http://www.tnhonline.com/news/2005/04/08/ArtsLiving/
Theres.More.To.the.Staircase.Than.Meets.The.Eye-917577.shtml

The New Hampshire
University of New Hampshire

There's more to "The Staircase" than meets the eye
By Brendan Berube
Published: Friday, April 8, 2005

The one apparent flaw in de Lestrade's film is, I suspect, not a flaw at all, but a devastating comment on the nature of the American justice system. In its obsession with the antics and activities of high-priced lawyers, self-important experts and put-upon defendants, "The Staircase" seems to shamefully ignore the one person around whom the story should revolve: the victim.

=============





DOWN THE TUBE

Tinted Lens
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050523&s=siegel052305

by Lee Siegel


After all the questions "The Staircase" raises about the American court system--Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?--it raises questions about its own methods and authority. Who will film the filmmakers themselves?

...

Lestrade, who won an Academy Award for a film about a black man falsely accused of killing a white tourist in Florida, is a French carpetbagger exploiting the crudest caricatures of American life. After convincing Peterson and his showboating defense lawyer, David Rudolf, to allow themselves to be filmed--he didn't have to try that hard to persuade them--Lestrade caustically remarks that Americans come across "as actors in their own lives--characters who become practically movie characters."

. . .

For one thing, you are never told what exactly was the biological cause of Kathleen's death, an incredible omission in a documentary about a possible murder.

=============





The other Peterson Trial

SALON
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/04/03/staircase/index.html

By Heather Havrilesky

April 3, 2005 | "We were both right here. And you know, the dogs would come over, and we were just talking and finishing our drinks. And then she said, 'I gotta go in, because I've got the conference call in the morning.' And she started walking out that way. And I stayed right here. Don't think I said anything special to her, certainly not thinking this was the last time I'm gonna see her."

-- Michael Peterson, describing the night of his wife's death in "The Staircase."



- - - - - - - - - - - -

While visiting my hometown, Durham, N.C., in December 2001, I read the first reports of a police investigation into the death of a local woman, Kathleen Peterson, who was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs. The woman's husband, Michael Peterson, 58, was a well-known local novelist who'd written about Vietnam. He'd once had a column in the local paper and had made an unsuccessful run for mayor in 1999. He told police that he discovered his wife, a 48-year-old executive at Nortel, in a pool of blood and called 911, but his wife stopped breathing before the paramedics arrived.

On the local news, the same shot of Michael Peterson talking to reporters was repeated over and over again: "I've whispered her name more than a thousand times, and I can't stop crying," he said into the microphones.

There was something wrong about his response, something too egocentric and melodramatic about it. When I asked my mom about the case, she told me that she was also suspicious. A friend of hers who lived down the street from the couple said that there was no way Peterson could've killed his wife; they had always been the perfect couple. But my mom took those words -- "perfect couple" -- with a grain of salt. Who knew what kind of darkness lurked behind any supposedly happy marriage? Another friend more plugged in to the local gossip, meanwhile, mentioned rumors that Michael might be gay.

Naturally, when I heard that the Sundance Channel would be airing an eight-part documentary (Monday nights beginning April 4, at 8 p.m. EST) about the case by Oscar-winning director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, I wanted to see it. This was the "French film crew" so often mentioned in the Durham Herald-Sun's coverage of the Peterson case, faithfully clipped and sent to me by my mom, which I'd read from start to finish since I first stumbled on Kathleen Peterson's obituary.

The case had more twists and turns than a Hollywood suspense thriller: Michael had four children from his first marriage -- two sons by his wife, and ***** two adopted daughters who were the children of friends who had died. But then it was discovered that the girls' mother, Elizabeth Ratliff, had also been found at the bottom of a staircase in Germany back in 1985, and Peterson had also been the last person to see her alive.

On top of that, Kathleen Peterson's sister claimed that Kathleen had been worried about losing her job at Nortel, which might have forced the couple to move out of their 11,000-square-foot mansion. Peterson, meanwhile, stood to gain from a $1.4 million life insurance policy on his wife. Plus, e-mails were discovered that indicated that Peterson had contacted a male prostitute shortly before Kathleen's death. Eventually, Michael Peterson was charged with his wife's murder; the prosecution claimed that he had beat her in the back of the head with a blunt instrument (leading to all the blood). Peterson's team would eventually claim that his wife simply must have fallen, hitting her head on the door frame at the bottom.

According to the paper, this film crew had access to the entire trial and more. And from the opening credits of "The Staircase," with its somber refrain and artful shots, it's clear that de Lestrade's documentary is very different from those ubiquitous, cheap, sensationalist takes on murder trials (there are several on the Laci Peterson murder already looping through cable TV).

Most remarkable, though, is the access the documentary team manages to get to the players in the enfolding drama, including Michael Peterson himself.

Early on, Peterson tells us in his own words what happened the night Kathleen died in a disturbingly matter-of-fact tone. He says that the couple was outside by the pool (many asserted that it was far too chilly that night for them to relax outside for so long) before Kathleen got up to leave. Michael demonstrates her walking back toward the house. "And the last I saw her was when I was there, and she was just walking here. That's it, that was the last I saw Kathleen -- alive. No, she was alive when I found her, but" -- [long pause] -- "barely."

Next, we hear Peterson's panicked voice on the 911 call. Then Peterson's son, Todd, tells the camera what he saw when he arrived back at the house early that morning. Later we see the damning images of Kathleen from the police video, lying in a pool of blood, blood covering the walls around her.

We watch as lead defense lawyer David Rudolf, his partner Tom Maher, and the defense investigator, Ron Guerette, discuss possible strategies.

************

"The benefits of an intruder theory is, it's simpler. There's no debate over the forensics for the most part," says Maher. "The real problem with the intruder theory is lack of evidence that there was an intruder. An intruder would have to have a weapon with them capable of inflicting these wounds, but not a knife or a gun, and then take that weapon with them."

****



De Lestrade's coups are impressive. Wait until you see Peterson make dinner and chat with his adopted daughters about the case, scoffing at reports in the paper of his bad temper, and pretending to put one of the girls in a stranglehold. And then there's the moment when Kathleen Peterson's sisters examine some of Peterson's archived personal writings, which include the statement, "Being happy is doing what gives you pleasure: Loving, sacrificing, murdering."

Throughout the entire ordeal, Peterson appears to remain oddly upbeat, even when he's expressing his displeasure with the press or the local officials. In fact, from the minute the cameras start rolling, it's easy to question Peterson's soundness of mind. His twitchy mannerisms, his morbid humor, the way he often seems so out of step with the gravity of the situation or what's happening around him -- all of these only serve to deepen existing suspicions.

Yet the filmmakers clearly aim to question not just Peterson's possible guilt, but the justice system itself. The crew skips some of the most damning details of the trial -- the fact that the couple were in serious financial straits, for example -- in order to focus on the circus atmosphere of the trial and hint at the backwater nature of the prosecution team. They include many shots of the expressions on the face of the deputy district attorney, a very old-fashioned-looking Southern woman, and they dramatically zero in on a moment she calls the gay porn found on Peterson's computer "filth."

In an article tellingly titled "On Trial for an Unusual Life," de Lestrade tells Australia's The Age of his negative impression of the prosecution team. "They couldn't imagine that Michael and Kathleen could live a happy life and be a happy couple with Michael having some gay encounters. To them that was unbelievable, it was out of their minds. They are very narrow-minded."

Narrow-minded as it may be to describe porn as "filth," the defense painted Michael and Kathleen as a perfectly happy couple, and the prosecution's assertions were an integral part of debunking these claims. Since Peterson had recently e-mailed a male prostitute, and Kathleen was on Peterson's computer the night she died, it seems reasonable to speculate that her discovery of his dalliances might have sparked a fight. De Lestrade's temptation -- shared by many of those unfamiliar with the South -- to paint the prosecution team as small-town folk in the thrall of Bush conservatism is more than a little bit disturbing to someone who knows that, with all its flaws, Durham is a relatively liberal, progressive town.

Still, de Lestrade's choices are so often riveting, his camera work so beautiful and sad, that it's easy to forgive his angle -- we all have our prejudices, after all. Perhaps I'm prejudiced against Michael Peterson. He's a novelist who wrote dramatically about killing in two novels, an egocentric guy who ran for mayor, lived in a mansion, clearly romanticized his life, and seemed happy to have a film crew document his darkest hour. His wife, Kathleen, and a close friend, Elizabeth Ratliff, were both found at the bottom of a bloody staircase, and Michael was the last one to see each of them. Autopsies showed both women had similar injuries to the back of the head. And then there's the volume of blood on the stairs. If walking up stairs can butcher someone like that, I'm not sure why anyone would risk having a staircase.

The night after the defense team makes its closing arguments, we see Michael's brother Bill pour him a glass of wine and joke, "Enjoy it. It could be your last."

**********

Michael chuckles in response. The two are clearly feeling optimistic. Bill, a lawyer who's consulted with the defense team along the way, tells his brother that he thinks that his odds of being convicted are slim. "I handicap this thing extremely low. But on the other hand, you just never know. Lightning strikes."

"Twice, sometimes!" Michael quips. The brothers laugh, and Bill adds, "Let's hope they believe that!"

Gallows humor could be understandable, given what Michael Peterson faced at that moment. But when paired with such little sentimentality about either Kathleen Peterson or Martha Ratliff * * * * -- save for a dramatic appearance by Michael in the courtroom -- this moment of levity makes the blood run cold.

Regardless of what you think of Peterson's innocence or guilt when the final episode ends and the verdict is rendered (don't worry: no spoilers here), you won't be able to forget this engrossing and ultimately tragic story.







===============

http://indyweek.com/durham/current/news.html



American Staircase

By David Fellerath

Independent Weekly
March 30, 2005



In fact, the film indulges in numerous malicious cutaways to Black making a variety of hideous scowls, a tactic that Poncet doesn't deny.

"Of course, Jean has made some decisions to show how prosecution behaved," Poncet says. But he adds, "You can also see cuts to David Rudolf that are not always good to him, where he sometimes appears arrogant and too sure of himself."

...

The series has already played in Europe, Australia and Canada. On BBC's Web page devoted to the film, viewers have posted comments that suggest that the Bull City is being seen as a present-day incarnation of Selma or Birmingham. "The people of the South can be wonderful but they are quite a different lot," writes an American resident of Ireland.

One scene in particular is probably responsible for such reactions. The defense team retains a jury expert named Margie Fargo, a woman who may prompt Triangle viewers to hurl tomatoes. There's a scene where a focus group is shown hypothetical testimony from forensics expert Henry Lee. The session is a flop, with several respondents seeming to discount Lee because of his Chinese accent. The jury consultant, a honeysuckle-tongued Southerner herself, says later to Rudolf, "This is not California. This is not New York. This is the South. Part of what we're hearing here is a reaction to ethnic differences."

...

The film has already stirred the polite ire of Craig Jarvis of the News and Observer. In the N&O's edition of Sunday, March 27, the reporter accused the film of misrepresenting the true tenor of the trial. "The investigation and trial that unfold in the documentary," he writes, "is not the one I covered for nearly two years as a news reporter."

Perhaps Jarvis is merely being modest, but he doesn't mention the adversarial encounter he had with Rudolf on the eve of the trial, when Jarvis published a long investigative piece about Peterson's Vietnam record that was, in a word, unflattering. Rudolf made an extraordinary but unsuccessful effort to quash the story. No such scene is in the film, and Jarvis, whom I reached on Monday morning, says that the seemingly ubiquitous film crew was not present at the meeting.

Given his background, Jarvis's critique of The Staircase is surprisingly mild. He writes, "There are recurring misrepresentations in the film," a litany that begins and ends with his next sentence: "Key prosecution witnesses appear to derail under cross-examination while the dismantling of defense experts under the state's questioning is not shown."

Jarvis goes no further, but one such impeachment was detailed by Peter Eichenberger in these pages in 2003. Late in the trial, Hardin confronted Jan Leestma, one of Rudolf's expensive forensics experts, with a passage from a textbook he'd written that contradicted his confident testimony about the accidental origin of Kathleen Peterson's injuries. ("Now take your check and don't let the door spank ya in the ass, ya puke," Eichenberger wrote.)

Although Jarvis admits that he found the film "riveting," he stands by his reservations. "I think their inside access came at a price. It skewed their perspective and caused them to overlook some of the physical evidence presented by the prosecution."

For their part, the filmmakers maintain that, despite their chumminess with Peterson and Rudolf, they still "don't know what the fuck happened," in the words of Poncet. Instead, they're amazed by the jury's unwillingness to yield to reasonable doubt, which they feel was in ample supply.

Poncet cites an interview the N&O published after the trial, in which jurors were asked what they would like to ask Michael Peterson. "One of the jurors said, 'What happened?'" Poncet recalls.

"It goes to show you they had no fucking idea what happened."





==================

With the Camera Lurking,
Anatomy of a Defense Case

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

New York Times
Published: April 4, 2005

Intellectual contortions - namely the way lawyers, while devising a criminal defense, sidestep the subject of a client's actual guilt or innocence - supply the drama in the astonishing documentary that begins tonight on the Sundance Channel with the first two of eight parts.

Mr. de Lestrade was allowed to film what seems like every move of Mr. Peterson's lawyers, and they appear here scheming, brooding, dissembling, collecting evidence, hypothesizing and hazing the defendant. The leader is David Rudolf, a bearded, moderately distinguished, intermittently charming criminal-defense lawyer given to indignation, best-defense blather and hair-trigger grandstanding.

Clearly, Mr. Rudolf is agitated, but also charged up, by the revelations about Mr. Peterson's past and private life that emerge and complicate the case. And Mr. Peterson - as if he weren't complicit in the half-truths advanced in his own defense - occasionally expresses high-minded concern about Mr. Rudolf: "All he wants to do is win," Mr. Peterson says. "Truth is lost in all of this now."

What the men have in common is a manifest thrill at having Mr. de Lestrade's venerable cameras around; according to BBC press materials, both men were impressed by the résumé of the filmmaker, who won an Academy Award for his last courtroom documentary, "Murder on a Sunday Morning." Mr. Rudolf likes to showboat and probably figures media attention will enhance his reputation. And Mr. Peterson has his own penchant for histrionics. He even composes a purple-prose treatment about the case, as if making notes for a novel.

"The Staircase" is most compelling if you have forgotten, or never knew, the facts of the North Carolina case or the outcome of the trial. The specific details are fascinating. But as a study of the evolution of a criminal defense, "The Staircase" is a masterpiece. The scenes of Mr. Peterson's lawyers circling warily around him, striving to anticipate and forestall the prosecution without ever once asking, "Did you kill her?" demonstrate exactly what's discomforting about American criminal justice: that sphere of courtroom theater and reasonable doubts, where truth, as Michael Peterson put it, is often lost.





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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/
11279727.htm%22%3ESee%20all%20stories%20on%20this%20topic



Epic 'Staircase' calls murder into question



By AARON BARNHART
The Kansas City Star
Apr. 03, 2005

My wife wonders why I don't read more novels. I'm making sure she sits down and watches all six hours of "The Staircase."

Over four weeks, starting at 8 p.m. Monday, the Sundance Channel will air filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's revisionist documentary of the Michael Peterson murder trial from 2003.

Peterson, an author and newspaper columnist, was accused of killing his wife, who was found in a pool of blood at the bottom of a staircase in the couple's home in Durham, N.C.

The case was covered daily by Court TV and spun off at least two books. As I familiarized myself with the case online, it seemed like everybody had an opinion about whether Peterson was guilty. Everyone, that is, but de Lestrade.

To be sure, "The Staircase," which aired in a much shorter version on ABC's "PrimeTime" last year, has a point of view, an agenda even. In interviews, de Lestrade has said he thought the prosecution had a flimsy case against Peterson.

But, he added, that did not mean he was sure Peterson didn't kill his wife that night in 2001. Nor, despite de Lestrade's unfettered access to the defendant, his children and legal team, can "The Staircase" be considered a brief for Peterson's exoneration.

Like all great documentarians, de Lestrade has risen above the mundane concerns of journalism to create an epic narrative. With a novelist's eye toward story, character and detail, he and producer Denis Poncet have made a film in every way the equal of his 2002 documentary, "Murder on a Sunday Morning," for which they won an Oscar. In some ways it is richer than that earlier film, which showed that local police in Florida had framed a black teenager in a murder case. There are no heroes in "The Staircase," but no obvious villains either. The defendant is a complex man, someone with a few unpleasant secrets that come out during the film, but he's also a loving family man who is often shown comforting his grown sons and adopted daughters.

During a meeting with his lawyer, David Rudolf, Peterson leaves the room in tears as Rudolf goes over the crime scene photographs in lurid detail. "Dave, what are you doing?" another member of the defense team chides Rudolf, noting that the victim's birthday "is not the best day to be doing this."

As for the prosecution, de Lestrade takes every opportunity to poke holes in their case, but he stops short of casting them as heavies. He sees them as people sincerely convinced that Kathleen Peterson's death wasn't accidental and thus motivated to marshal the facts against Michael in the most damning way.

The central drama is how these two adversaries work the system that will determine Peterson's innocence or guilt. Seen through de Lestrade's lens, it is a system based almost entirely on salesmanship and game strategy, where the truth becomes elusive and, perhaps, irrelevant to the side that winds up winning.

This should come as little surprise to anyone who has witnessed the elevation of the celebrity trial to a spectator sport. But for those convinced by hours of "CSI"-watching that forensic evidence is the ultimate authority, the Peterson case offers a sobering counterpoint.

Early on, we listen in on the private discussions of Peterson's defense team and the prosecution (who later stopped granting de Lestrade access). Jim Hardin, the district attorney, points to the autopsy photo of Kathleen Peterson, with multiple lacerations to her head, and says matter-of-factly, "You can't look at that and say it was an accident."

But someone does say exactly that. Former O.J. Simpson adviser Henry Lee visits the death scene with Rudolf's team and afterward theorizes that those wounds could have come about as a result of a particularly violent fall. With the detachment that one would expect from a forensic expert, Lee compares the injury to dropping a watermelon on the floor.

This observation - as well as his provocative claim that Kathleen bled too much to be an assault victim - would seem to make him a star witness for the defense. But Lee has a liability that worries Rudolf and clearly fascinates the filmmaker: As a Chinese-American with a thick accent, his testimony may be discounted because he's not personable enough and is too hard to hear.

This isn't just speculation. The defense team puts Lee's testimony on videotape and shows it to a focus group of randomly chosen Carolinians. They respond as if helping to choose a new TV anchorman.

"He comes off kinda hokey," says one.

Here and elsewhere, de Lestrade focuses on the conflict between red-state Durham and blue-stater Peterson, who has no discernible Southern accent. He has Peterson read from several of his newspaper columns, filled with diatribes against Durham police incompetency and political corruption. Though he has lived there his whole adult life and was one of the town's leading personalities, Peterson does not seem to feel especially welcome in North Carolina.

This cultural clash is accentuated by the prosecution during the trial. With Rudolf effectively counter-examining its witnesses and its forensic evidence undermined by the defense experts, Hardin makes a strategic shift away from the crime scene and toward Peterson's past. Revelations emerge that cast doubts on the defendant's character among the conservative townsfolk, even though these facts are of questionable relevance to the case at hand.

All of this is masterfully presented by de Lestrade. At times "The Staircase" looks like a feature film made with actors. The cinematography, the lighting, even the baleful string music that starts up from time to time, seem too elegant for a mere documentary.

That, I'm convinced, is because de Lestrade wants us to think about larger questions than whether a man did kill his wife. Americans expect their court system to deliver sound judgments and give victims closure. But does it? Can it?

"The Staircase" presents us with a defendant whose guilt ultimately may be impossible to determine. How many Michael Petersons are there on death row who don't have his means, his education or their own video chronicler?