Elizabeth had died, Michael had become the “sole continuous link” in their lives.

  Peterson talked about George Ratliff’s will, which had also designated him to be the guardian of the two girls. Upon George’s death, Elizabeth had changed the order of the guardians—it was something she had done after examining all the possibilities of the guardianship. It was Elizabeth’s conscious choice, as verified in her will, that Michael and Patricia Peterson become the girls’ guardians, excluding any family.

  Michael wrote that he considered this guardianship a sacred trust. He outlined how, for five years since Liz’s death, he had acted in Margaret and Martha’s best interests, loving them, comforting them, nursing them, and counseling them. Not only had he taken them to doctors and dentists, he had been to their recitals and plays, he had sat on the school board and had attended the PTA.

  Even though Michael never legally adopted the Ratliff girls, as their guardian, he considered them his children. He had been there to listen to their sorrows, to laugh at their jokes—he had overseen all the aspects of their lives. Michael thought it would be terribly harmful if the Ratliff girls were made to feel like a commodity, if they felt like they could be adopted by someone else, just passed on, losing all sense of continuity in their lives.

  Peterson believed that all of the girls’ aunts and uncles—George Ratliff’s brothers and sister, as well as Elizabeth’s sisters—were playing an important role in the girls’ lives. He wanted those connections to remain in place. But none of those distant relatives, he felt, could provide that function of “anchor” as well as he had. No matter what special bond the girls had developed with Margaret Blair, or any other family member, Margaret and Martha needed the stability and love that only he had given to them. Michael had become an integral part of their lives, and he felt it was his duty and honor to continue to act as their dad.

  Michael was happy that both sides of the girls’ family—Elizabeth’s and George’s—had tried so hard to become a presence in Margaret and Martha’s lives. He was appreciative of that, and grateful for their support. But Michael hoped that Margaret Blair and the rest of the relatives were appreciative of his efforts also. Michael had a special commitment to the girls. It was a commitment that nobody would ever be able to understand.

  Deep in his heart, Michael believed he was the best choice to raise the Ratliff girls. He was the right person to guide them. And he loved them.

  Thirty-four

  Caitlin remembered the way Michael felt about the Ratliff girls. He was very attached to them, and they seemed to love him. Margaret and Martha had been Caitlin’s favorite playmates, and the Ratliff girls seemed quite settled over at the Peterson house. They considered Michael and Patricia to be their parents. Way back when Caitlin first met them, Margaret and Martha couldn’t remember any details about their real mother, they couldn’t recall any exact details about Germany. All they knew was what they had been told.

  But all was not well at the Peterson house.

  It was Caitlin, even at a very young age, who noticed that Michael and Patricia didn’t seem happy together. Caitlin was aware of the dynamic that had developed between Michael and her mom, and to her, it was obvious that Michael was becoming more fond of Kathleen every day. From her backyard, Caitlin would watch Michael and Kathleen slip away into her mom’s bedroom. She was just an elementary-school kid, but she had an idea that they might be kissing—that something was going on. Margaret and Martha would eventually join Caitlin in her suspicions, especially when Michael began the process of trying “separations” from Patricia in those early years, in the late 1980s.

  By 1990, the summer that Margaret Blair had tried to adopt Margaret and Martha, Michael and Kathleen had become firmly entrenched in the lives of the three girls. That summer was a time that Caitlin would remember very well. When the Ratliff girls left for New England, Caitlin missed having Margaret and Martha around. In a way, they had become like sisters to her.

  For his part, Michael was overly annoyed that Margaret Blair would even suggest adopting the girls—she had no legal right to do that. He decided that he and Kathleen should take a trip up to Rhode Island that summer, just to check on the girls’ living circumstances. Of course Kathleen brought Caitlin along, who was thrilled to be able to visit with her best friends.

  When Michael made the arrangements for their trip up north, he never said it, but he had reason to believe that Margaret Blair’s home wasn’t the best place for Margaret and Martha. He acted as if he were curious. For his own peace of mind, he wanted to know if Margaret and Martha were truly happy in New England. If that wasn’t the case, he planned to bring them home to live in Kathleen’s house, and Kathleen was in support of that.

  For Caitlin, the idea of Margaret and Martha returning to Durham would be a dream come true. Being an only child, she loved having her best buddies around. Without the girls, Michael and Kathleen were no fun to be with, and Caitlin hadn’t exactly adjusted to having her parents being split apart. She didn’t mind having to spend time alone with her dad, Fred, but Fred couldn’t really entertain her. Caitlin loved her father, but she didn’t feel comfortable in his downtown Durham loft. It wasn’t exactly a home to her, and she missed the neighborhood kids.

  Before they took the trip to Rhode Island, Michael claimed he wasn’t sure about the fate of Margaret and Martha Ratliff. All along, Michael was saying that he would abide by whatever the Ratliff girls’ decision was. He wanted Margaret and Martha to know that it was their choice—that they alone could decide where they might be happier. Michael originally had planned to spend just a few days in New England, but after the first day of their arrival, Michael chose to extend their stay to a week.

  Caitlin had packed some of her favorite Barbie dolls and other toys—and the girls seemed to be enjoying each other so much. As Caitlin recalled, throughout the visit to Rhode Island, Michael and Kathleen would spend much of the day at the Blair household, allowing the girls a chance to play for hours. Margaret was happily married with kids of her own, so her house was always busy and alive with laughter. Michael thought it was nice that the Ratliff girls had gotten to know their cousins, but he also noticed that Martha seemed extremely attached to her aunt Margaret. Being the baby, that seemed only natural, but Michael was disturbed to learn that Martha might prefer to remain in New England, to live with Margaret Blair and her family.

  Michael explained that there were other priorities to consider. Michael said he wanted it to be Margaret and Martha’s decision, but he kept reminding the Ratliff girls that if they decided to stay in Rhode Island, they would be going against their mother’s dying wishes. He told them that Elizabeth’s will had designated that they live with him. He mentioned that their birth mother had big plans
for them, explaining that Elizabeth had left New England for a reason, that she hadn’t wanted her children to be raised there.

  The Ratliff girls had so much fun playing games with Caitlin, they finally admitted that they missed their former life in North Carolina. When Michael suggested that they all fly home together, Margaret and Martha agreed. Before they knew it, Margaret and Martha had joined them at the airport, where plane tickets were purchased for all of them to return to Durham. The girls’ belongings had been packed up, and some of them were taken on the plane. The rest of their summer things were left with their aunt, to be shipped at a later date.

  Being back with Michael was a difficult transition for the girls, especially in the beginning of his separation from Patricia. Michael had moved them to Germany and then back to Durham, and it took Margaret and Martha some time to think of him as a true dad. The girls hadn’t felt at home in Germany—they were much happier living back in English-speaking America—but by the time Michael and Kathleen had gotten married and moved into the Cedar Street house, the Ratliff girls finally felt like they belonged.

  They accepted Michael as their father and were comfortable with Kathleen, who had gone to great lengths to treat Margaret and Martha as daughters. Over the years, she’d done everything she could for the Ratliff girls, had given them birthday parties and special gifts. Every Sunday, Kathleen and Michael would make a point of doing things together as a family. There were vacations and excursions, and there were always big holiday gatherings that Kathleen would turn into magical occasions.

  It would take years, but eventually Margaret and Martha called Kathleen their mom. And that was appropriate, because Kathleen was the person who put most of the effort in with them. She focused as much on Margaret and Martha as she did on Caitlin, and she would encourage each of the girls to communicate every night at the dinner table, asking them about their day, about their schoolwork, and about their views on the world.

  “My mother was always wanting us to discuss things, and Michael always had a more outlandish view,” Caitlin confided. “If you hit on a topic that he wanted to talk about, he always had the better story. You would end up listening to him because he was a very educated man, and he knew history, like from B.C. It was clear you couldn’t compete with that. But it was Mom who genuinely tried to push for us to share. She wanted to hear what we had to say.”

  Kathleen would ask that each of the girls come to the table with three topics to discuss. There were always stories, there were jokes and anecdotes, and, as the years passed, the girls recognized the significance of their nightly family dinners. That was, until they became teenagers and were suddenly not as concerned with world events and homework reports. It all seemed tedious, the obligatory family dinner, complete with three full courses and dessert.

  Caitlin recalled that as they got older, the dinner table at the Peterson house would sometimes feel like a scene out of American Beauty, where everyone was forced to speak, where there would be some awkward stretches of silence. At times, Kathleen would get caught up talking about what she was doing at work. Her job was high-powered. She was traveling to Canada and Asia for Nortel Networks—a company in the high-end electronics field.

  By 1999, Nortel Networks, a Canadian company, formerly a manufacturer of telephones, had become a household name, competing with the American telecommunications giant Lucent. Nortel Networks was standing toe-to-toe with the high-tech networking company Cisco Systems, and Kathleen Peterson’s job responsibilities, as well as her income, were skyrocketing.

  At times, Kathleen, whose job entailed writing about Nortel equipment, would get too technical in her nightly dinner discussions about her fast-growing company. Her daughters couldn’t keep up with all the information Kathleen would try to impart, and sometimes, neither could Michael. When Kathleen would bring up Nortel, the girls would stare across the dinner table, trying to understand what she was saying. But they couldn’t comprehend it all. Often they would sit and listen silently, just to placate her.

  If their mom would get too specific, the girls would sometimes stare off into space, or would explain that Kathleen was losing them, asking her to change the subject. Margaret and Martha and Caitlin didn’t really care about Nortel announcing a half-billion-dollar deal with Sprint and MCI WorldCom to launch trials of Nortel equipment. They didn’t understand what it meant for Nortel Networks to be able to transfer data at ten gigabytes per second.

  They really didn’t want to know about it. They were in their fun years, busy with high-school concerns. They had boyfriends, dances, and loads of friends to occupy their minds. They would try to be polite whenever their mom would give details about Nortel—it was all well and good that she changed jobs a lot and was climbing the corporate ladder—but the girls didn’t really want to hear about phone systems being hooked up in Asia or third-world places.

  They’d never heard of half the technical stuff their mom talked about, and they would defer to Michael to move the conversation back to politics or social issues, to more familiar ground. As far as the girls were concerned, the Internet and the wireless world were great for e-mailing, but all the high-tech gunk that fueled it sounded more foreign to them than Greek.

  Thirty-five

  In February 2002, not long after Caitlin and Fred Atwater went to Durham to meet with Jim Hardin and Art Holland, Caitlin called her sisters to try to reason with them. Margaret and Martha were both back at college, and Caitlin was able to get hold of Margaret on the campus of Tulane.

  Shocked by the details in the autopsy reports, Caitlin didn’t want to flat-out tell Margaret that their mom had been beaten. It was a subject she preferred not to speak about on the phone. Caitlin just wanted her sisters to see the truth. Caitlin hadn’t taken sides; she was still giving Michael the benefit of the doubt. But she felt that once Margaret and Martha read about the seven lacerations to Kathleen’s head, without even looking at the photos of the wounds, they would realize that their mom had been killed by someone, perhaps an intruder.

  “Margaret, this is about Mom,” Caitlin pleaded. “You need to read the autopsy report. You need to understand that she didn’t fall down the stairs.”

  “Dad says not to read it,” Margaret said. “He says it would be too upsetting and that the things they’ve written in the reports are not true.”

  “You need to read it for yourself. You need to know what happened to Mom. She was beaten,” Caitlin told her.

  “I don’t want to read it,” Margaret insisted. “Dad already told me what’s in there, and he says the reports are wrong.”

  “She was our mother. This is about Mom,” Caitlin argued. “This is not about Dad.”

  But Margaret had made up her mind, and she told Caitlin not to bother calling Martha, who felt the same way. Neither of them had an interest in seeing bloody photos and autopsy reports filled with nasty accusations and things that would traumatize them all over again. Their dad had assured Margaret that he would be exonerated in court.

  Michael Peterson had convinced the girls of his innocence by leaning on the opinions of experts. Among the experts in his corner that he bragged about was, of course, Dr. Henry Lee, who had already made a trip to the house, who had brought in a crew from 20/20. Michael had given the Ratliff girls inside information, he had promised them that the top forensic expert didn’t believe there had been a crime.

  Michael had bragged about the appearance of Dr. Henry Lee to everyone on his side of the family. Kathleen’s immediate family had no idea, but they would watch in horror when ABC aired the 20/20 story in April 2002. Kathleen’s sister-in-law, Cynthia Woodward, happened to catch the program; it was a profile piece on Dr. Henry Lee. As the news team followed Henry Lee to the back staircase, Woodward recognized the entrance to the Peterson mansion. She recognized the furnishings, and was mortified to see Kathleen’s dried blood everywhere, in close-up shots.

  Dr. Lee took a pair of tweezers to show reporters that he was retrieving tissues and hair samples
from the bloody wall. There was dried and smeared blood on the walls behind him, and beneath his feet, there was blood all along the steps. Though the Michael Peterson case was never mentioned during the 20/20 segment, Cynthia Woodward went numb, devastated to see the great amount of blood. When they learned about the broadcast of the Peterson stairwell, some of Kathleen’s family members wrote editorials expressing their shock. They were beside themselves, and couldn’t believe that the news team could be so insensitive.

  Of course Michael Peterson was pleased that the 20/20 segment had aired. The segment was powerful. The image of Henry Lee finding “hidden tissue” made it seem like the expert was trumping the North Carolina authorities. The piece had punch. Attorney David Rudolf was shown in one of the shots, standing outside the Peterson house. He was in the background, having a friendly chat with Dr. Henry Lee.

  It was further proof of his innocence, Michael would insist to his family.

  And, according to Michael, it wasn’t only Dr. Lee, the top national forensic expert, who believed in him. Peterson insisted that David Rudolf had a very strong case lined up. He insinuated that Rudolf would show proof that the Durham police had a vendetta against him.

  Michael wanted his daughters to sit tight and wait for the trial. He swore that the day would come when numerous experts, who were in complete disagreement with the state’s autopsy findings, would testify in court.

  As for Margaret and Martha, they just wanted to go about their business, to work hard at getting good grades in college. They weren’t willing to watch the news anymore, they were sick of all the drama, and they didn’t even try to see the 20/20 piece when it aired.