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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Gaesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 5: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 6: Good Evening.
Speaker 7: On December ninth, two thousand and one, Kathleen Peterson was
Speaker 7: found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her Durham,
Speaker 7: North Carolina home. Her scalp was laced with deep incisions
Speaker 7: and her blood was strewn from outside the inside the house.
Speaker 7: The sinister truth of that night turned her murder into
Speaker 7: North Carolina's most enigmatic criminal case, capturing media attention across
Speaker 7: the globe. Police zeroed in on Kathleen's husband, Michael Peterson,
Speaker 7: and charged him with murder, but was it the truth?
Speaker 7: A neighbor, Larry Pollard, came up with an alternative killer.
Speaker 7: He claimed an owl had attack Kathleen outside her house.
Speaker 7: He said it sliced her scalp with its fierce talons
Speaker 7: and caused her to run inside, collapsing at the stairwell
Speaker 7: and bleeding to death. When the media heard about his theory,
Speaker 7: Larry was mocked and Michael was convicted. Now twenty years later,
Speaker 7: author Titty Smith explores Pollard's theory and questions whether law
Speaker 7: enforcement ignored or even hid evidence to convict Michael Peterson
Speaker 7: and was an owl in fact the real killer. The
Speaker 7: book that we're featuring this evening is Death by Talons
Speaker 7: then an Owl Murder Kathleen Peterson with my special guest,
Speaker 7: philosopher and author Titty Smith. Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 7: thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 6: Td Smith, thank you, it's great to be here.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much, and congratulations on this explosive and
Speaker 7: extraordinary book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I.
Speaker 6: Appreciate the praise. It was a very nerve wrecking thing
Speaker 6: to put together.
Speaker 7: Now, you right early on in the book that you
Speaker 7: had seen the original Staircase docuseries somewhere around two thousand
Speaker 7: and four you had a first impression of the case itself.
Speaker 7: And then in two thousand and three you talk about
Speaker 7: two events that would drastically change your thinking about the case. First,
Speaker 7: two thousand and three, and then in twenty and nineteen.
Speaker 7: Tell us what these two events were that drastically changed
Speaker 7: your mind about this case before we get to December ninth,
Speaker 7: two thousand and one.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I suppose I'll just recip by going right
Speaker 6: back to when I first saw the Staircase DOCU series,
Speaker 6: the original before it made its way onto Neatflips. You know,
Speaker 6: I saw the family unit, I watched the interviews, and
Speaker 6: I I wanted him to be innocent. You know, I
Speaker 6: wanted Michael Peterson to be innocent of murdering his wife,
Speaker 6: so emotionally I felt, you know, pulls into the story,
Speaker 6: and I thought, oh, you know, it could be it
Speaker 6: could be that she felt, couldn't it. But the more
Speaker 6: I looked at the evidence in the case, and the
Speaker 6: more I got through the episodes, I realized, Wow, it's
Speaker 6: really it's not looking good for Michael here. The evidence
Speaker 6: is not stacking up well. Most likely, if I put
Speaker 6: what I want to decide, I put my emotions to side, No,
Speaker 6: he is probably the murderer. But then a few years
Speaker 6: after Kathleen's death, a neighbor of Michael Peterson Kathleen Peterson,
Speaker 6: a man called Larry Pollard, began to put forward this
Speaker 6: owl theory, and according to him, Kathleen's death had resulted
Speaker 6: from an owl attack which occurred late at night outside
Speaker 6: her house. So the idea is that rather than falling
Speaker 6: down the steps and patting her head, rather than being
Speaker 6: bludgeoned to death stairwell by Michael, in fact, she had
Speaker 6: first been attacked by an owl, a bird of prey
Speaker 6: outside her house, and then ran inside with these terrible
Speaker 6: cuts on her head, having already been put there before
Speaker 6: falling in the staircase and bleeding to death after having
Speaker 6: gone concussed or knocking herself out after falling. Now that
Speaker 6: theory captured my imaginations, and I'm sure it captured many
Speaker 6: imaginations around the globe, right. It was a very crazy
Speaker 6: theory and people were attracted to it, not just because
Speaker 6: it seemed in some ways to fit the evidence. For example,
Speaker 6: fits the shape of the wounds on Kathleen's scalp very
Speaker 6: very well, and this was something that ornithologists were actually
Speaker 6: quite happy to accept that, yes, those are wounds that
Speaker 6: owl would be capable of inflicting, you know, So that
Speaker 6: that was the first thing that really captured my attention.
Speaker 6: Was Larry Pollard putting forward this owl theory, and I,
Speaker 6: you know, captured my imagination. I started, is the supplause theory.
Speaker 6: It seems like it could work, you know, I mean
Speaker 6: either and by this I think I was in two minds.
Speaker 6: I thought, either Michael killed Kathleen or an owl killed Kathleen.
Speaker 6: And I was pretty fifty to fifty. Then in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 6: I was discussing the case with the stranger at a
Speaker 6: party and I said something along the lines to that, Oh,
Speaker 6: but the owl there is pretty persuasive too. You know,
Speaker 6: she got these wounds on her head, she had the
Speaker 6: feather fragments that were found in her hand. You know
Speaker 6: what about all that? And this dude just laughed at me.
Speaker 6: You know, you think, and owl, a bird of prey
Speaker 6: could attack a woman, scour her head with its talons,
Speaker 6: slice it to shreds, and all that would be found
Speaker 6: in the aftermath are a couple of tiny feather fragments
Speaker 6: in her hands. You really, have you ever seen a
Speaker 6: cat with a bird, he asked me. And I thought
Speaker 6: about it, and I thought, oh my god, he's right.
Speaker 6: That's just incredibly obvious. If a bird of prey was
Speaker 6: tussling with Kathleen. You know, the idea is that she
Speaker 6: was supposed supposedly pulling to pray from her head. You know,
Speaker 6: she's bound to be coveredant feathers, and they're bound to
Speaker 6: be feathers all around where she was attacked, And according
Speaker 6: to all of the official accounts, there was no such thing.
Speaker 6: All that were founder a couple of stray for the
Speaker 6: fragments in her hands to fear the fragments. So at
Speaker 6: that point I realized, Okay, I'll have to start again,
Speaker 6: because one of these theories has to has to be
Speaker 6: right right, or both of them could be wrong. Either
Speaker 6: Michael did kill his wife, after all all, there are
Speaker 6: feathers all over the place where she was attacked. And
Speaker 6: that's when I started to look at the evidence a
Speaker 6: lot more closely in this case and discovered something that
Speaker 6: in a way I almost wish I hadn't by this
Speaker 6: point very interesting.
Speaker 7: Now through this thorough re examination of this case, you
Speaker 7: have to look at everything. Take us back to December
Speaker 7: ninth in two thousand and one, and the phone call that,
Speaker 7: as I said earlier before this interview, that really dooms
Speaker 7: Michael Peterson. Ellus WA's this phone call. What he says
Speaker 7: and as you chronicle in this book, the arrival of
Speaker 7: her own police department.
Speaker 6: Well, okay, right, So, according to Michael's story, he finds
Speaker 6: his wife at the bottom of the stairs, drenched in blood.
Speaker 6: Not only is her body drenched in blood, not only
Speaker 6: is her hair drenched in blood. The walls of the
Speaker 6: stairwell are covered in red stains, splatter stains, smear stains, carbash,
Speaker 6: an amazing amount of stains. I think when they were
Speaker 6: finally analyzed, it was found that there were about ten
Speaker 6: thousand individual blood spots in the stairwell, so a huge
Speaker 6: amount of blood around her body. He's found her body
Speaker 6: at the bottom of the stairs, and he calls nine
Speaker 6: one one and he said his first words to the
Speaker 6: operator are eighteen ten seed of set. Please, my wife's
Speaker 6: had an accident. She's still breathing. And the operator says,
Speaker 6: what kind of accident, and he says, she's fell down
Speaker 6: the stairs. She's still breathing. Please come. So his first
Speaker 6: impression from finding his wife, so as far as we
Speaker 6: can tell us that he believed she'd fallen down the
Speaker 6: stairs and whacked her head on the way down. But
Speaker 6: as soon as police arrived, as soon as the first
Speaker 6: responders arrived, they find something that is just absolutely incompatible
Speaker 6: with a fall downstairs. To them, this looks like a
Speaker 6: brutally violent scene, and so already with their arrival on
Speaker 6: the scene, we have these two hypotheses set in stone.
Speaker 6: Either she fell downstairs, as a crying husband claimed, or
Speaker 6: she was beaten to death by that same husband who
Speaker 6: was in fact crying crocodile tears. That's I think the
Speaker 6: very first moment where this case turns sour, because we
Speaker 6: begin immediately with what we philosophers like to call a
Speaker 6: false dilemma, as though these are the only two options
Speaker 6: on the table. It must be one or the other,
Speaker 6: either she fell or she was murdered. And that was
Speaker 6: the view that these were the lenses through which this
Speaker 6: case was viewed ever after, until at least Larry comes
Speaker 6: along with his outrageous theory about a bird. Pray.
Speaker 7: Tell us about the technicians that arrive. What they find again,
Speaker 7: you say, immediately, Michael seems to be the suspect, and
Speaker 7: this looks like it can't be a fall. Tell Us
Speaker 7: about this stairwell, and there's two stairwells in the home,
Speaker 7: So tell us about this stairwell.
Speaker 6: Describe it for us. But it's a very narrow, dark,
Speaker 6: boxy thing. It's not like a grand sort of mezzanine
Speaker 6: staircase winding around. This is a dark, narrow I think
Speaker 6: it's about forty inches across, rather steep, with hard, solid
Speaker 6: oak steps. When the police arrived on the scene, and
Speaker 6: when the first forensic investigators arrived on the scene, there
Speaker 6: were in the stairwell with Kathleen's body numerous objects that
Speaker 6: didn't seem to belong there. There was a pair of
Speaker 6: reading glasses on top of the blood. Next to Kathleen's head.
Speaker 6: There were a couple of blood soaked paper towels, one
Speaker 6: skin right side Kathleen's head, over the blood which was
Speaker 6: on the bottom steps and under her head. Michael had
Speaker 6: apparently stuffed at least one, possibly two large cotton towels
Speaker 6: that have been sort of bundled up into a pillow
Speaker 6: of sorts for her to rest her head on. And
Speaker 6: this was soaked in blood. Her hair was soaked in blood. Shirt,
Speaker 6: her sweatshirt, dark gray sweatshirt, was soaked in blood. Her
Speaker 6: white track pants were soaked until say knee high, or
Speaker 6: rather down to the knees, blood running down to the
Speaker 6: knees and in her hands were clumped over sixty individual
Speaker 6: hairs from her own head that she had wrenched out.
Speaker 6: So doesn't sound like fall downstairs, does it now? It
Speaker 6: doesn't sound like full downstairs, And it didn't look like
Speaker 6: fall downstairs. It looked like something much much more violent.
Speaker 6: But there were also other and normal subjects around Kathleen's
Speaker 6: body that fran Borden was the first to mention the detective.
Speaker 6: Friend Borden, who was one of the first detectives to
Speaker 6: arrive on the scene, do you not that it was
Speaker 6: very strange. She thought that Kathleen's body was surrounded with
Speaker 6: pine needles, so many pine needles scattered all around her body.
Speaker 6: He said, so, again, this is a very strange thing.
Speaker 6: If she was just falling down the stairs, or indeed,
Speaker 6: if she was beaten, she beaten to death with the
Speaker 6: limb of a Christmas tree, maybe it was a very
Speaker 6: strange thing that friend Bordon noticed. And these weren't the
Speaker 6: only strange things that I believe the investigators found when
Speaker 6: they arrived. There were other objects surrounding Kathleen in the stairwell,
Speaker 6: on the walls that I think we'll get in too shortly.
Speaker 7: You also talk about blood in other places. When they arrived,
Speaker 7: police arrived, and technicians arrive. Front door is open. There
Speaker 7: is also blood involved on the inside of that door.
Speaker 7: Tell us where they discover blood and some of the
Speaker 7: patterns that they notice.
Speaker 6: Yes, so this was, in fact the first thing that
Speaker 6: the fire officers noticed when they were on the front
Speaker 6: door was wide open. When the parents had arrived, they
Speaker 6: thought that was strange. When they ran through the front door,
Speaker 6: they noticed that the frame was smeared with blood stains
Speaker 6: and what looked like something fingerprinting. Now that's the inside
Speaker 6: frame of the door. To this is where we're looking at, say,
Speaker 6: the latch and the lock, right on the interior face
Speaker 6: where it actually shuts. So for some reason, blood had
Speaker 6: been smeared all in the frame of the door. Very
Speaker 6: strange place for a bunch of blood to be found,
Speaker 6: right if you've just fell down the stairs, or in fact,
Speaker 6: if you were beaten to death at the bottom of
Speaker 6: the sets. Now, the fire captain Gary Paschell takes two
Speaker 6: steps inside and as he's waiting for the paramedic team
Speaker 6: to wrap up, he turns his head and he looks
Speaker 6: at the back of the door. Now all over the
Speaker 6: back of the door are great wipes of red blood.
Speaker 6: These are not small smudges. This is not just a
Speaker 6: little fingerprint or two. These are great wipes of wet
Speaker 6: blood that have been deposited there. So immediately, as you
Speaker 6: can imagine, the police turning up, the fire captain, the paramedics,
Speaker 6: they know a fall didn't happen, because you can't fall
Speaker 6: down the stairs and smear blood all over your front
Speaker 6: door in a different room. So it was a very
Speaker 6: strange situation, and there's no wonder that the police were
Speaker 6: extremely skipped called Michael's story to beginner.
Speaker 7: What was Michael's story in terms of his whereabouts while
Speaker 7: this was all going on, and what was the time
Speaker 7: we I don't think we had mentioned what time in
Speaker 7: the mid morning it was and the early morning it was.
Speaker 6: That's right. So Michael's first call to nine forty am,
Speaker 6: he then called again six minutes later to tell the
Speaker 6: operator that Kathleen had stopped breathing, and his first phone
Speaker 6: call he had said she was still breathing, so he
Speaker 6: ran six. He rang again six minutes later to say
Speaker 6: that she had stopped breathing. So we're looking at a
Speaker 6: discovery of the body around about two forty am, so
Speaker 6: very very much the dark of night. The police investigators
Speaker 6: arrived not too late afterwards, we're talking about I think
Speaker 6: it's within two minutes of his second nine to one
Speaker 6: one call that the paramedics arrived, so about two forty
Speaker 6: eight am. So again, this was part of the reason
Speaker 6: that the owl theory came to Larry's mind, and the
Speaker 6: idea that well the time of night during which Kathleen
Speaker 6: was found might help support the hypothesis as well. And
Speaker 6: he also asked what was Michael's story about his whereabouts?
Speaker 6: This is a problem for anybody who wants to defend
Speaker 6: Michael's innocent It's a big problem. It's not a small problem.
Speaker 6: It's a really big book. According to multiple paramedics who
Speaker 6: were at the scene that early morning, they asked Michael directly,
Speaker 6: when did the falls happen, and he said, I don't know.
Speaker 6: I was just going downstairs to turn off the lights.
Speaker 6: I came back in and found her. Now, for anyone
Speaker 6: who's familiar with the staircase story and the documentaries and
Speaker 6: all that, you might be very surprised to hear that,
Speaker 6: because everybody knows that his story goes he was outside
Speaker 6: the pool, outside beside the pool all night, smoking his pipe,
Speaker 6: having a few drinks, maybe having a doze, maybe he
Speaker 6: was snapping. You can't really remember. It was late, you know,
Speaker 6: he was tired out by the pool all night at something.
Speaker 6: I don't know what ten degrees celsius is and fahrenheit
Speaker 6: right now, it's skipped my mind. But it was not
Speaker 6: very warm that much. It was relatively cool. So for
Speaker 6: most people, I think if you're familiar with the Staircasse story,
Speaker 6: you might not know that his first words the paramedics
Speaker 6: were in fact, I was going outside to turn off
Speaker 6: the lights. I came back and and found it. It's
Speaker 6: only in all of his subsequent stories in the media
Speaker 6: and its lawyers and documentaries and so on, that he says, no, no, no,
Speaker 6: I wasn't inside the house. I was out by the
Speaker 6: pool all night, really far away from Kathleen. So of
Speaker 6: course I couldn't care her fall. So it's a big story. Sorry,
Speaker 6: it's a big problem for Michael, and it's one that
Speaker 6: you know, I come at from a position of what
Speaker 6: I hoped, you know, the reader would know of it.
Speaker 6: This is kind of honesty about it, right. This book
Speaker 6: is not designed to exonerate my it's not about Michael.
Speaker 6: This book is about the forensic evidence this case and
Speaker 6: what it bet supports that doesn't actually have a lot
Speaker 6: to do with whether Michael knew about it, whether he
Speaker 6: was in the house, outside house anything. It's not a
Speaker 6: book about Michael and his innocent as not supposed to be.
Speaker 7: You write about the crime scene photographer and the crime
Speaker 7: scene videographer that gathered evidence for this trial.
Speaker 6: Tell us just a little bit about the work that.
Speaker 7: They do, and then you fast forward to nearly two
Speaker 7: years after Kathleen's death, October tenth, two thousand and three,
Speaker 7: the trial.
Speaker 6: Okay, so early in the morning of Sember ninth, the
Speaker 6: lead forensic investigator, man called Dan George, finally was given
Speaker 6: a search warrant and so he was able to go
Speaker 6: about the house making the crime scene video. Behind him
Speaker 6: was young sort of apprentice photographer who was taking photos
Speaker 6: as George went on with the video. Now, it's very
Speaker 6: difficult to express in words how poor quality the video
Speaker 6: that was given to the jury is, and all I
Speaker 6: can suggest for any interested listeners that they go to
Speaker 6: court TV, find Dan George's testimony and watch the crime
Speaker 6: scene video for themselves to see how truly terrible. The
Speaker 6: quality is as though it's been filmed by a potato.
Speaker 6: George also seems to make some very fundamental errors in
Speaker 6: crime scene videography. When you make a crime scene video,
Speaker 6: you're not really supposed to make any scene cuts. Supposed
Speaker 6: to be one continuous stream. There's a pretty reasonable justification
Speaker 6: for that, right you don't want the defense coming in
Speaker 6: at a later date and saying, well, what did you
Speaker 6: meet it out? Yes, absolutely, so it's rather shocking to
Speaker 6: note that Dan George's crime scene video has twice as
Speaker 6: many scene cuts as it does minutes of footage. In
Speaker 6: other words, there's approximately one scene cut every thirty seconds.
Speaker 6: Some of these scene cuts are indeed just cuts between
Speaker 6: different rooms, but other cuts totally anomalous. They are cuts
Speaker 6: that occur in the middle of the same shot. So,
Speaker 6: in other words, we might have a close up of
Speaker 6: a doorknob, and then there's a cut, and when the
Speaker 6: film returns, it's still a close up of the doorknob.
Speaker 6: So something's been cut apparently from that middle portion, and
Speaker 6: we don't know why. Either that or we're really just
Speaker 6: dealing with some pretty lous and police video skills. Now
Speaker 6: that's just the crime scene video. Now, another problem to
Speaker 6: know about crime scene video is it doesn't actually film
Speaker 6: that much of the house at all, or the outside
Speaker 6: of the house at all.
Speaker 8: We get in the crime scene video around about five
Speaker 8: rooms out of the fourteen rooms in Peterson House, and
Speaker 8: some of these rooms were noted to be very suspicious
Speaker 8: in harboring.
Speaker 6: What the police considered the evidence at a later day.
Speaker 6: So for example, the laundry room, where they argued Michael
Speaker 6: had gone to take up cleaning supplies to clean up
Speaker 6: the scene room Kathleen, which he did terrible and badly.
Speaker 6: This was supposed to go on the laundry They believed
Speaker 6: this for a long time. And yet the laundry wasn't filmed.
Speaker 6: The outdoor pool wasn't filmed, the basement wasn't filmed. There
Speaker 6: are all sorts of areas in the house that you know,
Speaker 6: the dining room wasn't filmed with it tap dinner that night.
Speaker 6: There arell sorts of areas of the house that you wonder, now,
Speaker 6: why did that go on film? And most important level,
Speaker 6: a couple of the detectives throughout the investigation have claimed
Speaker 6: that they saw blood drops in the kitchen. The blood
Speaker 6: drops were never filmed. The blood drops were never photographed,
Speaker 6: and the blood drops were never given a presumptive friends
Speaker 6: a test. So all that we have is the testimony
Speaker 6: of the investigations, and all they say is they saw
Speaker 6: something that looked like a blood drop in the kitchen,
Speaker 6: or a couple of blood drops in the kitchen. So
Speaker 6: that's this is a big problem with the crime scene video.
Speaker 6: The crime scene photos appaul. They're over exposed to they're smudging,
Speaker 6: they're blurry, they're often almost entirely colorless. They come with
Speaker 6: a strong cpo toned th effects almost everything, so we
Speaker 6: can't tell the difference between green or red or yellow blue.
Speaker 6: And once again, photos that are supposedly meant to represent
Speaker 6: particular objects like blood spots or items of interest and
Speaker 6: bits of murder weapon are so rather of such poor
Speaker 6: quality you can't make out what they're supposed to represent.
Speaker 6: There's one photo in particular that I want to talk about.
Speaker 6: There's a photograph of a pot in the kitchen sink.
Speaker 6: Angie Powell was the apprentice photographer under Dan George who
Speaker 6: took the photo in question. Now on the stand, one
Speaker 6: of the detectives who was there that night, or one
Speaker 6: of the agents rather said, well, there was something in
Speaker 6: the pot. We couldn't I couldn't make out what it was.
Speaker 6: It was dark red, tannish brown, something, but I couldn't
Speaker 6: make out what item was in this in the pot,
Speaker 6: in the sink in the kitchen. Well, luckily I got
Speaker 6: to interview the person who took the photo in question.
Speaker 6: I got to interview the agent, Angie Hell, who took
Speaker 6: that very photo. And I said, well, you took the photo.
Speaker 6: What was in the sink, in the pot, in the
Speaker 6: in the pot and the sink in the kitchen And
Speaker 6: she said, oh, I don't. I don't really remember. It
Speaker 6: might have been cork or little bits of cork. So
Speaker 6: you can't make out what these photos are off or
Speaker 6: what they're supposed to represent, and so much so that,
Speaker 6: I mean, these are so useless that even somebody who
Speaker 6: took a photo in Christian can't remember and can't make
Speaker 6: out what the objects are supposed to be.
Speaker 7: Now, despite this shoddy investigation so far in this in
Speaker 7: the areas you just described, at least there are two
Speaker 7: theories at trial, one for the defense obviously, one for
Speaker 7: the prosecution. Tell us what those theories are, and then
Speaker 7: before introducing Larry Pollard, When does he come to be
Speaker 7: involved in this case? Tell us what happens with the
Speaker 7: defense in the prosecution at trial, and when does Larry
Speaker 7: Pollard enter the scene?
Speaker 6: Right? Okay, Michael has put to trial two years after
Speaker 6: Kathleen's death, and he's put to trial for murder. And
Speaker 6: the theory goes like this, It's eleven eight pm. Kathleen
Speaker 6: who was high up executive at the telecommunications giant Nortel,
Speaker 6: so this was the old Canadian company that went terribly
Speaker 6: bankrupt just a year or two after her death. The
Speaker 6: colleague at Nortel needed to send an email to Kathleen
Speaker 6: that night. So Kathleen, so far as we've been told,
Speaker 6: couldn't access her own work email from home, so she
Speaker 6: asked for Michael's email address that night to give to
Speaker 6: Helen Prislinger, the colleague in Toronto. So Michael handed told
Speaker 6: Kathleen his email address and Kathleen recited it to Helen.
Speaker 6: Helen sent through some important documents that Kathleen had to review.
Speaker 6: Now the theory goes for as far as the murder
Speaker 6: theory goes that Kathleen said, pretty much, I'll just have
Speaker 6: a look at these emails. Michael and then I'll join
Speaker 6: you out by Paul or wherever you want to go.
Speaker 6: And she opens Michael's email and she finds not Helen
Speaker 6: Pristling's document, but she finds a sordid gay rendezvous meeting
Speaker 6: appointment exchange with male prostitute whom Michael had been following
Speaker 6: and who Michael had been apparently arranging extramarital liaisons with.
Speaker 6: So Kathleen is absolutely enraged. She runs from the computer room,
Speaker 6: finds Michael downstairs, says, what the hell is this I've
Speaker 6: just found on your computer. You're planning to have sex,
Speaker 6: not just outside the marriage, not with just some other woman,
Speaker 6: but with a bloody man? Are you kidding? They fight,
Speaker 6: They rowl, they howl at each other. Rage takes over
Speaker 6: Michael finally there's nerves at their end, grabs fireplace, blow
Speaker 6: poke the thin hollow brass rod from the fireplace, and
Speaker 6: he thrashes at Kathleen in she cowers in the stairwell.
Speaker 6: Now he eventually beats her unconscious and she's bleeding from
Speaker 6: the head, collapsed at the bottom of the stairwell, and
Speaker 6: Michael looks at what he's done and he thinks, Jesus,
Speaker 6: I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison.
Speaker 6: I have to clean up the scene. So he runs
Speaker 6: to the laundry and he gets a bucket and a mop,
Speaker 6: or he gets some rags and he gets some cleaning products,
Speaker 6: and he goes into the stairwell with Kathleen and he
Speaker 6: begins to wipe the north wall of the stairwell, and
Speaker 6: then he goes down on his knees and he wipes
Speaker 6: very selectively at a couple of little corners of skirting board.
Speaker 6: He does that on each side because that's very important
Speaker 6: to wipe those areas. And then just as he's finishing
Speaker 6: the other skirting board, wiping the little inch wide piece
Speaker 6: of blood from there, Kathleen stirs and she starts climbing
Speaker 6: to her feet again, and Michael can't believe it. She
Speaker 6: runs back to the blowpoke and he picks it up again,
Speaker 6: and he finally thrashes Kathleen again over the head, unleashing
Speaker 6: what will be the final fatal blows. Kathleen dies. Michael
Speaker 6: runs out the door with the fireplace blowpoke, leaving smudges
Speaker 6: on the door as he goes out to hide the weapon.
Speaker 6: He comes back inside, he thinks, oh my god, but
Speaker 6: I've got no why how can I explain how she
Speaker 6: just fell? Oh? I know, I'll make it look like
Speaker 6: she's drunk. Right, So he goes into the kitchen and
Speaker 6: he empties a bottle of wine down the sink, and
Speaker 6: he puts the bottle of wine on the countertop, and
Speaker 6: then he goes to the kitchen cabinets and he pulls
Speaker 6: out two wine glasses and he puts them aside the
Speaker 6: wine bottle, and he thinks to himself, Great, Okay, now
Speaker 6: they'll think she's drunk. That will explain how she fell.
Speaker 6: And then he gets the phone and he calls nine
Speaker 6: one one, and he starts balling with his best fake
Speaker 6: cry until the paramedics arrive. That's the murder.
Speaker 7: The it.
Speaker 6: It's really really elaborate, but it does have the virtue
Speaker 6: of accounting for most of the evidence quite well. The
Speaker 6: problem is is that it's once again very elaborate, and
Speaker 6: some of it has been disproven. So, for example, the
Speaker 6: idea that Michael went out the front door the blowpoke
Speaker 6: to hide that this never happened. We know that the
Speaker 6: blowpoke was found actually at the end of Michael's trial
Speaker 6: in the basement. Just clickeding cobwebs. Now the fall theory
Speaker 6: is rather more simple, doesn't take as long to explain. Luckily,
Speaker 6: fall theory is just that Kathleen fell. She'd had a
Speaker 6: couple of glasses of wine, she'd had a vellium. She
Speaker 6: was a bit tired, she'd been working pretty hard. She'd
Speaker 6: been having some headaches recently, but she'd been complaining about
Speaker 6: Michael was out by the pool. He was dozing away,
Speaker 6: smoking his pipe and drinking. Kathleen goes to walk up
Speaker 6: the steps of the internal staircase, but you know, it's
Speaker 6: wearing flip flops, and these get tangled on one of
Speaker 6: the steps. She slips, pits her head. This smacks open
Speaker 6: a great wound on the back of her head. Blood
Speaker 6: starts to spill down the steps. So when she tries
Speaker 6: to get to her feet again, she slips again, pits
Speaker 6: her head again, this time on the metal chair lift
Speaker 6: that was installed by a previous owner, so sharp edges,
Speaker 6: and then she finally slips the third time and dies
Speaker 6: from a sort of slow exanguination bleeding to Now Michael
Speaker 6: was eventually convicted. I think it was in October of
Speaker 6: two thousand and three, but just a week before his
Speaker 6: conviction Larry Pollard, a neighbor of Peterson's, asked one of
Speaker 6: the lawyers of Michael's legal teak whether he could see
Speaker 6: a picture of the autopsy or a photograph of the
Speaker 6: autopsy as it was on the back of Kathleen's head,
Speaker 6: because he wanted to see the head injuries. He had
Speaker 6: been told that these were absolutely strange in their dimensions
Speaker 6: in shape, so his interest was paued. He was a lawyer.
Speaker 6: He was an attorney who had previously worked for the
Speaker 6: Special Prosecutor's office in Durham, so he was not just
Speaker 6: a nosy neighbor. He was very confused about the evidence
Speaker 6: in this case of what it was supposed to support.
Speaker 6: So one of the lawyers passed the color photo of
Speaker 6: the autopsy on Kathleen's head. Kathleen scalped to Larry and
Speaker 6: he took one look at it and he thought, just
Speaker 6: look like bird tracks. Now Larry was a hunter, and
Speaker 6: that's why he identified these marks as like bird tracks.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: They were like all the turkey tracks he had ever
Speaker 6: stalked before out on his nuns. I said to him,
Speaker 6: this looked like an every day this is these are
Speaker 6: turkey tracks. But he knew it couldn't have been a turkey, right,
Speaker 6: And she thought, I don't really know why. They looked
Speaker 6: just like turkey tracks, but they looked just like turkey tracks.
Speaker 6: So a few days past and it occurred to Larry
Speaker 6: that it might have been an owl because there were
Speaker 6: always barred owls and barn owls around the property line
Speaker 6: in this area of Forest Hills and Durham, and Larry
Speaker 6: had lived in this part of Durham for fifty years,
Speaker 6: so he knew that they were always usually making their
Speaker 6: nests in December. They were often aggressive, they were swoop
Speaker 6: at people. And yet so that was how Larry's theory started.
Speaker 6: In Embryo and Larry first saw a photograph of the
Speaker 6: back of Kathleen's head from the autopsy and he thought,
Speaker 6: good grief, those looked just like turkey tracks. And that's
Speaker 6: where it all began for Larry. So just to be clear,
Speaker 6: Larry didn't have all of the evidence that he would find,
Speaker 6: yet that was just what caused him to have his
Speaker 6: first hunch that something to do with a bird might well,
Speaker 6: there might be something to do with the bird involved
Speaker 6: in this case.
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Speaker 7: Now, he had this hunch and he had looked and
Speaker 7: got to look at a report, and so he knew
Speaker 7: there was this microscopic feathers involved.
Speaker 6: Well, the story story is more complications than that, because
Speaker 6: in fact, first thing that Larry did it was right
Speaker 6: to the district attorney to ask for feelers. In other words,
Speaker 6: he wrote the attorney saying, look, I'm interested in Kathleen
Speaker 6: Peterson case. Can you tell me whether any feathers were
Speaker 6: found in the trace evidence report? Yours sincere, Larry Pollard.
Speaker 6: And they wrote back to him and they said, hy, Larry,
Speaker 6: no feathers. Thanks very much. See the DA, right, So
Speaker 6: Larry thought, okay, I'm not sure I believe that. I'm
Speaker 6: going to check it out for myself, so he sort
Speaker 6: of went behind the District Attorney's back, went to the
Speaker 6: Special Prosecutor's office where he used to work, and asked
Speaker 6: an old colleague if he could get the Traces Evidence report,
Speaker 6: which he then received. That's when he found that, in fact,
Speaker 6: a feather had been described as being plastered to one
Speaker 6: of Kathleen's heirs, which had been pulled out by the route. So,
Speaker 6: in other words, one of the hears that was found
Speaker 6: in Kathleen's hands had microscopic feather fragment attached to it.
Speaker 6: So that was in the trace evidence report, and Larry thought, well,
Speaker 6: I'm really angry now because you said there weren't any feathers,
Speaker 6: and now I'm looking at the trace evidence report and
Speaker 6: it says there was a feather. So we're going to
Speaker 6: have a look at this. So Larry went to the
Speaker 6: DA's office and he asked for the slide to be
Speaker 6: brought in so that he could view this feather. When
Speaker 6: the microscope was finally set up, when the slide was
Speaker 6: brought in from the police office, they looked down the microscope,
Speaker 6: they increased the magnification, and they found that, in fact,
Speaker 6: the trace evidence report was wrong. It wasn't a feather fragment.
Speaker 6: It was two feather fragments. So that now we've doubled
Speaker 6: kind that doubled from one to two to be fair,
Speaker 6: but we found a new piece of evidence that wasn't
Speaker 6: known to be there before. Now, this is absolutely incredible
Speaker 6: when you think about Larry predicted. So just by the
Speaker 6: power of deduction, Larry thought were if it were a bird,
Speaker 6: there ought to be feathers, right, and therefore we ought
Speaker 6: to look for some feathers. He finds these feathers. It's
Speaker 6: absolutely incredible. So that's one part of the justification for
Speaker 6: Larry's theory. Other things have to do with the injuries
Speaker 6: on Kathleen and the general distribution of blood around the
Speaker 6: inside of the house. Add all of these things together
Speaker 6: and get to Larry's theory. But again, it's not as
Speaker 6: though Larry just woke up on and I've got a
Speaker 6: great idea and el kill Kathleen is sort of a
Speaker 6: dream or something that came out of nowhere. It's a
Speaker 6: slow process of putting all pieces of evidence together.
Speaker 7: You also talk about. The film editor of the Netflix
Speaker 7: docuseries was also interested in this case as a result
Speaker 7: of speaking to Larry as he was the next door
Speaker 7: neighbor of Michael Peterson during the filming of the docuseries.
Speaker 7: Tell us a little bit about her involvement and why.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm not sure I could tell you why that
Speaker 6: would be up to. So her name was Sophie Brunet.
Speaker 6: She was eventually eventually she became romantically involved with Michael
Speaker 6: through the course of the filming of the docuseries. So
Speaker 6: some people might say that there was some wishful thinking
Speaker 6: involved there or something like that. I don't know. I
Speaker 6: don't know what her motivations were. But early in the
Speaker 6: filming of the docuseries she began talking to Larry about
Speaker 6: his new theory. She then began to reach out for
Speaker 6: Larry two ornithologists around the United States as to what
Speaker 6: they could do in so far as helping to justify
Speaker 6: this theory further. So this importantly eventually culminates in the
Speaker 6: decision to send photographs of the two feather fragments that
Speaker 6: were found in the trace Evidence report to an ornithologist
Speaker 6: at the Smithsonian Institute, a woman called doctor Carla Dove,
Speaker 6: who is an expersion in the forensic analysis feathers, so
Speaker 6: from small feather fragments she can identify birds in the
Speaker 6: particular species, the genus whatever. So the way that Larry
Speaker 6: put it to me when I was interviewing him was
Speaker 6: that Sophie Brunet had done more to popularize the our
Speaker 6: theory than any other person, including himself. So Larry believed
Speaker 6: that she was the great popularizer of the view. And
Speaker 6: I think this is an important point to note because
Speaker 6: when Larry first came out with the theory, he was
Speaker 6: absolutely ridiculed by the newspapers and Durham. It received virtually
Speaker 6: no international attention. It was a sort of embarrassing PostScript
Speaker 6: to Michael's trial. And it was only I think with
Speaker 6: the help of Sophie Brunei in the years that followed,
Speaker 6: that Larry regained some standing and some sense of honor
Speaker 6: and dignity through the work of brune who helped show
Speaker 6: that theary actually did have some legs.
Speaker 7: What was some of the information and evidence that Larry discovered,
Speaker 7: and in terms of the video and the photos, what
Speaker 7: was done to re examine those.
Speaker 6: Right, So the evidence that Larry began with was, of course,
Speaker 6: the wounds on Kathleen's scalp. He then noticed that Kathleen
Speaker 6: had three incision like injuries arranged like the points of
Speaker 6: triangles on each of her elbows, which were again compatible
Speaker 6: with the grasp of talons, rather than say falling down
Speaker 6: the steps or getting hit by a blunt hope. Now
Speaker 6: there was blood, as I've already said, there was blood
Speaker 6: outside the house, down the front path, and Larry's theory
Speaker 6: was not. Larry's theory was that this was where the
Speaker 6: attack first happened, That Kathleen had been attacked outside on
Speaker 6: the front path and then had run inside. Not and
Speaker 6: it was not that the blood was going the other
Speaker 6: way round. Kathleen killed in the stairwell, and then Michael
Speaker 6: carrying some bloody object out the door. This is the
Speaker 6: main chunk of evidence that Larry had. But Larry also
Speaker 6: had a suspicion about something, and maybe this is a
Speaker 6: good segue into my own's the case. Larry had a
Speaker 6: suspicion that one of the key pieces of evidence found
Speaker 6: in the autopsy report may have been misdescribed. So embedded
Speaker 6: in the back of Kathleen's head was an item that
Speaker 6: was eventually described in the evidence report as something like
Speaker 6: woody vegetation and some sort of piece of woody vegetation.
Speaker 6: But in fact, when it was first discovered by or
Speaker 6: first looked at by one of your friends of investigators,
Speaker 6: it was described as like a wood metal pit rather
Speaker 6: would slash metal chip, something that you couldn't really call metal,
Speaker 6: but too strong to be wood. You know, it was
Speaker 6: something some sort of you know, probably like probably a
Speaker 6: bit of the weapon that had been used. Now, Larry's hunch,
Speaker 6: although he's never really put this out in the public
Speaker 6: realm very loudly, but I think now's the time to
Speaker 6: start to question, is that this was in fact a
Speaker 6: shard of talent that had broken off become embedded into
Speaker 6: her skull. Now what's interesting here is that the descriptions
Speaker 6: that this investigator used would slash metal chip is identical
Speaker 6: to the description, but a different investigator gave to a
Speaker 6: different object which was found embedded in one of the
Speaker 6: steps of the staircase. Now, this object was described by
Speaker 6: the lead forensic technician, Dan George as quote like a
Speaker 6: mini talon.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: It was a silvery gum metal gray color, and it
Speaker 6: was described as like a wood metal chip. So this
Speaker 6: is independently described, two different pieces of events found two
Speaker 6: different places, both described as like wood metal chips. Now,
Speaker 6: Larry's theory is that the wood metal chip found in
Speaker 6: Kathleen's here may have been a chip of talent. And
Speaker 6: my theory, which extends upon Larry's theory, is that in
Speaker 6: fact what was found in the staircase, embedded in a step,
Speaker 6: is another chip talent as well. And for this reason
Speaker 6: we'd have to start considering that Larry's theory might have
Speaker 6: got things ever so slightly wrong. The attack didn't happen
Speaker 6: outside with Kathleen then later running inside and dying. The
Speaker 6: attack began outside and continued inside the stairwell. So there
Speaker 6: must be at some point in Catholic during Kathleen's demise,
Speaker 6: a bird inside the stairwell with Kathleen, and that opens
Speaker 6: up a real cannid works. So maybe we've talk about
Speaker 6: that can of worms.
Speaker 7: Let's talk about that can of worms and what it
Speaker 7: does say in terms of the evidence that.
Speaker 6: You write that was not gathered at this end. Well,
Speaker 6: let's start with things that, even on the official accounts,
Speaker 6: were not collected, which obviously should have been collected. Yes, Okay,
Speaker 6: so I already said. In the stairwell with Kathleen when
Speaker 6: she died there with these thick cotton towels bundled up
Speaker 6: under her head, drenched in blood, they were not collected.
Speaker 6: They were touching her head, and the very beginning of
Speaker 6: the investigation. They were disposed of, even before the chief
Speaker 6: medical examiner had a chance to come to the house
Speaker 6: and view the body in the early morning. They'd been
Speaker 6: removed and disposed of before the medical examiner arrived in saying,
Speaker 6: so they weren't collected. Probably the most important exerments not collected.
Speaker 6: A telephone, a cordless telephone that had fingerprints, bloody fingerprints
Speaker 6: all over. It had been used by Michael, might have
Speaker 6: been used by Kathleen, for all we know, had been
Speaker 6: handled by Todd Whenetsad mcdell, one of the investigators, and
Speaker 6: by Dan George. So at least five people that night.
Speaker 6: That bloody, blood smeared phone was not collected. It was
Speaker 6: in the stairwell with Kathleen when she was first out,
Speaker 6: so the phone was beside her head. It was not collected.
Speaker 6: The towels under her head, they were not collected. The
Speaker 6: two paper towels beside her head that apparently Michael and
Speaker 6: may have used to clean the scene. Weren't we told, well,
Speaker 6: they weren't collected, because hell, if he did clean zin,
Speaker 6: who needs to collect the paper towels that he did
Speaker 6: it with. Right around Kathleen's body, right her flip flops,
Speaker 6: the flip flops that she was wearing that apparently caused
Speaker 6: the fall, they were not collected. There's jacket around her
Speaker 6: body that was not collected. I mean, it's just extraordinary
Speaker 6: the number of there's about in total, fifteen items around
Speaker 6: her body that should have been taken into evidence, and
Speaker 6: every single one of them was not. Now that's not
Speaker 6: that's not just screwing up. That's something else. Because there
Speaker 6: weren't any other objects in the stairwell with her that's
Speaker 6: that were collected. So every item around her body was
Speaker 6: not collected. That's undeniably evidence of well, it's evidence that
Speaker 6: we ought to be very very suspicious about.
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Speaker 7: Today, you were discussing some of the things that were
Speaker 7: obviously not tested that should have been tested, but also
Speaker 7: the re examination of the videotape and those photos.
Speaker 6: That's right, so as I was saying, the collection of
Speaker 6: all of these items should have been a matter of
Speaker 6: forensics when I want this was the way that Angie
Speaker 6: Powell described the behavior that she saw, So for all
Speaker 6: that she could tell, the decision was, and I quoted
Speaker 6: on this, deliberate, and it was not simply a matter of, oh, whoops,
Speaker 6: we forgot to collect those blood drenched towels under her head.
Speaker 6: Had to be deliberate. Now, I think we should be
Speaker 6: suspicious about why these items were in collected, and I
Speaker 6: think it tells us something more broadly about the situation
Speaker 6: in the stairwell that night. There was something about the
Speaker 6: condition of her body that couldn't be noted. For some reason,
Speaker 6: none of this evidence could be collected because it would
Speaker 6: point in the wrong direction for the police place right now.
Speaker 6: The same goes again for the documentation of these items.
Speaker 6: So there's a reason that the police video is so
Speaker 6: shoddy and so patchy. There's a reason that it has
Speaker 6: missing portion. There's a reason that the police photographs are
Speaker 6: so distorted, so blurry soever exposed, that you can't identify
Speaker 6: the object's photograph. The decision is deliberate, not just all
Speaker 6: these weren't very well trained forensic technicians. Something is going
Speaker 6: on and something is being hit up. Now that's when
Speaker 6: I started to get suspicious, because a police team can
Speaker 6: screw up a couple of things, but they can't screw
Speaker 6: up everything. And in this case, they seem to screw
Speaker 6: up everything, and that makes me think it's not a
Speaker 6: screw up. So I started to look at the police
Speaker 6: crime scene video again, very slowly, and it would be
Speaker 6: very difficult, I think, for anybody watching the crime scene
Speaker 6: video for themselves to understand how much effort I put
Speaker 6: it into seeing how the manipulation occurred in the crime
Speaker 6: scene video, which I believe has occurred. And I want
Speaker 6: to maybe just begin with how I noticed that something
Speaker 6: was a mess in the very corner of Kathleen's eye
Speaker 6: in the chrimesn video. You can see it. There's just
Speaker 6: this little white fleck of something, And at first, when
Speaker 6: you view it, you think, well, I think it like
Speaker 6: a tear. Looks like a tear in the corner of
Speaker 6: a variety, just reflecting very bright white. I thought, well,
Speaker 6: it can't be a tear, though, because he's been lying
Speaker 6: there for hours by now, dead before the crime scene
Speaker 6: video started, so there's no chance it's tear. And then
Speaker 6: I noticed that whatever the object in the corner of
Speaker 6: her eye was, it seemed to extend over the bridge
Speaker 6: of her names So it was it was not just
Speaker 6: a small fragment of something, It was something connected to
Speaker 6: something else. And the reason I could tell that there
Speaker 6: was something connected to something else that was extending over
Speaker 6: the bridge of her nose is that the same distortion
Speaker 6: of what seems to be distortion in the video is
Speaker 6: visible from multiple angles in the video. So whether we're
Speaker 6: looking from far away, whether we're close up, whether we're
Speaker 6: looking straight bird's eye view down at Kathleen's head or
Speaker 6: sort of perpendicular to or a chimney, no matter what
Speaker 6: angle you look at, something cookes out or distortion seems
Speaker 6: to appear over the bridge of her nose. There was
Speaker 6: the first clue I had that there was something on
Speaker 6: her face that shouldn't be there, at least wasn't described
Speaker 6: as being there. But there was something on her face
Speaker 6: because it's visible from multiple angles under different lighting, you know,
Speaker 6: different positions. So that's when I started thinking there might
Speaker 6: be some sort of manipulation of this tape going on.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 6: Unfortunately, some sorts of typical video friends that processes that
Speaker 6: you could use might not be particularly effective here because
Speaker 6: usually to get a good video Friends analysis, But in
Speaker 6: any case, you need the original tape. We don't have
Speaker 6: the original tape. There's no access to the original tape
Speaker 6: unis you want to ever retrial. But there is a
Speaker 6: second best thing that you can do, which is apply
Speaker 6: a PCA analysis to the videotape. Now, a PCA analysis
Speaker 6: it's difficult to describe what it's really doing, but it's
Speaker 6: an AI interpretation of a video frame or a photographic frame,
Speaker 6: which tells you about unusual distributions or meaningful distributions in
Speaker 6: the color components of red, yellow, green. So you're getting
Speaker 6: a story about a normallys essentially in the video. Now
Speaker 6: if you submit the video tap to a PCA analysis,
Speaker 6: very very interesting things start to happen. You start to
Speaker 6: see the same objects appearing in the video or in
Speaker 6: the PCA analysis of the video once again when they're
Speaker 6: filmed from different angles, and that virtually negates the idea
Speaker 6: that this is some sort of visual artifact of the
Speaker 6: photographing process or the video process, or indeed of the
Speaker 6: PCA analysis. So this is this is a real feature
Speaker 6: of the scene. And so using this analysis, I started
Speaker 6: to develop some sort of what you could say is
Speaker 6: like enhancements of the scene to eliminate what seems to
Speaker 6: be the sepia tone distortion that the cinds and video
Speaker 6: has been put to it. And that's when I began
Speaker 6: to notice, good lord, it's not just something in the
Speaker 6: corner of her eye. There's stuff everywhere. And the only
Speaker 6: reasonable conclusion I could come to is that, given the
Speaker 6: way the rest of the evidence sits, and given the
Speaker 6: shape and size of these objects which are scattered all
Speaker 6: through the staircase and all over her body and all
Speaker 6: through here and all over the front path, these are feathers.
Speaker 6: These are bird feathers. And that was a terrifying conclusion
Speaker 6: actually because that's the moment at which the penny dropped
Speaker 6: for me and I realized that we were looking at
Speaker 6: we were no longer looking at something that could just
Speaker 6: be described as police malpractice or police You know, this
Speaker 6: is no longer a cock up. You know, this is
Speaker 6: this is probably, to use a word I wish I
Speaker 6: didn't have to use, a conspiracy. This is potentially quite
Speaker 6: wide ranging conspiracy. That was That was a very worrying
Speaker 6: to have to discuss.
Speaker 7: The absolutely you you right in the end that Michael
Speaker 7: was railroaded and the decision to hide crucial evidence was
Speaker 7: ultimately made either by the Durham Police, the SBI, or
Speaker 7: the District Attorney's office.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we'll ever
Speaker 6: know whose decision it was to cover up this key evidence.
Speaker 6: I'm not sure that I'm sure that we could even
Speaker 6: limit it to those groups that I listed there. So
Speaker 6: as far as you know, the fact that there's a
Speaker 6: conspiracy in this case, and the fact that the evidence
Speaker 6: has been seriously distorted, that's simply a fact about the case.
Speaker 6: I think people need to come to terms with and
Speaker 6: I hope that the book helps them to do that.
Speaker 6: The question about who really orchestrated this or why. I
Speaker 6: simply I don't have a good answer to you know,
Speaker 6: maybe if I had ten more years to work on this,
Speaker 6: I might be able to come up with a good answer,
Speaker 6: but I had an absolute loss to figure out, you know. Again,
Speaker 6: to bring it back to the idea that Michael had
Speaker 6: disappointed the authorities by writing these editorials, I don't think,
Speaker 6: you know, a lot was risked to get this cover
Speaker 6: up done properly, and I really don't think it was
Speaker 6: done over just a couple of annoying editorials. I think
Speaker 6: there's something much bigger at play.
Speaker 7: I want to thank you Teddy Smith for coming on
Speaker 7: and talking about your extraordinary death by talent than our
Speaker 7: murder of Kathleen Peterson. For those that might want to
Speaker 7: take a look at this book and more about this case,
Speaker 7: could you refer us to your publisher?
Speaker 6: Please, yes, please check out Wild Blue Press. They will
Speaker 6: be distributing the book. I'm absolutely wanted to be working
Speaker 6: with them. They're a wonderful team, and I would really
Speaker 6: suggest that if there are any budding true crime writers
Speaker 6: thinking of working with anyone, make Wild Blue your first pick,
Speaker 6: because there've been absolutely nothing but golden with me absolutely.
Speaker 7: I want to thank you so much Tiddy Smith for
Speaker 7: your coming on for the talk about death by talents,
Speaker 7: Did an Owl Murder? Kathleen Peterson, thank you so much
Speaker 7: for this interview and you had a great evening and
Speaker 7: good night