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The facts are these. In December 2001, the unsuccessful novelist Michael Peterson called 911 saying that his wife, Kathleen, had fallen down the stairs at their house and was unconscious. She died before the paramedics arrived. The huge amount of blood at the crime scene and wounds on Kathleen’s head caused Michael to become a suspect for her murder. With Peterson’s identity held in dramatic superposition – was he a grieving husband or a deceitful murderer? – the case became a media circus and constant local talking point.
At the trial, it was revealed that Peterson had been seeking out male prostitutes online; it also emerged that a family friend, Elizabeth Ratliff, had died the same way, by falling down the stairs, and that Peterson was the last person to see her alive. The jury found Peterson guilty of murder. He was later released, after a State Bureau of Investigation officer was found to have given flawed evidence. Peterson later entered an Alford plea – meaning that there was evidence to convict him but he denied his guilt – for manslaughter. He continues to contest his guilt.
None of this is what interests me about the podcast. Here’s what does: The Staircase: The Real Story is not a piece of original research. Rather, the podcast consists of reformatted interview clips taken from an earlier podcast, Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, which explored the death of Kathleen Peterson in 18 exhaustive episodes. It is one of six podcast and radio shows that have focused on this trial, most of which draw their material from the many books written about it. It has been released to piggyback on the attention garnered by HBO’s The Staircase, which is itself the most recent of 14 dramatisations and documentaries that take Kathleen Peterson’s death as their subject. As a piece of entertainment, it’s essentially worthless. But as a material artefact, it condenses beautifully the desiccation and lifelessness of our cultural moment.
The same almost goes for Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley which bills itself as ‘where true crime meets history’, though it ends up as such an amiable amble that you might think you’d tuned in to Gardeners’ Question Time. The show gets confused about its brief and, trying to take a feminist lens to the stories of female killers, accidentally ends up half-trying to prove that they’re innocent. The problem is they just don’t seem to be.
You already know the names: Lizzie Borden, who was home alone when her wealthy family were murdered with an axe, leaving Lizzie rich. Mary Ann Cotton, whose acquaintances died at an alarming rate just as she bought life insurance for them. No one quite has the heart to suggest that these women were unfairly accused, though someone gamely and improbably suggests that Lizzie Borden was tried for violating norms of female decorum. In fact, most of the women featured managed to successfully weaponise stereotypes of female frailty to their advantage. Which you might already know, if you’d read about it before. Or which you might find out soon, if The Inhabitant, an upcoming horror film about one of Lizzie Borden’s descendants, comes to Netflix quicker than usual.
Because you read about bbc sounds
Also by John Phipps
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